The CIA infiltrating the Left? Peter Myers, January 15, 2003; update May 24, 2007. My comments are shown {thus}; write to me at mailto:myers@cyberone.com.au.
You are at http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/cia-infiltrating-left.html.
(1) Robert Fulford's column about the CIA's covert cultural sponsorship (2) 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', by Frances Stonor Saunders (3) Carroll Quigley on Walter Lippman (4) Walter Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society (5) Marxist Anti-Communism (6) Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution (7) Max Shpak on The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism" (8) Mick Hume unmasked as a Neo-Con (9) Robert Manne unmasked as a Neocon (10) Karl A. Wittfogel and the Frankfurt School: Neocons (11) Convergence between the USSR and the West (12) Another Jewish Communist comes out as a Neocon ... in the Murdoch press (13) A Trotskyist Website Responds (14) Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House (15) Michael Lind vs Alan Wald on the Trotskyist tie to the Neocons (16) Noam Chomsky and the Trots as Gatekeepers for the Jewish lobbies (15) William Pfaff: The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind (16) Neocons - meet the 'Marxist Right', by Justin Raimondo (17) Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing
The Communist movement was irretrievably split by the Trotsky/Stalin divide. Jewish communists, over time, moved increasingly to the Trotsky camp, with its ambivalence about the Soviet Union. At first they were inclined to preserve it - hopefully with Trotsky back at the helm. Later they turned against it. Some co-operated with the CIA, and the CIA used them to drive a fatal wedge into the Communist camp.
While Stalin's murder of Trotsky is widely publicised, Stalin's own murder is hushed up - probably because it happened within two months' of the Doctors' Plot being announced, which suggests that Stalin was right about the plotters: death-of-stalin.html.
After Stalin's murder, the Soviet Union turned "revisionist", and - under Beria and Gorbachev - oriented to "convergence" with the West (see convergence.html), but Mao remained pro-Stalin. This was a substantial contributor to the Sino-Soviet split.
Communism has "fallen", yet it seems to reign in our universities and courts. Open Borders, Gay Marriage, Political Correctness ... these are the signs. The secret: what has fallen is Stalinism; that's all.
Trotsky's backers have not gone away. Many, "coming out" as Zionists, are now "Neocons".
And the New Left is largely Trotskyist in inspiration. The Frankfurt School (devoted to Marx and Freud; opposed to Stalin as much as Hitler) has had a great impact. And perceptions of the Left have been largely shaped by Isaac Deutscher, a Jewish Trotskyist: deutscher.html.
Despite New Left intellectuals' thinking of themselves as oppositionist "outsiders", Deutscher's material was published by such establishment bodies as The Economist and the BBC. The winners of the Deutscher Prize are announced in the London Review of Books, and the Deutscher Memorial Lecture is presented at the London School of Economics. Isaac Deutscher's central role in New Left Review: new-left.html.
(1) Robert Fulford's column about the CIA's covert cultural sponsorship (The National Post, April 25, 2000)
http://www.robertfulford.com/CIA.html.
... It began in the early years of the Cold War, when many European intellectuals admired the Soviet Union more than the United States. In Paris, even in Stalinist days, it was considered eccentric to be passionately anti-communist; if you were also pro-American, you were considered an outright loon. In England, things weren't all that different. A soon-to-be-famous journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, said that the New Statesman magazine had somehow established "the proposition that to be intelligent is to be Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."
Muggeridge urged the Americans to get into high-level propaganda. ...
The intellectuals who turned up at CIA-sponsored conferences and appeared in CIA-sponsored magazines were usually democratic socialists. That could never have been explained to Senator Joseph McCarthy and his sympathizers. But the CIA, its budget a black hole, was the one agency that never had to explain anything.
Eventually, a member of Congress began to expose the program. In 1964 Congressman Wright Patman, analyzing tax-free foundations, discovered that some were mainly mail drops. Journalists finally picked up on this a couple of years later, and by 1967 the secret was out. In the 1970s the CIA abandoned culture entirely (so far as we know). Melvin J. Lasky, who had started the whole program in 1950 and co-edited Encounter from 1958, kept the magazine flickeringly alive till 1991. When it died, hardly anyone mourned; the real Encounter had been gone a long time.
The story is still not entirely known (the CIA seldom obeys the Freedom of Information Act) but over the years it has emerged slowly from the shadows.
The most thorough history has recently appeared: Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta), by Frances Stonor Saunders. Aside from offering a vigorously researched account of these remarkable events, she delivers great lashings of gossip, some of which may fall into the too-good-to-be-true category. She tells us, for instance, that the CIA acquired the right to make George Orwell's Animal Farm into a film by promising his widow an introduction to Clark Gable. ...
(2) 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', by Frances Stonor Saunders
MONTHLY REVIEW Volume 51, Number 6 November 1999 www.monthlyreview.org The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited by James Petras
Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, (London: Granta Books), £20.
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA « projects, » and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publiclyexposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the « Democratic Left » and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell {end}
More at http://www.monthlyreview.org/1199petr.htm.
(3) Carroll Quigley on Walter Lippman:
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time, Macmillan New York 1966
{p. 938} More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical." There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes, and at a time when the ultimate in Left-wing radicalism was about to appear under the banner of the Third International.
The best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was The New Republic, a magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money, in 1914. Straight ... became a Morgan partner ... He married Dorothy Payne Whitney ... the sister and co-heiress of Oliver
{p. 939} Payne, of the Standard Oil "trust." ...
The New Republic was founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and continued to be supported by her financial contributions until March 23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England's foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J. H. Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918, while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to the British government. {end}
More at tragedy.html.
Walter Lippmann for World Government: wells-lenin-league.html.
Walter Lippmann on Wilson and House: lippmann.html.
(4) Walter Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society
Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, HarperCollinsPublishers, London 1995.
In 1920, Lippmann lampooned "the Red hysteria" in his article An Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo: lippmann.html. But in the wake of Stalin's defeat of Trotskyism, he came to the support of Liberalism.
{p. 9} Keynes and the Crisis of Liberalism, 1931-1939
From the 26th to the 30th of August 1938, but one month before the Munich conference which seemed to bring the triumph of totalitarianism in Europe an important step closer, an obscure conference took place in Paris to discuss what its participants called the 'crisis of liberalism' in Europe. The conference was convened and organized by a French academic, Professor Louis Rougier, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Besancon, and held at the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle. The twenty-six who attended the Conference were all academics, with one notable exception, the American columnist Walter Lippmann. Indeed, the gathering was named in his honour 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' in an attempt by Rougier to unite the disputatious academics around the central importance of Lippmann's book The Good Society, published in 1937. For Rougier, Lippmann's book was, simply, 'la meilleure explication des maux de notre temps'. 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' was, naturally, dominated by Frenchmen; their number included the prominent political philosopher Raymond Aron, and the economist Jacques Rueff. Amongst the other Europeans were two Austrians of particular significance - Friedrich von Hayek, then a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and his mentor and teacher Ludwig von Mises, then resident in Geneva at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. Also from Geneva came another exiled central European economist, Wilhem Ropke, later architect of Germany's post-war Social Market Economy. They were all drawn to Paris by a shared concern at the apparently inexorable decline of liberalism in Europe. 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' represented the first coherent attempt to analyse the reasons for that decline and to suggest ways in which that decline might be reversed.
Lippmann's The Good Society was but one of a number of books published during the mid-1930s which warned of the seemingly
{p. 10} unstoppable advance of 'collectivist' ideologies and governments throughout the world since the end of the First World War. Lippmann himself acknowledged the contributions of two of the academics at the Paris Conference - Hayek and von Mises - to the intellectual development of this theme at the beginning of his own book. The first chapter of The Good Society described the contemporary situation in stark terms, describing 'Collectivism' as 'the dominant dogma of the Age':
{quote} Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves Communists, Socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must, by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come ... [so] Universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and to multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. {endquote}
In what was then a comparatively novel intellectual formulation, anticipating George Orwell by almost a decade, Lippmann identified the two most powerful ideologies of the age, Fascism and Communism, as being no more than similarly extreme versions of the same collectivist impulse. Furthermore, collectivism could also be seen as an increasingly important ideology in countries which were supposedly opposed to those very extremist collectivisms, such as the United States of America (then in the throes of the collectivist 'New Deal') and Great Britain (where the virtues of Keynesian ideas about governmental intervention in the economy were being proclaimed to an increasingly sympathetic audience). The philosophy of individual freedom - classical liberalism - was, according to Lippmann, all but dead, and had been supplanted by collectivism. For Lippmann, the 'liberal philosophy' had stagnated during the mid-nineteenth century, when it had become 'frozen in its own errors', a 'great tradition that [had] become softened
{p. 11} by easy living ...' Only with the failure of liberalism as a coherent progressive philosophy was it conceivable that men 'should be tempted to regard the primitive tyrannies in Russia, Italy or Germany as the beginnings of a better life for mankind ...' Lippmann, like his fellow participants at the Paris conference, might acknowledge that collectivism was indeed the new intellectual orthodoxy, but to him this was 'little short of a disaster in human affairs'. In his opening remarks to the published proceedings of Le Colloque Walter Lippmann on 26 August 1938 Professor Rougier spoke of the evils of Communism, which after the Stalinist purges of the army and bureaucracy from 1936 to 1938 were especially evident in the West, but also argued that those people who thought there was some 'middle way' between the extreme of Fascist/Communist collectivism and the pure theoretical individualism of classical liberalism were labouring under the most dangerous illusion of all:
{quote} Le drame moral de notre epoque, c'est, des lors, I'aveugle- ment des hommes de gauche qui revent d'une democratie politique et d'une planisme economique, sans comprendre que le planisme economique implique l'Etat totalitaire et qui un socialisme liberal est un contradition dans les termes. Le drame moral de notre epoque, c'est l'aveuglement des hommes de droite qui soupirent d'admiration devant les gouvernements totalitaires, tout en revendiquant les avantages d'une economie capitaliste, sans se rendre compte que l'Etat totalitaire devore la fortune privee, met au pas et bureaucratise toutes les formes de l'activite economique d un pays. {endquote}
In a long paper on 'The Urgent Necessity of Re-orientation of Social Science' written for the Conference, Ropke and Rustow argued against thinking that there was any easy solution to the manifest economic dislocation and unemployment of the l930s, and that any attempt to solve these problems by 'monetary tricks and public works will only end in disaster, or to be more specific, in the totalitarian state, where all policy of giving coherence to society without giving it inherent and spontaneous stability must inevitably end'. All the participants in the conference agreed that liberalism as a coherent philosophy was at its lowest ebb, discredited and neglected, tarred with the brush of
{p. 12} Dickensian, Manchester School laissez-faire, just as they all agreed that the future of liberalism, as Rustow and Ropke understood it 'in the widest sense of anti-totalitarianism', depended on people like themselves. They wanted to develop a new, revitalized interpretation of liberalism: 'the combination of a working competition not only with the corresponding legal and institutional framework but also with a re-integrated Society of freely co-operating and vitally satisfied men is the only alternative to laissez-faire and to totalitarianism which we have to offer'. In his closing address, Rugier outlined various areas where liberalism thus needed to be re-examined, and he proposed to set up the 'Centre International d'Etudes pour la renovation du Liberalisme' for this purpose. The proceedings of the conference were published as 'Le Compte-Rendu des seances du Colloque Walter Lippmann', which Rougier rather grandly called the 'Magna Carta of Liberalism', and the twenty-six academics, intellectuals, journalists and others returned to their own countries at the beginning of September, with Lippmann, Hayek and Ropke charged with founding American, British and Swiss sections of the new organization.
However, it was, of course, an inauspicious moment to start founding new international organizations of ambitious intentions, and this was to remain the first and last time that 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' ever met, the war intervening only a year later. Rougier had, nonetheless, given an institutional focus to 'La Renovation du Liberalisme', and had started an intellectual movement for the revival of economic liberalism that would come to fruition nearly half a century later. But to understand why economic liberalism had reached such a low ebb by the 1930s, and why these philosophers and economists found the selves gathering in Paris on the eve of war to launch their intellectual counter-revolution against collectivism, it is necessary to examine the decline of liberalism as an ideology and to reflect, in the British case in particular, on the impact made by the thinking of one man - John Maynard Keynes - who had done more than any other single individual to bring Hayek, Rougier, Ropke, Aron, von Mises and the others together in Paris to mourn the end of liberal, even civilized, society as they understood it.
The rise of collectivism in Britain has been chronicled by several historians, the first, and perhaps most famous, of them being A. V. Dicey. Indeed, it was Dicey who first identified the nineteenth century
{p. 13} as an 'age of individualism', giving way towards the end of the century to an 'age of collectivism'. More recently, and most exhaustively, W. H. Greenleaf has published his two large volumes on The Rise of Collectivism and The Ideological Heritage. As Rougier and Lippmann had in Paris in 1938, Greenleaf identifies the two great currents of the British political tradition as the opposing ideological positions of 'libertarianism' and 'collectivism'. For Greenleaf, this represents the 'basic contrast' in British political thought and practice, between 'on the one hand, the growth of a natural harmony in society achieved without recourse to state intervention [what Hayek called the state of 'spontaneous order'] and, on the other, the idea of an artificial identification of human interests resulting from legislative or other - political regulation'. All the major 'Party' ideologies in Britain - Socialism, Conservatism and Liberalism - have reflected both strands of thought in their separate historical traditions; libertarianism and collectivism have been the two fixed poles on the compass by which since the early nineteenth century, politicians have, in practice, navigated their way across the legislative map. Economic liberalism, of course, was very much an economic expression of the 'libertarian' tradition, and reached its peak as an ideological and practical economic concept in the 1870s and 1880s, tracing its ideological roots back to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which was published a century before, in 1776. Economic liberalism was the governing principle of both the Liberal Party, under Gladstone, and the Conservative Party, particularly under Disraeli, up to 1880. The point has often been made that for all Disraeli's purple prose about Young England and Tory Democracy, as Prime Minister from 1874 to 1880 he was as frugal in his conduct of the country's finances as Gladstone had always been.
However, at the same time as the liberal tradition seemed to reach the peak of its influence, 'collectivism' had gradually been making inroads on the liberal state, beginning with such legislation as factory reforms and public health reforms, which, to varying degrees, compelled people to carry out laws laid down by Westminster in the name of what came to be called 'social justice'. The Times was later to name this steady erosion of individual liberty, orchestrated by an ever more intrusive State, the 'Silent Revolution', which meant that even before anybody had formulated a coherent intellectual case for collectivism, Government had started to intervene in such matters as industrial relations and national education - areas where it had previously
{p. 14} feared to tread. Greenleaf has written of this general drift towards collectivism - or 'creeping collectivism' as some have called it - a process which was
{p. quote} not, at least initially, deliberately induced. Rather it rested for a long time on what Sidney Webb used to call the unconscious permeation of an overtly individualist society by a contrary principle ... He said, the 'advocates of each particular change intend no further alteration, the result is nevertheless an increasing social momentum' in the collectivist direction. The cumulative, incremental effect of these piece-meal reforms was indeed considerable. {endquote}
However, if, by the end of the nineteenth century, the increase in State powers was only small, the result of pragmatism rather than ideology, this all changed with the foundation of the Fabian Society in 1884, the creation of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society was the first British organization to formulate an essively and successfully promote a coherent intellectual justification for the extension of the power of the State in pursuit of certain specific aims, such as the creation of a 'national minimum' standard of living. In Shaw's phrase, commending the original Fabian programme, the Fabian Society sought to replace the existing 'scramble for private gain' with 'the introduction of design, contrivance, and co-ordination' in the conscious pursuit of 'Collective Welfare' . The Fabians, through their tactics of 'gradualism' and 'permeation, sought to persuade all political parties of the virtues of their programme, particularly the Liberal Party and, after 1900, the nascent Labour Party. The Fabians were sowing their seeds on extremely fertile ground, for, as the memory of the old century receded, the certainties of the Victorian, liberal free-traders seemed to slip away, too. The old shibboleth of 'free trade' came under vehement attack from the politician Joseph Chamberlain with the Tariff Reform Campaign, which, though it split the Conservative Party in the process, was eventually vindicated by the gradual erection of Tariff Barriers from 19l5 onwards, culminating in the Ottawa agreements of l932. In signing these, Britain, in protectionist mood, finally created the system of 'Imperial Preference' that the Tariff Reformers had been pressing for since the first years of the century. Furthermore, the Liberal Party,
{p. 15} under the guidance of its economic mentors J. A. Hobson and L. T Hobhouse, adapted the ex-German Chancellor Bismarck's social insurance system (which had created, for instance, the first modern state-financed pension system) and applied it to Britain during Asquith's great Liberal administrations of l908 to 19l5, thus ushering in the age of'New Liberalism'. Asquith's governments embraced the new Fabian model of collectivism, and introduced old-age pensions social insurance, school meals and other 'welfare' measures. For the first time, the State took it upon itself to tax its citizens in order to fulfil a specific collectivist, social aim, that of 'social welfare'. The 'National Efficiency' movement, which embraced politicians of all parties, also supported the Fabian arguments for the increase of State powers, in order to increase 'national' defence against the rising power of Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Germany. All the legislation passed in the fourteen years before the First World War, by politicians of both the Conservative and Liberal Parties - whether in the name of 'Social Welfare, 'National Efficiency' or 'Industrial Rationalization' - represented a distinct and accelerating step towards the Fabian collectivist State, and, as Shaw later put it, 'the Fabian policy was to support and take advantage of every legislative step towards Collectivism no matter what quarter it came from, nor how little its promoters dreamt that they were advocating an instalment of Socialism.' The 'New Liberals' were in the vanguard of this movement, led by Lloyd George, whilst the old Liberals, loyal to the Party's Gladstonian roots of free-trade lassez-fare and minimum governmental intervention, were, like the libertarian political philosopher Herbert Spencer, left to lament the withering of the Victorian liberal ideological tradition. It is ironic that Spencer's greatest exposition of the liberal creed, Man Verss the State, was published in 1884, the same year as the Fabian Society was founded. As early as 1894, a Fabian, William Clarke, could say of old 'classlcal liberals' like Spencer, with only a touch of hyperbole, that
{quote} His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah's ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. {endquote}
This steady march of collectivism was, of course, given a tremendous
{p. 16} fillip by the First World War, when the demands of war saw the final buckling of the Victorian liberal State, giving way to an unprecedented degree of central control and central economic planning, measures which were, again, supported and carried through by politicians of all parties, barring the initial resenations of the Asquithian Liberals. The coal industry was virtually nationalized in 1917 and the McKenna duties of 1915 saw the first break with the tradition of free-trade, a measure introduced by a Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. The war witnessed the proliferation of new Whitehall departments, such as the Ministry of Munitions and the Ministry of Foods. Moreover, the very success of Britain's 'collectivist' war effort seemed to many to vindicate the claims of the Fabians that 'collectivism' was not only the route to a more just and equitable society, but that it was also a more efficient way of running a modern economy. It was no coincidence that in 1918 the Fabians persuaded the Labour Party to accept a new, specifically Socialist constitution, with its commitment in Clause IV to the nationalization of what would later be termed the 'commanding heights' of the British economy.
It was thus not surprising that collectivist measures did not end with the War; the Consenative-dominated Lloyd George coalition government founded the Ministry of Health and passed the Housing Act of 1919, which for the first time committed the Government to subsidizing local authority housing so that rents could be fixed at below the market price, at a level those needing to be housed could afford. Furtherrnore, the government also intenened in the economy as never before, instituting formal machinery for arbitration in industrial disputes in the form of the Whitely Councils; and in the name of 'rationalization', substantial state assistance was given to certain industries, such as the railway companies, to amalgamate. With the creation of the Central Electricity Board in 1926, the first state industrial monopoly was established and in the early 1930s loans were given to ailing industries such as the ship building industry. When British broadcasting began in 1926, it was created, in unprecedented fashion, as a newly born state monopoly - the British Broadcasting Company. All this entailed a considerable increase in government expenditure; total government expenditure as a percentage of Gross National Product rose from a low of nine per cent in 1870-90, to twenty-six per cent by 1926, and to sixty per cent by 1940. As Greenleaf has pointed out, increasing governmental expenditure was common to all political
{p. 17} parties. In terms of state spending, it became impossible to distinguish between a high-spending and a low-spending party. As Greenleaf concludes,
{quote} Taken together, then, these policies of national efficiency, tariff reforrn, and rationalization, as they emerged over the early decades of this century, invited substantial steps towards a collectivist economy. Their introduction was piecemeal but was none the less cumulatively significant. Moreover, they intimated, even if they did not overtly entail, the further notion of the planned economy itself, the idea of government intervention to attempt nothing less than the systematic management of life as a whole. {endquote}
Thus, by the time of the economic deluge of the 1930s, which effectively started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the ideological course towards collectivism was firmly set, not least by the Liberal Party of Lloyd George which was in the forefront of demanding an ever-increasing extension of governments' power and the spending of governmental money to alleviate Britain's economic problems. The famous Liberal 'Yellow Book' with which the Party launched its 1929 election campaign was but the culmination of decades of 'progressive' thinking, starting with Hobson and Hobhouse, that had produced a more collectivist vision. As early as 1903, Herbert Spencer had already noted how far the Liberal Party had strayed from its original principles:
{quote} I do not desire to be classed among those who are in these days called Liberals. In the days when the name came into use, the Liberals were those who aimed to extend the free- dom of the individual versus the power of the State, whereas now (prompted though they are by desire for popular wel- fare), Liberals as a body are continually extending the power of the State and restricting the freedom of the individual. {quote}
Spencer's gloomy prognosis for the future of classical liberalism was famously echoed by Hilaire Belloc in his book The Servile State, published in l902. Belloc predicted that 'Collectivism' would not lead to the fulfilment of the Socialists' dream of 'social justice' but to a new condition of slavery, in which the people would be completely subordi-
{p. 18} nated to the demands of a central state authority. It was a prescient book, and an early rehearsal of the arguments that Hayek would deploy thirty-two years later in The Road to Serfdom. However eloquent Belloc and Spencer might have been in their warnings about the dangers of collectivism for individual liberty, they both, nonetheless, acknowledged that they were fighting against a current that was running strongly against them.
{p. 100} The publication of The Road to Serfdom by Routledge brought Hayek the kind of intellectual celebrity that his rival Laski had been used to for a decade or more. Invitations to lecture before guest audiences, both lay and academic, began to flood in. In April 1945, he embarked on a lecture tour of North America, after publication of The Road to Serfdom by the University of Chicago Press had created the same sort of intellectual ferment in the USA as it had in Britain. The book was actually turned down - on political grounds - by three American publishers, before the Chicago economist Aaron Director secured a contract with his University Press. The book sold out within a day of publication, and the University of Chicago Press had to fight a similar battle with the paper-rationing authorities in the United States as Routledge had done in Britain to satisfy public demand for the book. The connection with the University of Chicago was to be an important one in Hayek's life, as the economics faculty there, under the direction of Frank Knight, was already fertile ground for the Hayekian view. The University sponsored and organized his tour of America in 1945 and created a special chair for him as Professor of Social and Moral Sciences in 1950 when he left the LSE.
However, the publicity that his ideas received in printed form courtesy of Routledge and Chicago was dwarfed by the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom published in the Reader's Digest of April I945. Their editions sold in the hundreds of thousands. The publication of a condensed version of the book in the Reader's Digest was arranged by Henry Hazlitt, and gave Hayek an exposure to a far larger audienct than he had expected. Propitiously, it was published on the eve of his American visit, thus altering his schedule considerably. As he la recalled:
{quote} While I was on the ship, the Reader's Digest published a condensation and when we docked in New York I was told all our plans were changed; I would be going on a nationwide
{p. 101} lecture tour beginning at NY Town Hall ... Imagine my surprise when they drove me there the next day and there were 3,000 people in the hall, plus a few score more in adjoining rooms with loudspeakers. There I was, with this battery of microphones and a veritable sea of expectant faces. {endquote}
During the course of his lecture tour, he found that The Road to Serfdom had divided opinion in America much as it had done in Britain, with the Rooseveltian New Dealers attacking it ...
With the historian Sir
{p. 102} John Clapham in the chair, Hayek proposed the idea of an 'Acton Society', in honour of the British historian whom Hayek revered as the greatest exponent of the principles of a liberal society. Hayek suggested that such a society could be a forum allowing British, German and other European intellectuals to meet and to publish ...
Quite independently, and at the same time, another economist who had been at the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' was also suggesting a revival of Rougier's original idea of an international liberal forum. ... Wilhem Ropke, the German economist, suggested that such a forum was urgently needed to challenge the reigning intellectual fallacies of Westetn Europe. Ropke suggested that an international meeting of liberal scholars should be convened at regular intervals; it should publish an international periodical, appealing to the 'upper intellectual classes'. Ropke circulated his paper amongst his colleagues and to members of the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann', and raised a small amount of money for the projected periodical.
It was a Swiss businessman, involved in the work of the Institut d'Etudes Internationales at Geneva, Dr Hunold, who brought the ideas of Ropke and Hayek together. Hunold invited Hayek to address the students of the University of Zurich in November 1945 and aftenvards Hunold dined with Hayek and a group of Swiss industrialists and bankers, at which point Hayek told them of his own plans for a gather-
{p. 103} ing of those intellectuals who shared his views to discuss and redefine liberalism. Hayek proposed that it would be 'an enormous help' if these people 'could come together and meet for about a week somewhere in a Swiss Hotel in order to discuss basic ideas'.
{p. 108} So, it was Hayek's international liberal society which now became the focal point of international efforts, and the delegates invited by Hayek to his inaugural Conference assembled at the Hotel du Parc on the slopes of Mont Pelerin overlooking Lac Leman on 1 April 1947. The Conference lasted until 10 April. As well as the funding secured for the Conference by Dr Hunold's Swiss backers, the participation of a large American contingent was ensured by the financial contribution of the William Volker Charities Trust. Apart from the British academics such as G. M. Young and E. L. Woodward who could not attend the meeting other prominent absentees included Walter Lippmann and Jacques Rueff. The former never became involved with what became known as the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), whilst the latter became a regular attendee from the second meeting onwards. These absentees, added to
{p. 109} the fact that Hayek's natural contacts lay within the field of academic economics, ensured that from the start the membership of the Mont Pelerin Society was composed largely of economists. Hayek himself regretted that he could not have included more historians and political philosophers at the inaugural meeting.
This first meeting of the MPS was attended by thirty-eight people, and amongst their number were almost all those academics and intellectuals who were to be most important in the revival of economic liberalism in the post-war era. As has already been mentioned, Hayek himself identified three main intellectual centres of the revival of contemporary liberal thought, and the composition of the MPS reflected the intellectual influences of those three centres - London (the LSE), Chicago and Vienna. ... The American contingent from Chicago included the doyen of American economists, Frank Knight, Aaron Director, George Stigler and the young Professor Milton Friedman. There were also three economists from the Foundation of Economic Education in New York, F. A. Harper (Professor of Economics at Cornell University, 1928-46), Leonard Read and V. O. Watts. Another important American was Henry Hazlitt, the financial journalist, who had spent most of his life on the New York Times before switching to Newsweek in 1946, for which he wrote an influential business column. He was a prolific and fluent author and an unforgiving and relentless critic of Keynes. He was a very important publicist for economic liberalism and, for instance, had much to do with putting the Institute of Economic Affairs on the map by referring to their first publication in his Newsweek Column.
The most prominent Austrians were, naturally, Hayek, von Mises and Popper, but they were also joined by Fritz Machlup, then a Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and later atJohns Hopkins, Dr Karl Brandt, then a Professor at the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, and at subsequent meetings their numbers were swelled by the presence of Gottfried Haberler, also based in America. One of the main aims for Hayek at this conference was to reintegrate the German liberal tradition into the mainstream of European thought, and so he was careful to complement the Austrian contingent with several members of what was later to be called the
{p. 110} 'Freiburg' School of Economics, the pioneers of the 'Soziale Marktwirt slaft', the 'Social Market economy'. Present at the first meeting of the MPS was Walter Eucken, the leader of the 'Freiburg School', who died in 1950 in the middle of five lectures in London on the subject of the bitter lessons which Europe still had to learn from the collectivist economic policies of the Nazis. Wilhem Ropke was also a founder-member; born in 1899, he had taught in both Germany and Austria before the Nazis had come to power, and from 1948 onwards he was an economic adviser to the Adenauer administration in Bonn The man most closely identified with this school, Ludwig Erhard, joined the MPS at the second meeting; which meant that the most constructive and celebrated school of post-war economic thought was well represented at the MPS.
{p. 118} Amongst British politicians who attended MPS meetings in the 1960s and 1970s were Geoffrey Howe, Enoch Powell, John Biffen, Keith Joseph and Rhodes Boyson as well as a clutch of journalists (such as William Rees-Mogg of The Times) and members of free-market 'think-tanks' in Britain. With the international revival of economic liberalism in the period 1960 to 1980 the membership of the MPS ballooned, so that by 1980 six hundred members and guests attended a Conference at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Indeed, so popular had it become by that time that in his capacity as President of the MPS in 1972, Milton Friedman argued that the Society should end because its original function, as a mutual support organization for like-minded people in an intellectually hostile world, had long since been fulfilled. However, Friedman was thwarted and the MPS survives to this day.
{end}
(5) Marxist Anti-Communism
Arthur Koestler against the USSR: koestler.html.
In Australia, the CIA is said to have funded the anti-Communist Quadrant Magazine, edited by Robert Manne. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Manne, writing in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, has consistently taken a "New Left" line ... promoting open-border migration, and that part of the aboriginal movement which blames "White Australia" for its plight (contrary to aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who blames "progressive" policies on alcohol, drugs etc. for destroying aboriginal family life).
Many of those named in Who Paid the Piper? are Jewish intellectuals of the type of Lippmann and Manne, Left-wing but anti-Stalinist - "Marxist anti-Communist" - as Richard Kostelanetz put it: kostel.html.
Might one extend Saunders' argument, and say that the CIA funded the Trotskyist Left against the Stalinist Left? Even Orwell was a Trotskyist: burnham.html (this item, by James Burnham, deals with the appeal of Communism and National Socialism in the 1930s. Burnham, a Trotskyist, became an opponent of both).
More exactly, since some Trotskyists (mainly Spartacist) wanted to preserve the USSR, does Saunders' argument lead to the hypothesis that the CIA funded that part of the Trotskyist Left which wanted to bring down the USSR?
These same Trotskyists were promoting Free Trade and opposing national sovereignty: xTrots.html.
(6) Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution
by John B. Judis, Foreign affairs, Volume 74 No. 4, July/August 1995.
{This is a review of The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994, by John Ehrman, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995}
{p. 123} For 14 years, from the 1973 Jackson-Vanik amendment until the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a group of intellectuals known as neoconservatives shaped, and sometimes dominated, American foreign policy. They wrote for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and later The National Interest. They acted through organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World. ...
{p. 125} The other important influence on neo-conservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism but that eludes Ehrman. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.
What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. In 1939, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Trotskyist movement split, with one faction under James Burnham and Max Schachtman declaring itself opposed equally to German Nazism and Soviet communism. Under the influence of an Italian Trotskyist, Bruno Rizzi, Burnham and Schachtman envisaged the Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats and American managers as a new class {burnham.html}. While Burnham broke with the left and became an editor at National Review, Schachtman remained. The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist
{p. 126} movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class.
The neoconservatives also got their conception of intellectual and political work from their socialist past. They did not draw the kind of rigid distinction between theory and pratice that many academics and politicians do. Instead they saw theory as a form of political combat and politics as an endeavour that should be informed by theory. They saw themselves as a cadre in a cause rather than as strictly independent intellectuals. and they were willing to use theory as a partisan weapon. ...
In 1973 Jackson and the neo-conservatives who worked with him, including Wohlstetter protege Richard
{p. 127} Perle, began a campaign to link trade concessions to the Soviet Union to explicit Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration. ... They rejected Kissinger's realism ... Jackson and the neo-conservatives insisted on passing Jackson-Vanik. The Soviets then baulked at complying with its terms, and detente, from that moment, was dead. ...
They laid the basis for the massive and at least partly unnecessary American arms buildup, which may have accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union but also contributed to the decline of the American economy - leading, among other things, to the crippling deficits of the 1980s. ...
{end of quotes}
(7) Max Shpak on The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"
Shpak points out that many Trotskyists are today known as "neo-Conservatives". They are "Conservative" because they opposed the Soviet Union, but still Marxist.
[Original Dissent]
The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"
by Max Shpak
May 15, 2002
http://www.originaldissent.com/shpak051502.html
{start} Neoconservatives and their apologists would have the public believe that the neocons were former Leftists who saw the light and came to reject liberal or Marxist ideology as a matter of conviction and principle. Regrettably, this official line has come to be conventional wisdom, no doubt reflecting neocon efforts to hide the fact that their transformation was neither sincerely motivated nor sincerely enacted. To understand the real agenda that drove and continues to drive much of neoconservatism, one needs to look back to the origins of the movement and the cultural backgrounds of those who lead it.
It is a well-established fact that many of the early luminaries of neoconservatism (most famously Irving Kristol in the 1940's, a more recent famous example being David Horowitz) came from Marxist backgrounds, and that neoconservatism (like Marxism itself) began and continues to be a largely a phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism. In the early part of the 20th century, Marxism attracted a disproportionate pool of Jewish recruits for a number of obvious reasons. There are a number of complex psychological and social reasons for the attraction, all of which largely stem from the fact that Marxist internationalism is an ideology which by its very nature finds disciples among a rootless, anti-religious urban intelligentsia.
More important for the purposes of this analysis, however, are the practical reasons for Jewish sympathy with Bolshevism. European and American Jews alike carried deep-seated hatreds for the traditional regimes and religions of the European continent, particularly Czarist Russia and various Eastern European nations due to (real and imagined) "persecution" and "pogroms" that occurred there. Thus, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, destroyed the hated Orthodox Church, rendered powerless the landed religious peasantry, and replaced traditional Russian authority with a largely Jewish Commissariate, world Jewry (including alleged "capitalists" like the Schiffs and Rothschilds) embraced the Revolution and Marxist ideology alike.
With Russia becoming an effective Jewish colony where "anti-Semitism" was an offense punishable by death and the native gentile culture was effectively stamped out (thanks to a leadership consisting mainly of Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Severdlov, held together under the stewardship of the obsequious philosemite Lenin), Jews throughout the world put their hopes in the possibility of similar revolutions elsewhere. Indeed, their comrades in arms were hard at work affecting similar changes in Hungary (Kuhn), Austria (Adler) and Germany (Eisner). The rise of Fascist and Nazi movements only served to further polarize Jewish support in favor of international communism.
This near unanimity would change as a result of two developments: a shift in the character of Soviet Communism on the one hand and the foundation of the State of Israel on the other. Stalin's purges of many of his former Bolshevik colleagues (including Trotsky, who was assassinated while in exile), his 1939 pact with Hitler, and rumors of Stalin's own anti-Jewish prejudices gave many would-be supporters pause. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it became clear the Russian masses would not fight for the sake of Bolshevism, an ideology that brought them so much misery, but rather for the sake of Russian blood and soil. From then on, the Soviet leadership had to court the very Russian nationalist elements that the early Bolsheviks had worked so hard to stamp out. This lead to an increasing tolerance towards the Russian Orthodox Church and a decreased Jewish presence in the Soviet politburo and KGB. Thus, the USSR was "betraying" the very elements that made it attractive to the Jewish establishment to begin with.
Perhaps even more significant a factor in the origins of neoconservatism was the emergence of an independent Israeli state. While many Jewish Marxists eagerly supported the Zionist state, the more intellectually consistent Left opposed Zionism on the grounds that all nationalisms, including Jewish ones, are enemies of global proletarian revolution. Thus, Jewish leftists who once advocated internationalism for gentile nations were forced to come to terms with the implications of this ideology for their own nationalist sentiments. Thus, they needed an ideology which would let them have their cake (opposing gentile nationalism) and eat it too (by supporting Israel), and they found just such a worldview with neoconservatism.
At the same time, although the Soviet Union initially courted Israel during the 1948 wars of independence, it became clear to the Israeli government that in world polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union the former would be wealthier and more pliant cash cow to milk. By the 1950's and the coming of the Suez Wars, regardless of residual Jewish loyalties to Communism, the battle lines were already drawn, with Israel in the US/Western camp and the Arab nations forced to make alliances of convenience with the Soviet Union.
It is hardly a coincidence that the changing character of Soviet Communism and the status of Israel as a US ally came at the same time that neoconservatism was becoming an influential political movement. For all of their talk about "capitalism," "democracy," "freedom," and "free markets," the fact that so many Jewish leftists turned on a dime to back the US in the Cold War because America could serve as a life support system for Israel and a bulwark against resurgent Russian "anti-Semitism" makes their real agenda entirely transparent. One can witness an identical phenomenon taking place today, as many Jewish liberal Democrats switch party ranks and join the GOP because of the latter's stronger support for Israel and harder line with the Arab nations. All of the window dressing about their newfound "patriotism" and "Americanism" is a sham designed to mask the fact that the question for the neocons has always been and will always be "is it good for the Jews?"
The different agendas driving neocon Cold Warriors as opposed to their erstwhile Old Right allies could be seen on any number of fronts. The most obvious one has been the different reactions in the two camps to Russia after the end of the Cold War. While paleoconservative leaning Cold Warriors such as Pat Buchanan have pushed for normalized relations with Russia, the neocons continue to fight on the Cold War, enthusiastically supporting Chechen separatists as "freedom fighters" and advocating NATO expansion. The reasons for this difference are entirely obvious: the Old Right's enemy was Communist ideology, while neoconservative Jews nurtured a hatred for Russian nationalism. Thus post-Communist Russia is still very much a threat to the latter, particularly with resurgent Russian "ultra-nationalism" and "anti-Semitism," while in the absence of Communist rule the above are of little concern to the Old Right.
For all their talk about "anti-Communism," the real engine driving neocon Cold Warrior instincts was punishing the hated Russian goyim for the sin of "anti-Semitism," not any opposition to residual or latent Marxism. As further evidence that this is the case, one need only consider the fact that while the Old Right championed Christian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, to the neocons the only legimate "dissidents" were Zionists like Natan Sharansky, just as the only "refugees" championed by the neos were invariably Jewish (including today's shady Odessa Mafiosi). Solzhenitsyn represented the Russian nationalism and Orthodox Church that made so many of the neocons' predecessors embrace Bolshevism, thus Solzhenitsyn and the plight of Christian dissidents were relegated to obscurity in neocon publications, while Zionist noise-makers in the USSR were given a hero's welcome.
In this regard, the neocons are the true heirs to Leon Trotsky, who condemned Stalin and his followers not so much for their brutality (as commander of the Red Army and overseer of Lenin's terrorist CHEKA, Trotsky was no stranger to brutality and sadism) but for their "anti-Semitism" and "betrayal of the Revolution." Trotsky's main critique of Stalinism seemed to be that Stalin was moving Russia in a nationalist direction rather than working towards the establishment of an international "proletarian" vanguard. The fact that the intellectual ancestors of neoconservatism had not an unkind word to say about Bolshevism while Leninist-Trotskyite goals were being fulfilled suggests that it was not so much ideological reconsideration as tribal self-interest that drove these most unlikely conversos.
Because their move from the Left to a pseudo-right was insincere, one would expect to find a whole range of issues where the neocons retain leftist instincts and remain true to their Trotskyite heritage. Indeed this is the case. In their portrayal of the Cold War as a struggle between "capitalism" on the one hand and "socialism" on the other, the neocons try to minimize the fact that in many ways the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the West was over much more than economic systems. To most on the Old Right, the economic issues were at best peripheral: Marxism was opposed because it was materialistic, atheistic, and because it rejected nationalism and patriotism in the name of global revolution.
Most neocons came from a culture that was every bit as materialistic and cosmopolitan as the early Bolshevik leaders, so it is rather unlikely that they would have any quarrel with these aspects of Communist doctrine. The fact that neoconservatism is an ideology which is materialistic in nature and internationalist in focus (with its talk of "global democracy" and "global markets") makes it obvious that the fundamental underpinnings of the Marxist Left are alive and well among the scribblers of Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Their "conservative" pretenses seem limited to the fact that they oppose "socialism" (of the nationalist variety) in the name of "capitalism" (of the internationalist variety), and for all too many naïve people that seems to be sufficient and believable.
Understanding the true nature of the neoconservatives illuminates the essence of the struggle between the Right and the Left. It was never a struggle between "capitalism" and "socialism" as neoconservative or Communist progaganda would have one believe. Rather, it was always a conflict between spiritualism and materialism, between nationalism and globalism, between tradition and subversion, between the defenders of Western Civilization and its enemies. With the battle lines drawn as such, it is abundantly clear where the neocons stand. Many "capitalists" understood that economic means are not significant, only the desired end. Jacob Schiff understood it when he financed the Bolsheviks, just as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Marc Rich, Boris Berezovsky, and George Soros understand that their form of "capitalism" is fully compatible with the essence of the Left, and that they can find friends and allies among the ostensibly conservative neocons.
Unfortunately, many Rightists are not nearly as perceptive in their choice of allies.
May 15, 2002
{end}
(8) Mick Hume unmasked as a Neo-Con
Living Marxism (LM Magazine), was a "Marxist" magazine which opposed political correctness - ostensibly, anyway. It was edited by Mick Hume.
LM said that the Green movement originated in Nazi Germany. A 2-part TV series was broadcast in Britain and Australia on this theme, put together by LM.
So LM were anti-Nazi, but anti-Green.
They opposed the put-down of men that has occurred under Feminism. Yet they spoke up in favour of refugees (asylum-seekers) being able to enter Britain fairly freely.
They opposed censorship, even of pornography, and they supported teenage sex.
8.1 Mick Hume supported fox hunting. The following item shows that, after LM folded, he became a columnist for The Times (hardly a sign of being an "outsider"):
The Real Rural Agenda by Mick Hume
The Times columnist Mick Hume today writes a thought-provoking and hard-hitting piece ridiculing New Labour's handling of the hunting issue and defending the civil liberties of those who wish to hunt.. ...
http://www.countryside-alliance.org/newsextra/001218mick.htm
8.2 Not only did the Trotskyist site http://www.wsws.org support LM; Emperors' Clothes also ran Mick Hume's articles. A common feature of all 3 is that they deny a specifically "Jewish" role in Communism, and repudiate the suggestion of Mossad involvement in 9-11. Mike Ruppert likewise.
They want us to blame the Empire; but they divert attention from the Jewish dominance of that Empire.
The Zionists' trick has been to "converge" their plans with the Empire's, so that Imperial leaders can't tell the difference.
Another Voice, by Mick Hume (on Emperor's Clothes):
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/hume/VOICE.html
8.3 Mick Hume now runs http://www.spiked-online.com and http://www.spiked-online.co.uk (caution: these sites make my computer hang).
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41406,00.html
by Aparna Kumar
... Among the British intelligentsia and media establishment, Hume has a hard-won reputation as a crusader for free speech at any cost, especially that which offends. In fact, "muckraker" is a badge he wears with pride. "(Spiked) is trying to set a new agenda. It stands for the Right to be Offensive," he wrote in an e-mail.
Over the years, Hume's politics have vacillated between the poles of communism and libertarianism, although his critics hail mostly from the left. His notoriety peaked when LM (formerly Living Marxism) -- a small-circulation culture and current affairs magazine where he was a founding editor -- was ordered to pay 375,000 pounds in damages to the British news network ITN in a controversial libel case last year.
But for a man who went from Marxist-magazine founder to columnist for the conservative Times (of London), the leap to online publishing threatens to be his biggest splash yet. ...
8.4 Melanie Phillips, another LM contributor, has since come out as a Zionist:
The new anti-Semitism
The Spectator, 22 March 2003 Melanie Philips
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/870739/posts
8.5 Now Mick Hume has also come out as a Zionist. He says the West is turning against Israel because it is losing confidence in itself:
His article at the Times was reproduced on several sites in Israel
e.g. the Weizmann site:
Mick Hume in The Times. Excerpted from The Times, April 22, 2002
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself. by Mick Hume ...
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/~comartin/israel/hume.html
and the Likud site:
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing ... The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself.
By Mick Hume, London Times, April 22, 2002. A few months ... http://www.likud.nl/press189.html
Here's Hume's article, reproduced on the Likud site:
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself
By Mick Hume, London Times, April 22, 2002
... As one who has long sympathised with the Palestinian cause, I feel increasingly suspicious of what is behind the anti-Israeli turn in Western opinion. The newfound discomfort with Israeli aggression looks less like a response to events in the Middle East than a symptom of the West's loss of conviction in itself.
It is becoming clear that, while the Israelis stand accused of a brutal crackdown in the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin, there was no massacre of civilians. Yet last week leading institutions and commentators were quick to give credence to the wilder claims of war crimes and secret mass graves. Those who suggest that the horrors of Jenin are unique in the annals of the Arab-Israeli conflict have short memories.
Instead, Israel is now being widely condemned for the sort of 'anti-terrorist' action that might have been tacitly condoned in the past. The new mood is strongest in Europe. Yet even in America the Israeli lobby is on the defensive, its columnists and Congressmen making shrill demands for support that would once have been unnecessary. Jewish groups boycotted the LA Times last week after an article compared Ariel Sharon to Slobodan Milosevic.
The reaction against Israel is not old-fashioned anti-Semitism, Even prominent Jews are coming out as anti-Israeli. The leading Labour MP Gerald Kaufman - a veteran Zionist - has branded Israel a pariah state and suggested that Sharon might be a war criminal.
"Every Jew needs to sob their heart out," says a spokeswoman for one Washington peace group: "We need to build healing mechanisms."
In the eyes of many today, Israel's crime is to be the most forceful expression of Western values. The Israeli state is seen as a beachhead of Western civilisation in a hostile world. That used to be its greatest asset. Today, however, Western civilisation has fallen into disrepute even within its own heartlands, and Israel's image has suffered accordingly.
Israel has never been able to accept completely such trends as political correctness, relativism and self-doubt. If it did so, the Israeli state would be finished. Today, however, Israel's unambiguous attitude of 'we're right and you're wrong', and defence of national sovereignty against the intrusions of international bodies, are embarrassing reminders of the kind of conviction that Western elites no longer feel able to express. The Israeli defence of its actions in Jenin: "at least we sent our men in to fight, instead of flattening everything from 50,000ft", is likely to have touched a raw nerve in Washington and Whitehall. ...
While Western leaders turn their backs on their old ally, their enemies turn on Israel as a scapegoat for the world's ills. Israel and the Jews have become the targets of a sort of ersatz anti-imperialism.
A global consensus against Israel has taken shape among all those who hate the values of Western society, an unholy alliance of Islamic fundamentalists with fashionable anti-capitalists. The 50 Western demonstrators who turned up at Yassir Arafat's besieged Ramallah compound bizarrely included Jose Bove, the French farmer famous for smashing up a McDonald's. ...
Sympathy with the terrible plight of Jenin is no reason to endorse the anti-imperialism of idiots. Populist anti-Israeli rhetoric is cheap, but offers no solutions to the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. And climbing on the backs of the victims to strike moralistic postures is just, as the diplomatic French might say, merde.
{end}
another Jewish site:
EUROPE: HOME OF ANTI-SEMITISM ...
a Mick Hume column in the UK Times. The guy is historically a Palestinian sympathizer, but he writes about this phenomenon of piling on Israel - and blames it ...
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/folder/apr_22_europe_hone_of_antisemitism.guest.html
8.6 Another item by Hume in the same vein:
The anti-imperialism of fools By Mick Hume
New Statesman (British leftist magazine) Monday 17th June 2002
http://virus.lucifer.com/virus/2499.html
Western leftists find themselves in strange company when it comes to the Middle East. Are they really happy to line up with neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists? ... {end}
8.7 Neocons are former leftists - often Trotskyist - who support Zionism, and oppose the Left because it sides with the Palestinians and Arabs in the face of Israeli expansionism.
The Neocons therefore joined the "Right-wing" political parties, but retain many "Far Left" social policies, such as favouring pornography, gay rights etc.
Neocons support Globalization (Free Trade, i.e. Capitalism), yet endorse most (but not all) of the New Left's cultural policies.
The Ayn Rand Institute typifies the Neocon policy mix:
(a) "libertarianism" -
Mar. 19, 2003 Thought Control Government should not have the power to legislate morality.
By Onkar Ghate http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/thoughtcontrol.shtml
{quote} You are jolted awake at 1:00 a.m. by loud knocking on the door. Alarmed, you and your girlfriend rise to answer. The police barge in and arrest you both on suspicion of having had premarital sex. Sound like something that would happen only in a dictatorship like Iraq's or China's? Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that if not overturned will grant legitimacy to such governmental power. ... At issue is not whether a particular sexual practice among consenting adults is in fact moral or immoral. At issue is something much broader: whether the government should have the power to enter your home and arrest you for having sex because it regards your sexual desires as "base," ... At issue is whether the government should have the power to legislate morality. If you want to live in a free society, the answer is: No. ... {endquote}
(b) Zionism
In Moral Defense of Israel
A Supplemental Issue of Impact, Newsletter of the Ayn Rand Institute, September 2002 http://www.aynrand.org/site/DocServer/israel_sept_2002.pdf?docID=164
We hold that the state of Israel has a moral right to exist and to defend itself against attack - and that the United States should unequivocally support Israel. On televi-sion, on radio, in newspapers, on college campuses - throughout our culture, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has been de-fending the use of retaliatory force against terrorists. This ad hoc publication out-lines our position and illustrates the im-pact of our intellectual activism. We stand for individual rights and freedom. In the name of justice, of defending the good, we support Israel. In a region dominated by despotism and to-talitarian dictatorships, Israel alone up-holds rights. Defending Israel - our only true ally in the Mideast - is in America's own self-interest.
No Moral Equality Between Israel and Its Enemies
Israel and those who attack it are not moral equals. Israel is a free, Westernized country, which recognizes the individual rights of its citizens (such as their right to prop-erty and freedom of speech). It uses military force only in self-defense, in order to protect itself. Those attacking Israel, by contrast, are terrorist organizations, theocracies, dictatorships and would-be dictators. They do not recognize the individual rights of their own subjects, much less those of the citizens of Israel. They initiate force indiscriminately in order to retain and expand their power. In contrast to the state of Israel, such organizations and regimes have no moral right to exist.
Israel Attacked for Its Virtues Fundamentally, Israel is the target of these organizations and regimes precisely be- cause of its virtues: it is an oasis of freedom and prosperity in a desert of tyranny and stagnation. If Israel is destroyed, the ene-mies of freedom attacking it will be able to turn their full attention to the United States. The United States must not let this happen.
Israel's War Is America's War
In America's war against terrorism, it is imperative that America distinguish friend from foe, good from evil, the opponents of terrorism from the perpetrators. In the name of justice and self-preservation, therefore, America should uncompromisingly encour-age and support Israel in the common fight against the enemies of freedom. ...
{end}
(9) Robert Manne unmasked as a Neocon
Robert Manne is a regular commentator in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. The Age published the following article by Manne, for the 50th anniversay of Stalin's death.
Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, has for years given the impression of being anti-communist. This was the tenor of his book Shadows of 1917; during the Cold War he was co-editor of Quadrant Magazine, funded in part by the CIA.
He had advised the Labor Party to ditch Feminism, but in recent years his articles on ethnic issues have taken a "Far Left" flavour: he takes a "progressive" stance on Aboriginal issues, and open borders (asylum seekers should be able to just turn up, without having to apply to come here).
On the Aboriginal issue, he opposes Noel Pearson, the Aboriginal leader who says that "progressive" forces are destroying Aboriginal culture (http://www.abc.net.au/austory/transcripts/s723570.htm; for Manne's opposition see http://old.smh.com.au/news/0111/26/opinion/opinion1.html).
Manne is Jewish; Australian Jewish News did a feature on him, in the issue of Friday, February 23, 2003:
True to the Inner Manne
{quote} POLITICAL historian Robert Manne remembers his bar mitzvah fondly and the years he taught in religion school at Temple Beth Israel, Melbourne.
In his office at La Trobe University, where he has been awarded a personal chair, Professor Manne, 55, who has been an associate professor in politics at the university for some years and is now La Trobe's professor of politics, is discussing what makes him Jewish.
Yet beyond the gate of teenage memories, the standard interviewer's questions about his involvement with the community do not attract the usual answers that refer to shuls, clubs and associations. Although he has close Jewish friends, he is not communally active.
But tap into his sense of values and you find a distinctly Jewish perspective. A sense of a shared heritage of rootlessness, displacement and subsequent passion for social justice have been constants in his life, as has a sense of moderation and reason. ...
With his Cold War-era distaste for communist regimes in Europe and Asia losing much of its relevance after the early 1990s, Manne became caught up in a domestic sea change. ...
"And in part, my interest in certain issues has been enlivened since the end of the Cold War, particularly my attitudes to reconciliation and the Aboriginal question, which I spend a lot of time thinking about, and my attitude to Australian multiculturalism, which I was sceptical about until I became convinced it was an important move. Those things have made me appear to be moving to the left." ...
In his regular opinion pieces for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, he has sounded warnings about xenophobia, racism in Australia and the popular backlash against ideas that began in the 1970s the realisation that Australia is answerable to its indigenous population, that it is a multicultural society and that it has a place in the broader Asian region. ...
His mother fled Germany and his father fled Austria on the eve of World War II, and later met and married in Australia. Untold numbers of family members perished in the Holocaust.
"It's easier for Jewish people to imagine severe forms of powerlessness because of Jewish history, particularly the 20th century. In my own case, it's my family's history and their sense of powerlessness and injustice."
When Manne sees asylum-seekers, he sees his own parents running for their lives to a land of opportunity. ...
{end of feature on Manne}
Not only does Manne's article in The Age (below) fail to mention his Jewish identity; the words "Jew" and "Jewish" do not appear in connection with communism, in the article at all, except as Stalin's paranoia over the Jewish Antifascist Committee and Doctors' Plot.
In the following article one notes that, although Manne castigates Stalin, he makes no criticisms of Trotsky. No mention that he wrote a book justifying the Red Terror (worst.html).
Nor does he mention that the Bolshevik regime had been created by Jews (lenin-trotsky.html); that Stalin turned the tables on them (kaganovich.html).
There's no mention of the plan for a Jewish Crimea, put by the the Jewish Antifascist Committee, which alarmed Stalin (sudoplat.html). No mention of the 1946 Baruch Plan for World Government, crafted by David Lilienthal and Bernard Baruch - both Jews - and put to Stalin by the United States (baruch-plan.html). No mention that Stalin was murdered, shortly after the Doctors Plot issue arose (death-of-stalin.html).
One might ask, "Is this the best that Jewish intellect can offer?" But fortunately, Benjamin Ginsberg, also a Jew, and Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University, puts the record straight on the Jewish role in Bolshevism: ginsberg.html.
Setting the standard for Manne, one might say. But if Manne is a Neocon - a Trotskyist who switched sides when the Jewish Bolsheviks lost control in the USSR, but retains many Trotskyist ideas - then his seemingly contradictory positions make sense.
Manne opposes the war in Iraq, but diverts attention from the Jewish
cabal behind it (on this topic see http://www.dailystar.com.lb/05_04_03/art22.asp,
http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/special_reports/iraq/bee/story/6408561p-7360864c.html,
http://www.middleeast.org/launch/redirect.cgi?a=&num=248,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/nyregion/26PROF.html,
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2125).
Man of steel, heart of stone
Robert Manne
The Age, Melbourne
Date: March 5 2003
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/03/04/1046540186583.htm
He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil. Robert Manne examines the legacy of Joseph Stalin, who died 50 years ago today.
In November 1940, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Soviet foreign minister Molotov visited Berlin. "I know that history will remember Stalin," Hitler told him, "but it will also remember me."
Hitler was right. Both he and Stalin were destined to be remembered as the 20th century's two most consequential political figures and the two most terrible tyrants known to history.
Stalin died 50 years ago today. He was born, as Iosif Dzugashvili, of poorest Georgian peasant stock. The family was not close. Stalin's father was a cobbler, a wife beater and a drunk. From the time he left the Orthodox seminary to join the Bolshevik party in 1904 to the year of her death in 1937, Stalin met his mother on no more than four occasions. With the partial exception of his first wife, who died in 1907, Stalin appears to have experienced throughout his life no attachment to any human being.
The Bolshevik party was the most extreme tendency of Russian Marxism. Before the abdication of the tsar in February 1917, Stalin worked as a professional revolutionary, and he was arrested and exiled several times. By the time he was voted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912, he had become the party's expert on the problem of the empire's non-Russian minority nationalities.
While Stalin's personal role in the almost bloodless seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 was considerably less glorious than he would later pretend, he did play a significant part in the military victory over the White Armies in the unbelievably savage civil war of 1918-20.
Yet, at that stage, even his more brilliant comrades continued to look down on him as a nonentity, as the "grey blur", or as Leon Trotsky put it, the "outstanding mediocrity". Stalin never forgot a slight. For their condescension, Stalin's comrades would later pay a high price.
Lenin suffered a series of strokes between November 1922 and his death in January 1924. During these months his misgivings about Stalin grew, because of his brutal administrative style, and the unheard of insolence he displayed towards Krupskaya, Lenin's wife.
In his final political will, Lenin suggested removing Stalin from the general secretaryship. Because they feared Trotsky and not Stalin, and because Lenin had been less than complimentary about all of them, Stalin's colleagues helped to suppress Lenin's will.
During the 1920s, the members of the post-Lenin Politburo became absorbed in a fierce and complex political struggle. The stakes were high - not merely the Lenin succession but the very future of the revolution, which all accepted was the most important historical event in the movement towards ending class oppression and emancipating humankind.
In the first phase of the struggle Trotsky was isolated and defeated by all his colleagues. In the second phase the "Right-Centre", led by Bukharin and Stalin, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev "Left". In the third phase, Stalin detached himself from, and politically destroyed, the Bukharin "Right".
Why did Stalin triumph? In part, he triumphed because his opponents took each other far more seriously than they did Stalin, until it was too late; in part because Stalin had an unparalleled capacity to separate questions of power from questions of ideology; in part because, as general secretary, Stalin possessed vast resources of political patronage, which he dispensed with great skill; and in part, it must be said, because in his cunning and unscrupulousness, and also in the sensitivity of his antennae to the mood of the Bolshevik rank and file, Stalin proved to be far superior politically to his more theoretically gifted colleagues.
By the late 1920s Stalin's victory over his rivals was complete.
Stalin now lurched violently to the policies of the ultra-Left. In the space of a few months in 1929-30, in conditions of indescribable chaos, the Stalin leadership used an iron broom to sweep the entire peasantry from their ancestral communes onto vast state-controlled collective farms. As part of the collectivisation drive, millions of slightly more prosperous peasants, the so-called "kulaks", were either deported for resettlement to the remotest regions or transported, as forced labour, to the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag Archipelago.
Collectivisation coincided with Stalin's decision to industrialise the Soviet Union at breakneck speed. The most immediate purpose of collectivisation was to force peasants to deliver grain to the regime, either to feed the factory workers, or for the export income needed to pay for the imports of foreign machinery Soviet heavy industry required.
In the early 1930s, Stalin collected grain quotas even when there was nothing for the peasants to eat. In his "man-made famine" of 1933, perhaps five million Ukrainian peasants starved to death.
The Communist Party celebrated the economic achievements at the Congress of Victors in 1934. Stalin was acclaimed, not merely as the leader of the party, but as a towering, universal genius in every human sphere.
Beneath the surface, however, reality was more complex. At the congress, corridor discussions about removing Stalin from his post as general secretary took place. In the secret ballot for the Central Committee, more than 100 of the 2000 or so delegates crossed out Stalin's name. Only three had crossed out the name of the popular Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov.
The Congress of Victors marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin no longer trusted the Communist Party. As an immediate measure he arranged for the assassination of Kirov, whose death he ostentatiously mourned. More important, he decided that there existed inside the Soviet Union a vast anti-socialist conspiracy. Stalin was convinced that the leader of this conspiracy was the man he most feared and loathed, Leon Trotsky.
Unfortunately, because he had been sent into foreign exile by Stalin, Trotsky was not available for arrest, trial and execution. However, Stalin was also convinced that the Trotsky conspiracy inside the Soviet Union was led by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both were arrested and, in 1936, were put on public trial where they confessed abjectly to heinous crimes. They were executed without delay. Stalin soon came to the opinion that the conspiracy had spread to the Right. In 1938 the show trial of Bukharin and his supporters took place.
In an atmosphere of hysteria, a Soviet-wide drive to root out the entirely fictitious Trotskyite conspiracy began. In 1937 and 1938 - the most horrific years in Russia's long and terrible history - almost one million "counter-revolutionaries" were executed, while perhaps five million were dispatched to the Gulag Archipelago, where the vast majority died.
Stalin personally signed thousands of death warrants. He often took pleasure in taunting former comrades with hints about their impending deaths. In these years, more than half the delegates at the Congress of Victors disappeared.
Stalin believed that the conspiracy had reached the Soviet army. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 army commanders were executed. As the Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, puts it: "The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in the time of peace."
During the 1930s, Stalin became the champion of the international anti-fascist movement, and the withering critic of the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the democratic powers, Britain and France. It was because of this that many left-wing intellectuals joined communist parties at this time.
By mid-1939, as the German invasion of Poland loomed, Stalin was effectively offered a choice between a military alliance with Britain and France or acceptance of a non-aggression pact with Germany. The West offered Stalin participation in the front-line of a continental war, while Hitler offered him the mirage of peace, the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and more time to arm. Stalin chose Germany.
Between August 1939 and June 1941, he was almost fanatical in his determination to do nothing that could be construed as a provocation to Germany. Consequently, when the massive German attack inevitably came, on June 22, 1941, the Soviet Army was militarily and psychologically unprepared. For the only time in his life Stalin's resolution broke. But it soon returned. According to his Russian biographer, General Dmitri Volkogonov, while Stalin was not a brilliant supreme commander of the Soviet armed forces he was highly competent. He listened to his talented generals; he developed a broad strategic grasp; he showed judgement in his refusal to evacuate Moscow and in his appeal to old-style Russian patriotism rather than proletarian solidarity.
On the basis of the 1930s industrialisation, the USSR became one of the world's great arsenals. In order to secure victory over Germany, Stalin was unconcerned about how many millions of his soldiers or civilians died. Nazi Germany was essentially conquered on the eastern front. This represents Stalin's one and only contribution to the improvement of mankind.
Soon after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the Soviet-British-American alliance began to fall apart. The British and Americans encouraged the Soviet Army into eastern Europe. Generally, they were sympathetic to Soviet border claims and demands for the creation of "friendly" governments in the lands between Germany and the USSR. They found it impossible, however, to reconcile themselves to Soviet political methods or the gradual imposition of single-party dictatorship in the areas the Red Army occupied. By 1948 Europe was effectively divided between a Soviet East and an Anglo-American West. Eastern Europe was swiftly Stalinised. In response to the Soviet military threat, NATO formed. In Germany, a dangerous military stand-off over the Soviet blockade of West Berlin arose. The Cold War had arrived. A third world war seemed more likely than not.
As always, inside Stalin's mind, morbid suspicions, mirroring the situation in the external world, took hold. Stalin dispatched to the Gulag vast numbers of returned Soviet soldiers who were tainted by knowledge of another, non-Soviet, reality.
Then, following the creation of Israel, Stalin's thoughts turned to the Jews. In 1952, he brought the leaders of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to trial. A vast anti-Semitic action was, most likely, being planned. As his health deteriorated, Stalin's gaze turned towards those around his bed. The organs of Beria's secret police began to investigate what was called "the doctors' plot". On March 5, 1953 - most likely to the genuine anguish of the Soviet people and the no less genuine relief of the members of his close entourage - Stalin finally died.
Stalin left after him nothing but the taste of ash in the mouth. He was not responsible for the creation of the brutal single-party dictatorship in Russia. Credit for that belongs to Lenin. Yet upon the Leninist foundations a number of possible futures - none that was likely to be democratic or prosperous - might have been built. That it was Stalin who succeeded Lenin, and not Trotsky or Bukharin or someone else, mattered a great deal.
For it was Stalin who was responsible for the needless deaths of perhaps 20 million human beings. And it was Stalin, more than anyone else, who cut the utopian 19th century idea of socialism from its humanitarian moorings and transformed it into a 20th century nightmare of economic irrationality and privation, mind-numbing ideological conformity and hypocrisy, barracks-style social regimentation, primeval leader worship, and universal fear.
{end}
(10) Karl A. Wittfogel and the (Jewish) Frankfurt School: Neocons
10.1 Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988)
http://www.riseofthewest.net/thinkers/wittfogel01.htm
"Karl A. Wittfogel was born on 06 September 1896 in Woltersdorf (Germany). ... In 1920-1921, he became a high school teacher in Tinz. In 1920, Wittfogel joined the communist party. ...
"Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1939, Wittfogel broke with the communist party. In the afterwar time, he became an outspoken opponent of the Russian and Chinese communist empires. ...
10.2 The Frankfurt School are the pioneers of Deconstruction and the "political correctness" Culture War raging in the West at present. The leading figures were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse ... but Wittfogel was in there too.
In perspective: Theodor Adorno
by DAVE HARKER, Manchester
http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/harker3.htm
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy, highly-cultivated, liberal-bourgeois family. His father was an assimilated Jewish wine merchant who had converted to Protestantism, and his mother was the Catholic daughter of a Corsican-French army officer and a German-born singer. ...
Adorno... since 1928 he had put a lot of effort into cultivating an old acquaintance, Max Horkheimer, Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
The Cafe Marx
The Frankfurt Institute was proposed in 1923, the same year as the defeat of the German Revolution. The impetus came from Felix Weill, a millionaire and self-styled 'salon Bolshevik' ...
By 1937, Horkheimer had announced a systematic shift of emphasis away from a marxist belief in the existence of 'class domination' towards an effectively liberal-bourgeois perspective of 'social justice', and away from marxist methods of analysis to what he liked to call 'critical theory'. ...
In 1938 Adorno followed the Institute to the USA.
Notes
36 Horkheimer became disillusioned after the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht in 1919, though he seems to have remained intellectually optimistic about the Soviet experiment until at least 1927. Marcuse had had some practical political experience in the SPD in 1917-1918, left on account of what he saw as its 'betrayal of the proletariat', but was in touch with Left Oppositionists {Trotskyists} so late as 1927. Langerhaus, Mandelbaum and Biehahn have been characterised as Korschists or Trotskyists, and yet Langerhaus, along with Massing and Gomperz have also been described as either members of (or friendly towards) the KPD up until some point in the 1930s. Grossman and Pollock were KPD members, Wittfogel was a KPD candidate in Reichstag elections ... Wittfogel seems to have given up the struggle inside the KPD by 1934, while Massing was lucky to be allowed to leave Moscow and the Party in 1938. Only Grossmann, a former member of the Polish CP, retained an unreflective enthusiasm for the Soviet Union into the 1940s, though he was already marginalised at the Institute by the time of the first Moscow Trials.
58 ... known communists like Wittfogel and Grossman were not allowed to have offices along with the rest of the staff in New York. Horkheimer and his staff worked hard to counter this left-wing reputation and after the USA entered the war in 1941, they not only took money for research from CBS and the Rockefeller Foundation but also went to work for the US State directly. Neumann went to the Washington-based Board of Economic Warfare, and later the Intelligence Division of the Office of the US Chief of Staff. Kirchheimer worked alongside Gurland as a staff member of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) at the State Department. Marcuse went to the Office of War Information in the State Department, and then worked with Neumann at the OSS, up to the time of the Korean War. Lowenthal also worked at the Office of War Information before he was appointed Director of the Research Department at the 'Voice of America' in 1949.
{end} more at wittfogel2.html.
(11) Convergence between the USSR and the West
The usual Convergence theory comes via Anatoliy Golitsyn. An ex-Soviet agent, he claimed that Convergence was a Soviet plot: convergence.html.
The evidence I have accumulated shows otherwise. It shows that Jews had gradually lost control of the Soviet Union; that there was a genuine non-Jewish Communism there, just as there was in Poland during the 1980s: poland.html.
Convergence, my material shows, was a movement by Jews (Trotskyists and/or Zionists) to REGAIN control of the USSR by returning it to its Trotskyist period. At the same time, they would impose Trotskyist social policies in the West, including the destruction of the family: engagement.html. This is the gist of David Ben Gurion's prediction of how the world would be in 1987: bengur50.jpg. For a bigger image see bengur62.jpg.
For background on this see tmf.html.
To shift the USSR from "Stalinism" to "Trotskyism", they had to loosen the scrwws; in the process, they lost control there.
Isaac Deutscher wrote that the Bolshevik Government, in its first years, was run by "emigres had lived many years in the West", who looked down on Russian "backwardness" and pursued "internationalist" politics:
"... they were Marxists in partibus infidelium, West European revolutionaries acting against a non-congenial Oriental background, which ... tried to impose its tyranny upon them. Only revolution in the West could relieve them from that tyranny ... "
"No sooner had Bolshevism mentally withdrawn into its national shell than this attitude became untenable. The party of the revolution had to stoop to its semi-Asiatic environment. It had to cut itself loose from the specifically Western tradition of Marxism ... "
Beria and Gorbachev attempted to return to this "Western" Marxism: each emphatically rejected Stalin. But Deutscher was a Jewish Trotskytist, and this "Western" Marxism is Trotskyism by another name: beria.html.
{end}
(12) Another Jewish Communist comes out as a Neocon ... in the Murdoch press. But Albert Langer insists he still represents the "Left"
May Day - it's the festival of the distressed
By shifting the argument to one about democracy and liberation, Dubya has done the right (Left) thing on Iraq. Meanwhile, the pseudo-Left just about got everything wrong, claims Vietnam War activist Albert Langer
The Australian
May 1, 2003 {by Albert Langer}
THE Left tide that rose worldwide in the 1960s subsided in the '70s, just as the previous tides from the '30s and '40s subsided in the '50s.
There was no significant Left upsurge in the '80s or '9Os, partly because reactionary forces were already on the retreat, with the liberation of southern Africa, East Timor and Eastem Europe the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the shift from military to parliamentary rule throughout Latin America, the Philippines and Indonesia.
When the left tide is rising, May Day provides an opportunity to sum up past victorles and preview the revolutionary "festival of the oppressed" to come. When the tide is low or dropping, as now, Mayday is just the international distress call - a cry for help.
For more than two decades, the genuine Left has been swamped by a, Left whose hostility to capitalism is reactionary rather than progressive. The pseudo-Left opposes modernity, development, globalisation, technology and progress.
It embraces obscurantism, relativism, romanticism and even nature worship. At May Day rallies, the pseudo-Left whines about how things aren't what they used to be.
The real Left has been marginalised, debating neither the neo-cons nor the pseudo-Left, simply because there has been no audience for that debate. Incoherent nonsense from complete imbeciles is published as "Left" comment in newspapers just so right-wing commentators can pretend they have something intelligent to say. In fact "Left" is used as a euphemism for "pessimistic", "unimaginative" and just plain "dull".
But now there is an audience. The war in Iraq has woken people everywhere - and the pseudo Left has really blown its chance.
Millions who marched in mid February stopped marching two months later, as soon as the argument shifted towards democratising and liberating the Iraqi people. Those millions still agree that George W. Bush is an arrogant bully, but they no longer believe the peacemongers have got it right. People want to figure out what is going on and are joining the debate at websites such as www.lastsuperpower. net.
For months, the argument was about weapons of mass destruction and the role of the UN. If the demands of the US, and the UN, had been fully met, Saddam Hussein could have lived happily, and the Iraqi people miserably, for ever after.
But look at what happened next! Suddenly we were hearing a different song. Bush has been making the argument not for disarming Iraq but for liberating Iraq.
Stripped of the "God bless America" stuff, the US President's case now goes like this:
"If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the 'campaigns of hatred', we can not only reduce the threats we face, but also live llp to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take hem seriously."
Actually, those words are from Noam Chomsky two days before Bush's UN speech on September 10, 2002.
But if Bush had adopted Chomsky's position so early, that would have prevented congressional authorisation. Such a position threatens to destabilise despotic, reactionary regimes everywhere. But those in the US foreign policy establishment have devoted their entire careers to supporting the most corrupt tyrannies in the Middle East, in the name of "stability".
For Chomsky, "draining the swamps" apparently didn't include killing people and blowing things up. Fortunately, Bush is made of sterner stuff.
Both Bush and Chomsky know the US cannot be secure from medievalist terrorist mosqitoes while the Middle East remains a swamp. But Bush also knows that modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun.
That is a genuinely Left case for a revolutionary war of liberation, such as has occurred in Iraq. The pseudo Left replies: "That's illegal."
Well, of course revolutionary war is illegal. Legal systems are created by revolutions, not revolutions by legal systems.
The next logical step for the new policy is to establish a viable Palestinian state. Bush has put himself in a position where he can and must take that step. Naturally, he will not admit to the enormous strategic and policy retreat that such a step implies, so he has preceded it with enough triumphalist rhetoric to make even the Fox News team look queasy.
The revival of the Left in the '60s only began once it was widely noticed that the remnants of the previous movement were reactionaries obstructing progress. After it tried so hard to preserve fascism in Iraq, even after Bush Jr had wisely given up on Bush Sr's policy of keeping the Iraqi dictator in power, can anyone deny the pseudo-Left is reactionary?
Albert Langer is an unreconstructed Maoist (anarcho-Stalinist) ...
{end}
(13) A Trotskyist Website Responds
The historical roots of neoconservatism: a reply to a slanderous attack on Trotskyism
By Bill Vann 23 May 2003
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/shac-m23.shtml
The May 20 edition of the Spanish-language daily El Diario/La Prensa in New York City published a column by the newspaper's political editor Vicky Pelaez entitled "From permanent revolution to permanent conquest." The thrust of the piece is an attempt to trace the current policies of the extreme right-wing clique that dominates the Bush White House and the Pentagon to the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.
This article is by no means unique. A number of print and on-line publications ranging from the Sunday Times in Britain and El País in Spain to the web site antiwar.com and that of the John Birch Society have featured similar material. In some cases, these articles are motivated by internecine disputes within the American right. In other cases they represent a confused attempt to explain the eruption of US militarism that has developed under the Bush administration, and the role played in it by a tight-knit group of hard-right ideologues centered in the Pentagon.
Ms. Pelaez's column is distinguished only by the crudeness of the fabricated details that she employs to further her arguments. After tracing the undoubted influence of the right-wing German-born political scientist Leo Strauss (See: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/stra-m26.shtml) upon many of those dubbed neoconservatives in the Bush administration, she proceeds to the alleged Trotskyist connection.
Pelaez writes: "But strangest of all is the political position of all those [Bush administration officials] cited above. The investigation reveals that the parents of all of them were Trotskyist militants, anti-Stalinists and belonged to the movement of the 1930s to the 40s that arose when Leon Trotsky abandoned the Soviet Union and denounced Stalin as a revisionist and a dictator. Of course, the United States supported with all its might the Trotskyist movement, which was spread worldwide; this included here in New York the CIA's organizing their congress at the Waldorf Astoria in 1949 (The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders.)"
She continues: "The children of the made-in-the-USA Trotskyists, their names are Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Feith, David Wurmser, etc., became part of the liberal anticommunist movements between the 1950s and 70s. Later they converted themselves into neoconservatives and transformed Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution into Permanent Conquest based on Strauss. Then they put it into action after taking power, calling it Permanent Expansion, justifying it by saying that Ôeverything that is good for America is good for the world' and that Ôthe United States has the right to attack any country if it perceives the existence of any danger.'" ...
{end}
(14) Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House
Influence on Bush aides: Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war
Jeet Heer
National Post, Saturday, June 07, 2003
http://www.majority.com/news/jeet1.html
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was paranoid. Perhaps his deepest fears centred around his great rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik movement, Leon Trotsky. Stalin went to extraordinary lengths to obliterate not only Trotsky but also the ragtag international fellowship known as the Left Opposition, which supported Trotsky's political program. In the late 1920s, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party and deported him from the Soviet Union. Almost instantly, other Communist parties moved to excommunicate Trotsky's followers, notably the Americans James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman.
In 1933, while in exile in Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the Fourth International. Never amounting to more than a few thousand individuals scattered across the globe, the Fourth International was constantly harassed by Stalin's secret police, as well as by capitalist governments. The terrible purge trials that Stalin ordered in the late 1930s were designed in part to eliminate any remaining Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. Fleeing from country to country, Trotsky ended up in Mexico, where he was murdered by an ice-pick-wielding Stalinist assassin in 1940. Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Stalin became even more obsessed with his great foe after killing him. Fearing a revival of Trotskyism, Stalin's secret police continued to monitor the activities of Trotsky's widow in Mexico, as well as the far-flung activities of the Fourth International. - - -
More than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Stalin's war against Trotsky may seem like quaint ancient history. Yet Stalin was right to fear Trotsky's influence. Unlike Stalin, Trotsky was a man of genuine intellectual achievement, a brilliant literary critic and historian as well as a military strategist of genius. Trotsky's movement, although never numerous, attracted many sharp minds. At one time or another, the Fourth International included among its followers the painter Frida Kahlo (who had an affair with Trotsky), the novelist Saul Bellow, the poet André Breton and the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James.
As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.
In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule.
As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.
Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book, The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.
To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.
"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.
To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.
Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin's leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of total opposition, eventually known as the "third camp" position. Shachtman argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow.
Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet Communism was "the greater and more dangerous" enemy. "There was a way on the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it obscured everything else," says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best portion of Shachtman's legacy still belongs to the left.
By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s.
Shachtman died in 1972, but his followers rose in the ranks of the labour movement and government bureaucracy. Because of their long battles against Stalinism, Shachtmanites were perfect recruits for the renewed struggle against Soviet communism that started up again after the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1970s, intellectuals forged by the Shachtman tradition filled the pages of neo-conservative publications. Then in the 1980s, many Social Democrats found themselves working in the Reagan administration, notably Jeanne Kirkpatrick (who was ambassador to the United Nations) and Elliott Abrams (whose tenure as assistant secretary of state was marred by his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal).
The distance between the Russia of 1917 and the Washington of 2003 is so great that many question whether Trotsky and Shachtman have really left a legacy for the Bush administration. For Christopher Phelps, the circuitous route from Trotsky to Bush is "more a matter of rupture and abandonment of the left than continuity."
Stephen Schwartz disagrees. "I see a psychological, ideological and intellectual continuity," says Schwartz, who defines Trotsky's legacy to neo-conservatism in terms of a set of valuable lessons. By his opposition to both Hitler and Stalin, Trotsky taught the Left Opposition the need to have a politics that was proactive and willing to take unpopular positions. "Those are the two things that the neo-cons and the Trotskyists always had in common: the ability to anticipate rather than react and the moral courage to stand apart from liberal left opinion when liberal left opinion acts like a mob."
Trotsky was also a great military leader, and Schwartz finds support for the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik's writings. "Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist," Schwartz notes. "Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don't refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army."
Paul Berman agrees with Schwartz that Trotskyists are by definition internationalists who are willing to go to war when necessary. "The Left Opposition and the non-Communist left comes out of classic socialism, so it's not a pacifist tradition," Berman observes. "It's an internationalist tradition. It has a natural ability to sympathize or feel solidarity for people in places that might strike other Americans or Canadians as extremely remote."
Christopher Phelps, however, doubts these claims of a Trotskyist tradition that would support the war in Iraq. For the Left Opposition, internationalism was not simply about fighting all over the world. "Internationalism meant solidarity with other peoples and not imperialist imposition upon them," Phelps notes.
Though Trotsky was a military leader, Phelps also notes "the Left Opposition had a long history of opposition to imperialist war. They weren't pacifists, but they were against capitalist wars fought by capitalist states. It's true that there is no squeamishness about the application of force when necessary. The question is, is force used on behalf of a class that is trying to create a world with much less violence or is it force used on behalf of a state that is itself the largest purveyor of organized violence in the world? There is a big difference." Seeing the Iraq war as an imperialist adventure, Phelps is confident "Trotsky and Shachtman in the '30s and '40s wouldn't have supported this war."
This dispute over the true legacy of Trotsky and Shachtman illustrates how the Left Opposition still stirs passion. The strength of a living tradition is in its ability to inspire rival interpretations. Despite Stalin's best efforts, Trotskyism is a living force that people fight over.
{end}
(15) Michael Lind vs Alan Wald on the Trotskyist tie to the Neocons
15.1 The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War
By Michael Lind
New Statesman - April 7, 2003
http://www.rense.com/general37/theweirdmenbehind.htm
... The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti- communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think- tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and- outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about
