War and Propaganda
Leo Strauss, Neocons, Fascism and Christianity
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Friday, 19 November 2004, Friday, 2 October 2009
That Strauss was a great defender of democracy is laughable… Strauss disciples consider it a noble lie.Shadia B Drury
The Straussists
Compared with these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a liberal. … The question is whether—Bush having already shown himself to be a fascist stooge—the American people like it that way and see that as their future. If this president is re-elected we are facing the totaldeath of the American Dream.Hunter S Thompson, Interview, October 2004
Time magazine (17 June, 1996) considered Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a University of Chicago philosopher, among the most influential figures in Washington DC. Strauss built a cult in his years at Chicago—the “Straussists” or SS. It appeared in Saul Bellow’s autobiographical novel, Ravelstein where Strauss is Davarr, the Hebrew for “Word”! Harper’s, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and The New Yorker have all featured the Straussist plot. It is time people began to get scared and angry about it!
American students—“virgins” described as savages by Strauss’s disciple, Allan Bloom, when they came to university because they were so ignorant and badly read—were impressed by the scholarly German, who groomed those he hand-picked for the succession. Strauss considered himself a modern Moses taking his children, described as “boys”, to the promised land, but destined never to see it himself. While mainly far from brilliant, the “boys” were ambitious, and, considering themselves Chosen, had the advantage of the close knit network of the Straussist cult.
Straussists are unique for “conservative intellectuals” in becoming a school. It consisted of Strauss’s many postgraduates, and their own students and disciples down through the generations for half a century, who have slowly infiltrated university political-science departments. Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, argued that justice is helping friends and hurting enemies, a basic principle of the Straussists among themselves and in international affairs—whence the absurd reaction to the legitimate objections of the French over the US and UK attempt to steamroller the UN over Iraq.
Straussists gave each other exemplary references whatever their personal disagreements, tilting the academic playing field in their own favour, and now dominate the politics and philosophy departments of US universities. Lesser gentlemen opted for government positions in the executive branch at Washington DC, where their lack of scruples about lying were an advantage. Thus Strauss aimed to fulfil his belief that society should be directed by an intellectual elite.
Straussians talk in a kind of code to one another. When one refers to someone as a “gentleman”, it means they are a morally admirable person but not capable of philosophy. They network in academia and in Washington and find one another jobs. A lot of their academic money comes from the John Olin Foundation.Robert Locke, Straussist “scholar”
Unsurprisingly, Locke is unfazed by this, unlike “the Left”, but Straussist influence is overwhelming. Liberals need to stop pussyfooting around and start to fight the fascist epidemic Strauss started. Some say Strauss is not responsible for the mania of his disciples—that their barbarism has reduced Strauss's “esoteric philosophy to vulgar ideology” (Carole Widmaier)—but they could hardly have gone anywhere else except the far right. The disciples of Strauss’s cult are now in charge of US justice and foreign policy. Paul Wolfowitz, a student of Bloom, is Deputy Defense Secretary, and leads the fascist faction in G W Bush’s foreign office. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a Straussist Washington think tank and sponsor of “the Project for a New American Century”. Its policy has been the unity of Bush’s Middle East policy with that of Sharon’s Likud. This Straussist-Likud axis explains much of Bush’s foreign policy.
Liberal scholar, Shadia B Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, is one of the few who has tried to counter the vile disease of Straussism by publicly exposing it in several books. In 1997, Drury (Leo Strauss and the American Right) listed Straussists in the Washington ruling clique, most of whom are still there, and joined by many others——Paul Wolfowitz, Supreme Court Justic Clarence Thomas, Judge Robert Bork, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, William Bennett, William F Buckley (National Review), Alan Keyes, Francis Fukuyama, ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, Ken Masugi, Michael Ledeen, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Abram Shulsky and Richard Perle of the Pentagon, Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council, George Will, Newt Gingrich, Robert Kagan, and even Clinton advisor, William Galston, and fellow Democrat, Elaine Kamark. Jeffrey Steinberg reports in Executive Intelligence Review, 21 March, 2003, that Strauss allies and protégés in the neoconservative movement after World War II were Irving Kristol—father of William Kristol, Willmoore Kendall, Norman Podhoretz, Samuel Huntington, Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Q Wilson.
Leo Strauss—Outing the Closet Fascist
Steinberg called Leo Strauss the “Fascist Godfather of the neoconservatives”. His neocon disciples believe that an elite should use deception, religious fervour and perpetual war to control the credulous population.
With the neoconservatives and the Christian Right in power, Americans can forget about the pursuit of happiness and look forward to perpetual war, death, and catastrophe.Shadia B Drury
Strauss was born to observant Jewish parents and was educated in Germany. In the 1920s, he was active in Jewish youth groups inspired by the German nationalist youth movement, and took a German doctorate. He started out a theologian commenting on Jewish writers, then he turned to the Greek philosophers. His defenders say he left Nazi Germany as a refugee, seeming to suggest that he could not therefore have been a fascist, but he was already a rabid anti-democrat looking for ways round the dominant political ideal of liberalism. He was looking to turn the clock back before the Enlightenment to the ancien régime.
He so admired the three philosophers also most admired by the Nazis—Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Nazis hero-worshipped Nietzsche. As a young man, Strauss fell under Heidegger’s influence. Heidegger was a Nazi. Carl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher of law, had, in fact, arranged a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in France (1932) and England (1934), before entering the United States (1937), ending up at the University of Chicago (1949). Schmitt, like Thrasymachus, classified everyone simply as friends or enemies, “with us” or “against us”, exactly as Bush and his Republican predecessors call everyone good or evil. Those who do not directly serve the needs of US Republicans are enemies, and when they are independent countries had better watch out against invasion by the US military intent on regime change!
In 1933, Strauss wrote to Schmitt, by then a Nazi member, for help meeting Charles Maurras, the French fascist leader of the Action Française. Also in 1933, with Hitler already Reich Chancellor and legislatiing against Jews, Strauss wrote to Karl Löwith:
Because Germany has turned to the right and has expelled [Jews], it simply does not follow that the principles of the right are therefore to be rejected… only on the basis of principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial—is it possible in a dignified manner, without the ridiculous and pitiful appeal to “the inalienable rights of man” to protest…
He added that he admired Virgil’s observation that, “under imperial rule the subjected are spared and the proud are subdued”. His enthusiasm for Hitler has now been exposed. Heidegger remained Chancellor of Freiburg University during the Nazi era, being keen on Nietzsche and his ideas of the New Man—the Superman! Strauss’s apparent disagreements with Heidegger have to be read in the Straussist fashion! Nietzsche and Heidegger refuted the absolutes of revealed religion—right and wrong. Values were social constructs. What Nietzsche, and thence Hitler, called the “Superman”, or the “New Man”, Strauss called the “philosopher”. For Strauss, no woman could be a philosopher.
Strauss came out openly as conservative in 1956 in a published letter to Willmoore Kendall of the National Review. The Zionism in him came out in his objection to the conservative journal’s antipathy towards Israel—it was “unqualifiedly opposed to Israel”.
Reading Esoteric Writing
Strauss’s approach to political philosophy is to understand ancient philosophy as better than modern philosophy, so long as the ancient philosophers are understood as they understood themselves. Strauss taught that the ancient philosophers wrote at both an esoteric and at an exoteric level, and he alone had realized it:
The greatest thinkers often wrote with both exoteric and esoteric teachings, either out of fear of persecution or a general desire to present their most important teachings to those most receptive to them. This leads to an attempt to discern the esoteric teachings of the great philosophers from the clues they left in their writings for careful readers to find.Straussian.net
Not just the Greek philosophers used this unrecognized skill. Machiavelli too! Strauss declared Machiavelli’s work to be “elaborate ventures in ‘hidden writing’”. Yet, Machiavelli was also blamed, or credited, with hiding the ancient secret from modern readers by also openly stating the hidden truths! Strauss alone read the true, hidden meaning behind old philosophic tradition. He taught that the esoteric was there and that those who knew it could read it carefully to reveal the hidden truth amidst apparently contradictory words. There is indeed more to the Straussists’ innocent advice for:
A return to treating old books seriously, reading them slowly and with an effort to understand them as their authors did, rather than as History does.Straussian.net
They are convinced that the cognoscenti used literary devices simultaneously to conceal and to reveal true teaching. Among them are contradictions, concealment or obscurity of the plan, pseudonyms, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, strange expressions, kinds of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions, usage of the first person singular, and so on, and these are the clues to correct reading. Here was the influence of Heidegger:
Nothing made a greater impact on Strauss than Heidegger’s manner of studying a text… he thought that Heidegger’s approach laid bare the intellectual sinews of a text, and it was unlike anything else he had ever seen or heard… The goal was not so much understanding as initiation in a mystical cult… the same can be said for Strauss.Shadia Drury
If it is reasonably supposed that the Greek philosophers did understand things differently, it is now no easy task to see how they did understand things. Recapturing their world outlook is most likely impossible, and without the original writer’s key or method of obscuring their meaning, many keys can be imagined. Who can be sure they have the right one? To deduce certainly the next term in even such a simple arithmetic series as 1,2,3,… is impossible, but Straussists can do it. They would concede that the obvious answer of 4 is the exoteric answer—for mass consumption—but the esoteric one is 10… or 16, or 1804, or any one of an infinite number of other choices. The writings of philosophers are hardly so simple, but somehow Strauss deludes himself and his deluded apostles. As John Allen Paulos puts it:
Only a demented conspiracy theorist can read a story on new advances in treating diabetes and claim it is in fact a story about the Trilateral Commission’s effort to undermine the Aryan Brotherhood.
Biblical codes have been a publishing industry for centuries, up to and beyond Barbara Thiering, who was fond of pseudonyms and temporal clues. Without an assured key, what is hidden can be read as almost anything at all, and, with no historical clues, anything can be made of a text supposed to have an esoteric sub-text. A saint would find a saintly sub-text. What Strauss read was not a saintly message!
Obscuring the Truth
The Straussist method then gets even more tortuous for, we are told that to understand Strauss, we have to read him in the same obtuse way. Straussists are encouraged to find something surprising in any text, knowing they will find something behind it that is not there! But the elitist ideas of Strauss tell them what to expect, and lo! they find it. Brought up in Weimar Germany, with fascism rising, Strauss learnt from Goebbels, Goering and Hitler that deception was intrinsic to politics. So, it was necessary for the ruling philosophers of the ideal state. Thus in Plato’s Republic, when Socrates seemed to succeed in defeating Thrasymachus over how the republic should be ruled, Strauss insisted that Plato meant the losing argument to be the one he advocated! The losing argument was that justice is the exercise of power and not the cultivation of harmony! Similarly, where Locke prefers natural law over natural rights, Strauss uses tortuous logic to show he meant the opposite. To anyone reasonable, Strauss is suggesting, with his deluded hypothesis, we do the opposite of whatever any rational argument persuades us to do! It is the philosophy of insanity. But his disciples take him seriously and practice it! Shulsky and Schmitt argued that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning…
…alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.
Though it sounds cautionary, as they deceptively intend, it is meant as a principle of their ideal political life. Proof is just a social-science and judicial convention for these men. They take the opposite of anything they are told to be true, and decide that lack of evidence is proof of concealment. It is just how the inquisitors and witch hunters treated those they had labelled as evil.
Strauss’s colleague and chum, Allan Bloom—“outed” in Bellow’s novel as Ravelstein himself, a promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS, according to Tony Papert—became famous in 1987 with a book, The Closing of the American Mind, described by Nicholas Xenos, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in Logos Journal as an anti-egalitarian diatribe. In it he declared his intellectual antecedents, though mentioning Strauss only once. Though Bloom writes in a charming style, he…
makes his argument complex and subtle to the point of evasiveness, as if he wants to confuse and mislead the reader.Karl Jahn
So, style notwithstanding, Jahn, a sympathetic critic, judges that Bloom leaves even the sympathetic reader unsure of what he really means to say. Although he dissects social problems of culture with a sharp scalpel, his own recommendations are anything but clear. How could they be? It is fascism! Jahn remarks, “So careful is he to hide the point of his argument, he nearly fails to make it”. Trying to understand it has the benefit of leaving the diligent reader too tired to criticize!
Bloom cannot help being dishonest in his book. Papert recalls that Bloom wrote Socrates, accused of rejecting the gods, never denied the charge. Yet, Plato (Apology of Socrates) tells us Socrates did deny it. Bloom is a Greek scholar. Is he wrong, or is he doing what Straussists do—telling lies. The fascist intentions of the Straussists cannot be revealed even in books intended for other Straussists without giving the game away. Strauss was anything but clear in most of his writing.
Now, was it an accident that Strauss’s books, especially his later books, were unreadable? No. I came to see that it was deliberate.Tony Papert
Obscurity is essential for secrecy, but the secret cannot be kept forever. Strauss revealed his idea of it to his students while keeping his own writing obscure, but neocons in power, like Kristol and Locke, inevitably have let the cat right out of the bag.
Hating the Modern World
Strauss contrasted ancient and modern philosophy, while teaching philosophy was political, today’s Straussists claiming:
a recognition of the political nature of philosophy, that most philosophers who wrote did so with a political purpose.Straussian.net
Modern philosophers gave birth to the modern world at the Enlightenment when liberality and scientific discovery and progress began in earnest. The Enlightenment opened knowledge to everyone to pursue according to their interest. Science is an open endeavour. Its results are published openly for others to read and check. To make full use of human talents, society must be egalitarian, allowing anyone to attain seniority according to their ability but irrespective of their origins. Fascist elitism opposes all this. “Modern” is the worst word of abuse for Straussists, who are urged to recognize…
the dangers that historicism, relativism, eclecticism, scientism, and nihilism pose to philosophy and to Western culture generally, and an effort to steer philosophy away from these devastating influences through a return to the seminal texts of Western thought.straussian.net
In other words, Strauss—and his protégés—hated the modern world—had a “huge contempt” for it and for secular democracy, in Drury’s reported words—particularly post-Enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism and democracy of the United States. For them, democracy is a weakness. Strauss taught the German Nazi party had arisen because the Weimar Republic was tolerant of political and religious extremes, and, as a similarly liberal country, the US was in a similar boat, and could not recognize its real enemies.
Straussist preference for the ancients categorizes them as anti-modern, and offers them the chance of allies in the Straussist master plan.
…modernity itself is the problem.Robert Locke
Religious believers too are anti-modern, like the broad swath of primitive Christians in the US, and so too are political conservatives looking to the golden days of the ancien regime, before the Enlightenment.
Much of what conservatives find attractive in society is ultimately premised on philosophy that is pre-modern and to some extent anti-modern.Robert Locke
Strauss added a philosophical conservatism to religious belief and economic and political conservatism, ostensibly based on reason, based on an interpretation of Greek philosophy different from the Enlightenment’s. Pfaff concluded that Strauss’s appeal to conservatives was that his elitism offered a rationalization for policy expediency, and for “necessary lies” for those whom the truth would alienate.
The hatred of modernism, democracy and liberalism of the present US neocon administration proves that their claim to be taking democracy to the Moslems is a lie. It is one of their modern invented “myths”. Nor is it coincidence or accident that Bush has twice been elected by bending the US electoral system with blatant electoral buggery.
They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they’re conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy.Shadia B Drury
They are fond of the picture given by Dean Swift when he depicted the giant Gulliver as saving the Lilliputians by dousing the conflagration that threatened their city by pissing on it. The Lilliputians were nonetheless outraged to be doused in piss. That is how the Straussists see themselves vis-a-vis the rest of the world. America will save them by pissing on them because they will be enraged anyway. In their relationship with hoi polloi of the US, they know they can piss on them and get re-elected for their kindness!
They even lie about their own intellectual aims, claiming to be modernists:
A constant examination of the most drastic of philosophic distinctions—that between the Ancients and the Moderns. An attempt to better understand philosophers of every age in relation to this distinction, and to learn everything that we as moderns can learn about ourselves by studying both eras.
Of course, they can be nothing else, but it is typical of them that they will boast about the exclusive importance of the lost ideas of the ancients, skuttling modernism in favour of these old ideas then claim still to be modern. They know full well that their war programs depend upon the superiority of American modern science and technology the ancient Greek philosophers knew nothing about, and Straussists are not so besotted with ancient genius they urge a return to four elements and the celestial spheres. If the city of modernity, as Strauss taught, is built on “low but solid ground”, the Straussist city is built on waterlogged sand in a rift valley. Let them live in it, but the trouble is they want to take us all with them as their cannon fodder and slaves. Pray for the earthquake before it is built!
The Ruling Caste and its Morality
The perfect city is realised, classically, through a properly ordered “regime” (politeia) seeking the excellence of its citizens. It is a totalitarianism consisting of its mass of herd slaves ruled by a small elite of philosophers. The philosophers need people to serve them. Above the vulgar caste and below the philosopher caste, these they call “gentlemen”. They expound the exoteric teachings, acceptable knowledge that publicly serves the good of the philosopher elite—religion, morality, patriotism, public service—and act as administrators. They are front men rewarded by the favours of the philosophers to rule the “secret kingdom”. With G W Bush, the secret kingdom had arrived, but even though the secret is out, Americans are not interested! They voted an endorsement of it. “Give us more of the same!”
For Straussists, moral virtue did not apply to philosophers. Strauss taught:
Those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right—the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.Shadia Drury
Moral virtue was for the vulgar, for popular consumption only. There is no morality, nor any good and evil. These are relative values, and Strauss hated relativism. The great majority of people are so afraid of the truth, they are effortlessly inferior—the “herd” or “slaves”—untermenchen! The philosophers, or more honestly, the führer-sophers, the modern elite, are the Straussists and neocons! The herd would take their revenge on the philosophers if the truth got out. Like Socrates, the philosophic elite run the risk of the herd forcing them to drink hemlock if the truth be known. The rulers have to keep the herd in fear so that they would willingly surrender freedom for security! So, Straussists want to return to the ancient esoteric tradition whereby knowledge is kept secret from the vulgar herd. Only philosophers know the truth:
- there is no God
- the universe cares nothing for humanity which is a mere speck in the cosmos
- there is no afterlife
Strauss believed there is no God, that morality is prejudice, and that society is independent of Nature. This “moral clarity” was essential for Strauss’s disciples but no one else.
He died as a philosopher. Without fear, but also without hope.L Strauss, in a eulogy
But it is possible to have hope while not believing any religious fancies. We have hope in the future of the world we pass on to our children. It is the only thing we can usefully have hope in, and the only sensible thing for us to conserve.
Common people, the vulgar mass, are not worthy of the great endeavour of philosophy. Philosophers could bear the burden of living without some supernatural hope, but not the vulgar, who cannot stand to think there is no God to reward good and punish evil. If slaves at the base of society were told these truths, society would collapse in disorder. An orthodox moral “clarity” served for the slaves, a clarity that calls evil by its true name. W Bennett explained that “terms like evil, wrong, and bad were rightly put back into the lexicon”. Hoi polloi can and should be fed myths—lies in honest language. Being absolute rulers, the philosophers had no need of natural law, and indeed were right to lie by making up myths intended to deceive the people. The Greek ideal of “virtue” was impossible for slaves to understand or achieve, so they had to be fed lies about political economics and history. The vulgar are empty-headed readers but respond to simple images. The noble lie for the consumption of society’s slaves are best delivered as images, simple constructions making the point required. Only the elite knew the truth.
The concept of the Straussian text is one susceptible to intellectual mischief in the form of wild claims about the esoteric meaning of texts, not to mention rather off-putting for anyone who doesn’t like know-it-all elites. But … it is strikingly similar to the view cultivated for centuries by the Catholic and Orthodox churches and by Orthodox Judaism, not to mention other religions—there is a small number of men who know the detailed truth. The masses are told what they need to know and no more.Robert Locke
If virtue was an impossible standard, then rulers should take advantage of the base and selfish instincts of ordinary people, the slaves of the philosophers. Niccolo Machiavelli was right. Machiavelli wrote The Prince, recommending that a strong ruler should use any means, however despicable, to maintain his rule—the ruling caste could restrict free inquiry, and could exploit the gullibility of ordinary people to keep society in order. Machiavelli was a man much admired by Strauss, and William Kristol, who wrote his dissertation on him. Kristol with S Lenzner says one only has “to show sovereign indifference to moral principles to establish oneself as a teacher of tyrants” (The Public Interest, 2003). Since such statements are not subtle, and these people have worked their way into power, it is difficult to see why Americans are not outraged and fearful. Al Queda is less the threat than the dangerous scheming sect in Washington.
Strauss has given philosophy a bad name by using it as the basis of a Nazi world view. Karl Jahn notes that Strauss thinks philosophers are superior beings—a type of superman. But philosophers are human beings, and if they are in any sense better than others, it is only a matter of degree, just as professional basketball players will generally be taller than other people. As Jahn says, the difference between the philosopher and the ordinary person is one of degree, not of kind. A philosopher might be more curious about things and more analytical about thinking about them but in other respects he is human, and has no more grounds for being considered superior than a bishop has.
The ancient philosophers did believe that the philosophic life is the highest and best, but only a few are suited to it.Karl Jahn
By the same criterion, only a few are suited to be steeplejacks or Olympic swimmers. That some are able to do these things is no reason to think they are an absolute elite of humanity, chosen to rule. Straussists claim egalitarianism devalues everything by making it accessible to the common man. Yet whatever skill is considered, only a selection of ordinary people are able to excel at it. They are the elite human beings in that skill, and it benefits humanity to draw upon as many potential sources of any skill as possible. In the same way, to get the best philosophers, philosophy must be able to appeal to as many people as possible, but what can be appealing about it, if no ordinary folk are allowed to know what it is ultimately about because it is an esoteric secret of the supermen who already rule society. It inevitably will lead to rebellion, and the rebels will have to be stopped by whatever method is available, including confinement, torture and death. We are back to the Dark Ages!
Bloom’s only hope is the cultivation of a tiny remnant to pass on the old lore through the new Dark Age.Karl Jahn
The Jewishness of the neocon Straussist movement is also highlighted in this assessment. Like the biblical remnant of Jews returning from exile, the Straussists will be the salvific remnant of conservative society and ancient values—the Hope of Israel! Israel means the philosophers in the Straussist outlook—the priests of the neocon temple to the God of Lies!
The Use of Religion
In Irving Kristol’s view, religion should particularly be used to deceive the ignorant ballot fodder of the masses. Marx warned that religion was the opiate of the people. The Straussists concur, but not as a warning, as a worthy, indeed, recommended practice! With his Old Testament background, Strauss saw humanity as intrinsically wicked—what Christians call original sin—so, religion was essential to impose moral law to control the mob.
Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed. Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united—and they can only be united against other people.Leo Strauss
War was necessary, and so too fervid sectarianism or nationalism. The war of good and evil is easy for the simplest people to get, and war is a necessary state in perpetuum for Straussists. Strauss was opposed to all utopias, his daughter plainly admits, yet the idea of peace is for Strauss a utopian dream. Better to stick to war or the threat of war to keep the politics clear! Historically, religion has been a force for evil, a constant cause of mutual hatred, strife and war.
The use of religion as a political tool encourages the cultivation of an elite of liars and frauds who exempt themselves from the rules they apply to the rest of humanity. And this is a recipe for tyranny, not freedom or democracy.Shadia B Drury
Religion could be used without guilt for lying propaganda because the elite were not religious. Strauss makes every effort to negate any hint of theism in the early modern political philosophers. Though a Jew, and plainly influenced in his thinking by Judaism all his life, being buried as a Jew despite his supposed atheism, Strauss called it a “heroic delusion” and a “noble dream”, but his acolytes urge careful attention be paid…
to the dialogue throughout the development of Western culture between its two points of departure—Athens and Jerusalem. The recognition that Reason and Revelation, originating from these two points respectively, are the two distinct sources of knowledge in the Western tradition, and can be used neither to support nor refute the other, since neither claims to be based on the other’s terms.Straussian.net
Plainly they did not offer Jerusalem any more respect than Athens, and could not be considered religious in Christian terms. And Strauss’s scholarship apparently never took him before “Athens” and “Jerusalem” to the point at which they both met in Rhages. The Persian leaders, who used religion just as Strauss does, seemed pious themselves, but, for Strauss, religion was for the masses alone. As a pious fraud, rulers need not be bound by it, but they must propagate a myth that they are religious, to fool the ballot box religious slaves at the base of society. They rejected any God that punished wrongdoing, and so were ready to do any wrong out of expediency.
Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.Ronald Bailey, Reason
Drury illustrates such Straussist delusions with Dostoevsky’s famous short story, The Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor interviews a mysterious stranger he had condemned to death. The stranger explained to the cleric that Jesus had repealed the Mosaic law so that people could exercise their free will and choose between good and evil. The stranger was Jesus come again. The Inquisitor demured. People were too “weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious” to be free. The authority of the Church and belief in mystery and miracle would console the worthless masses until they died, expecting an eternal life in heaven they would never have, a secret they could never expose. In offering the empty consolation, the clergy had to lie, but their reward was to be considered as gods by the ignorant masses. The attitude of Strauss was identical.
Yet, in practice, “moral clarity” meant believing his own lies. Among the myths he taught his disciples was that Plato was the prince of philosophers, but he had been misread by later Platonists and even by the Christian scholastics. Naturally, Strauss had “recovered” the real Plato! His critics think he “recovered” what suited him as one of the myths he propagated meant for popular consumption only.
Benevolent Hegemony
Straussists William Kristol and Robert Kagan masterminded a policy of “benevolent hegemony”, a benign American imperialism, as Thomas G West, Professor of Politics at Dallas University, calls it in The Claremont Review of Books. The ostensible reasons for this hegemony—the propaganda reasons for public consumption—are to stop any foreigners from attacking America, and to impose democracy on the world.
Immediately the contradictions of Straussism are evident. How is hegemony compatible with democracy, or in other words, how can it be democratic to impose democracy? How can oppressing foreigners, making them hate you, make you safer from their attacks? The real reasons are that through benevolent hegemony, Straussists will encourage the US citizen to “relish the opportunity for national engagement, embrace the possibility of national greatness, and restore a sense of the heroic”. Does the neocon devotion to benevolent hegemony square with a foreign policy that secures the lives and liberties of Americans? Attempting to force democracy into places like Iraq that have only known despots seems likely to lead to an unnecessary waste of American lives, not to mention Iraqis. Bush’s father did not buy it and rejected Wolfowitz and Cheney’s urging to finish off Saddam in 1991. Wolfowitz was shocked. Bush Sr turned out not to be one of the “New Men”. The younger Bush was more malleable.
Yet from a reading of the classics, human excellence is the highest task of politics, a domestic issue, and foreign policy has the simple purpose of making it possible through survival or self-preservation and independence, and nothing else. It is not the purpose of nations to be imperial, even if at times it might be necessary. Aristotle criticized Sparta for having as its central political purpose the domination of other nations by war, and the perpetual imperialism of Rome was its weakness not its strength. Strauss knew this, so he or his disciples are being economical with the truth to claim otherwise. Of course, for Straussists, only the elite knew the truths about society and its history. Ordinary people were not strong enough to handle truth, and so were consoled with lies. People might have to be told the lie that a foreign prince intends to threaten our survival by WMD. Strauss pretends that such lies are “noble lies”, but there is nothing noble about the intention behind them. Their aim is to shape society to benefit the ruling class—the New Men themselves.
Why was there a big disagreement about the WMD held by Saddam Hussein? Are the secret services just useless? The answer is that they are not useless, and indeed they knew Saddam had no WMD. It did not suit Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who had decided on war. So, they and their fellow believers in Straussism invented a myth. They created an agency called the Office of Special Plans to establish the case for WMDs—to invent a mythical case for the invasion of Iraq. Wolfowitz’s boss, Donald von Rumsfeld appointed Abram Shulsky as its director. Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of Leo Strauss, and has bragged (Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)) that Strauss taught him “deception is the norm in political life”. In this essay, written with Gary J Schmitt, Shulsky shows his utter disdain for military intelligence, or any truth. Sure enough, he found Saddam was armed to the teeth with monstrous weapons and would be sure to attack the US when he was ready. Since the war there has been no signs of the myth being shown to have been true. How can myths be true? Lies cannot be true by definition!
Strauss’s neoconservatives are using foreign policy to fulfil what Irving Kristol had already called a “national destiny” in 1983. Now the neoconservative ideologues have convinced Bush Jr that he is a man of destiny. They have pushed him forward as a modern Hitler to win a new world empire for a New World Order. And Bush, with the massive turnout of Christians in his favour has won a second term based on lies, and the unnecessary suffering of a lot of human beings! The evangelical yearning for righteousness is incompatible with liberty. Free people will not necessarily choose righteousness, as even God recognized. Moreover, the Christian right applauds suffering because it makes man appeal to God for redemption, so the neocons use both Straussist and Christian delusions to achieve the political domination they desire. The neocon aim is a New World Order under US hegemony, achieved by destroying America’s enemies, and all international jurisdiction.
[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.John Quincy Adams, 4 July, 1821
Kristol and Kagan challenged this, suggesting Americans should not stand by watching the monsters abroad, but it is not the Greek philosophers’ view, and probably not even Strauss’s, if he agreed with the classical scholars that domestic self-improvement was the highest aim. The classical approach to foreign affairs may be ruthless selfishness where necessary towards others for the improvement of the nation’s citizens, but Straussists overlook that foreign hegemony is illegitimate except when necessary. The Founders consdered this a natural law.
America’s Declaration of Independence clearly says every nation is entitled to a “separate and equal station” among “the powers of the earth”. “The laws of nature and of nature’s God” declare “all men are created equal” and we have to respect other’s equal rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Liberty is each nation consenting to its own government independent of the government of other nations. No nation has any right to conquer or interfere in the affairs of any other nation, except for self defence. Even then, the classical Greats thought any such necessity should be held to an absolute minimum.
In The Federalist, Madison said the constitution of 1787 meant that though states might dissent, yet “moral relations will remain uncancelled. The claims of justice, both on one side and on the other, will be in force, and must be fulfilled; the rights of humanity must in all cases be duly and mutually respected”. Natural law obliges a nation to respect “the rights of humanity” in other nations, subject to the qualification that the nation’s government has to secure the lives, liberties, and properties of its own citizens. Governments neither have the right to disregard the lives of their own citizens nor those of others. Lenzner and Kristol (The Public Interest 153) say Strauss thought wisdom “requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to the cause of constitutionalism”. But should we believe men who say, “I lie!”
Apologies for Straussism
Naturally, the apologists of the conservatives and the Straussists make light of those exposing the fascist conspiracy, laughing off suggestions of a “cabal practicing some sort of political black arts”, though Shulsky braggs about it, according to Seymour Hersh. “Straussists are dangerous not because they are Machiavellian but because they are naive”. So, the senior political reporters of the media heavyweights are making out of season April Fool jokes to have a laugh at their reader’s expense!
Straussists cannot conspire because none of them can agree about what Straussism is, the apologists say. Even though Straussists readily admit to using deception, their apologists pretend they speak straight from the horse’s mouth. Straussists are remarkably uniform in their outlook because they were taught directly by their masters and did not have to depend upon their own attempts to interpret what Strauss obscured—that he propagated fascism. All he was was an absent-minded professor innocently teaching Greek and Medieval philosophy as it was intended.
This was precisely the deception that the Straussist method of counter-dialectic interpretation hides. Strauss pretended to be concerned with Hitler and Stalin when he was concerned that Stalin had defeated Hitler! Strauss hated disorder, and the type of orderly regime that Hitler stood for was the type of regime that Strauss wanted in America. Writing to Karl Löwith (1946), Strauss said:
I really believe, although to you this apparently appears fantastic, that the perfect political order, as Plato and Aristotle have sketched it, is the perfect political order. I know very well that today it cannot be restored.
Liberality was disorder, or led to it, and his despairing final sentence is typical of his obscurantism. A man who believed he was Moses could have no such defeatest thought. He pretended to advocate democracy while spreading the hidden message of tyranny, as he thought the Greek philosophers had too.
We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to “the conquest of nature” and in particular of human nature, what no other tyranny ever became—perpetual and universal.Leo Strauss, On Tyranny
Strauss did not mean fascism, which was already defeated when the book was written. He let it be assumed that he meant communism, but in his counter-dialectical method, he really meant western liberalism. Strauss liked tyrants. The rule of a good tyrant is better than the rule of misguided political parties. A tyrant is a law to himself. Strauss is advocating tyranny instead of constitutional rule. He admired Machiavelli who urged his Florentine prince to be tyrannical if he wanted to be a strong ruler. He had no regard for religion but considered it was an essential tool for the tyrannical ruler.
Apologists of Strauss also use a typical pathetic ploy of the Christians defending their own unjustifiable beliefs. Any criticism of Strauss is an ad hominem attack on him. They depend on the ignorance and prejudice of their readers just as Christian apologists do. An ad hominem attack is an unwarranted attack on the person to discredit their arguments. A warranted attack is legitimate. “Strauss is a fascist and not to be trusted” is an ad hominem argument, but it is not ad hominem to show from evidence that Strauss is a fascist and therefore not to be trusted. The very accusation of ad hominem against someone whose argument is in fact legitimate is itself an ad hominem attack, simply meant to discredit the person so accused. The Straussist apologists for example say that Drury’s attacks on Strauss are ad hominem, but she presents a wealth of evidence to back up her claims. It is not ad hominem, her attack on Strauss is justified. Moreover, it is ad hominem and Straussist to accuse critics like Drury of being left wing. It is simply meant to prejudice a right wing reader against these authors with no regard for their arguments—it is ad hominem. Right wing readers might prefer not to read a left wing view, but it is still as legitimate a view in a democracy as a right wing one, and more so than an anti-democratic political philosophy like fascism.
Another defence, and an apparently sensible one, is that Strauss’s own writings should be read to understand him. The trouble with it is that the Straussists do not read in texts what rational people do. There is a sub-text to it, according to Strauss—the esoteric layer. The Straussists were taught how to understand it, beginning with the master himself, and from then on, by subsequent generations of his students teaching each other. So, simply reading Strauss as straightforward text is just confusing, and Strauss meant his work to be unclear unless it was read properly. Even so, reading his work is helpful, because it shows either that the disciples of Strauss have got it all wrong, or they were being taught something deliberately obscured in Strauss’s words.
Takng over the Republican Party
From the days of Edmund Burke, traditional conservatives have been suspicious of natural right as liberalism, but Bush seems to have persuaded them otherwise, and identified the Republican party with the universality of democracy and human rights:
Liberty is the design of nature.G W Bush
Freedom is the right and the capacity of all mankind.G W Bush
Yet he evdently has no conception of human rights outside of the US. Is he serious, or is it another Straussist deception?
William Pfaff, in the International Herald Tribune 15 May, 2003, noted that the Republican Party after WWII was a practical party of business men that rejected intellectuals. Conservatism was heredity, and reason could contradict it. Strauss agreed, but even so, the neoconservative Staussians of the 1960s set out to be an intellectual movement of the American right. Strauss appealed to US conservatives for these reasons:
- Appealing to tradition as opposed to the modern suited the conservative mentality
- Criticizing moral relativism brought back from the fringe discussions of what conservative ideas of good behaviour were
- Questioning the acts of the founders of the US under the guise of innocently studying the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the US constitution
- Making tyranny respectable was a good base for fighting communism.
They succeeded beyond their dreams. Politics on The Hill have polarized. Republicans and Democrats today are more ideologically homogeneous in Congress. There is less party disloyalty because the hybrid creatures that used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats have actually joined the party that they belonged in. Consequently voting discipline is tighter in The House and Senate. Republicans today are predominantly rural. Democrats, by contrast, predominate in the big cities. The Republican party is the party of rural and small-town America, what they like to call a “coalition of the willing”—Southern and red neck white racists, Christian bigots, the greedy rich, and a control room of neoconservative, often Jewish, Straussists.
The Straussists are the caste of Washington ideologues who have dominated Bush’s foreign policy. Traditional conservatives prefer to remain aloof from the world, and object to empire building in Iraq as Straussist universalism. But, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king, and these cynical opportunists have persuaded the leaden-minded old Republicans to part with their dollars to buy a strategy that is really an ideology of fascism. In their insane inverted dialectic, they preach democratic idealism while planning really an anti-democratic putsch.
Republicans have been governmental minimalists, opposing too much federal power and opposing nannying by individual states. It is a strategy that is inconsistent—it points away from federation and welfare all together—and it rebounded in the 1990s. It suggested to neocon opportunists that they should emphasize the power and value of big government for security.
Bush’s Straussist puppet masters came up with “compassionate conservatism”, traditional callous right wing values diluted with a modicum of better welfare. It was good enough to satisfy the Republican voter base when the main neocon strategy was to create a fearful external enemy. Nationalism always appeals to conservatives in crisis, so they plan on home affairs sinking into insignificance in the popular mind.
Few African Americans anywhere in the US vote Republican, so white rednecks are stronger in the Republican vote. President Bush’s use of the phrase “axis of evil” suited the fundamentalist crusading zealots of the primitive Christian right. The evangelical vote is the “Religious Right”, the Republican right. Its old political fronts, the “Moral Majority” and the “Christian Coalition”, are now redundant. Straussist strategy has steered their activists, and thereafter their supporters, into the real political heavyweight—the Republican party itself. The major party division is accentuated by those fearing fundamentalist religious mania turning to the Democratic party as the secular alternative.
James W Ceaser, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and Daniel DiSalvol, in The Public Interest 157, note that “the majority of Americans today” have never “heard of ‘neocons’”. If this is so, can the US really be called a democracy? Can they distinguish incipient fascism from a high school hop? Pundits agree that education favours Democratic voting. Straussists need uneducated and unintelligent people to manipulate. They actually like it!
In May 2004, George F Will asked the government for “conservatism without the prefix”. Better still, eliminate the fascist neocons and their Straussist ideologues all together before they eliminate us!
Straussist Justice
In 1953, Strauss sought to reopen the question of natural right, a standard of justice independent of and superior to human convention. Natural Right and History was based on the Walgreen lectures of October 1949, given when he joined the University of Chicago. Natural right was supported by the liberal thinker, Walter Lippmann. Strauss criticized historicism, that standards and thoughts are relative to or imposed by particular historical situations, set in motion by Hobbes and Locke. He asked whether the classical view of natural right of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero had lessons for us today.
Strauss sought to find a ground or basis for justice in nature, beginning with “natural right” as how “nature” shows itself in politics. But what is nature? It is the necessary and permanent basis of all change and contingency. What is the nature of justice? Social laws are not natural but are human conventions. Conventionally, what is just is good, and the most good is the philosophic life, says Strauss. The wise are the only ones justified in ruling, and ruling absolutely. No one wants to be ruled, and anyone who wants to rule those who do not want to be ruled is not wise. To make rule possible, law is devised by the philosophers so that they can rule with the consent of the people. Thus natural right is established as wise rule by the absolute wise rulers.
Straussists believe this guarantees Hitlers and Stalins are debarred from government, but, to anyone not indoctrinated with their bent logic, it offers such tyrants a perfect excuse for their absolute power. It justifies elected dictatorship. Worse! For whereas modern thought takes cognisance of natural humanity as the norm, Strauss, following classical ideas, liked the norm of perfection, orienting himself from the viewpoint of the superman—the virtuous philosopher. The upshot of much tortuous reasoning is that the philosopher caste should rule absolutely, and all the checks and balances of modern political governance intended to protect the individual from tyrants are misguided!
Strauss does not like historicism or relativism, but he cannot refute them or prove natural right. He makes no attempt to show universal and unchanging principles of justice in Nature discernible to human reason. All he can do is cast doubt on the ideas of historicism and relativism to encourage the doubter to think natural a justice is possible. Thus Strauss uses the definition of historicism to refute itself. If all ideas are local in time then so too is the idea of historicism. It cannot have any eternal validity.
This reductio ad absurdum shows historicism cannot be universally true, but it does not prove that natural right is true, or any other form of justice is true either. Historicism might be more true than any other hypothesis about justice, so Strauss gets us nowhere but contrives to imply he does. Indeed he appeals to the individual’s experience of right and wrong to try to counter arguments from historical experience which suggest that people are brought up thinking the contemporary way they do as surely as they will grow up speaking their local language. Yet the individual is taught right and wrong as surely and in the same way—from their parents! It is like the Christians Straussists use who think thieir own concepts of right and wrong are planted in them by God, as if their parents and parsons were merely vespers of wind.
The natural rights on which the American constitution is based are challenged directly by the neocons, and, unsurprisingly, their first venture into power has already seen them erode away significantly. They have started the demolition of democracy and justice in the US, by condemning people without trial on the basis that it is a practical expedient to defeat terrorism. The Inquisitors did the same. To defend yourself against such accusations is to confirm the accusation.
No human being and no group of human beings can rule the whole of the human race justly.Leo Strauss
The New World Order will not be a just one. It is based on perpetual witch hunts, the present witches being Moslem terrorists.
Straussists claim radical historicism questions all natural right. Democrats prefer such high ideals as human rights, human dignity, and the sanctity of the environment to the selfishness of conservatives, but have generally considered natural right the judgements of progressive and compassionate human beings, rather than having any absolute justification in a cruel world. Yet the basis for it is indeed natural. It is there. It is our kinunity—the common roots we have, most closely, with our own fellow humans, but also with all life. Destruction of any life is destroying part of ourselves, and that is the natural reason for what is called “humane behaviour”. Straussists consider this to be weak. They want strong men with the stomach to kill without compunction. That is fascism!
- Essential critical reading are the works of Shadia B Drury, professor of philosophy and political science and Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at the University of Regina.
The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, written when she still had some respect for him, is somewhat useful, though not wholly reliable. Her second book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, is a snide, careless and inaccurate piece of liberal boilerplate.Most recently, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche, Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.Robert Locke
