THE "NEOCON" MYTH

There is another book here condemning "neocons" generally and "Straussians" in particular. These wicked souls are said to be behind a push to make America some sort of "empire". They LIKE big government and want to expand its influence worldwide.

I have no doubt that there are some "conservative" intellectuals who think like that -- particularly those who have migrated from the Left. But to say that such people are the power behind the throne in the current administration is absurdity of a high order. No doubt some of GWB's advisers do favour broadly "neocon" thinking, though I am sure there are big differences among them over actual policy. The point is, however, that GWB receives a wide range of policy advice from many sources. Practically every newspaper and TV station for a start is keen to give him advice, to say nothing of his many official staff. And it is GWB who decides what advice to take from the menu that is offered to him. And one thing nobody claims is that GWB is a "neocon". He is plainly a Christian conservative and that is of course the major theme of his policies. The idea that a handful of neocons would have more weight with him than would the many millions of Christian conservatives who put him into office is absurd.

The big obsession among the propagators of the "neocon ascendancy" myth is the current military involvement of the USA overseas. That is their "Aha!" factor. Neocons want a more activist foreign policy so the present involvements abroad must be an outcome of that. I suppose the involvement of Wilson in World War I, Truman in Korea, Johnson in Vietnam and Clinton in Serbia were "obviously" the product of a fiendish neocon plot too! The point I want to make, then, is that there are many reasons why America might take up military involvements abroad and "neocon" thinking is only one of them. And to attribute the present involvements to neocon thinking is quite simply perverse. The reason for America's present activist foreign policy is as plain as a pikestaff and is known to everybody. It is the outcome of one event: The fact that America was grievously attacked by Muslim fanatics on 9/11/2001. No country will last long if it ignores attacks on it and America has finally got to the point where it can no longer do so. It now just has to hit back in some way if the attacks are not to escalate. So it has moved to take down two of the world's biggest and most assertive Muslim power centres and bases of support for Islamic aggression. The "neocon" theory for America's actions ignores all that and just shows that those who hold it are as much out of touch with reality as conspiracy theorists always are.

In the circumstances, I was rather amused to see that there is a recent article in The Public Interest (the premier journal of the neoconservatives) which points out at great length that the support-base for GWB and the GOP is overwhelmingly "cultural". In other words, among GOP voters, economics plays second fiddle to concerns about things like abortion, guns and military strength. It shows that it is GWB's voters who want him to hit back at America's attackers. Another proof of the vast neocon conspiracy? Far from it. The article is in fact written by a Left-leaning author and is little more than a parade of exit polls and other voting statistics -- statistics that are publicly available for anyone to check (and I have checked some of them). So it may suit the neocons that GWB's voters want an assertive military response to the 9/11 attacks but it is the voters who matter. And I am sure that intelligent people like the neocons are not stupid enough to think that American public opinion will ever support America becoming any sort of empire -- though some of them can be remarkably naive, as George Will points out.

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ELSEWHERE

There is a long and well-informed article by Sherwin Nuland (a doctor) in the Left-leaning "New Republic" about the history of eugenics. He of course hardly mentions that the support for eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s mainly came from the Left of the day but he does at least note that people like himself would probably have supported eugenics if they had been around in the Hitler era. He also notes that America was well ahead of Germany in introducing eugenic policies such as the forcible sterilization of the "unfit". His conclusion is perverse, however. He compares pre-war eugenics with the possibilities of genetic engineering today and implies that the two are just as dangerous. He concludes: "It all sounds very familiar. Looking backward, we can now see the danger in state-enforced policies of improvement, but too many of us have yet to awaken to the equally dangerous reality of improvement that is self-determined. We are once again standing on the slope, from the top of which the future we may be wreaking is already visible". In other words, he cannot see the difference between something that is voluntary and something that is State-enforced! How Leftist!

I made some disparaging remarks about Harry Truman a little while back designed to show that conservatives accept too uncritically the claims to fame of former Democrat Presidents. There often seems to be a view that the Democrats of yesteryear were really good guys who were not nearly as Leftist as Democrats today. I think there is something in that if we are talking of J.F. Kennedy but certainly not if we are talking about FDR, LBJ or Truman. I liked this summary of Truman's domestic policies by Oliver Kamm: "In the wider context of domestic as well as international policy, there has never been a President as hostile to business as Harry Truman. In November 1947, he proposed an economic programme of extensive price and credit controls, federal direction of capital to business, and rationing of consumer goods. The next year - Congress having refused to go along with the programme - he sent one bill after another to what he termed a "do nothing Congress" proposing price controls, a massive federal housing programme, a law requiring the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, and subsidised utilities".

Another indication of how far-Left the BBC is. Note this description of the ghastly North Korea: "North Korea emerged in 1948 amid the chaos following the end of World War II. Its history is dominated by its Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, who shaped political affairs for almost half a century." Note that the regime "emerged" rather than being the product of a Moscow-backed takeover by Communists and that the grisly Kim Il Sung is unapologetically assigned his own claimed title of "Great Leader".

Davids Medienkritik asks whether Saddam's WMDs were "fake but accurate" too.

New blog! Mike Jericho has just started a new group blog called "The Man Blog". There are lots of established bloggers in the group so there should be new stuff popping up there all the time. Mike asked me to join in so I have put up a few posts there to help get the ball rolling.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and EDUCATION WATCH. Mirror sites here, here, here and here

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Anti-Americanism is in epidemic proportions in France and Germany but most people don't realize that it is in epidemic proportions in South Korea too. And what do those three countries have in common? They were liberated by America. And what is probably the most pro-American country in the world? Poland. They liberated themselves. Ego defeats rationality all the time.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and big egos who will say anything to win applause

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