Those Who Forget the Past (42 page)

It's a commonplace now to observe with Jay Bolter that the triumph of the Web represents the overthrow, for good or ill, not just of linear narrative but of the entire system of Baconian inductive reasoning, with its explicit commitment to hierarchies of knowledge, tests of proof, and so on. The universe of deep cyberspace is akin to whatever lies way beyond the reassuringly orderly alignment of the planets in our own relatively parochial solar system. Instead, it launches the traveler along a pathway of links to indeterminate destinations, the wormholes of epistemology; and along the routes, the digital argonaut is exposed to a furiously oncoming welter of incoherently arrayed bodies of information. The engineers of hate sites know this, and depend on capturing the aimless surfer who might, for example, stumble on an ostensibly Orientalist health site called “Bamboo Delights”—including “The Skinny Buddha Weight Loss Method” and—be directed through a single link to the neo-Nazi “Police Patriot” site, both designed by “Jew Watch” and “Stormfront.”

The Web is by its nature uncritically omnivorous. All it asks for is to be fed with information. It has the capacity to monitor its input only through the clumsy and ethically controversial means of censorship, so that, I'm told, in Germany when asked for sites responding to the word “Mengele,” the Web will refuse to deliver them to the user. But the notion that any sites can somehow be scrutinized—much less policed for misinformation, fraud, and lies—is already both electronically and institutionally impossible. If you search Google or
www.alltheweb.com
for
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
you'll be greeted on the first page with many hundreds of entries, many of which are now devoted to reporting or debating the Egyptian television series
Horse Without a Rider,
which notoriously treated the
Protocols
as an historical event; not by the Anti-Defamation League or by YIVO or any other critical historically informed repudiation of the forgery, but by Radio Islam's invitation to download the entire foul and forged text, along with
The Jewish Conspiracy
Against the Muslim World
and Henry Ford's (there he is again)
The International Jew
, or the anti–new world order ravings of Henry Makow, Ph.D., inventor of the word game “Scruples,” as he tells us—his website is
www.savethemales.com
—and who regards Judaism as a mask to disguise the international hegemony of the Khazars. All of these will line up for the unwary, long before any sort of critical or historically responsible commentary is reached.

Nor could anything possibly be further away from the epistemological conventions according to which arguments are tested against critical challenges than the Net's characteristic form of chat, which overwhelmingly takes the form of call and response, to which there is never any resolution nor conclusion, merely a string of unadjudicated utterances and ejaculations. Digital allegiances can be formed there not through any sort of sifting of truth and falsehood but in response to or in defense against a kind of cognitive battering. And the virtual reality of the Internet, as Sherry Turkle, Les Back, and others have pointed out, has been a gift to both the purveyors and the consumers of paranoia. It offers an electronic habitat which is simultaneously furtive and exhibitionist, structurally molecular but capable, as the user is emboldened, of forming itself into an electronic community of the like-minded. It is perfectly engineered, then, for leaderless resistance and the Lone Wolf—the recommended model for zealous racists, neo-Nazis, and white-power warriors, hunting, like Timothy McVeigh, in solitude or small or temporarily linked packs. Instead of slogging up to the camp in Idaho or Montana, digital stormtroopers can assemble in their very own virtual Idaho, download the “Horst Wessel Lied,” and electronically bond.

The Web is also, of course, a mine of useful information for the aspiring neo-Nazi, not just in the selection of human and institutional targets but about the resources needed to strike them. Everything from artisanal ammonium nitrate to the much more wired offensives against the race enemy, involving intensive electronic jamming known as “digital bombing,” to targeted systems of electronic virus contamination and sabotage. Taken together, the five hundred or so websites in the United States built to proselytize for anti-Semitic and racist causes constitute a virtual universe of hatred, protean enough to hunker down or reach out as the moment and the need require, encrypting, when necessary, their most bilious messages so that they become accessible only to those with decrypting keys, a tactic of course adored by secrecy fetishists, or aggressively and openly campaigning when that seems to be the priority.

Once inside this net, you can log on to “Resistance Records” and download white-power music like Nordic Thunder, order CDs from the online catalog; you can link to the ostensibly more mainstream racist organizations, like the British National Party, who have just trebled their representation in British local government elections. You can reassure yourself that the “Holo-cost,” as it's called, or the “Holo-hoax,” never happened, and it's just another disinformation conspiracy designed to channel reparations to the ever-open mouth of the international conspiracy of Jew bankers. You can browse the
Christian Guide to Small Arms,
order up Nazi memorabilia or your Aryan Nations warm-up jacket, with all the ease of someone going shopping for Yankees souvenirs. And most ominously of all, out there in cyberspace you can act out games of virtual annihilation with none of the risks or consequences you might incur in the actual world of body space.

In the circumstances, it is perhaps reassuring that according to the best and most recent estimates of regular visitors and inhabitants of these kinds of sites, these may amount to no more than maybe 50,000 or 100,000 at most. It's possible to argue it is better that the paranoids lock themselves away in the black holes of cyberspace than act out their delusions in the world of real humanity. But that is of course to assume that “Stormfront” troopers and Aryan crusaders will never make the leap from clicking to shooting. And if there's anything we've learned from this peculiarly delusional moment in our history, it is that today's media fantasy may indeed turn into tomorrow's cultural virus. And in the world of wired terror, head counts are no longer any guide to the possibility of trouble, which comes, as we've learned to our cost, very much in single spies rather than battalions.

However abhorrent, I suspect the real threat posed by electronic hatred may not be in the hard core of rabidly delusional anti-Semites, who may, alas, may always be with us. It is rather from the electronic extension of the paranoid's style out to much bigger constituencies of the aggrieved, who see in its basic worldview—a global conspiracy of money, secularism, and sexual corruption—a perennial explanation for their own misfortune, for their sense of beleaguered alienation. The trans-positions then become easy. For the Rothschilds, read Gold-man Sachs and the IMF; for the Illuminati, read the Council on Foreign Relations. Henry Ford said of the
Protocols of the Elders
of Zion
: “All I know is that it fits events.” Nor is this habitual imprinting of the old template onto contemporary events a monopoly of Left or Right. In fact,
les extrêmes se touchent:
antiglobalizers meet the anti-immigrants; anti-Americanism meets America First; America First meets America Only.

What they share is a freshening and quickening of the rhetoric of violence, the poisoning of the airwaves as well as cyberspace. Ultra-chauvinist blowhards habitually demonize on air those whom they take as insufficiently patriotic as “scum” or “vermin,” and who need, in whatever manner, to be locked up, deported, or generally done away with.

Who are these contaminating aliens lodged in the bloodstream of the body politic? Lovers of multilateralism, or the United Nations, any sort of faggoty liberal intellectual who professes a self-evidently diseased skepticism and who exercises a disguised but clawlike grip over the media. Jews? Goodness, no. Just people who happen to talk too much, think too highly of reason, and organize conferences.

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

The Neoconservative Cabal

OVER THE LAST MONTHS, the term “neoconservative” has been in the air as never before in its thirty-year career. Try entering it in Nexis, the electronic database of news stories. Even if you were to restrict the request to stories containing “Iraq” and “Bush,” the search will abort; the number of entries exceeds the program's capacity. Seven years after Norman Podhoretz, the conductor of the neocon orchestra, pronounced the demise of the movement in these pages [
Commentary
], neoconservatives are seen to be wielding more influence than ever before. For it is they who, notoriously, are alleged to have transformed George W. Bush beyond all recognition. At their hands, the President who as a candidate had envisioned a “humble” America—one that would reduce foreign deployments and avoid nation building—became a warrior chieftain who has already toppled two foreign governments and has laid down an ultimatum to others warning of a similar fate.

“The neoconservatives . . . are largely responsible for getting us into the war against Iraq,” observes Elizabeth Drew in
The
New York Review of Books
. “The neocon vision has become the hard core of American foreign policy,” declares
Newsweek
. “They have penetrated the culture at nearly every level from the halls of academia to the halls of the Pentagon,” frets
The
New York Times,
adding that “they've accumulated the wherewithal financially [and] professionally to broadcast what they think over the airwaves to the masses or over cocktails to those at the highest levels of government.” “Long before George W. Bush reached the White House, many of these confrontations [with other nations] had been contemplated by the neoconservatives,” reveals the
National Journal
.

Overseas, where the policies attributed to the neocons are far more controversial than here, the tone is commensurately hotter. A six-page spread in the French weekly
Le Nouvel Observateur
described “les intellectuals neoconservateurs” as the “ideologues of American empire.” The article ran under a banner headline: AFTER IRAQ, THE WORLD. In England, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) aired an hour-long television special that began: “This is a story about people who want the world run their way, the American way, [and] . . . scare the hell out of people.” The
Times
of London anxiously urged close British cooperation with the U.S. if only to gain the leverage needed to “spike the ambitions of U.S. neoconservatives.”

Who makes up this potent faction? Within the administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is usually identified as the key actor, together with Richard Perle, a member and until recently the chairman of the Defense Advisory Board. A handful of other high-level Bush appointees are often named as adherents of the neocon faith, including Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams, and Vice Presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI, where I work),
The Weekly
Standard
magazine, and William Kristol's Project for the New American Century—all three rent offices in the same building— are often described as constituting the movement's Washington command center. And then, of course, there is this magazine [
Commentary
], crucible of so much neoconservative thought.

The history of neoconservatism is less sensational than its current usage implies. The term came into currency in the mid-1970s as an anathema—pronounced, by upholders of leftist orthodoxy, against a group of intellectuals, centered mostly in
Commentary
and the quarterly
The Public Interest,
who then still thought of themselves as liberals but were at odds with the dominant thinking of the Left. One part of this group consisted of writers about domestic policy—Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer—who had developed misgivings about the programs of the New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The other main contingent focused on foreign policy, and especially on the decline of America's position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the wake of the Vietnam war. The names here included, among others, Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Eugene V. Rostow. Although, at first, most of these people resisted the label “neoconservative,” eventually almost all of them acquiesced in it.

Today, many who are called neoconservatives are too young to have taken part in these debates while others, although old enough, followed a different trajectory in arriving at their political ideas. This would hardly matter if neoconservatism were an actual political movement, or if there were general agreement about its tenets. But few of those writing critically about neoconservatism today have bothered to stipulate what they take those tenets to be. For most, the term seems to serve as a sophisticated-sounding synonym for “hawk” or “hardliner” or even “ultraconservative.”

For others, however, it is used with a much more sinister connotation. In their telling, neoconservatives are a strange, veiled group, almost a cabal whose purpose is to manipulate U.S. policy for ulterior purposes.

Thus, several scribes have concentrated on laying bare the hidden wellsprings of neoconservative belief. These have been found to reside in the thinking of two improbable figures: the immigrant American political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899– 1973) and the Bolshevik military commander Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). “Who runs things?”
The New York Times
asked, concluding that “it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss” with whom the Bush administration is “rife.”
The Boston Globe
ran a 3,000-word article claiming that “we live in a world increasingly shaped by Leo Strauss,” while in a sidebar to its own feature story on the neocons,
Le Nouvel Observateur
introduced French readers to “Leo Strauss, Their Mentor.”

Michael Lind, an American who writes for the British leftist magazine
New Statesman,
has been the most insistent voice invoking the name of Trotsky, or rather “the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement” of which, Lind says, “most neoconservative defense intellectuals . . . are products.” Jeet Heer, who expounded the Straussian roots of neoconservatism in
The Boston Globe,
went on to disclose the Trotsky connection in Canada's
National Post
. (“Bolshevik's Writings Supported the Idea of Pre-emptive War,” ran the subhead.) Others agreed about this dual connection. William Pfaff, in the
InternationalHerald Tribune,
contributed one column on the influence of Leo Strauss and another linking Bush's foreign policy to the “intellectual legacy of the Trotskyism of many of the neoconservative movement's founders.” In particular, in Pfaff's judgment, administration policy “seems a rightist version of Trotsky's ‘permanent revolution.' ”

Actually, neither line of genealogical inquiry is new. Eight years ago, in
Foreign Affairs,
John Judis derided my advocacy of “exporting democracy” as a kind of “inverted Trotskyism.” As for Strauss, it was noticed as far back as the Reagan administration that a small number of the philosopher's former students had taken policy positions in the State and Defense departments. But the prize for the recent resuscitation of Strauss's name would seem to belong to the crackpot political agitator Lyndon LaRouche, who began to harp on it in speeches and publications months before any of the references I have cited above. LaRouche, who ceased using the pseudonym Lyn Marcus (a conscious derivation of Lenin Marx) when he vaulted from the far Left to the far Right, and who has served time in a federal penitentiary on charges of gulling elderly people out of their savings in order to finance his political movement, has fingered Strauss “along with Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells” as the parties responsible for “steering the United States into a disastrous replay of the Peloponnesian war.”

This preoccupation with ancestor-hunting may seem of secondary interest, but since it is typical of the way most recent “analysis” of neoconservative ideas has been conducted, it is worth pausing over for another moment.

For one thing, the sheer sloppiness of the reporting on the alleged Strauss-Trotsky connection is itself remarkable. Thus,
The New York Times
claimed extravagantly that AEI consists in its entirety of Straussians, whereas a little checking yields, out of fifty-six scholars and fellows, exactly two who would count themselves as Straussians and a third who would acknowledge a significant intellectual debt to Strauss; none of the three is in the field of foreign policy. The
Times
also identified Perle as a Straussian—which is false—while erroneously stating that he was married to the daughter of the late military strategist Albert Wohlstetter, whom it likewise falsely labeled a Straussian. Even after an initial correction (explaining that Perle had merely studied under Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago and had not married his daughter) and a second correction (acknowledging that Perle had never studied under Wohlstetter
or
attended the University of Chicago), the paper still could not bring itself to retract its fanciful characterizations of either Perle's or Wohlstetter's ties to Strauss. The paper also mischaracterized Podhoretz as an “admirer” of Strauss, which is true only in a very loose sense. Similar errors have infected the stories in other publications.

And Trotsky? Lind in his disquisition on “the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement” instanced seven pivotal neocon figures as the Bolshevik revolutionary's acolytes: Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, Bolton, Abrams, James R. Woolsey, and Perle. This was too much for Alan Wald, a student of political ideas and himself a genuine Trotskyist who pointed out that none of these men “ever had an organizational or ideological association with Trotskyism.” Even more ludicrously, Lind characterized a series of open letters to the President published by the Project for the New American Century as “a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors”; whatever Lind may have had in mind by this phrase, genuine Trotskyists would be less interested in sending petitions to the President than in hanging him from the nearest lamppost.

In truth, I can think of only one major neocon figure who did have a significant dalliance with Trotskyism, and that was Irving Kristol. The dalliance occurred during his student days some sixty-odd years ago, and whatever imprint it may have left on Kristol's thought certainly did not make him a neoconservative on foreign policy, for in that area his views have been much more akin to those of traditional conservatives. During the 1980s, for example, Kristol opposed the “Reagan Doctrine” of support for anti-Communist guerrillas and belittled the idea of promoting democracy abroad.

But that brings us to the actual ideas of these two presumed progenitors of neoconservatism. Strauss, according to Jeet Heer, emerges from a close reading as a

disguised Machiavelli, a cynical teacher who encouraged his followers to believe that their intellectual superiority entitles them to rule over the bulk of humanity by means of duplicity.

Similarly, Pfaff:

An elite recognizes the truth . . . and keeps it to itself. This gives it insight and implicitly power that others do not possess. This obviously is an important element in Strauss's appeal to American conservatives. . . . His real appeal to the neoconservatives, in my view, is that his elitism presents a principled rationalization for policy expediency, and for “necessary lies” told to those whom the truth would demoralize.

Neither Heer nor Pfaff offers a clue as to where in Strauss's corpus one might find these ideas, giving one the impression that they learned what they know of him from a polemical book by one Shadia Drury, who holds a chair in “social justice” at a Canadian university and who finds Strauss to be a “profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker.” In any event, although Strauss did write about restrictions on free inquiry, notably in
Persecution and the Art of Writing,
his point was not to advocate persecution but to suggest a way of reading philosophers who had composed their work in unfree societies. Far from the authoritarian described by Heer and Pfaff, Strauss, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was a committed democrat whose attachment and gratitude to America ran deep and who, in the words of Allan Bloom (perhaps his most famous student), “knew that liberal democracy is the only decent and just alternative available to modern man.”

Both Heer and Pfaff make Strauss out to be a Machiavellian, but both have the story upside down. If there is a single core point in Strauss's teachings, including his book on Machiavelli, it concerns the distinction between ancients and moderns; his own affinity—perhaps eccentric, certainly “conservative”—lay with the thought of the former, who were devoted to knowing the good, in contradistinction to the latter, who were more exclusively concerned with practical things. In this understanding, it was Machiavelli who initiated the philosophical break with the Platonic/Aristotelian tradition, a development that Strauss regarded as baneful. But reading political counsel into Strauss is altogether a misplaced exercise. He was not a politico but a philosopher whose life's work was devoted to deepening our understanding of earlier thinkers and who rarely if ever engaged in contemporary politics.

If Strauss's writing is abstruse, Trotsky by contrast is easy to understand, at least if one knows the basic formulas of Marxism. Nonetheless, those who invoke him as another dark influence on neoconservatism are no better informed than those who invoke Strauss. Lind and Pfaff and Judis all refer portentously to Trotsky's theory of “permanent revolution,” apparently under the impression that by it Trotsky must have intended a movement to spread socialism from one country to another in much the same violent and revolutionary manner that neocons supposedly aim to disseminate their own brand of democracy around the world.