Leo Strauss theory

[muchacho]

If you haven’t read Renana Brooke’s article "The Character Myth" in the new Nation I urge everyone on this board that wants to beat Bush to do so.

The article deals with the Karl Rove constructed imagery that the administration is built on. It also touched on something along the old cabal conspiracies, the teachings of Leo Strauss that seems to be the underpinning of much of the neo-cons MO. Compelling and creepy.

Go buy the Nation and check it out.

Or read the article here, and then go out and give the Nation your money:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1212-09.htm

[Khephra]

1. "Leo Strauss and the American Right"

by Drury is also a great reference.

[muchacho]

3. cha ching

yeah, and it's freakin $50. on Amazon!!

on edit:

The paperback is $25. ahh much better.

[La_Serpiente]

2. There was a thread on it

here Thank Eloriel for it :-)

[muchacho]

4. Eloriel

Thanks, I tried to email him/her but their profile as been disabled.

Good stuff though...

[UTUSN]

5. Besides My Tweety Rant, This Is My Repetition

Disclosure: Am saving it for future repetition:

It's really not so much matter of "the ideas of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss" (your Nation link) or "who focused on the classics (esp. Plato) but who was infuenced by Germans who also influenced Hitler's thinking including Nietsche and Heidegger" (Eloriel)---------it's that what binds ALL of these seeming mavericks NIETZSCHE, STRAUSS, PAGLIA, and Victor Davis HANSON (CHEENEE's guru) is the CLASSICS Department, the pre-Christian values they are INDIVIDUALLY steeped in ---and wanted to be a part of, literally.

It's not that NIETZSCHE "influenced" the ones after him, it's that EACH of these WENT BACK individually to the Ancients. They want to live by the "strong" pre-Christian values of STRENGH, physical force/domination, PRIDE ("gloating") as opposed to the "weak" values of humility, mercy, turning the other cheek.

And it's NOT that NIEZCHE was a proto-Nazi. Richard WAGNER *was* one and NIETZSCHE broke with him. After he went into his mental helplessness his unintellectual sister took control of his body and dressed him as a prophet and herself courted the proto-Nazis according to her own small understanding of him, or just for her self-interest.

CHEENEE did a little dance right before the Iraq attack, presenting Victor Davis HANSON to the media as his guru. This dude has been laying out the PNAC working plans for public consumption, the two-pronged thing of active war plus "noble goals" (forcing democracy on others). His role has been to dig up historical examples as precedents for what the PNAC-ers want to do anyway.

******QUOTE*****

Nat'l Cathedral: (History or Hysteria?) http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson032803.asp
.... In disgust at the hysteria, I took a drive to Washington to the National Cathedral on Sunday. Big mistake. All except one of the entrances were closed due to security concerns. I walked in under the wonderful sculptures of Frederick Hart, an authentic American genius who almost single-handedly restored classical realism to American sculpture. A small statue of a kneeling Lincoln, who sent thousands into battle to eradicate slavery, was in the corner. A plaque of quotations from Churchill, about the need for sacrifice in war, was on the wall. So I was feeling somewhat good again — until I heard the pious sermon on “shock and awe.” In pompous tones the minister was deprecating the war effort, calling down calumnies upon the administration, and alleging the immoral nature of our nation at war.

Such a strange man at such a strange time, I thought. His entire congregation, by its own admission, is in danger from foreign terrorists (why else bar the gates?). His church is itself a monument to the utility of force for moral purposes. His own existence as a free-speaking, freely worshiping man of God is possible only thanks to the United States military — whose present mission he was openly deriding at the country’s national shrine. ....

Full HANSON archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp

*****UNQUOTE****

[UTUSN]

6. A Painless Specimen of Ancient Pride

********QUOTE, Excerpts******

http://libretto.musicals.ru/text.php?textid=5&language=1

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Music: Stephen Sondheim Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim Book: Larry Gelbart + Burt Shevelove Film: 1966

"Bring Me My Bride" (a.k.a., "I, Miles Gloriosus")

....Let haste be made,
I cannot be delayed!
There are lands to conquer,
Cities to loot
And people to degrade!

SOLDIERS
Look at those arms!
Look at that chest!
Look at them!

MILES
Not to mention the rest!
Even I am impressed. ....

SOLDIERS
Look at that foot!
Look at that heel!
Mark the magnificent muscles of steel!

MILES
I am my ideal! ....

MILES
COURTESANS
I, Miles Gloriosus,
I, Paragon of virtues,
Him, Miles Gloriosus
Him, Paragon of virtues,

SOLDIERS
A man among men!
With sword and with pen!

MILES
I, in war the most admired,
In wit the most inspired,
In love the most desired,
In dress the best displayed,
I am a parade! ...

*********UNQUOTE******

[UTUSN]

7. An Example of How NIETZSCHE's Thought Was Degraded

It wasn't NIETZSCHE looking forward in thinking to the Nazis, it was the Nazis looking back for whomever they could plausibly claim as intellectual forebearers, corrupting and distorting to fit their own agenda. So the first quote is HANSON's "Mexifornia", in which he shows appreciation of Mexican immigrants for good and ill, and the second quote is from racists. HANSON is not a racist, but his work can be used by them.

**********QUOTE********
Mexifornia: http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_2_do_we_want.html
Thousands arrive illegally from Mexico into California each year—and the state is now home to fully 40 percent of America’s immigrants, legal and illegal. They come in such numbers because a tacit alliance of Right and Left has created an open-borders policy, aimed at keeping wage labor cheap and social problems ever fresh, so that the ministrations of Chicano studies professors, La Raza activists, and all the other self-appointed defenders of group causes will never be unneeded. ....

And while the Democrats think the illegals will eventually turn into liberal voters, the actual Hispanic vote so far remains just a small fraction of the eligible Mexican-American pool: of the 14,173 residents of the central California town of Hanford who identified themselves as Latino (34 percent of the town’s population), for example, only 770 are registered to vote.

My sleepy hometown of Selma, California, is in the dead center of all this. ....It is a schizophrenic existence, living at illegal immigration’s intersection. Each week I pick up trash, dirty diapers, even sofas and old beds dumped in our orchard by illegal aliens—only to call a Mexican-American sheriff who empathizes when I show him the evidence of Spanish names and addresses on bills and letters scattered among the trash. ....

Yet I also walk through vineyards at 7 AM in the fog and see whole families from Mexico, hard at work in the cold—while the native-born unemployed of all races will not—and cannot—prune a single vine. By natural selection, we are getting some of the most intelligent and industrious people in the world, people who have the courage to cross the border, the tenacity to stay—and, if not assimilated, the potential to cost the state far, far more than they can contribute. ....

*****UNQUOTE****

And here's how the racists translate what he said:

from this website: http://www.bustamanteno.com/Lawlessness.html comes this:

[ithinkmyliverhurts]

8. A very good post, UTUSN

I think you're spot-on. For Plato, and all else who follow (including Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), the philosophical is the political. And matters of war, of course, are only political. This is quite frightening: the philosophical is intimately linked to war. That's the problem, I guess. How does one use philosophy, that which justifies war, to avoid war? War and the political are simply extensions of philosophy, even when philosophy professes to seek peace. Western conceptions of morality are likewise founded upon this philosophical model. "The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. The philosophers deduce a final peace from the reason that plays out its stakes in ancient and present-day wars: they found a morality on politics." (this quote may or may not be a direct quote from Emmanuel Levinas--I have it scribbled on a napkin surrounded by other paraphrases).

[UTUSN]

9. Thanks

When a misinterpretation takes hold, it is the DICKENS to get the correction to take its place. (& I realize my repetitions are tiresome.)

[UTUSN]

10. Kick for Last Hard Work

Next repetition will just be cut'n'paste.

[UTUSN]

11. PERLE Denies STRAUSS, Attacks Josh MARSHALL

******QUOTE*****

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/12/17/neocons/?ref=http://www.salon.com/src/ads/powells/salon4.html

.... In September, Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (also home to Perle), published a 6,000-word rejoinder to neoconservatism's critics in Commentary. In it, he attacks the arguments that the neocons are the intellectual descendents of Leon Trotsky and of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, finding a whiff of anti-Semitism in his opponents' analysis.

Noting the profound differences between the two men, Muravchik writes, "There is, however, one thing that Strauss and Trotsky did have in common, and that one thing may get us closer to the real reason their names have been so readily invoked. Both were Jews. The neoconservatives, it turns out, are also in large proportion Jewish -- and this, to their detractors, constitutes evidence of the ulterior motives that lurk behind the policies they espouse."

Of course, the neoconservatives' harshest critics are also in large proportion Jewish, which Muravchik acknowledged while smearing them as self-haters. "Michael Lind, for one, has gone out of his way to assert his own Jewish 'descent,' and Tikkun is in some self-professed sense a Jewish magazine," he wrote. An hour-long BBC special about the movement had particularly incensed Muravchik, and he noted, "Even the BBC's assault on the neocons featured a Jewish critic in the starring role. So passionate are these Jews in their opposition to neoconservative ideas that they have not hesitated to pander to anti-Semitism in the effort to discredit them."

Much of the debate Monday proceeded on about this level. ....

*****UNQUOTE****