Mouood Mouood English Edition
Atheist War Hawks Manipulate Believers to Beat the Drums of War
Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration.
Indeed, many of the main neocon players – including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Cambone, Elliot Abrams, and Adam Shulsky – were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years.
The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See this and this . (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago .) For example, Shulsky was the director of the Office of Special Plans – the Pentagon unit responsible for selling false intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He is now a member of the equivalent organization targeting Iran: the Iranian Directorate.
Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli . Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that :
A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured
(the quote is by one of Strauss’ main biographers ).
Indeed, Stauss used the analogy of Gulliver’s Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:
“When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect.” (this quote also from the same biographer )
Moreover, Strauss said :
Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic . . . Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns.
So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one’s own soil to one’s own people — of “pissing” on one’s own people, to use his Gulliver’s travel analogy. And he advocates that government’s should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally “not know” that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one’s own people in order to save them from some “catastophe” (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from our real threat — an increasingly-powerful China?).
What does this have to do with religion?
Strauss taught that religion should be used as a way to manipulate people to achieve the aims of the leaders. But that the leaders themselves need not believe in religion.
As Wikipedia notes :
In the late 1990s Irving Kristol and other writers in neoconservative magazines began touting anti-Darwinist views, in support of intelligent design. Since these neoconservatives were largely of secular backgrounds, a few commentators have speculated that this – along with support for religion generally – may have been a case of a “noble lie”, intended to protect public morality, or even tactical politics, to attract religious supporters.
So is it any surprise that the folks who planned war against Iraq and Iran at least 20 years ago are pushing religious disinformation to stir up the evangelical community?
I’ve recently seen a swarm of spam claiming that all Muslims are evil, that they want to take over the world and establish a Muslim caliphate, and that they want to nuke Israel. They misquote Muslims and use false statements to try to stir up religious hatred.
They are simply promoting the Straussian playbook: stir up religious sentiment – even if you are personally an atheist – to create and demonize an “enemy”, so as to promote war …
Postscript 1: While there are certainly some Arab terrorists, Islam cannot be blamed for their barbaric murderous actions, just as Christianity cannot be blamed for the Norwegian Christian terrorist – Anders Behring Breivik’s – actions.
University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape – who specializes in international security affairs – points out :
Extensive research into the causes of suicide terrorism proves Islam isn’t to blame — the root of the problem is foreign military occupations.
And the 9/11 hijackers used cocaine and drank alcohol, slept with prostitutes and attended strip clubs … but they did not worship at any mosque. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this .
Postscript 2: Neoliberals and Neoconservatives are very similar in many ways . And because Neocons are not conservative , nothing in this post is meant to criticize conservatism.
Postscript 3: Most evangelicals are not dispensionalists, and so do not want to bring on armageddon.
