X-pist frin WayOfTheBern on reddit.
h/t u/rundown9 for pointing me to this 22-minute video clip, which dovetails nicely with my recent post on the same subject. This clip looks at when and how the proponents of Straussian political philosophy came to power and brought to full flower the mythological good vs. evil dichotomy that continues to drive American foreign policy. A brief historical retrospective on what was being said and done in the 1970s makes Henry Kissinger look sane and reasonable by comparison.
Narrator: Strauss refused to be filmed or interviewed, devoted his time to building a loyal band of students and what he taught them was that the prosperous, liberal society they lived in contained the seeds of its own destruction.
:53
Professor Harvey Mansfield, Straussian Philosopher, Harvard
University: He didn't give interviews or write political essays or appear on the radio, there wasn't TV yet. But he did want to have a school of students, to get others to see what he had seen, that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define or defend itself, a development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings and made us dwarf animals. It made us into herd animals, sick little dwarves satisfied with the dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.
Narrator: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything, all values and moral truths. Instead people were led by their own selfish desires, which threatened to tear apart the shared values that held societies together.The way to stop this was for politicians to assert powerful, inspiring myths everyone could believe in. They might not be true but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion, the other was the myth of the nation. In America, it was the idea that the country had a unique destiny, to battle against the forces of evil throughout the world.
This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite TV show, Gunsmoke.
2:59
Professor Stanley Rosen, student of Leo Strauss 1949: Strauss thought Gunsmoke had a salutary effect on the American people because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way immediately intelligible to everyone. The hero has a white hat, he's faster on the draw than the bad guy, the good guy wins. The values are clear, that's America, we're going to triumph over the evils trying to destroy us and the virtues of the western frontier, good and evil.
Narrator: Strauss's other favorite was Perry Mason, and this he told his students epitomized the role that they, the elite had to play. In public they should promote the myths necessary to rescue America from decay. In private, they didn't have to believe in them.
Rosen: Perry Mason was different from Gunsmoke. The extremely cunning man who as far as we can see is very virtuous, uses his cunning and quickness of mind to rescue his clients from danger but who could be fooling us because he's cleverer than we are. Is he really telling us the truth? Maybe his client is guilty.
4:19
America 1967
Strauss's ideas about how to transform American were about to
become powerful and influential because the liberal political order that had dominated America since the war started to collapse. (Clip of LBJ talking about law and order breaking down in Detroit.)
Narrator: Only a few years before LBJ had promised policies that would create a new and better world in America. He
called it The Great Society. (Clip of LBJ speech 1964)
Narrator: But now, in the wake of some of the worst riots ever seen in America, that dream seemed to have ended in violence and hatred. One prominent liberal journalist called Irving Kristol began to question if it was the policies themselves causing social breakdown.
Irving Kristol: If you were to ask any liberal in 1960, "we're going to pass these lawa and these laws, etc., mentioning all the laws that actually passed in 1960s and 70s, would you say crime, drug addiction and illegitimacy would go up or would they go down. Everyone would have said that obviously they would go
down. They would have been wrong. It's not something the liberals have been able to face up to. They had their reforms and they led to consequences they didn't expect and don't know what to do about.
6:05
Narrator: In the early 70s Kristol became the focus of a group of disaffected intellectuals in Washington determined to find out why the liberal policies had failed. They found the answers in the theories of Strauss.
Strauss explained it was the very basis of the liberal idea, the belief in individual freedom, that was causing the chaos because it undermined the shared moral framework that held society together. Individuals pursued their own selfish interests and this
inevitably led to conflict.
[I'm sure the social "chaos" had nothing whatsoever to do with the three assassinations that occurred between 1963 and 1968 - JFK, RFK, MLK Jr. - or the Vietnam War with its attending military draft]
Many young students who had studied with Strauss came to
Washington to join this group - like Paul Wolfowitz, Francis Fukiyama and Irving's son William Kristol. They became known as the New Conservatives.
William Kristol: many of them couldn't get academic jobs, political science and philosophy faculty weren't very friendly to those of a conservative or moderately conservative disposition. What we had in common was a doubt about what once seemed a great certainty and confidence in liberal progress. The philosophical grounds for liberal democracy had been weakened.
Straussians who came to Washington didn't think of themselves as Churchill or Lincoln, but they did think there was something noble about public life and politics and tried to make a contribution in many different areas.
Narrator: The neoconservatives were idealists. Their aim was to try and stop the social disintegration they believed liberal freedoms had unleashed. They wanted find a way to unite the people by giving them a shared purpose. One of their great
influences in doing this would be the theories of Leo Strauss.
They set out to recreate the myth of America as a unique nation whose destiny was to battle against evil in the world. And in this project the source of evil would be America's Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union. They thought in doing this they would not only give meaning and purpose to people's lives, but they would spread the good of democracy around the world.
8:53
Professor Stephen Holmes, Political Philospher: the US would not only be able to bring good to the world according to the Straussians but overcome the fundamental weaknesses of American society, a society that has been suffering - almost rotting, in their language - from relativism, liberalism, lack of
self-confidence, lack of belief in itself. One of the main political projects of the Straussians during the Cold War was to reinforce
the self-confidence of Americans and the belief that America was
fundamentally the only force for good in the world that had to be supported, otherwise evil would prevail.
Narrator: But to do this the neocons were going to have to defeat one of the most powerful men in the world.
Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State under President Nixon but he didn't believe in a world of good and evil. What drove him was a ruthless, pragmatic vision of power in the world. With America's growing social and political chaos, he wanted America to give up its ideological battles. Instead, it should come to terms with countries like the Soviet Union, to create a new kind of global interdependence, a world in which
America would be safe.
[Note: this harkens back to what Robert Barnes said about Kissinger's remarks at Davos about Ukraine needing to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia, that Kissinger represents the monied interests (neoliberals) while the Soros crowd represents the ideology (neocons). Both groups are globalists.]
Kissinger, 1975 interview: I believe that with all the dislocations we've now experienced, there also exists an
extraordinary opportunity to form for the first time in history a truly global society, carried out by the principle of interdependence. And if we act wisely and with vision, I think we can look back to all this turmoil as the birth pangs of a more creative and better system.
Narrator: Kissinger had begun this process in 1972 when he persuaded the Soviet Union to sign a treaty with the US limiting nuclear arms. It was the start of what was called detente. (Clip of Richard Nixon speech on returning from his Moscow trip)
But a world without fear was not what the neoconservatives needed to pursue their project and they now set out to destroy Kissinger's vision. What gave them their opportunity was the growing collapse of American political power both abroad and at home.
The defeat in Vietnam and Nixon's resignation over Watergate led to a crisis of confidence in America's political class. The neoconservatives seized their moment, allied themselves with two right-wingers in the new administration of Gerald Ford.
One was Donald Rumsfeld, the new Secretary of Defense. The other was Dick Cheney, the president's Chief of Staff. Rumsfeld began to make speeches alleging the Soviets were
ignoring Kissinger's treaties and secretly building up their weapons
with the intention of attacking America.(Clip from 1976)
Narrator: The CIA and other agencies that watched the Soviet Union continuously for any sign of threat said this was a complete fiction, that there was no truth to Rumsfeld's allegations. But Rumsfeld used his position to persuade Ford to set up an independent inquiry to prove the Soviet Union was a threat to America. The inquiry would be run by a group of neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz. The aim was to change the way America saw the Soviet Union.
13:45
Melvin Goodman, Head of Office of Soviet Affairs CIA, 1976-82: Rumsfeld won that very intense political battle
that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. As part of that battle Rumsfeld and others like Paul Wolfowitz wanted to get into the CIA and the mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.
Narrator: The neocons chose as the inquiry chairman a well-known critic and historian of the Soviet Union called Richard Pipes. He was convinced that whatever the Soviets said
publicly, secretly they still intended to attack and conquer America. This was their hidden mindset. The inquiry was called Team B and the other leading member was Paul Wolfowitz.
Professor Richard Pipes interview: The idea then was to appoint a group of outside experts who have access to
the same evidence as the CIA uses to arrive at its conclusions and see if they come up with a different conclusion. I was asked to chair it, I was not an expert on nuclear weapons, if anything I was an expert on Soviet mindset. But that was a real key, the Soviet mindset, because the CIA was known as bean counters, they only looked at weapons. But weapons can be used in various ways, for defensive or offensive purposes. The group of experts I collected began to sift through the evidence.
Narrator: Team B began examining all the CIA data on the Soviet Union but however closely they looked, there was little evidence of the dangerous weapons or defense systems they
claimed the Soviets were developing. Rather than accept that this meant the systems didn't exist, Team B made an assumption that the Soviets had developed systems that were so sophisticated they were undetectable.
For example, they could find no evidence that the Soviet submarine fleet had an acoustic defense system. What this meant, Team B said, was that the Soviets had actually invented a new non-acoustic system which was impossible to detect. This meant that the entire American submarine fleet was at risk from an invisible threat that was there even though there was no
evidence for it.
16:14
Dr. Anne Cahn, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines because they couldn't find it. So they said, maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence for this. So they're saying the fact a weapon doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means we haven't found it.
Pipes: That's important, yes, if something is not there it's
significant. (Interviewer: by its absence). By its absence. If you
believe that they share your view of strategic weapons and they don't talk about it, there's something missing, something is wrong. The CIA wasn't aware of that.
Narrator: What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn't found but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air
defenses. The CIA was convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the
Soviet Union. Team B said this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet regime. The air defense system worked perfectly.
But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world.
Pipes: The CIA was very loathe to deal with issues which could not be in a kind of mathematical form, a ? form. They considered this soft evidence. They deal in realities whereas this was a fantasy, that's how it was perceived. And there
were battles all the time on this subject. (Interviewer: did you think it was a fantasy?) No, I think it was absolute reality.
Cahn: I would say that all of it was fantasy. I mean, they looked at radars out in Krasnoyarsk and said "this is a
laser beam weapon" when in fact it was nothing of the sort. They even took a Russian military manual, which the correct translation of it is "The Art of Winning", and when they translated it and put it into Team B, they called it "The Art of Conquest."
Well, there's a difference between conquest and winning. And if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems and examine them one by one, they were all wrong. (Interviewer: Nothing true?) I don't believe anything in
Team B was really true.
Narrator: The neoconservatives set up a lobby group to publicize the findings of Team B. It was called the Committee on the Present Danger. And a growing number of politicians joined, including a presidential hopeful, Ronald Reagan.
The Price of Peace and Freedom, Committe on the Present
Danger, Propaganda film 1976
Through films and television the Committee portrayed a world in
which America was under threat from hidden forces that could strike at any time. Forces that America must conquer to survive.
(clip of fiery speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn with voiceover translation: "A concentration of world evil, a hatred for humanity is taking place and it is fully determined to destroy your society. Must you wait until the young men of America have to fall defending the borders of your continent?"
Narrator: This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught his
students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It might not be true but it was necessary, to reengage the public in a grand vision of America's destiny that would give meaning and purpose to their lives.
The neoconservatives were succeeding in creating a simplistic
fiction, a vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all evil in the world and America as the only country that could rescue it. And this nightmarish vision was beginning to give the neoconservatives great power and influence.
Holmes: The Straussians started to create a worldview which is a fiction. The world is not divided into good and evil. The battle in which we're engaged is not a battle between good and evil. The United States, as anyone who observes understands, has done some good and some bad things, like any great power. This is the way history is. But they wanted to create a world of moral certainties so therefore they invent mythologies, fairytales, describing any force in the world that obstructs the United States as somehow Satanic or associated with evil.
there doesn't seem to be anything here