National Socialism and National Greatness
In the Museum of Discarded Notions and Laughable Nostrums, surely the concept of “national greatness” deserves a special place. It was all the rage in neoconservative circles circa 1997, when David Brooks, then an editorialist for the Weekly Standard, penned his ode to the sense of “grandeur” and America’s imperial greatness as embodied, he thought, in the Library of Congress building. With its golden curlicues, and overly ornate projection of self-importance, and ideological symbolism, this structure represented, for Brooks, the spirit of an American past that had, by the 1990s, been nearly exhausted:
“The designers of the Library of Congress, like so many of their countrymen, thought America was on the verge of its own golden age. At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America's task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.”
With the end of the cold war, and the absence of any overwhelming threat to American national security, this great national purpose had shrunk to something no more impressive than, as Francis Fukuyama, the neocons’ former philosopher-in-residence, put it, “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”
We had reached, said Fukuyama, “the end of history,” which, he averred, “will be a very sad time” because “the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” will be replaced by such mundane matters as earning a living, recycling old wine bottles, and the eternal problem of keeping both wife and mistress happy. The age of heroism is past, and from now on our task will merely be the “endless care-taking of the museum of human history” and “centuries of boredom.”
Without any wars to fight, you see, or any causes requiring the spilling of copious amounts of blood, your archetypal neocon is bored—not that these typically soft, physically incapable, often dwarfish and invariably pear-shaped policy wonks would ever consider personally fighting for any of these noble causes, mind you: Their role is to instigate the wars, it is for others to fight them. War, for the neocon, is strictly a spectator sport, rather than a hands-on business. However, the very idea of a world without any really serious conflicts struck them as the ultimate in ennui, although at the end of his “end of history” essay, Fukuyama was hope that “perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”
He was right about history getting started again, albeit not in the manner he or anyone else anticipated: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon put the neocons back in business again, opening up, as it did, a new world fresh with possibilities of conflict.
The end of the Soviet empire had made their cachet as ex-Commies—which imbued them with an aura of expertise, and gained them easy entry to the then-booming field of Kremlinology—obsolescent, and deprived the world of its Manichean gloss. Post-9/11, what Fukuyama termed “the worldwide ideological struggle” was revived, albeit with an Islamic-Arabic adversary rather than a Slavic one. Once again, the cry went up: “To the barricades!” And its echoes were heard from Washington to Tel Aviv.
Instead of building monuments to our global supremacy, and devoting ourselves to the endless caretaking of the museum of human history, we could once again get back to the noblest cause of them all—war. And not any ordinary war, but a “War on Terrorism” —a war without end. Oh, for joy! History was back —with a vengeance.
The neocon response to this was to develop a new ideology; or, rather, to distill and perfect their old ideology—warmed over Social Democratic nostrums combined with a merciless devotion to the cult of Ares —that has morphed, in its later stages, into what might be categorized, without a whole lot of Procrustean maneuvering, as a variant of fascism. The contempt for the “bourgeois” virtues, as given expression by Senor Fukuyama, the longing for the heroic, the valorization of death for the sake of an abstraction —these “aristocratic” virtues, as Fukuyama characterized them, are back in vogue, along with the cult of militarism, the idea of Big Government, and the revival of genuinely authoritarian impulses in the West.
That these impulses were manifesting themselves among rightist intellectuals, rather than nesting exclusively on the left, as in the past, was merely a function of the neoconservative mindset, which is as much a history as it is an ideology. Many of the leading neocons, after all, had been leftists, usually of the Trotskyist variety, and retained the universalist-totalitarian frame of reference long after abandoning left-sectarian politics. Neoconservatism, in an important sense, is merely Trotskyism turned inside out. Instead of exporting the “world socialist revolution,” they are intent on spreading what George W. Bush described as the “global democratic revolution.” And they do it with the same revolutionary fervor that they —or their intellectual ancestors —once hailed the Red Army and its founder.
On domestic matters, historically, the neocons have been all over the map: their one true and abiding belief is in the liberating power of American military might. With the implosion of the Leninist project, and the apparent “end of history,” the neocons were essentially put out of business — until the worst terrorist attack in American history revived their fervor, and their fortunes. And this marked yet another milestone in their long odyssey from Marxism to a new kind of authoritarianism on the right.
I hesitate to use the far too often abused term “fascism,” which has been used to describe everyone to any opponent of the New Left during the 1960s to anyone who opposed U.S. entry into World War II. The Communists, during the “third period” of the 1930s, routinely describe the Social Democrats as “social fascists,” and this has been a favorite term of abuse employed by the neocons to smear anyone who crosses their path. Yes, even I, a libertarian, i.e., one who believes that the best government is no government, have been so described, by no less an authority than David Horowitz’s Frontpage.
Yet there is such an ideology as fascism, historically speaking, and its main themes are being revived in contemporary neoconservative ideology to a chilling degree. Aside from the fin-de-siecle romanticism of Fukuyama’s pining for a rebirth of history, the neocons have replicated most if not all of the classic symptoms of the fascist mindset, if not quite yet generated all the characteristics of fascism in power. No, we don’t have a single-party state, which is the central organizational principle of fascist ideology. But that’s only because the neocons have yet to seize total power, and sweep away the last vestiges of constitutional democracy. However, they lack none of the telltale symptoms of fascists out of power, that is, of aspiring authoritarians..
The essence of neoconservatism is war and the valorization of conflict, and, as such, seems tailor made for the post-9/11 era. To the early fascist theoreticians, and the first successful fascist politician, Mussolini, war was the noblest cause of them all, not merely a necessity but a sacred obligation. Acts of war were, for the fascists, acts of worship: Ares replaced Zeus in the fascist Olympus. The one true abiding faith of the fascists was in the efficacy of military force as a means to shape society, and this militarism dominated every aspect of fascist society, which was built around war and preparations for war. Mussolini sought to recreate the Roman Empire —an ambition shared by neoconservative columnist and military maven Max Boot, whose “The Case for An American Empire” lays out the American claim to the imperial purple.
The faith of the neocons in the ability of the American military to “transform” the Middle East, and create Jeffersonian republics where before there had been nothing but tyranny and grinding poverty, is surely a mystical phenomenon, just as surely and frankly religious as faith-healing or Christian Science. Whereas the foreign policy of a constitutional republic is necessarily limited to the defense of the nation and its interests, a nation that declared its foreign policy goal to be “benevolent global hegemony”—as Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan put it in their 1996 foreign policy manifesto — is a creature of a different type. It is surely not a republic, in any meaningful sense of the term, but an empire: perhaps even an evil empire, for all its “benevolent” pretensions. Not since the fascist and national socialist movements of the 1930s had any mass political movement put forward a program of world conquest as a political goal.
The ideal fascist model was Sparta —a warrior nation geared for conquest, in a permanent state of mobilization for war. For the fascist, life is war, nations are necessarily always in conflict, and this inevitable clash of interests must always in end war —and in the victory of one over the other. This worldview is mirrored in the endless “war on terrorism,” which our rulers promise us will last at least a generation. Perpetual war, as far as the eye can see —this is the core doctrine of neoconservatism, and the animating spirit of classical fascist movements, as well as German national socialism.
War abroad means an atmosphere of conformity and hostility to dissent on the home front, and this has translated, in contemporary neoconservative thought, to the equation of antiwar sentiment with treason. In his infamous smear attack on paleoconservative and libertarian critics of the Iraq invasion, David Frum, the neocon Vyshinsky, attacked yours truly, as well as an entire platoon of antiwar right-wingers, as “unpatriotic conservatives.” On a lower level, where neocon ideology meets talk radio and Fox News, we have Sean Hannity howling “Enemy of the State” at war critics and dissenters from the neocon party line. Like classic fascist movements of the past, neoconservatism today values and promotes uniformity of thought, and seeks to enforce intellectual homogeneity with strictures equating dissent with treason. Andrew Sullivan, a leading warmonger and neocon shill, infamously accused a “fifth column” on “both coasts” with not so secretly sympathizing with Osama bin Laden and other enemies of America. On a cruder level, we have the rantings of David Horowitz, who routinely accuses his political opponents of being in league with the terrorists, either consciously or “objectively,” as the Marxists used to say.
Conservatism used to mean anti-statism. Today, under the rubric of neoconservatism, this has been stood on its head. It is a Bizarro World conservatism, where the individualism of Barry Goldwater and Frank S. Meyer has given way to the militarized groupthink of David Frum and the Dittohead demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh. From The Conscience of a Conservative [.pdf] (or, perhaps, A Choice, Not an Echo) to An End to Evil is a long way to travel: it has been a long way downward, but it seems today’s ostensible “conservatives,” committed as they are to what is rapidly becoming an openly fascist movement, are finally scraping rock bottom.
Racism is not necessarily related to fascism, yet the example of German national socialism makes the connection inevitable. And here, too, there are ominous parallels. Neoconservatism, like Nazism, has its “Other,” it’s equivalent of the Eternal Jew, and that is the Eternal Arab. A great deal of how the neocons see the Arab and Muslim worlds is rooted in a brazenly racist mindset, exemplified in the writings of Raphael Patai, whose book, The Arab Mind, reportedly had a large influence in official Bush administration circles, as well as among neoconservatives outside the government. As Seymour Hersh pointed out in his investigation into the horrors of Abu Ghraib:
“The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. 'The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,' Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, 'or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.' The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.' In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged —'one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.'"
Torture as a political act, the central theme of a propaganda campaign, is something we must surely associate with fascist movements. Furthermore, to single out persons of a particular ethnicity or religion —in this case, Arabs and Muslims —is so evocative of the National Socialist German Workers Party that one has to wonder if it’s intentional. That the neoconservatives are now carrying the pro-torture banner is a major milestone is their journey to a peculiarly Americanized form of fascism.
In terms of ideology and policy, as well as in style and spirit, the post-9/11 neoconservative movement exhibits all the classic characteristics of a genuinely fascist phenomenon: militarism, leader worship, intellectual authoritarianism, delusions of “national greatness,” hatred of the Other, the romanticization of violence, and a program of permanent war. All that is lacking is a one-party state —and we are, perhaps, a major terrorist attack away from that.
Justin Raimondo is Editorial Director of Antiwar.com.
Comments
I think the characterisation of the neocons as racist is fairly weak, and smacks of “Jews are the new Nazis”. Otherwise the links between neoconsevatism and fascism are well made, unsurprising since they have closely linked intellectual roots on the Left.
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if you look at what goeebals said about jews, it is really simliar to what is said about muslims today. there is a very obsessive and cynical view of them as evil and backward.
Besides being wrong, it coes completely against their prescription of internvetionism in the middl east. If muslims are so awful, we should go away from them rather than towads them, right?
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Excellent article. Thank you.
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As usual, Justin “the smoking gun” Raimondo is dead-on. (nice pun,eh?) He calls ‘em like he sees ‘em and there is Nothing in this article I can find to disagree with. I mean I’m no intellectual, but I know when I’ve been “had” and all the neo-cons I see are all smoking butts waiting for round 2 to begin. Or is that round 3? I’m losing count as well as consciousness…
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The comparison between neocons and nazis I believe is an apt one. There is a certain kindred spirit animating them. We are used to think of the nazis as the embodiment of evil. But they believed themselves to be the good ones. They saw Germany as the indispensable nation that defended Western civilization against its mortal enemy, the evil of judeo-bolshevism. Similar is the idealistic spirit that makes for propaganda and concentration camps. The US is now living its moment of madness. An attack on Iran will be like the attack on Poland in 1939 - a crossing of the line after which the US will become hated all over the world, and perhaps forever loose the moral credit it has enjoyed since WWII.
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The charectorization of neo-cons as racist is actually pretty accurate, but without mentioning the neo-con attitude that Jewish suffering is the only real suffering, it misses the strongest example of the racist tendency.
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I was wondering where the OLD Taki’s Top Drawer went! NEVERMIND! Taki plus Justin Raimondo: the mind boggles!
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Raimondo gets it right as usual! He may be a devout libertarian, whilst I am a Christian Socialist; but as far as his outlook on the supposed democratic government Israel and the U.S. incessantly purport to possess, he has it right that ‘our’ American government is nothing more than murderous thugs, be they democrat or republican.
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Raimondo again demonstrates his gift for frankly addressing inconvenient issues. It’s refreshing to see reasoned and knowledgeable articles that dismantle propagated narratives.
One distinction may be that our middle-eastern foreign policy has been ‘outsourced’ to a troublesome and draining nation that serves little, if any, of our national interests. Both Arab and Persian countries have historically been important suppliers to us, so it would be in beneficial for us to foster friendships. Unfortunately, we now risk a conflagration in the entire region that threatens our energy security and those of our closest allies worldwide. Many American strategists, including Kennan, have warned about the deleterious effects of ethnic lobbies and media.
BTW, did some of the Comment poster even read the article? The internet mercenaries must be inundated nowadays. A latest post first system will probably help keep it that way.
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Most of the Arab & Islamic world use to look with affection and admiration toward the USA; the aggravating problem is USA policy toward the Middle East, especially after Sepetmber-11 and the empowerment of the neo-cons. It’s very unfortunate and dishearting to witness this great country and people misled by such negative and destructive cabal. The USA must remain in the forefront of human progress and civlilization.
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Justin, like many of the writers at antiwar.com provide a timely
reminder of the sort of exceptional analytical abilities that some
Americans possess which made it the number one nation on earth. He and
the rest of the paleconservatives do a better job of selling America
to the Muslim world then the Shock and Awe brigade ever could if
only his message could be heard beyond a few websites. Justin, when
will you be coming to the UK to debate with the likes of Daniel Pipes
who was in London recently to promote the usual neo-con war cry that
bashing Muslim nations to a pulp is a pre-requisite to preserving
western civilization?
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Anti-War.com in my morning read where I found out about this site. I was banned from commenting about blogs on Huffingt onPost becuase I challenged the many neoconish posters who wrote articles that included statements like,"Issrael cannont afford the luxury of being a member of the Atomic Energy Commission.” The real reason why they cannont is that they don’t want by rules that would allow anyone to inspect their nuclear arsenal.
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Lester:
“Besides being wrong, it coes completely against their prescription
of internvetionism in the middl east. If muslims are so awful, we
should go away from them rather than towads them, right?”
I think it’s this contradiction that is at the heart of neocon
failure - they both despise their enemy and believe that their enemy
yearns to be ‘just like us’; indeed, already is ‘just like us’ in
all essential characteristics. There is a total absence of respect
for the foe, both for the foe’s abilities and for the foe’s own
culture. I think this derives from left-liberalism’s therapeutic &
psychoanalytic Freudian approach to conflict; the idea that those
who oppose us aren’t just wrong, they’re mentally ill.
Personally I prefer the paleocon approach: “We prefer our culture to
yours, and will fight you if you try to impose yours on us, but we
respect your right to your own culture as long as you leave us alone
likewise.”
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the reason we went into iraq was a lie, pure and simple, you can spin it anyway you want, but a lie is a lie. the neocon thinktanks led by the israeli americans whose main interests are the interests of the criminal apartheid state of israel went on a coast to coast campaign to promote the lies about sadam being hitler etc....worse than the devil himself, in order to get mainstream americans to follow blindly as most of us did.
The christian community has been under the spell of the state of israel for many many years, and lately more and more rabbis are colluding with preachers (pastor hagee and rabbi lapin are one single examle) to garner financial and political support for israel, these groups support israel and will blindly advocate for it until they start to discover the racist and criminal policies of that stateI i am a right wing christian who believed that israel was the poor oppressed state that is presented to us in the daily press and tv.
Esterina Tartman a memeber of the israeli knesset made this comment in january of this year, “We need to drive out and destroy this evil from our environs…. The State of Israel is a Jewish state that is supposed to be ruled by Jewish values, with a Jewish regime and Jewish sovereignty.” she was referring to the naming Israel’s first-ever Muslim Arab Cabinet minister
I am seeing more and more concern being expressed by jewish americans such as dershowitz and malcom hoenleins speeches at herzliya which speak of the fear that the wheels are starting to come off the wagon. presently aipac has two ex members under indictment for spying against the u.s on behalf of israel, malcolm hoenlein executive chairman of the 52 most powerful jewish american groups in the us said this “ Lamenting what he called “the poisoning of America,” Hoenlein painted a dire picture of American public discourse turning increasingly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel in the year ahead.” >>>"Hoenlein dated the trend to the 2005 arrest of two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, on charges of passing classified national security information. Hoenlein argued that the Jewish community made a major mistake by not forcefully criticizing the arrests"<<
yesterday we saw the israeli lobby start to advocate for the release of the israeli spy pollard, they want bush to pardon him; how arrogant of this group to do this on american soil.
personally i dont mind seeing these jewish american groups start to worry about their image in the us, God knows they have caused much harm and control way too much of the press in this country.
unfortunately mainstream american jews have no idea of what these groups are doing.
you reap what you sow, and the lobby has sown fear and intimidation for too long.
america is starting to awaken.
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What a load of junk. You have utterly *FAILED* to represent the change between a constitutional republic at a time of a peace and a constitutional republic at a time of war. You label them all as being just like fascists because they call for pre-emptive attacks. That does not make them fascists or evil people. It means they understand the threat that radical islam poses with millions of potential easily recruitable young men in every country in this world. Pear shaped eh? I’m certainly not, neither are most conservatives who support Israel’s right to exist (Or, a neo-con as you so affectionately refer to us as). The absolute fact is that if any nation that you pledged allegiance to suffered the attacks from Israel’s neighbouring states is they were our own, you would be up in arms just as well. If every nation surrounding you attacked you again and again, you TOO would be prepared to fight. If these nations sponsored terrorist groups in disputed territories, you too would want to rid them from your nation. You are a hypocrite of the worst kind. Anti-war.. right. You’re no more anti-war than most of those on anti-war.com. You’re movement is all about the west disengaging from the middle east so the Arabs (rightfully, by your eyes, I am sure) can wipe Israel off the map. That way you and your golf buddies will be rid of a difficult problem. Rather than sitting on the side of right, you sit with the tyrants and the fascists (as you call the neocons). Do you still believe you are correct when you hear the KKK and other neonazi groups attacking Israel and “neocons”. Do you believe you are correct when you hear far left communists complaining about Neocons. Do you believe you are correct because you agree with Pat Buchanan? All you do is help the destruction of Israel, and you know it.
“classic characteristics of a genuinely fascist phenomenon: militarism, leader worship, intellectual authoritarianism, delusions of “national greatness,” hatred of the Other, the romanticization of violence, and a program of permanent war.”
This is the problem. You do not distinguish a nation at war to the nations civil state. Every civil nation makes sacrifices when going to war. Every nation in the past has done all of these things to bolster the war effort, which ultimately leaves more of the good people alive at the end of the war so we can return to civility.
The whole world is at war with Islam, even if we do nothing to fight them. They started this war, and we will finish it, leaving people like yourself behind in the dust with your heads in the sand.
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In response to Dare.
The Jews have been stealing Arab land for the last 150 years, don’t they, the Palestinians, have just as much right to fight back as the Native Americans did against the white invaders?
It is not like they invited the Israelites into their land, and buying out a couple of sheiks who did not even live in the land, and saying it was a ‘legal’ bill of sell, is about as much nonsense as saying that when settlers ‘homesteaded’ on Indian land, with the backing of the Calvary, that it was then ‘rightfully’ the white man’s land.—Please!!! Superior weapons and a bloodlust to kill does not make anything right, it just allows you to write the history books.—About the only difference I see between the Nazi v. the American and Israeli governments is that we have not seen the concentration camps, after all, the U.S. has a Pacific Island chain with untold ‘installations,’ Alaska, and apparently even many foreign governments quite willing to ‘hold’ whoever ‘we’ deem to be ‘enemies of the state.’—God only knows what horrors may lay within the depths of American and Israeli secretive government policies . . .
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Let us not forget the delectable pigtailed Michelle Malkin’s fervent defense of the right of the State to put people of a particular ethnic background into concentration camps. If you don’t want to be compared to famous fascists of the past, quit proposing their solutions, gosh darn it!
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The question of a newly emergent American fascism given life in a reaction to the events in New York in 2001 has seen only sporadic treatment in the years since. It deserves more. Lew Rockwell’s piece on Red State fascism followed by the insightful periodic commentary of Paul Craig Roberts, Justin Raimondo, the author of this present article, and a rather restrained analysis not long ago by Scott Mc Connell appear to have exhausted the subject. And it is any one’s choice how to frame the material.
In this instance the analysis is made from the perspective of neo-conservative theory and its application to the world of foreign policy. While such an approach has much to offer, the question would seem to be better approached in a more comprehensive fashion embracing as it does historical aspects which bear a noticeable relation to the early history of German National Socialism. Here a more precise analysis of the underlying social and governmental elements come into play and the form of the beast is more easily identified.
I am not of the opinion that fascism has many faces. There is one fascism, it has definable characteristics, and many of them are easily perceived in present circumstances. All of us know what torture is and what in modern parlance is called “ethnic cleansing”. And there is nothing mysterious about the big lie. Fascism crystallized over time; there was at first something more fluid. We see something of this development in the movement from the initial criticisms of the Geneva standards to the enactment of the MCA. It is here as much as it is in the working out of the underlying theory in foreign relations that we see the new fascism.
John Lowell
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Dare To be Stupid?
My goodness. All that typing and saying what
exactly?
The old mantra “Israel Good/Arabs Bad” is
getting old. I am sick and tired of hearing
anyone who “dares” criticize America’s middle
east colony as “wanting to wipe Israel off
the map”. Puleeeze
I read another column yesterday in which the
author said that any state that could not
support itself without massive foreign aid
was a “failed state”.
Israel is a failed state. It has failed
by all measures; politically, financially,
morally and has no credibility with most
of the rest of the civilized world.
Great work Justin
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Excellent. Support for the racist argument can also be found in the coded language found in the early writings of the neocons and their reaction to the great society.
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