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Entry: A Neoconservative Categorical Imperative Link: http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/a_neoconservative_categorical_imperative#25846 Post contents: Let us be precise. Neocons are disloyal Americans. They demand bellicosity by America to serve a complicated ideology espousing universalist and unpatriotic principles refracted through an uncritical, pro-Israeli lens. Most self-identified neoconservatives are Jewish, and they identify America's moral failing in the mid-20th Century as an excessive and selfish nationalism. Obviously, they see this same failing in Nazi Germany. They believe that everyone, but particularly Jews and other minorities, are safer and societies are better that are founded on universalist principles in which Jews are not easily identified within nationalist societies as "The Other." They are partisans for modernism and its expansion through US power. So there is an internal program--liberalism, mass immigration, multiculturalism, American "civic religionism," Lincoln fetishism--and there is an external program: wars and diplomacy to spread liberal democratic and capitalist values. Invade-the-world/Invite the world, as they say at vdare.com. Neoconservatives clearly view the US and Israel's respective interests as the same, because they view any nation's good as defined by (a) fidelity to the universal principles of liberalism or (b) the expression of healthy Jewish ethno-nationalism. The former values serve the later, even if they serve other interests as well. Just as domestic liberalism has various "unprincipled exceptions," so does neoconservative liberalism with respect to Jewish nationalism in Israel: it's the one, pure defensible nationalism, but this is no surprise, because all of the universalist talk is always designed never to interfere with Jewish minority interests in the various nations--Russia, US, France--where it is promoted. If the neoconservatives would not serve here in the United States military, one might imagine they'd serve over there in Israel itself, since this is their only tangible ethno-religious loyalty. (They love America only for its power; they want everywhere from Iraq to Vladivostock to be identical and indistinguishably liberal, capitalist, and non-nationalist.) But no dice. They're war-mongerers, transparent nationalists (for Israel), and possessed of dual loyalties, but they're also cowards. I don't think any Arab state presents a conventional threat to Israel with or without democracy. Israel has nukes, remember. They'll be fine, and no one will be dumb enough to attack them. I harbor no especial love or hatred for Israel and don't take my marching orders from Taki or anyone else. I think the maudlin accounts of Palestinian refugees by Noam Chomsky and certain paleoconservatives are overstated. I also think the romantic portray of Israelis as the stalwart democratic capitalist's outpost in the Middle East is an exageration too. They're an old-fashioned ethno-nation, like Turkey or mid-century India. I wish we were more like them, but I don't think we should foot the bill for their crummy neighborhood, festering Palestinian problem, or semi-socialist government. Real nationalism means taking pride in standing up on your own two feet, i.e., the virtue of strategic independence. Read Slezkine on communism and Jews in his tour de force work, the "Jewish Century." They were clearly the vanguard group and liked communism for much the reason they like American modernism: its universalist and being a Jew under such a regime is not supposed to be a demerit. Slezkine reports that even with the Doctors' Plot, Jews on a per capita basis suffered less under Stalin and his purges than ethnic Russians. Solzhenitsyn makes the same point about prisoners in the Gulag. The anti-Jewish paranoia of Stalin in the Doctors Plot episode has been a useful means of papering over the disproportionate participation of Russian and Ukranian Jews in the Bolshevik atrocity, the anti-Orthodox and anti-Russian character of these years particularly from 1917-1948. After the establishment of Israel proper, Stalin and other Communist non-Jewish leadership worried about dual loyalties, plots, and the like. Nonetheless, Jews remained disproportionately represented in party leadership and important ideological positions--media, law, universities, secret police, NKVD, KGB--until 1989. We needn't hate Israel, Jews, nor eschew a magnaminous concern for the weak and the downtrodden to realize that neoconservatism is one more variant on universalist liberalism promoted by people whose self-interest as a group will be furthered by its triumph. Its fundamental driving force is the destruction of traditional nations, national identities, and the necessarily subordinate position of minorities in healthy nation-states. Sent at: 2008 05 22