Interview with the Neo-Con

Sometime during the 90's...........

Back in the days when race was debated around the OJ trial, when feminism portrayed as a match between Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia, and when the prospect of "another Vietnam" was written of as the paranoia of a few leftists. When Timothy McVeigh was the big name in terrorism on US soil. Back when most Americans were very secure in their belief that "it could never happen here" whether *it* was a number of things from a botched election, a serious economic meltdown, a major internal natural disaster, or a the threat of losing our Civil Liberties.

At that time, I was not particularly complacent. While not aware of what the future would bring, I was quite concerned about the environment and afraid that someday there would be "another Vietnam", but at the time had little to go on but a series of eerie hunches.

But back then in my pre-WTO protest adulthood, I did run into a series of college professors whose ideas I never realized would gain such power. Indeed, I was more worried at the time about the sociobiologists with their zeal to prove women not fit for full citizenship. But yet, they were a bunch you could not ignore or forget.

Only years would I come to know the significance of what I saw when dealing with a pack of neocon professors and neocon students.
Of course, part of that came from the fact that they were less than honest about selling their ideas to undergraduates and used a good deal of manipulation in the process. In retrospect that should surprise nobody. Often what they would do if you disagreed with their ideas was suggest that you were simply too "limited" or "provincial" or caught up in closed minded middle class morality to understand. It reminded me of certain Freudians who tried to paint everyone who disagreed with them as prudes who didn't want to hear about sex.
Among the students many of those who bought into the neo-con thinking were also great fans of Frank Herbert's "Dune" series (which has been posthumously increased by his son since). In both cases, I felt portrayed as a schmuck for suggesting that for all the problems of modern democracies, that replacing it with a bunch of scheming feudal elites wouldn't be a great trade. Such ideas according to this bunch were just corn-fed naivete. Of course, politics was all about deceiving the masses. Even as a first year biology student, I was able to point out several biological impossibilities in the stories. But that was also dismissed as closed mindedness. This crowd deemed such "mere details" as rather beneath them and best left to the "techies types" who would of course never grasp their master plans or have a real say in their grandiose master plans.

One consistent theme with the neo-cons was the idea that the ordinary person needs to be deceived. That people will behave irresponsibly if not kept in line somehow. One neo-con professor of political philosophy told me that to let people make their own decisions was tantamount to forcing them to have bad habits and watch TV 40 hours a week. In his mind the idea that people could control themselves was simply that they don't, and that to try and argue for anything different was childish and irresponsible.

In fact, both Sayyid Qutb the founder of the radical Islamist movment and Leo Strauss founder of neo-conservative political thought, believed that any people in a supposedly free society were in fact slaves to their own animal nature. And both believed that such persons are universally capable of committing extreme acts of brutality such as those committed by Gestapo, the Chinese Red Guard, or the My Lai masacre because having grown up in a democratic society left them with absolutely no internal moral compass and no ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. However, people with this "sickness" didn't know they were sick and are not capable of knowing how easily they could commit atrocities until they had done so.

Of course the irony of this is extreme seeing how both groups were so concerned about such brutality but advocated violence themselves. In fact, neo-cons see war as another necessity designed to keep the ovine gullible masses from going crazy.

"Are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, at the moment?"

Or something like that.

But perhaps the most important lesson in dealing with the neocons is that ideas matter and political ideas can often gain power faster than anyone ever dreamed.

Now as was in the case during the 90's, there is a bit of chaos in terms of idea. People will throw terms like "Socialist", "Communist", "Nazi", "death panel" and such. Of course, the neocons blamed this on liberalism and the dangerous chaos of democracy.

But nowadays I put most of the blame on a culture of manipulative political arguments which is fostered more by the political right if anything. However, it is of utmost importance to make sure the political ideas are taken seriously by progressives rather than basing everything on broad coalitions or attempts to poke holes in what the right is doing.

To accept anything less is to risk getting caught unaware of what might be coming down the pipe next.

Say Goodnight Readers!