L’alliance BRICS continue de renforcer sa position sur la scène mondiale. Après avoir consolidé sa domination dans les secteurs du pétrole et du gaz, le groupe détient désormais une part significative des réserves mondiales de métaux rares. Ces ressources stratégiques pourraient donner un avantage crucial à l’alliance dans les échanges commerciaux internationaux.
Une emprise renforcée sur les ressources mondiales
L’expansion des BRICS en 2024 a renforcé leur emprise sur les marchés énergétiques mondiaux. Le bloc contrôle désormais 42% des réserves mondiales de pétrole et de gaz grâce à l’intégration de nouveaux membres. Cette position stratégique leur permet d’influencer les prix et les politiques énergétiques à l’international.
Parallèlement, les BRICS détiennent 72% des réserves de métaux rares, indispensables dans les technologies avancées et l’électronique. Cette majorité leur confère une capacité sans précédent à façonner les règles du jeu dans le commerce des minéraux stratégiques. Le bloc peut facilement influencer les industries technologiques et manufacturières à l’échelle mondiale. Cette nouvelle dynamique suggère un basculement potentiel des pouvoirs traditionnels vers ces nations en plein essor.
Stratégies économiques et politiques des BRICS
Le prochain sommet de BRICS devrait se concentrer sur le commerce des métaux rares et du pétrole. Les membres discuteront de la possibilité de restructurer les accords commerciaux actuels pour renforcer l’intégration économique de l’alliance. Un rapport indique que les perspectives de coopération dans le domaine de l’étude, du développement et de l’utilisation rationnelle des ressources minérales seront à l’ordre du jour. Chef de l’Agence fédérale russe de gestion des ressources du sous-sol (Rosnedra), Evgeny Petrov a souligné l’importance de cette coopération. Il a déclaré qu’elle permettrait d’assurer la continuité des approvisionnements et la stabilité des prix.
Par ailleurs, le bloc souhaite faire recours aux monnaies locales pour les échanges de minéraux rares. Cette stratégie pourrait affaiblir la position du dollar américain sur les marchés internationaux. Un tel changement pourrait avoir des conséquences profondes sur les économies mondiales, en particulier sur les secteurs fortement dépendants des importations de ces matériaux.
En résumé, les manœuvres des BRICS pourraient non seulement redéfinir les règles du commerce international mais aussi suggérer des changements plus profonds dans la gouvernance économique mondiale. En anticipant ces évolutions, les acteurs mondiaux doivent envisager des stratégies adaptatives pour maintenir leur pertinence dans un monde en rapide mutation.
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The neoconservative ideology gained increasing influence in world politics from the early 1980s onwards. Despite the misleading name, neoconservatism is not conservative at all. Rather it is a left-wing ideology that hijacked American conservatism. Although neoconservatism cannot be traced back to one particular thinker, the political philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and the sociologist Irving Kristol (1920-2009) are generally regarded as its founders.
The founders of Neoconservatism
Leo Strauss was born into a Jewish family in the German province of Nassau. He was an active Zionist during his student years in post-World War I Germany. In 1934, Strauss emigrated to Great Britain and in 1937 to the US, where he was initially appointed to Columbia University in New York. In 1938-1948 he was professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and in 1949-1968 at the University of Chicago.
At the University of Chicago, Strauss taught his students that American secularism was its own destruction: individualism, selfishness and materialism undermined all values and morals and led to enormous chaos and riots in the US in the 1960s. He saw the creation and cultivation of religious and patriotic myths as a solution. Strauss argued that white lies are permitted to keep society together and direct it. Consequently, according to him, unproven myths posited by politicians were necessary to give the masses a purpose, which would lead to a stable society. Statesmen therefore had to create strong inspiring myths, which did not necessarily had to correspond to the truth. Strauss was one of the inspirations behind the neoconservatism that emerged in American politics in the 1970s, although he never participated in active politics himself and always remained an academic.
Irving Kristol was the son of Ukrainian Jews who emigrated to Brooklyn, New York in the 1890s. In the first half of the 1940s, he was a member of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the Jewish Bolshevik leader expelled from the USSR by Stalin, who fought Stalin with this rival communist movement. Many leading American Jewish intellectuals joined the Fourth International.
Kristol was also a member of the influential New York Intellectuals, an equally anti-Stalinist and anti-USSR collective of Trotskyist Jewish writers and literary critics from New York. In addition to Kristol, this included Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Marshall Berman, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahy, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, Harvey Swados, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, Michael Walzer, Albert Wohlstetter and Robert Warshow. Many of them had attended the City College of New York, New York University, and Columbia University in the 1930s and 1940s. They also lived primarily in the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx. During the Second World War, these Trotskyists realized that the US could be useful in combating the USSR, which they hated. Some of them, such as Glazer, Hook, Kristol and Podhoretz, later developed neoconservatism, which retained Trotskyist universalism and Zionism.
Kristol started out as a convinced Marxist in the Democratic Party. He was a student of Strauss in the 1960s. Their neoconservatism continued to believe in the Marxist malleability of the world: the US had to take active action internationally to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism. That is why Kristol was a fierce supporter of the American war in Vietnam. Strauss and Kristol also rejected the liberal separation of Church and State, since secular society led to individualism. They made religion useful for the State again.
Kristol spread his ideas as a professor of sociology at New York University, through a column in the Wall Street Journal, through the magazines he founded (The Public Interest and The National Interest) and through the influential neocon weekly The Weekly Standard founded by his son William Kristol in 1995. The Weekly Standard was funded until 2009 by media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and then by billionaire Philip Anschutz’s Clarity Media Group).
Kristol was also involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, founded and financed by the CIA in 1950. This anti-USSR organization active in approximately 35 countries published the British magazine Encounter, which Kristol founded together with the British former Marxist poet and writer Stephen Spender (1909-1995). Spender was very attracted to Judaism due to his partial Jewish origins and was also married to the Jewish concert pianist Natasha Litvin. When the CIA’s involvement in the Congress for Cultural Freedom was leaked to the press in 1967, Kristol withdrew from it and became involved in the neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute.
Kristol also edited the monthly magazine Commentary together with Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930) in 1947-1952. Podhoretz was the son of Jewish Marxists from Galicia who settled in Brooklyn. He studied at Columbia University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge. In 1960-1995, Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary. His influential essay ‘My Negro Problem – And Ours’ from 1963 advocated complete racial mixing of the white and black races, as for him « the wholesale merging of the 2 races was the most desirable alternative ».
In 1981-1987, Podhoretz was an advisor to the US Information Agency, an American propaganda service whose purpose was to monitor and to influence foreign public opinions and state institutions. In 2007, Podhoretz received the Guardian of Zion Award, an annual prize given by Israel’s Bar-Ilan University to an important supporter of the State of Israel.
Other leading names in this new ideology were Allan Bloom, Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter and Kristol’s wife Gertrude Himmelfarb. Bloom (1930-1992) was born to a Jewish family in Indiana. At the University of Chicago, he was strongly influenced by Leo Strauss. Bloom later became a professor of philosophy at various universities. The later professor Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) was one of his students. The Jewish feminist journalist and writer Midge Rosenthal (1927-2022) – who changed her surname to Decter – was one of the founders of the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century and also served on the Board of Directors of the neocon think tank Heritage Foundation. Brooklyn-born Jewish historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922-2019) was an active Trotskyist during her studies at the University of Chicago, the Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Cambridge. Later, she was active in the neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute.
The Trotskyist Roots of Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism is wrongly considered ‘right-wing’ because of the prefix ‘neo’, which wrongly suggests a new conservative thinking. However, many neocons, on the contrary, have an extreme left past, namely in Trotskyism. After all, most neocons descend from Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals from Eastern Europe (mainly Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine). Since the USSR banned Trotskyism in the 1920s, it is understandable that they became active in the US as an anti-USSR lobby within the left-liberal Democratic Party and in other left-wing organizations.
Irving Kristol defined a neocon as “a progressive struck by reality.” This indicates that a neocon is someone who changed political strategies in order to better achieve his goals. After all, in the 1970s, the neocons exchanged Trotskyism for liberalism and left the Democratic Party. Because of their strong aversion to the USSR and the welfare state, they joined the anti-communism of the Republicans for strategic reasons.
A former Trotskyist, neocon Kristol continued to promote Marxist ideas such as reformist socialism and international revolution through nation building and militarily imposed democratic regimes. In addition, the neocons defend progressive demands such as abortion, euthanasia, mass immigration, globalization, multiculturalism and free trade capitalism. The welfare states are also seen as superfluous, although the Western peoples themselves would prefer to see their laboriously built up social security continue to exist.The neocons are therefore waving wildly exaggerated doomsday scenarios – such as an aging population and globalization – to prepare the population for a massacre in the government sector and social services. They seek support for this from the liberal-capitalist political forces. The term ‘poverty trap’, which refers to unemployed people who do not go to work because the costs caused by this dilute their slightly higher income from work, was also invented by neocons.
Each of these are core concepts of neocon philosophy. In 1979, Esquire magazine called Irving Kristol “the godfather of the most powerful new political force in America: neoconservatism.” That year also saw the publication of Peter Steinfels’ book ‘The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America’s Politics’, which pointed to the increasing political and intellectual influence of the neocons.
The monthly magazine Commentary was the successor to the magazine Contemporary Jewish Record, which ceased operations in 1944. Commentary was founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. The first editor-in-chief Elliot Ettelson Cohen (1899-1959) was the son of a Jewish shopkeeper from Tsarist Russia. During his tenure, Commentary focused on the traditionally very left-wing Jewish community, while at the same time wanting to introduce the ideas of young Jewish intellectuals to a wider audience. Norman Podhoretz, who became editor-in-chief in 1960, rightly stated that Commentary reconciled radical Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals with liberal-capitalist America. Commentary took an anti-USSR course and fully supported the three pillars of the Cold War: the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and NATO.
This magazine about politics, society, Judaism and socio-cultural topics has played a leading role in neoconservatism since the 1970s. Commentary transformed Jewish Trotskyism into neoconservatism and is the most influential American magazine of the past half century because it profoundly changed American political and intellectual life. After all, the opposition to the Vietnam War, the capitalism underlying that war and especially the hostility against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 aroused the ire of editor-in-chief Podhoretz. Commentary therefore depicted this opposition as anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-Semitic. This led to the emergence of neoconservatism, which fiercely defended liberal democracy and opposed the USSR and Third World countries that fought neo-colonialism. Strauss’s students – among other Paul Wolfowitz (b. 1943) and Allan Bloom – argued that the US should wage a battle against ‘Evil’ and spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism, considered ‘Good’, in the world.
In addition, they talked the American population into a – fictitious – Islam danger, on the basis of which they advocate American intervention in the Near East. But above all, neocons argue for massive and unconditional US support for Israel, even to the extent that traditional conservative Russel Kirk (1918-1994) once argued that neocons confused the US capital with Tel-Aviv. In fact, according to Kirk, this was the main distinction between neocons and the original American conservatives. He already warned in 1988 that neoconservatism was very dangerous and warlike. The US-led Gulf War of 1990-1991 immediately proved him right.
Neocons emphatically strive for power in order to push through their reforms in the expectation that this will improve the quality of society. They are so convinced of their own right that they do not wait until there is broad support for their interventions, even in the case of major reforms. This makes neoconservatism a Marxist feasibility utopia.
The Neocon Resistance against President Richard Nixon
In the 1970s, neoconservatism emerged as a resistance movement against President Nixon’s policies. Republican Richard Nixon (1913-1994), together with Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) – national security advisor in 1969-1975 and Secretary of State in 1973-1977 – pursued a completely different foreign policy by establishing relations with Maoist China and initiating a détente with the USSR. In addition, Nixon also implemented social policies and abolished the gold standard, making dollars no longer convertible into gold.
Nixon and Kissinger took advantage of the high tensions and border conflicts between the USSR and China to establish secret relations with China in 1971, after which Nixon became the first American President to visit Maoist China in February 1972. Mao Zedong appeared to be enormously impressed by Nixon. Fearing a Sino-American alliance, the USSR now yielded to the American pursuit of détente, enabling Nixon and Kissinger to transform the bipolar world – the West vs. the communist bloc – into a multipolar balance of power. Nixon visited Moscow in May 1972 and negotiated trade agreements and two groundbreaking arms limitation treaties (SALT I and the ABM Treaty) with Soviet leader Brezhnev. The hostility of the Cold War was now replaced by détente, which calmed tensions. Relations between the USSR and the US improved greatly from 1972 onwards. At the end of May 1972, a five-year cooperation program on space travel was established. This led to the Apollo-Soyuz test project in 1975, in which an American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz performed a joint space mission.
China and the USSR now reduced their support for North Vietnam, which was advised to start peace talks with the US. Although Nixon initially seriously escalated the war in South Vietnam by also attacking the neighboring countries of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam, he gradually withdrew his troops and Kissinger was able to conclude a peace agreement in 1973. After all, Nixon understood that for a successful peace the USSR and China had to be involved.
Nixon was further convinced that sensible government policies could benefit the entire population. He transferred federal powers to the states, provided more food aid and social assistance and stabilized wages and prices. Defense spending fell from 9.1% to 5.8% of GDP and average household income rose. In 1972, social security was greatly expanded by guaranteeing a minimum income. Nixon became very popular because of his successful socio-economic policies. He was re-elected in November 1972 with one of the largest election victories in American history: with the exception of Massachusetts and Washington DC, he obtained a majority in all American states.
In response to Nixon’s overwhelming victory, in December 1972, at the instigation of Democratic Senator Henry Jackson (1912-1983) – who had unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination – the centrist faction Coalition for a Democratic Majority (CDM) was founded within the Democratic Party. The CDM argued that Democrats needed to return to a broader and centrist stance to defeat Republicans. The CDM also attracted members from the Trotskyist Socialist Party of America and especially from its youth wing, the Young People’s Socialist League.
However, despite the CDM’s significant membership and support, Jackson failed to win the Democratic nomination in the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries. Some mainly non-Jewish CDM members – including Les Aspin, Lloyd Bentsen, Tom Foley, Samuel Huntington, William Richardson and James Woolsey – would later participate in the Carter (1977-1981) and Clinton (1993-2001) administrations, while countless, mostly Jewish others – Daniel Bell, Midge Decter, Nathan Glazer, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, Irving Kristol, Joshua Muravchik, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Richard Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, Benjamin Wattenberg and Paul Wolfowitz – became neocons and ipso de facto Republicans and participated in the CIA propaganda organization Congress for Cultural Freedom, important neocon think tanks and the Reagan (1981-1989), Bush Sr. (1989-1993) and Bush Jr. (2001-2009) governments. So here was a transition from Trotskyist Jewish intellectuals in the Democratic Party to neocons within the Republican Party. The neocons previously formed an opposition movement within the Democratic Party, which was fiercely anti-USSR and rejected the détente of Nixon and Kissinger with the USSR. Neocon businessmen made enormous amounts of money available to neocon think tanks and magazines.
In 1973, the Straussians asked that the US pressure the USSR to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. However, Secretary of State Kissinger – although a Jew himself – felt that the situation of the Soviet Jews had nothing to do with the interests of the US and therefore refused to address the USSR about this. Senator Henry Jackson undermined détente with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of 1974, which made détente dependent on the USSR’s willingness to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. Jackson was criticized within in the Democratic Party for his close ties to the arms industry and his support for the Vietnam War and Israel. For the latter he also received significant financial support from American Jewish billionaires. Several of Jackson’s associates, such as Elliot Abrams (b. 1948), Richard Perle (b.1941), Benjamin Wattenberg (1933-2015), and Paul Wolfowitz, would later become leading neocons.
Kissinger was also not pleased with the persistent Israeli requests for American support and called the Israeli government “a sick bunch”: “We have vetoed eight resolutions for the past years, given them four billion dollars in aid (…) and we still are treated as if we have done nothing for them”. Various tape recordings from the White House from 1971 show that President Nixon also had serious doubts about the Israel lobby in Washington and about Israel.
Kissinger prevented Israel from destroying the encircled Egyptian 3rd Army in Sinai during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When the USSR did not dare to enforce its pro-Arab rhetoric, he was able to extricate Egypt from the Soviet camp and to transform it into an ally of the US, which meant a serious weakening of Soviet influence in the Near East.
Meanwhile, Nixon continued his social reforms. For example, in February 1974, he introduced health insurance based on employer and employee contributions. However, he was forced to resign in August 1974 due to the Watergate scandal, which began in June 1972 and consisted of a more than 2-year series of sensational media « revelations » that landed several Republican government officials and ultimately President Nixon himself in very serious trouble.
The Washington Post newspaper in particular significantly soiled the image of the Nixon administration (1969-1974): editors Howard Simons (1929-1989) and Hirsch Moritz ‘Harry’ Rosenfeld (1929-2021) organized at a very early stage the extraordinary reporting on what would become the Watergate scandal and put journalists Bob Woodward (°1943) and Carl Bernstein (°1944) on the case. Under the approving eye of editor-in-chief Benjamin Bradlee (1921-2014), Woodward and Bernstein suggested numerous accusations against the Nixon administration based on ‘anonymous sources’.
Simons was born to a Jewish family in Albany, New York State and earned a journalism degree from Columbia University. Rosenfeld came from a family of German Jews who settled in the New York City borough of the Bronx in 1939. Bernstein’s Jewish parents were members of the Communist Party of America and were shadowed by the FBI for subversive activities for 30 years, leaving them with an FBI file of more than 2,500 pages. Woodward has been accused for decades of exaggerations and fabrications in his reporting, especially regarding his ‘anonymous sources’ on the Watergate scandal.
This media offensive against the Nixon administration led to an intensive judicial investigation and the Senate even established an investigative committee that began to subpoena government employees. Nixon therefore had to fire several top employees in 1973 and ultimately came under fire himself, although he had nothing to do with the burglary and bribery affair that formed the basis of the Watergate scandal. From April 1974 onwards, there was open speculation about Nixon’s impeachment and when this actually threatened to happen in the summer of 1974, he resigned on August 9. Secretary of State Kissinger predicted during these final days that history would remember Nixon as a great President and that the Watergate scandal would prove to be a mere footnote.
Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford (1913-2006). The neocons exerted considerable pressure on Ford to appoint George Bush Sr. (1924-2018) as the new Vice President, but Ford displeased them by choosing the more moderate Nelson Rockefeller (1908-1979), former governor of New York State. Since, despite Nixon’s resignation, Parliament and media continued to strive to bring him to justice, Ford granted a presidential pardon to Nixon in September 1974 for his alleged role in the Watergate scandal. Despite the enormous impact of this scandal, its roots were never exposed. Nixon maintained his innocence until his death in 1994, although he admitted errors in his handling of the scandal. He would spend the remaining twenty years of his life rebuilding his badly damaged image.
In October 1974, Nixon was struck by a life-threatening form of phlebitis, for which he required surgery. President Ford came to visit him in the hospital, but the Washington Post – again – felt it necessary to mock the seriously ill Nixon. In the spring of 1975, Nixon’s health improved and he began work on his memoirs, although his assets were eaten up by high legal fees, among other things. At one point, former President Nixon had barely $500 in his bank account. From August 1975 his financial situation improved through a series of interviews for a British television program and the sale of his country residence. His autobiography ‘RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon’, published in 1978, became a bestseller.
Chinese state leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping remained grateful to Nixon for the improved relations with the US for years and repeatedly invited him to China. Nixon only managed to somewhat restore his tarnished reputation in the mid-1980s after highly publicized trips to the Near East and the USSR.
President Ford and Kissinger continued Nixon’s détente by, among other things, concluding the Helsinki Accords with the USSR. And when Israel continued to refuse to make peace with Egypt, Ford suspended all US military and economic aid to Israel for six months in 1975, amid intense protest from neocons. This was a real low point in Israeli-American relations.
The rise of neoconservatism
During the Ford administration (1974-1977), neocons such as White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021), presidential advisor Dick Cheney (b. 1941), Senator Jackson and his associate Paul Wolfowitz referred to the USSR as ‘Evil’, even though the CIA stated that the USSR posed no threat and no evidence of this could be found. The CIA was therefore accused – among other by the Straussian neocon professor Albert Wohlstetter (1913-1997) – of underestimating any threatening intentions of the USSR.
The Watergate scandal caused the Republican Party to lose heavily in the November 1974 legislative elections, giving the neocons an opportunity to gain more influence in government. When William Colby (1920-1996), head of the CIA, continued to refuse to allow an ad hoc study group of outside experts to do over the work of his analysts, Rumsfeld successfully pressed President Ford in 1975 for a thorough reorganization of the government. On November 4, 1975, several moderate Secretaries and top officials were replaced by neocons in this ‘Halloween Massacre’. Colby, among others, was replaced by Bush Sr. as head of the CIA, Kissinger remained Secretary of State but lost his position of National Security Advisor to General Brent Scowcroft (1925-2020), James Schlesinger was succeeded by Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, Cheney was given Rumsfelds vacant position of White House Chief of Staff and John Scali gave up his position as ambassador to the UN to Daniel Moynihan (1927-2003). Vice President Rockefeller also announced under pressure from neocons that he would not run as Ford’s running mate in the 1976 presidential elections.
The new head of CIA, Bush Sr., formed the anti-USSR study group Team B led by the Jewish professor of Russian history Richard Pipes (1923-2018) to ‘restudy’ the intentions of the USSR. All members of Team B were already anti-USSR a priori. Pipes, at the suggestion of Richard Perle, then an aide to Senator Jackson, included Wolfowitz in Team B. The study group’s highly controversial 1976 report claimed to have identified « an uninterrupted USSR pursuit of world hegemony » and « an intelligence failure ».
Afterwards, it turned out that Team B had been completely wrong on all levels. After all, the USSR did not have an “increasing GDP with which it could purchase more and more weapons”, but slowly sank into economic chaos. An alleged fleet of nuclear submarines undetectable by radar also never existed. Through these pure fabrications, the Straussians consequently presented the US with a fictitious threat from ‘Evil’. Team B’s report was used to justify the massive (and unnecessary) investments in armaments that began at the end of the Carter administration and exploded during the Reagan administration.
In the run-up to the 1976 presidential elections, the neocons put forward former governor of California and former Democrat (!) Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) as an alternative to Ford, who was blamed, among other things, for his détente towards the USSR and for suspending support for Israel. Nevertheless, Ford still managed to have himself declared the Republican presidential candidate. However, in the actual presidential elections he lost to the Democrat Jimmy Carter (b. 1924).
Within the Republican Party, infiltrated by neocons, the think tank American Enterprise Institute emerged in the 1970s. This included influential neocon intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer (1923-2019), Irving Kristol, Michael Novak (1933-2017), Benjamin Wattenberg and James Wilson (1931-2012). They influenced the traditional conservative supporters of the Republicans, causing the growing Protestant fundamentalism to align with neoconservatism. As a result, Reagan – who was a Protestant himself – became President in 1981 and immediately appointed a series of neocons (such as John Bolton, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, William Kristol, Lewis Libby and Elliot Abrams). Bush Sr. became Vice President.
Instead of détente, there was now an aggressive foreign and fiercely anti-USSR policy, which was strongly based on the Kirkpatrick doctrine that the former Marxist and former Democrat (!) Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) described in her controversial 1979 article ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ in Commentary. This meant that although most governments in the world are and always have been autocracies, it would be possible to democratize them in the long term. This Kirkpatrick doctrine was primarily intended to justify support for pro-American dictatorships in the Third World.
Many immigrants from the Eastern Bloc became active in the neocon movement. They were also fierce opponents of détente with the USSR and regarded progressism as superior. Moreover, Podhoretz criticized the proponents of détente very sharply in the early 1980s.
The American population was now talked into an even greater Soviet threat: the USSR would control an international terrorist network and therefore be behind terrorist attacks throughout the world. Once again, the CIA dismissed this as nonsense, but still spread the propaganda of the “Soviet international terror network”. Consequently, the US had to respond. The neocons now became democratic revolutionaries: the US would support international forces to change the world. For example, in the 1980s the Afghan Mujaheddin were heavily supported in their struggle against the USSR and the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista Ortega government. In addition, the US started an arms race with the USSR, which led to large budget deficits and rising government debt: Reagan’s defense policy increased defense spending by 40% in 1981-1985 and tripled the budget deficit.
The rise of the neocons led to years of Kulturkampf in the US. After all, they rejected the guilt about the defeat in Vietnam, as well as Nixon’s foreign policy. In addition, there was resistance against active international action by the US and against the identification of the USSR with ‘Evil’. Reagan’s foreign policy was criticized as aggressive, imperialistic and bellicose. Moreover, in 1986 the US was convicted by the International Court of Justice of war crimes against Nicaragua. Many Central Americans also condemned Reagan’s support for the Contras, calling him an over-the-top fanatic who overlooked massacres, torture and other atrocities. Nicaraguan President Ortega once said he hoped God would forgive Reagan for his “dirty war against Nicaragua”.
Neocons also influenced foreign policy in the subsequent Bush Sr. administration. For example, Dan Quayle (b. 1947) was then Vice President and Cheney Secretary of Defense with Wolfowitz as an employee. In 1991-1992, Wolfowitz opposed Bush’s decision not to depose the Iraqi regime after the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In a 1992 report to the government, he and Lewis Libby (b. 1950) proposed ‘preemptive’ strikes to « prevent the production of weapons of mass destruction » – already then! – and higher defense spending. However, the US suffered a huge budget deficit due to Reagan’s arms race.
During the Clinton administration, the neocons were expelled to the think tanks, where about twenty neocons met regularly, partly to discuss the Near East. A Richard Perle-led neocon study group that included Doug Feith and David Wurmser prepared the disputed report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’ in 1996. This advised the newly appointed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt an aggressive policy towards his neighbors: ending peace negotiations with the Palestinians, deposing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and ‘preemptive’ strikes against the Lebanese Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. According to this report, Israel had to strive for a thorough destabilization of the Near East in order to solve its strategic problems, but little Israel could not handle such enormous undertakings.
In 1998, the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century wrote a letter to President Clinton calling for the invasion of Iraq. This letter was signed by a series of prominent neocons: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Robert Zoellick. This once again shows that these ideas certainly did not come out of nowhere when the Bush Jr. administration took office.
The neocons’ obsession with the Near East can be traced back to their Zionism. After all, many neocons are of Jewish descent and feel connected to Israel and the Likud party. The neocons further believe that in the unipolar post-Cold War world the US had to use its military power to avoid being threatened and to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism. The concept of ‘regime change’ also comes from them.
Although Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. already adopted neocon ideas, neoconservatism only really triumphed under President George Bush Jr. (b. 1946), whose foreign and military policy was completely dominated by neocons. During the summer of 1998, Bush Jr., at the intercession of Bush Sr., met with his former adviser on Soviet and Eastern European Affairs Condoleeza Rice at the Bush family estate in Maine. This led to Rice advising Bush Jr. on foreign policy during his election campaign. Wolfowitz was also hired the same year. In early 1999, a full-fledged foreign policy advisory group was formed, drawn largely from the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. The Rice-led group also included Richard Armitage (b. 1945, former ambassador and former secret agent), Robert Blackwill (b. 1939, former adviser for European and Soviet Affairs), Stephen Hadley (b. 1947, former adviser for defense), Lewis Libby (former employee of the Departments of State and Defense), Richard Perle (adviser at the Department of Defense), George Schultz (1920-2021, former adviser to President Eisenhower, former Secretary of Labor, Treasury and State, professor and businessman), Paul Wolfowitz (former employee of the Departments of State and Defense), Dov Zakheim (b. 1948, former advisor at the Department of Defense), Robert Zoellick (b. 1953, former adviser and former Deputy Secretary of State). In this way, Bush Jr. wanted to compensate for his lack of foreign experience. This foreign policy advisory group was given the name ‘Vulcans’ during the 2000 election campaign.
After Bush’s election victory, almost all Vulcans were given important positions in his government: Condoleeza Rice (National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State), Richard Armitage (Deputy Secretary of State), Robert Blackwill (ambassador and later Security Advisor), Stephen Hadley (Security Advisor), Lewis Libby (Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney), Richard Perle (again advisor at the Department of Defense), Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense and later President of the World Bank), Dov Zakheim (again advisor at the Department of Defense), Robert Zoellick (Presidential Representative for Trade Policy and later Deputy Secretary of State).
Other neocons also received high positions: Cheney became Vice President, while Rumsfeld again became Secretary of Defense, John Bolton (b. 1948) became Deputy Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams became a member of the National Security Council and Doug Feith (b. 1953) became presidential adviser for defense. As a result, American foreign and military policy was fully aligned with Israel’s geopolitical interests. Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld were the driving forces behind the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
With the ‘Clean Break’ report from 1996 (cf. supra), the blueprint of his foreign policy had already been drawn up five years before the Bush Jr. government took office. Moreover, the three main authors of this report – Perle, Feith and Wurmser – were active within this government as advisors. A restructuring of the Near East now seemed a lot more realistic. The neocons presented it as if the interests of Israel and the US coincided. The centerpiece of the report was the removal of Saddam Hussein as the first step in transforming the Israel-hostile Near East into a more pro-Israel region.
Several political analysts, including paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan, pointed out the strong similarities between the ‘Clean Break’ report and 21st century facts: in 2000, Israeli leader Sharon blew up the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians with his provocative visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in 2003 the US occupied Iraq, in 2006 Israel waged a (failed) war against Hezbollah and in 2011 Syria was seriously threatened by Western sanctions and US-backed terrorist groups. And then there is the ongoing threat of war against Iran.
From 2002 onwards, President Bush Jr. claimed that an ‘Axis of Evil’ consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed a danger to the US. This had to be combated by ‘preemptive’ wars. The Straussians planned to attack Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran in a first phase (reform of the Near East), in a second phase (reform of the Levant and North Africa) Libya, Syria and Lebanon, and in a third phase (reform of East Africa) Somalia and Sudan. Podhoretz also listed this series of countries to be attacked in Commentary. The principle of a simultaneous attack on Libya and Syria was already conceived in the week after the events of September 11, 2001. It was first publicly stated by Deputy Secretary of State John Bolton on May 6, 2002 in his speech ‘Beyond the Axis of Evil’. Former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark confirmed this once again on March 2, 2007 in a television interview, in which he also showed the list of countries that would be successively attacked by the US in the following years. The simultaneous attack on Libya and Syria effectively took place in 2011: Libya was destroyed by a US-led NATO attack and Syria was drawn into a years-long, devastating war by various US-backed terrorist groups.
Bush Jr. failed to achieve a UN Security Council resolution for an invasion of Iraq due to fierce opposition from several countries. This even led to a diplomatic crisis at the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. The neocons saw the Iraq war as a testing ground: the US would try to install a parliamentary democracy in Iraq to reduce Arab hostility towards Israel. Podhoretz strongly advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Commentary and praised President Bush Jr., who also withdrew from the ABM arms limitation treaty with Russia. However, due to the American fiasco in Iraq, neoconservatism lost its influence, making it much less dominant during the second Bush Jr. administration.
Bush Jr.’s foreign policy was severely criticized internationally, especially by France, Uganda, Spain and Venezuela. Anti-Americanism increased sharply during his presidency. Former President Jimmy Carter also criticized Bush for years for an unnecessary war « based on lies and misinterpretations. » Nevertheless, in 2007, Podhoretz pushed for the US to attack Iran, even though he was well aware that this would exponentially increase anti-Americanism around the world.
Some neocon think tanks
Neocons want to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism internationally, including in unstable regions and also through war. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Heritage Foundation (HF) and the now defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) are/were the main think tanks. An interesting detail is that the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century and the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard were in the same building.
1. American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
The AEI, founded in 1938, strives for downsizing government services, a free market, liberal democracy and an active foreign policy. This think tank was founded by executives from large companies (among other Chemical Bank, Chrysler and Paine Webber) and is funded by companies, foundations and private individuals. To date, the AEI Board of Directors consists of executives from multinational and financial companies, among other AllianceBernstein, American Express Company, Carlyle Group, Crow Holdings and Motorola.
Until the 1970s, the AEI had little influence in American politics. However, in 1972 the AEI started a research department and in 1977 the accession of former president Gerald Ford brought several top officials from his administration to the AEI. Ford also gave the AEI international influence. Several prominent neocons, such as Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Michael Novak, Benjamin Wattenberg and James Wilson, also started working for the AEI. At the same time, AEI’s financial resources and workforce increased exponentially.
In the 1980s, several AEI employees joined the Reagan administration, where they advocated a hardline anti-USSR position. In the period 1988-2000, the AEI was strengthened with, among others, John Bolton (then a top official under Reagan), Lynne Cheney (b. 1941, wife of Dick Cheney), Newt Gingrich (b. 1943, Speaker of the House of Representatives in 1995-1999), Frederick Kagan (b. 1970, son of PNAC co-founder Donald Kagan), Joshua Muravchik (b. 1947, then a researcher at the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy) and Richard Perle (advisor at the Department of Defense in 1987-2004), while financial resources continued to increase.
The AEI became especially important since the Bush Jr. administration took office. After all, several AEI employees were part of or worked behind the scenes for this government. Other government employees also maintained good contacts with the AEI. This think tank always paid a lot of attention to the Near East and was therefore closely involved in the preparation of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent civil war. In addition, the AEI also targeted Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Venezuela and liberation movements such as Hezbollah. At the same time, calls were made for closer ties with countries with similar interests, such as Australia, Colombia, Georgia, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, Mexico and Poland.
2. Heritage Foundation (HF)
The HF was founded in 1973 by Joseph Coors (1917-2003), Edwin Feulner (b.1941) and Paul Weyrich (1942-2008) out of dissatisfaction with Nixon’s policies. They explicitly wanted to steer government policy in a different direction. The entrepreneur Coors was a backer of the Californian governor and later American president Reagan. He also provided the new think tank’s first annual budget with $250,000. Feulner and Weyrich were advisors to Republican lawmakers. In 1977, the influential Feulner became head of the HF. By issuing policy advice – then a completely new tactic in the world of Washington’s think tanks – he aroused national interest in the HF.
The HF was an important driving force behind the rise of Neoconservatism and focuses mainly on economic liberalism. ‘Heritage’ refers to Jewish-Protestant ideas and liberalism. This think tank promotes the free market, reduction of government services, individualism and a strong defense. The HF is funded by companies, foundations and private individuals.
The Reagan administration was strongly influenced by ‘Mandate for Leadership’, a 1981 HF book about government downsizing. Under the influence of the HF, the US also actively supported anti-USSR resistance groups around the world and Eastern Bloc dissidents. The concept of ‘Evil Empire’ with which the USSR was described in this period also comes from the HF.
The HF also strongly supported the foreign policy of President Bush Jr. and his invasion of Iraq. Various HF employees also held positions in his government, such as Paul Bremer (b. 1941) who became governor of occupied Iraq. At the end of 2001, the HF established the Homeland Security Task Force, which outlined the contours of the new Department of Homeland Security.
When Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in June 2015, HF initially turned against him. Already in July 2015, the chairman of Heritage Action – HF’s political advocacy organization – said on Fox News: “Donald Trump is a clown. He must drop out of the race.” And in August 2015, Stephen Moore – economist at HF – criticized Trump’s policy positions. In December 2015, HF Vice Chairman Kim Holmes opposed Trump’s candidacy and criticized his supporters as « an alienated class » who were agitating against liberal-progressive policymakers and the institutions they controlled.
When Trump won the Republican nomination and the presidential elections approached, the HF changed strategy. It began e-mailing potential candidates for government appointments in case Trump became president. The HF wanted to use questionnaires to assess their interest in an appointment in a possible Trump administration. The e-mail also requested that the completed questionnaires and a CV be returned to the HF by October 26, 2016 – approximately one week before the presidential elections.
After Trump’s effective victory in the presidential elections, the HF gained influence over the composition of his government, as well as over his policies. CNN reported that “no other institution in Washington has such enormous influence over the composition of the government”. According to CNN, this disproportionate influence of the HF was because the other neoconservative think tanks continued to oppose Trump during the presidential elections, while the HF eventually started supporting Trump and thus was able to infiltrate his movement.
At least 66 HF employees and former employees were appointed in the Trump administration (2017-2021). In addition, hundreds more people selected by the HF were appointed to top positions at government agencies. In January 2018, the HF stated that the Trump administration had already incorporated 64% of the 334 policy measures proposed by the HF.
In April 2023, HF Chairman Kevin Roberts founded Project 2025 to provide the 2024 Republican presidential candidate with an ideological framework and workforce for his potential administration. Project 2025 includes a collection of policy proposals – 922 pages – to reform the government apparatus. It states that the executive branch is under the direct control of the president under Article II of the US Constitution. It proposes a thorough purge of the government apparatus in which tens of thousands of government employees would be fired for being politically useless. Many legal experts said this would undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of Church and State and civil rights. Project 2025 used bellicose rhetoric and apocalyptic language in describing this ‘battle plan’.
Although the HF has been considered highly controversial and strongly criticized in the American political community for many years, its impact on public policy has historically made it one of the most influential American think tanks, both in the US and internationally.
3. Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
The PNAC was founded in 1997 by the New Citizenship Project and aimed at US international hegemony. It wanted to achieve this through military strength, diplomacy and moral principles. The 90-page PNAC report ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ from September 2000 noted the absence of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor” and also mentioned four military objectives: protecting the US, convincingly winning several wars, acting as an international police officer and reforming the military. The PNAC lobbied American and European politicians very intensively for these objectives.
The 25 founders of the PNAC included John Bolton (top official under Reagan and Bush Sr.), Jeb Bush (Governor of Florida and brother of President Bush Jr.), Dick Cheney (White House Chief of Staff under Ford and Secretary of Defense under Bush Sr.), Elliot Asher Cohen (b. 1956, professor of political science), Midge Decter (journalist, writer and wife of Podhoretz), Steve Forbes (head of Forbes Magazine), Aaron Friedberg (professor of international relations), Francis Fukuyama (professor of philosophy, political science and sociology), Donald Kagan (professor of history), Zalmay Khalilzad (employee of the Department of State under Reagan and of the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.), William Kristol (editor-in-chief of the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard), John Lehman (businessman and Secretary for the Navy under Reagan), Lewis Libby (employee of the Department of State under Reagan and the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.), Norman Podhoretz (editor-in-chief of the neocon magazine Commentary), Dan Quayle (Vice President under Bush Sr.), Donald Rumsfeld (White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense under Ford, presidential advisor under Reagan and Department of Defense advisor under Bush Sr.) and Paul Wolfowitz (employee of the Department of Defense under Ford and advisor to the Department of State under Reagan and the Department of Defense under Bush Sr.). Later, Richard Perle (adviser to the Department of Defense in 1987-2004) and George Weigel (well-known progressive Catholic publicist and political commentator) also joined.
The PNAC is a highly controversial organization because it advocated US dominance of the world, space and the Internet in the 21st century. There was a counter-reaction with the BRussells Tribunal and From the Wilderness. The citizens’ initiative BRussells Tribunal was founded in 2004 by, among others, cultural philosopher Lieven De Cauter (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) and opposes US foreign policy. It therefore rejected the PNAC and the American occupation of Iraq. Brussells Tribunal also denounced the assassination campaign against Iraqi academics and the destruction of Iraq’s cultural identity by the US military. From the Wilderness stated that the PNAC wanted to conquer the world and that the attacks of September 11, 2011 were deliberately allowed by American government members with a view to conquering Afghanistan and Iraq and restricting freedoms in the US.
In his well-known book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’ from 1992, professor and PNAC co-founder Francis Fukuyama posited that after the demise of the USSR, history had ended and from then on capitalism and parliamentary democracies would triumph. For the Bush Jr. administration, his book was a justification for the invasion of Iraq. It also was one of the main sources of inspiration for the PNAC. However, Fukuyama indicted those in power in the White House in his 2006 book ‘America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy’. He stated that the US lost international credibility and authority due to the Iraq war. Worldwide, and especially in the Near East, it strongly fueled anti-Americanism. Moreover, the US had no stabilization plan for occupied Iraq. Fukuyama also stated that the Bush Jr. administration’s rhetoric about the “international war on terror” and the “Islamic threat” had been greatly exaggerated. Yet Fukuyama remains a convinced neocon who pursues global democratization led by the US. He did, however, accuse the Bush Jr. administration of its unilateral approach and its ‘preemptive’ warfare to spread liberal democracy. The regime changes previously applied by the US were therefore neglected. Fukuyama therefore wants to continue neocon foreign policy in a thoughtful manner that does not arouse fear or anti-Americanism among other countries.
From 2006 onwards, the activity of the PNAC disappeared. In December 2006, former director Gary Schmitt (b. 1952) said on the BBC News television channel that the PNAC was never intended to “last forever” and had “already done its job” because “our view has been adopted”. Thus, the mission of the PNAC was accomplished and therefore, in 2009, it was replaced by the new think tank Foreign Policy Initiative. The main goals of this FPI were to counter the isolationist current in the Republican Party during the Obama administration (2009-2017) and to keep the party focused on the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The FPI was founded by Robert Kagan, William Kristol and Daniel Senor (b. 1971). Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire born in 1944 to a Jewish family in New Jersey, was the most important donor to the FPI.
The FPI advocated increased US military involvement in the war in Afghanistan, a new war against Iran and the cancellation by the Department of Defense of a $572 million contract with Russian arms exporter Rosoboronexport. Regarding the war in Syria, the FPI proposed that the US impose a partial no-fly zone, arm Islamist groups and deploy Turkey-based Patriot anti-aircraft missiles against the Syrian air force in the northwestern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. It also opposed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
The FPI, which was intended to be temporary from the start, was stopped at the end of the Obama administration in 2017 because its mission – to have the Republican Party defend the wars in the Near East during this term of office (cf. supra) – had been accomplished. The incoming Trump administration also caused division among the founders of the FPI about what should be achieved during this reign. This was due to the fact that although donor Singer took an anti-Trump position during the 2016 presidential elections, he immediately changed course after Trump’s victory: together with 25 other billionaires, he donated $ 1 million for his inauguration as President. Kagan and Kristol, on the other hand, remained virulently anti-Trump and even left the Republican Party. The FPI was therefore no longer useful to Singer and he decided to reduce his donation to the FPI to a very low amount, after which the FPI came to the conclusion that there was no point in continuing.
A number of top neocons
Elliot Abrams was born in 1948 to a Jewish family in New York and is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz. Abrams worked as a foreign policy advisor to Republican presidents Reagan and Bush Jr. During the Reagan administration, he became discredited for concealing the atrocities of pro-American regimes in Central America and the Contras in Nicaragua. Abrams was ultimately convicted of withholding information and making false statements to the US Parliament. During the Bush Jr. administration, he served as presidential advisor on the Near East and North Africa and on the global spread of democracy. According to the British newspaper The Observer, Abrams was also involved in the failed coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Jeb Bush, born in 1953, comes from the wealthy Protestant entrepreneurial Bush family, which also produced Presidents Bush Sr. (his father) and Bush Jr. (his brother). Jeb Bush co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. He served as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007 with the support of both Cuban and non-Cuban Latinos, as well as Florida’s Jewish community.
Protestant Zionist Dick Cheney was born in Nebraska in 1941. After studies at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, he began working for presidential aide Donald Rumsfeld in 1969. In the following years, Cheney held various other positions in the White House before becoming an adviser to President Ford in 1974. In 1975, he became White House Chief of Staff.
As Secretary of Defense in the Bush Sr. administration, Cheney led the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, establishing military bases in Saudi Arabia. After 1993, he became involved in the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. From 1995 to 2000, Cheney headed energy giant Halliburton.
Under Bush Jr., Cheney was Vice President from 2000 to 2008 and was also able to appoint Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. However, he failed to put Wolfowitz in charge of the CIA (cf. infra). To justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Cheney contributed significantly to the development of the ‘War on Terror’ concept and to the false accusations of weapons of mass destruction. Cheney was the most powerful and influential Vice President in American history. He and Rumsfeld also developed a torture program for prisoners of war. Cheney also greatly influenced taxation and the state budget. After leaving office, he strongly criticized the Obama administration’s security policies.
Doug Feith was born in Philadelphia in 1953, the son of Zionist Jewish businessman Dalck Feith, who emigrated from Poland to the US in 1942. After studies at Harvard University and Georgetown University, Feith became a professor of security policy at the latter university. He also wrote very pro-Israeli contributions for Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Feith strongly opposed the détente with the USSR, the ABM arms limitation treaty and the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. He intensively defends American support for Israel too.
In 1996, Feith was among the authors of the controversial report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, which formulated aggressive policy recommendations for then Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In 2001, Feith became a defense advisor to President Bush Jr. In 2004, he was questioned by the FBI on suspicion of passing on classified information to the Zionist lobby group AIPAC. Feith is currently an employee of the think tank Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which advocates a close alliance between the US and Israel.
Steve Forbes, born in New Jersey in 1947, was appointed in 1985 by President Reagan to head the CIA radio stations Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, which broadcasted American propaganda in various languages in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. Reagan increased the budget of these anti-USSR radio stations and made them more critical of the USSR and its satellite states.
The pro-Israel Forbes co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997 and serves on the Heritage Foundation’s Board of Directors. He advocates free trade, reduction of government services, strict crime legislation, legalization of drugs, gay marriage and reduction of social security. Today, he is head of his own publication, Forbes Magazine.
The Jewish professor of international politics Aaron Friedberg (b. 1956) was co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in 1997. In 2003-2005, he served as security adviser and director of policy planning to Vice President Cheney.
Nathan Glazer (1923-2019) was born as the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. In the early 1940s, he studied at the City College of New York, which was then a Trotskyist anti-USSR hotbed. Glazer met several Jewish Trotskyists from Eastern Europe, such as Daniel Bell (1919-2011), Irving Howe (1920-1993) and Irving Kristol.
Glazer served as a top official in the Kennedy (1961-1963) and Johnson (1963-1969) administrations. He became professor of sociology at the University of California in 1964 and at Harvard University in 1969. Together with his fellow sociology professor Daniel Bell – one of the most important post-war Jewish intellectuals in the US – and Irving Kristol, Glazer founded the influential magazine The Public Interest in 1965. Glazer was also a strong promoter of multiculturalism.
Donald Kagan (1932-2021) came from a Jewish family from Lithuania, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The Trotskyist Kagan became a neocon in the 1970s and was in 1997 one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century. He was first a professor of history at Cornell University and then at Yale University.
The Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad (b. 1951) studied at the American University of Beyrut and the University of Chicago. At the latter university, he met the prominent nuclear strategist, presidential advisor and professor Albert Wohlstetter, who introduced him to government circles. Khalilzad is married to the Jewish feminist and political analyst Cheryl Benard (b. 1953). He founded the international business consultancy Khalilzad Associates in Washington, which works for construction and energy companies.
In 1979-1989, Khalilzad was a professor of political science at Columbia University. In 1984, he worked for Wolfowitz at the State Department and in 1985-1989 he was a government advisor on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq war. During that period, Khalilzad worked closely with the strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had engineered American support for the Afghan Mujaheddin. In 1990-1992, he worked at the Department of Defense.
Khalilzad co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. In 2001, he was an advisor to President Bush Jr. and a member of the National Security Council. Khalilzad served as ambassador to Afghanistan in 2002-2005, to Iraq in 2005-2007 and to the UN in 2007-2009.
Oklahoma-born Protestant Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926-2006) studied political science at Columbia University and at the French Institut des Sciences Politiques. Influenced by her Marxist grandfather, Kirkpatrick was then a member of the Young People’s Socialist League (the youth wing of the Trotskyist Socialist Party of America). At Columbia University, she was strongly influenced by the Jewish Marxist professor of political science Franz Neumann (1900-1954), who had previously been active in the SPD in Germany.
From 1967, Kirkpatrick taught at Georgetown University. In the 1970s, she joined the Democratic Party, where she worked closely with Senator Henry Jackson. However, Kirkpatrick became disenchanted with the Democrats because of the détente towards the USSR. Her Kirkpatrick Doctrine, which justified American support for Third World dictatorships and claimed that this could lead to democracy in the long term, became known through her article ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ in Commentary in 1979. Republican President Reagan therefore made her member of the National Security Council in 1981 and ambassador to the UN. As ambassador to the UN, the strongly pro-Israel Kirkpatrick opposed any attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1985, she resigned and returned to professor at Georgetown University. Kirkpatrick was also affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.
William Kristol, born in New York in 1952, is the son of the Jewish neocon godfather Irving Kristol and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. Kristol initially taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. In 1981-1989, he was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State William Bennet in the Reagan administration and in 1989-1993 Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the Bush Sr. administration. His nickname ‘Dan Quayle’s brain’ acquired in this last position indicates that Kristol exerted a considerable influence.
Kristol is active in various neocon organizations. In 1995, he founded the neocon magazine The Weekly Standard. In 1997 he co-founded the Project for the New American Century and, of course, defended the invasion of Iraq. Kristol has been advocating for an American attack on Iran for years and, in 2010, he criticized President Obama’s « lukewarm approach to Iran ». He also actively supported the American war against Libya in 2011.
From 2003 to 2013, Kristol was a political commentator on Fox News. In 2014, he created the podcast ‘Conversations with Bill Kristol’, in which he has in-depth conversations with academics and public figures about foreign policy, economics, history and politics, among other things.
Until 2016, Kristol was editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard, which closed in 2018. The demise was due to a conflict that arose between the anti-Trump editorial team and the pro-Trump owner Clarity Media Group. The Washington Examiner, Clarity Media Group’s other neocon magazine, on the other hand, took the position desired by its owner, while some of The Weekly Standard’s subscribers also defected to The Washington Examiner. Consequently, Clarity Media Group decided to discontinue The Weekly Standard.
Kristol then became editor-in-chief of the news and opinion website The Bulwark, launched in 2018, which focuses on neocons within the Republican Party. Kristol is also a board member of the Emergency Committee for Israel’s Leadership, a neocon lobby group that opposes Israel-critical parliamentarians.
Businessman John Lehman, born in Philadelphia in 1942, served as Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration (1981-1987). Since then he has been active in various neocon think tanks, such as the Project for the New American Century, the Heritage Foundation, the Committee on the Present Danger, …
Lewis Libby (b. 1950) comes from the wealthy Jewish banking family Leibowitz from Connecticut. His father changed the original family name Leibowitz to Libby. After studying political science at Yale University and law at Columbia University, the friendly Yale professor Paul Wolfowitz then launched his law career. Libby worked for Wolfowitz at the State Department in 1981-1985 and at the Department of Defense in 1989-1993.
In 1997, Libby co-founded the Project for the New American Century. During Bush Jr.’s election campaign, he belonged to the neocon advisory group Vulcans. In 2001, Libby became an advisor to President Bush Jr., as well as Chief of Staff and advisor to Vice President Cheney. He was considered the most fervent representative of the Israel lobby in the Bush Jr. administration. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw even said of Libby’s involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations: “It’s a toss-up whether he is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day”.
In 2005, Libby resigned after being cited for perjury, making false statements and obstructing the judicial investigation in the Plame case. In 2007, Libby was convicted and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison, 400 hours of community service and a $250,000 fine. However, the prison sentence was waived by President Bush Jr.
Liberal Catholic Michael Novak (1933-2017) came from a family of Slovak descent and studied philosophy and English at Stonehill College, theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and history and philosophy of religion at Harvard University. His progressive writings on the Second Vatican Council, which he attended as a journalist, were severely criticized by conservative Catholics. It did win him the sympathy of the Protestant theologian Robert McAfee, who helped him get a professorship at Stanford University in 1965.
In 1969-1972, Novak was dean at the State University of New York. In 1973-1976, he worked for the Rockefeller Foundation and then became a professor of religious studies at Syracuse University. Since 1978, he has also been affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute. His publications dealt with capitalism, democratization and rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics. In the 1970s, Novak also served on the Board of Directors of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a neocon faction within the Democratic Party that sought to influence party policy.
During the Reagan administration, Novak served on behalf of the US on the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1981-1982 and he led the US delegation to the Conference on Security & Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) in 1986. In 1987-1988, Novak was a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Joshua Muravchik was born in New York in 1947, the son of a prominent Jewish socialist. From 1968 to 1973, he was national chairman of the Trotskyist Young People’s Socialist League. Muravchik belonged to the group of Marxist intellectuals who transformed themselves into neocons in the 1960s and 1970s.
Muravchik studied at the City College of New York and Georgetown University. In 1975-1979, he was an aide to three Democratic lawmakers, including Henry Jackson. In 1977-1979, he was also head of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority faction within the Democratic Party, founded by Jackson. In the mid-1980s, he was a researcher at the pro-Israel think tank Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Since 1992, he has been an assistant professor at the Institute of World Politics, a private university in Washington specializing in security issues, intelligence services and foreign policy. At the same time, he worked as a researcher for the American Enterprise Institute in 1987-2008 and at John Hopkins University in 2009-2014.
Much of Muravchik’s work focuses on defending Israel and advocating an American ‘preemptive’ strike on Iran. On Iran, he stated that « our only option is war. »
Richard Perle was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1941, but grew up in California. After studying political science at the University of Southern California, the London School of Economics and Princeton University, Perle worked for Democratic Senator Henry Jackson in 1969-1980, for whom he drafted the Jackson-Vanik Amendment that made détente with the USSR dependent on the possibility of emigration for Soviet Jews. Perle also led resistance to the Carter administration’s disarmament talks with the USSR. In 1987, he criticized the Reagan administration’s INF disarmament treaty with the USSR, as well as the Obama administration’s renewal of the START arms limitation treaty with Russia in 2010.
Perle was regularly accused of actually working for Israel and even spying for it. As early as 1970, the FBI caught him discussing classified information with someone from the Israeli embassy. In 1983, it was revealed that he received significant sums of money to serve the interests of an Israeli arms manufacturer.
Perle served as a consultant to the Department of Defense from 1987 to 2004 and is a member of several neocon think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. He also fervently defended the American invasion of Iraq and, in 1996, he was among the authors of the controversial report ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, which contained policy advice for then Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The controversial historian Richard Pipes (1923-2018) was the son of a Jewish businessman from Poland. The Pipes family immigrated to the US in 1940. After studying at Muskingum College, Cornell University and Harvard University, Pipes taught Russian history at Harvard University from 1950 to 1996. He also wrote for Commentary. During the 1970s, Pipes criticized the détente with the USSR and served as an advisor to Senator Henry Jackson. In 1976, Pipes led the controversial study group Team B, which was tasked with reassessing the USSR’s geopolitical capabilities and objectives. In 1981-1982, he served on the National Security Council. Pipes was also a member of the neocon think tank Committee on the Present Danger for many years.
Pipes’ scientific work, however, is controversial in the academic world. Critics argue that his historical work merely aims to label the USSR as the ‘Evil Empire’. In addition, he wrote in full about Lenin’s alleged “unspoken assumptions”, while completely ignoring what Lenin actually said. Pipes is further accused of the selective use of documents: what fitted his objective was described in detail and what did not fit his objective was simply overlooked. The Russian writer and intellectual Alexandr Solzhenitsyn also dismissed Pipe’s work as “the Polish version of Russian history”.
Daniel Senor (b. 1971) comes from a Jewish family from Utica (New York State) and was an advisor to the Department of Defense, a presidential advisor and a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2009, he co-founded the neocon think tank Foreign Policy Initiative with Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Senor is currently an opinion writer at The New York Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the former neocon magazine The Weekly Standard.
Dan Quayle was born in Indiana in 1947 as the grandson of the wealthy and influential newspaper magnate Eugene Pulliam. After studying political science at DePauw University and law at Indiana University, Quayle served in the American Parliament from 1976. In 1989-1993 he was Vice President under Bush Sr. The investment banker Quayle co-founded the Project for the New American Century in 1997. He also serves in several boards of directors of major companies, is a director at Aozora Bank in Japan and is chairman of the Global Investments department of the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management.
Illinois-born Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021) was a naval pilot and flight instructor in the US Navy in 1954-1957. He then worked for two parliamentarians (until 1960) and for an investment bank (until 1962), after which he became a Republican Member of Parliament. Rumsfeld served as Nixon’s presidential advisor from 1969 to 1972. In 1973, he was ambassador to NATO in Brussels.
Rumsfeld became White House Chief of Staff under President Ford in 1974. At his instigation, Ford thoroughly reshuffled his government in November 1975 (later dubbed the « Halloween Massacre »). Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense. He halted the gradual decline in the defense budget and strengthened US nuclear and conventional armaments, undermining Secretary of State Kissinger’s SALT negotiations with the USSR. Rumsfeld used Team B’s controversial 1976 report to build cruise missiles and a large number of Navy ships.
After the Democratic Carter administration took office in 1977, Rumsfeld briefly taught at Princeton University and Northwestern University in Chicago before moving on to top business positions. Under Reagan, he served as presidential advisor on arms control and nuclear weapons in 1982-1986 and as presidential envoy on the Near East and the International Law of the Sea in 1982-1984. In the Bush Sr. administration, Rumsfeld served as an advisor to the Department of Defense from 1990 to 1993. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century.
Under President Bush Jr., Rumsfeld served again as Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006, dominating the planning of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is believed responsible both in the US and internationally for the detention of prisoners of war without the protection of the Geneva Conventions, as well as for the subsequent torture and abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. In 2009, Rumsfeld was even named a war criminal by the UN Human Rights Council.
Benjamin Wattenberg (1933-2015) came from a Jewish family from New York. In 1966-1968, he worked as an assistant and speechwriter for President Johnson. In 1970, together with political scientist, election specialist and presidential advisor Richard Scammon (1915-2001), he drew up the strategy that gave the Democrats victory in the 1970 parliamentary elections and that made Republican Richard Nixon president again in 1972. In the 1970s, Wattenberg served as an adviser to Democratic Senator Henry Jackson. He also worked as a top official for Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush Sr., and was affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.
Professor of political science James Wilson (1931-2012) taught at Harvard University in 1961-1987, at the University of California in 1987-1997, at Pepperdine University in 1998-2009 and then at Boston College. He also held various positions in the White House and was an advisor to several American presidents. Wilson was also affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute.
Leading neocon Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father was statistics professor and AIPAC member Jacob Wolfowitz (1910-1981), who actively supported Soviet Jews and Israel. Wolfowitz first studied mathematics at Cornell University in the 1960s, where he met professor Allan Bloom and was also a member of the secret student group Quil and Dragger. While studying political science at the University of Chicago, he met professors Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, as well as his fellow students James Wilson and Richard Perle.
In 1970-1972, Wolfowitz taught political science at Yale University, where Lewis Libby was one of his students. He then served as an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. In 1976, Wolfowitz belonged to the controversial anti-USSR study group Team B, which was tasked with ‘reexamining’ the CIA’s analyzes of the USSR. In 1977-1980, Wolfowitz worked for the Department of Defense. In 1980, he became professor of international relations at John Hopkins University.
In the Reagan administration, Wolfowitz became an employee of the State Department in 1981 at the suggestion of John Lehman. He strongly rejected Reagan’s rapprochement with China, which brought him into conflict with Secretary of State Alexander Haig (1924-2010). In 1982, the New York Times predicted that Wolfowitz would be replaced at the State Department. Instead, the opposite happened in 1983: Haig – who was also at odds with the half-Jewish and virulently anti-USSR Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1917-2006) – was replaced by the neocon George Schultz and Wolfowitz was promoted to Schultz’s assistant for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad became Wolfowitz’s employees. In 1986-1989, Wolfowitz was ambassador to Indonesia.
During the Bush Sr. administration, Wolfowitz served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Secretary Cheney, with Libby again as his assistant. As a result, they were closely involved in the war against Iraq in 1990-1991. Wolfowitz strongly regretted that the US limited itself in this war to the reconquest of Kuwait and did not advance to Baghdad. He and Libby would continue to lobby for a ‘preemptive’ and unilateral strike against Iraq throughout the 1990s.
In 1994-2001, Wolfowitz was again a professor at John Hopkins University, where he promoted his neocon vision. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for a New American Century.
Wolfowitz divorced his wife Clare Selgin in 1999 and started a relationship with the British-Libyan World Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza, which would get him into trouble in 2000 and 2007 (cf. infra). During Bush Jr.’s 2000 election campaign, Wolfowitz belonged to Bush’s foreign policy advisory group Vulcans. For the subsequent Bush Jr. administration, Wolfowitz was nominated to head the CIA, but this failed because his ex-wife wrote a letter to Bush Jr. calling his relationship with a foreign national a security risk to the US. He then became Deputy Secretary of Defense again under Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001-2005.
Wolfowitz took advantage of the events of September 11, 2001 to immediately revive his rhetoric about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘preemptive’ attacks against ‘terrorists’. From then on, he and Rumsfeld advocated an attack on Iraq at every opportunity. Because the CIA did not follow through on their claims about ‘Iraqi weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘Iraqi support of terrorism’, they created the Office of Special Plans study group within the Department of Defense to ‘find’ evidence. This OSP quickly overtook the existing intelligence services and, based on often dubious information, became President Bush Jr.’s main source of intelligence on Iraq. This led to accusations that the Bush Jr. administration was creating intelligence to get Parliament to approve an invasion of Iraq.
In 2005, Wolfowitz was successfully nominated by President Bush Jr. as chairman of the World Bank. However, Wolfowitz made himself unpopular through a series of controversial appointments of neocons and pushing through neocon policies in the World Bank. His affair with World Bank employee Shaha Ali Riza also led to controversy as internal rules of the World Bank prohibit relationships between executives and staff. Moreover, Wolfowitz had given Riza a promotion in 2005 with a disproportionate salary increase. Ultimately, Wolfowitz was forced to resign as chairman of the World Bank in 2007. He then became a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.
Conclusion
Neoconservatism arose from the virulent enmity of Jewish Trotskyists who fled from Eastern Europe for both the Stalinist USSR and Russia. They came mainly from the territory of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania). These Jewish immigrants settled mainly in the New York boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1920s and 1930s. In the US they formed a very close community through friendships, professional relationships and marriages. Some also Anglicized their surnames, for example ‘Horenstein’ became Howe, ‘Leibowitz’ became ‘Libby’, ‘Piepes’ became ‘Pipes’ and ‘Rosenthal’ became ‘Decter’. Their children studied en masse at the City College of New York and formed the Trotskyist group New York Intellectuals.
To combat Stalin from his Mexican exile, the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky formed a rival communist movement with the Fourth International. Out of disgust for Stalinism, a number of important American Jewish radical left intellectuals gathered around Trotsky in the 1930s, such as the young communists Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Albert Wohlstetter. In the 1960s, they exchanged their Trotskyism for Neoconservatism.
The main ideologues of neoconservatism are therefore Marxists who reoriented themselves. The names have changed, but the objectives remained the same. After all, the liberal theses of neoconservatism equally support universalism, materialism and the feasibility utopia, because both Marxism and liberalism rely on the same philosophical foundations. So, the communists were more likely to be in New York than in Moscow during the Cold War. Neoconservatism also made religion useful for the State again.
Neoconservatism was turned into an actual movement by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. This neoconservative movement can best be described as an extended family based largely on the informal social networks these two godfathers created.
Neocons are democratic imperialists who want to change society and the world. Their messianism and their urge to spread parliamentary democracy and capitalism worldwide are also at odds with real conservatism. After all, real conservatives have no universal pretensions and rather defend non-interventionism and isolationism. The neocons also want to convert their active support for Israel, if necessary, into military interventions in countries that they consider dangerous to their and Israel’s interests.
The neocon ideal of multiculturalism implies mass immigration. However, cultures have different values, norms and legislative frameworks. To make social interaction possible, a common denominator is needed. Consequently, the final goal is not multiculturalism, but monoculturalism: the neocons therefore want to create a uniform, unitary human being.
There are a striking number of intellectuals among the neocons. They are therefore not a marginal group, but, on the contrary, they form the intellectual framework of American foreign policy. However, President Richard Nixon had a very different approach to the two superpowers China and the USSR than all other post-war American presidents, with the exception of President John Kennedy (1917-1963), who also strove to end the Cold War. To the anger of the neocons, he established relations with China and significantly improved relations with the USSR. In the US itself, Nixon decentralized the government, expanded social security and combated inflation, unemployment and crime. He also abolished the gold standard, while his wage and price policy was the largest peacetime government intervention in American history.
The neocons hated the détente of the 1970s: they feared losing their favorite enemy – the USSR. After Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal, they therefore claimed that the CIA produced far too rosy analyzes of the USSR. The government reshuffle of 1975, which they instigated, put George Bush Sr. in charge of the CIA, after which he set up the a priori anti-USSR Team B to make an ‘alternative assessment’ of the CIA data. Team B’s controversial and completely erroneous report incorrectly stated that the CIA was wrong.
Although Secretary of State Henry Kissinger dismissed Team B’s report, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld still promoted it as a ‘reliable’ study. Rumsfeld thus undermined the arms limitation negotiations of the following years (i.e. during the Carter administration in 1977-1981). In addition, Team B’s report also provided the basis for the unnecessary explosion of the defense budget during the Reagan administration.
During a trip to Great Britain in 1978, former President Nixon said about the Watergate scandal: “Some people say I didn’t handle it properly and they’re right. I screwed it up. Mea culpa. But let’s get on to my achievements. You’ll be here in the year 2000 and we’ll see how I’m regarded then”…
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 certainly did not defeat totalitarianism. On the contrary, it has taken on a different – conservative-looking – guise and has Europe and North America in its grip. The advocacy of top neocons such as Norman Podhoretz and William Kristol in favor of the Republican Party, the rejection of President Obama’s policies and the infiltration of the power apparatus around President Trump clearly shows that the neocons want to re-enter the US government. After all, their end goal remains an attack on Iran and American world dominance. The fight for our freedom will therefore continue for a long time!
References
ABRAMS (N.), Norman Podhoretz and Commentary Magazine: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, New York, Continuum, 2010, pp. VII + 367.
BALINT (B.), Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed The Jewish Left Into The Neoconservative Right, New York, Public Affairs, 2010, pp. 304.
BRZEZINSKI (Z.), The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York, Basic Books, 1997, pp. 240.
DRURY (S.), Leo Strauss and the American Right, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 256.
EASTON (N.), Gang of Five, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002, pp. 464.
GREEN (K.), Jew and Philosopher – The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. XIV + 278.
HOEVELER (D.), Watch on the right: conservative intellectuals in the Reagan era, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. XIII + 333.
JEFFERS (T.), Norman Podhoretz: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 418.
MEARSHEIMER (J.) en WALT (S.), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, pp. 496.
SAUNDERS (F.), The Cultural Cold War, New York, New Press, 1999, pp. 419.
WALD (A.), The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 456.
WEDEL (J.), Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market, New York, Basic Books, 2009, pp. 283.
We can either wallow in this bread and transvestite circuses crap, or we can seize the day and the initiative.
To get our heads around the farce that is the 2024 Paris Olympics, let’s start with another farce, Fawlty Towers which, according to the BBC, is “the British sitcom by which all other British sitcoms must be judged, Fawlty Towers withstands multiple viewings, is eminently quotable (‘don’t mention the war’) and stands up to this day as a jewel in the BBC’s comedy crown”. Leaving aside, if we can, that the ‘don’t mention the war’ episode was banned in Germany because of its anti-German sentiment and that some of our South Asian friends took umbrage at some other clearly racist parts of the series, the secret to Fawlty Towers is its tight writing around the tried and tested farcical tropes the series fed off.
Contrast that tight script with the opening farce of the French Olympics, where a flotilla sallies down the Seine in the pouring rain and Barbara Butch, an obese Eddie the Elephant Jewish lesbian, gets to pose as Jesus in a mockery of Da Vinci’s depiction of Jesus’ Last Supper.
In thereby succeeding to mock athletes, aesthetics, religion and morality all at the same time, Butch and the army of parasitical transvestites, who mocked all that is good and holy alongside her, showed the Olympics are now nothing more than an over-hyped farce gift wrapped in the tawdriest of rainbow coloured freaks. Not only do these transexual parasites lack talent, but they lack taste as well. What, for example, was the deal with showing a supposedly headless Marie Antionette gallivanting about the stage, given that France’s last Queen Consort, who was only 18 when she was martyred, was a very minor figure in French history, when compared to Joan of Arc, Coco Chanel, Marie Curie or the inestimable Edith Piaf herself?
Although the Russophobes of the International Olympic Council lied that this farce was not a mockery of the Last Supper but was a re-enactment of the ancient Roman Bacchanalia, where the depraved would get as drunk as skunks, such behaviour has no place in the Olympics, where the supposed mission is encapsulated in the Faster, Higher, Stronger motto of the modern Olympics rather than the eat as many Big Macs as you can stuff into your fat mouth that Ms Butch symbolises.
Faux mission statements aside, the real mission of the modern Olympics is to enrich the main sponsors and to convey NATO’s message of top down control to the world. Forget the terror campaign the IOC, working on NATO’s orders, have waged against athletes from Russia and Belarus, and read this recent SCF article about the Olympian security measures France and its NATO allies implemented to guard this grotesque Eddie the Elephant figure, as she mocked the world’s Christians, as well as what remains of France’s aesthetics.
Given that France is already a powder keg, this is not to say that some security was not necessary to protect Eddie the Elephant and Israel’s athletes, whose gung ho views on Israel’s wars have been widely disseminated.
After Hadid was hired to help Adidas sell their 1972 Munich Olympics retro line, the usual suspects objected because Hadid is half Palestinian and Palestinians are haram. But Hadid was hired, not because she was an athlete and less still because she is Palestinian, but because she is a babe, and babes are hired to help move merchandise to fellow babes, who will win few Olympic medals in their 1972 retro shoes.
Because the Munich Olympics is famous for American Zionist Mark Spitz displaying his mastery in the pool, and for the great Belarusian patriot Olga Korbut, POTUS Nixon’s favourite who wooed generations of young girls to gymnastics, the Olympics, Munich 1972 included, is as much the property of American Republicans, American Zionists, Belarusian patriots and Palestinian models, as it is of entitled Israelis, whose relative under-performance at the Olympics can be explained by their adherence to the Zionist ideology, which has always stressed political supremacy over frivolous games devoid of political purpose.
Although most of us couldn’t care less who Addidas gets to flog their 1972 retro crap, Israel must care because, in their vista, Palestinians must be invisible in the Olympics and on the catwalk, as well as in every other walk of life. And, because under performing Israel can dictate to Adidas what babes they can hire and what babes they cannot hire, that is another reason why the French Olympics are, at best, a French farce.
Although farces first appeared around the 5th century BC, when the Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote his comedies with larger-than-life characters, ridiculous situations, and oodles of vulgar humour to keep the Athenians giggling, it was left to the Roman playwright Plautus to master the convention of mistaken identity. No less a figure that William Shakespeare adapted Plautus’ Brothers Manaechmi into his Comedy of Errors, which is the best-known Renaissance era farce.
The term “farce” derives from a French word meaning “to stuff” and was used to describe comic bits inserted (“stuffed”) in between scenes in religious plays. Although farce gradually emerged as its own theatre form in 15th century France and in 16th century England, it is important to say that this Parisian attempt at art is not even farce. It is garbage.
But so too, by contagion, is the entire Olympics. Let’s revert to the granddaddy of them all, Hitler’s 1936 Olympics where, today’s IOC jokers tell us, Jesse Owens stole the show not only by winning four gold medals but by sticking it to Herr Hitler who, like Franco, Mussolini and Eddie the Elephant, had no interest in sport, except in so far as he could hijack it for his own madcap ideas.
Although Owens was a star performer in Berlin, it is important to note that it was racist America and not Hitler’s Germany, who treated him with the utmost disrespect by forcing him to race against horses just to make ends meet.
At least Owens could make a living, something the IOC denied to Tommie Smith and John Carlos for protesting against America’s systematic racism when they won medals at the 1968 Mexican Olympics; as Australian Peter Norman, who won the silver medal and who supported their protest, was also persecuted by his fascistic government, the IOC should save us all their syrupy lectures.
The Berlin Olympics are more remembered for Olympia, the homo erotic documentary on them, which the cinematic genius Leni Riefenstahl produced almost as a follow up to her 1935 Nazi classic Triumph of the Will. Though overt anti-semitism is absent from both of those classics, they each reek of the homo erotic sensuality of writhing, oiled-up and sweating male hunks that lurked in the subconscious of Hitler and his camp followers, just as this French farce reeks of the worst excesses of Weimar and de Sade.
Just as those earlier gay documentaries Hitler commissioned set out to sublimely tell us something, so also does Eddie the Elephant’s French farce. Drag queens mocking The Last Supper, a decapitated head singing, a bearded ‘woman’ dancing provocatively, a naked Smurf with a king sized erection and ‘gagging’ children in their midst all send out a message that is, in its own way, as portentous as Olympia and Triumph of the Will were before the Wehrmacht goose stepped into Austria and Sudetenland.
Although there might be no Panzer tanks crossing into Poland as of yet, other, equally dark forces are on the move. Though we could here wax on about this hedonist glorification of Sodom and Gomorrah, just check out this video on drug doping czar Vincent Conte to see how easy it is to systematically cheat at these farcical Olympics.
But it is not just the Americans. Here is an account of the Irish being caught drugging their prize winning horses. When one considers the money to be made from stud fees, no wonder the Olympics is little more than a farcical Dick Francis crime thriller. Though I wrote back in early July about the risk of these Olympics descending into a French farce, it is much more mediocre than that. Whereas French farce had rhyme and reason, this shoddy effort has none. It is a tacky effort to boost the bottom line of tacky companies like Adidas and the tackier agenda of Macron and his husband, and all others who swear by NATO’s cultural wars agenda. And, though I wrote another piece in late June pining for Olympic Games gone by, those games are long gone and it is time to pull the plug and let go of the entire circus.
Boy, was I on the money when I wrote that “I would much prefer to watch this Russian children’s troupe show their mastery of Irish dancing” than to watch these French Olympians, who do not even meet the basic standards of the simplest French farce! We can either wallow in this bread and transvestite circuses crap, or we can seize the day and the initiative. We should reject not only Adidas and their 1972 (or is it 1936?) retroism but we should also reject all the LGBT tinsel they marinate it in.
Meanwhile, if you must follow these uneven contests, here is the medal tally table so far. Commiserations to Fiji for missing out on gold in the rugby 7s, and to Mongolian judoka Baasankhuu Bavuudorj for losing out to Japan’s superlative Tsunoda Natsumi. And, Baasankhuu, if you are reading this, you take a much better photo than does Eddie the Elephant, who could only ever upstage you in farce. Though you are a credit to Mongolia, to judo and to the world, heaven help you when you get back to Ulaanbaatar and you have to explain to the good folk there what a fat and fit for nothing farce France is.
Contrary to what happens in fascism, under which working class organizations are crushed, in Egypt’s nationalist regime mass movements were not suppressed, but to a large extent protected, Eduardo Vasco writes.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, in Arab countries (colonized by the Allied powers, England and France) some governments and movements, mostly for pragmatic reasons, supported the Nazi-fascist Axis forces.
Among them were nationalist groups who, when not remaining neutral, sought to ally with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to defeat the British and French occupying forces. On the other hand, most communist parties – influenced by Stalinist politics – campaigned for enlistment in the colonial army.
Hence, the idea that Arab nationalism would have fascist inspirations. And, nationalism, in general, would also have fascist characteristics, as the case of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil during the Estado Novo or Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina.
Another alleged fascist characteristic of Arab nationalism, particularly that of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, would be the corporatist political and social regime. The Republic, proclaimed in 1953, abolished political parties, unions were placed under government control and workers lost their class independence, with the persecution of opposition unionists. The repression of communists was strong in the first years of the revolution, with the closure of the communist party. After Egypt’s rapprochement with the USSR, the regime allowed the creation of a new communist party, which later ended up fully integrated with Nasserism.
Furthermore, the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical religious mass movement, was violently persecuted from 1954 onwards. Linguistic and national minorities were discriminated against by the revolutionary system.
The Egyptian constitution created in 1956 subordinated the National Assembly to the president, Nasser. The Charter also established a single party, the National Union. In turn, the 1961 National Charter set up a corporatist National Congress of Popular Forces, in which its members were not chosen through free debate, and popular organizations were controlled by the government.
However, despite corporatism and control of popular organizations, the Nasserist revolution allowed and encouraged the occupation of various positions by mass movements, and the Arab Socialist Union – later name of the National Union, with the adoption of the 1961 Charter – proposed the allocation of half of the vacancies in political organizations and in the Chamber of Deputies to workers and peasants. A series of reforms also improved the living and working conditions of the popular classes and allowed some participation in company management, something that had never been considered by the dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler.
Contrary to what happens in fascism, under which working class organizations are crushed, in Egypt’s nationalist regime mass movements were not suppressed, but to a large extent protected. It can be said that Nasserism was more akin to conciliation with the workers’ movement (which had been strong since the Revolution), seeking to prevent its independence, rather than combating it, as traditionally occurs in a fascist regime.
Another common feature of fascist regimes (such as those in Germany, Italy or the Apartheid’s South Africa and Israel) is extreme racism. Despite the contradictions of his regime, Nasser’s pan-Arabism did not mean the submission of other peoples by “Great Egypt”, as German and Italian expansionists preached about their respective states – and as Israel does.
“Our resistance to racial discrimination expresses a clear understanding of the true meaning of the problem. Racial discrimination is a form of foreign exploitation of people’s wealth and work. The slavery regime, based on racial discrimination, was the first form of imperialist exploitation. Racial discrimination is violence against universal conscience,” Nasser wrote.
Nasser, like the Nazi-fascist regimes (and like most capitalist regimes, as a whole, depending on the forces relation between the workers and the capitalists), sought to neutralize the contradictions of the class struggle: “The inevitable and natural class struggles cannot be ignored or denied, but their solutions must be achieved peacefully, within the framework of national union, through the dissolution of distinction between classes.” However, the difference between the policy adopted by his regime and that adopted by Nazi fascism is visible: while this was used by the German and Italian imperialist bourgeoisie to crush the working class and place it under its total control, greatly benefiting capital, the Nasserist regime was supported by the working masses, in a conciliation with the bourgeoisie and, to a certain extent, with imperialism, making concessions to the workers to guarantee the dominance of the capitalists and trying to curb their more radical positions, not crushing them with the force of the State as was made in Germany and Italy.
Still, the nationalist discourse of fascism, which is pure rhetoric, is not true nationalism. The German and Italian fascist regimes were controlled by the imperialist bourgeoisie of their countries to exploit their people and other peoples, guaranteeing the enjoyment of national wealth by capitalists and not by the people. Nationalism is not the same thing in a backward country and in a developed country. In a developed country, nationalism is the defense of that country’s imperialism, while in a backward country it is the fight against imperialism, although, to a certain extent, it invariably makes some type of conciliation with imperialism, by representing the interests of the fragile national bourgeoisie of a given country. When the nationalist regime, due to the interests of the bourgeoisie, moves closer to imperialism, it moves to the right; when, on the other hand, the interests of the bourgeoisie are the same as national interests and the regime clashes with imperialism, it is displaced to the left of the political spectrum.
In addition to being fraudulent, due to the lack of respect for Olympism, the Paris Games are also a manifestation of sports corruption – and that is not insignificant.
Peace to its soul, which had little pure and virginal in fact. Call it what you will, but not the Olympic Games. They can be the games of pettiness, the games of segregation, the games of war, the games of cowardice, the games of addiction, the games of exclusion, the games of humiliation, the games of denial, the games of ostentation, the games of anything that has nothing to do with the nobility of the ideal preached by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and much less with the spirit of the rituals of peace and culture of ancient Greece; but not the Olympic Games.
The so-called “Olympic spirit” has long been a fraud, especially since it was assaulted as a promotional vehicle for the brands of the most powerful globalizing transnationals. Despite this, the space of athletes, coaches, and other players in the competitive dynamics, judges and referees, volunteers and spectators seemed immune to organizational and sponsoring corruption.
They cultivated emotion, spectacle, attraction, friendship in rivalry and human overcoming that sport, or rather, sports also provide. There are, of course, doping, cheating, games of influence, the glaring differences in means of preparation and competition, but the fantastic feats, many of them becoming legendary over the 128 years of the so-called “Olympic Games of the Modern Era”, feed memories, fill stadiums, pavilions and swimming pools.
It is also true that several previous episodes denying the so-called “Olympic spirit” and the refunding principles of the Olympics proclaimed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin and his peers in the last decade of the nineteenth century have deeply stained this gigantic sporting gathering; a “celebration of humanity, a platform for peace and understanding”, as defined by those who wanted to recreate in modernity the ideals of conviviality, fraternity, traditions, rituals and good examples of the Games of almost 3000 years ago.
From Hitler to Ukrainian Nazi-Banderism
The celebration of the 1936 Games in Nazi Germany, through which the International Olympic Committee of the time contributed to the promotion of Hitler, his segregationism and his imperial aesthetics; the boycott mounted by the United States of Reagan and his subjects in Western Europe against the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980, as the beginning of the neoliberalization of the Olympic Movement; the contemporaneity of several editions of the Games with the Western wars unleashed by the West in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, without considering the declaration of any “Olympic truce”; the treacherous and cowardly use of the world’s attention on the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games on August 8, 2008 for the then Americanized regime of Georgia to invade the Russian-speaking territory of South Ossetia, causing a massacre of more than 2,000 people in just the first few hours; the lack of a declaration of truce in the war in Ukraine now that athletes from almost all over the world are gathering in Paris – all these events are just a few examples of how the dominant political powers internationally trample on the autonomy of the International Olympic Committee and Coubertin’s expressed intention that the Games be “a celebration of universal language that transcends borders and cultures”. The arbitrary “rules-based international order” has thrown its hands behind the Games, demolishes principles, undermines the best intentions and stifled the Olympic spirit.
In the year 424 BC, in the luminous fifth century of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and other legendary philosophers of classical Greece, for the first time the “sacred truce” proper to the Olympic Games was not declared due to fears of an invasion by Sparta, which in the end did not happen. The Olympic “holy truce” was conceived not only for mystical reasons – the Games were dedicated to Zeus – but also so that athletes, judges and organizers could travel to Athens and return safely to their places of origin.
424 BC was only one exception; the rule was the declaration of a truce every four years. Nowadays, the Olympic mentors blatantly ignore the tradition of the truce; the exception of the past has become the rule in modernity.
The Olympic Games of Classical Antiquity, which began in the year 776 BC, were banned and extinguished 1169 years later, in 393 of our era, by the Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I, for being a “pagan” event. The tendency of “Christian and Western civilization” to adulterate and exterminate all events created in a spirit and principles that in practice contradict its way of looking at the world, its unrestrained domination, colonial and imperial vocation, goes back a long way.
Pettiness, segregation, exclusion
And we arrived at the Paris 2024 Games. We hear the conversations, the comments, the litanies, the routine clichés, words piled upon words in which everything is deliberately omitted and everything is done to erase the original sin of this edition: the exclusion of athletes from the Russian Federation and Belarus, with the exception of those who publicly declare themselves against their presidents and other freely elected bodies of power. Sportsmen and women who, even so, will not be able to compete with the equipment of their national team, listen to the anthem and see the flag of their country raised in case they win the events in which they participate.
There are many and varied aberrations of this decision, which humiliates and mortally wounds the “homage to the human spirit and its capacity for greatness” that Baron Pierre de Coubertin had defined as one of the golden rules of the Olympic Games idealized by him.
On a somewhat marginal level, but with a significant charge of perversity, is the fact that Russian and Belarusian athletes participating in the Games do not need enemies if they are their friends in the “civilization” on this side. Now, if Western governments, thanks to their control of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), demand that athletes confront Putin, Lukashenko and the power of Moscow and Minsk, which they consider dictatorial, they know that Russian and Belarusian citizens present at competitions may be the target of alleged reprisals when they return to their countries. Either the politicians of NATO and the European Union sacrifice the athletes of the proscribed countries to their war propaganda objectives or else they do not even believe what they say about the anti-democratic nature of the punished political systems.
Regarding this behaviour without a minimum of coherence, let us suppose, by reduction to absurdity, that the IOC assumed the independence that is in its rules and, assuming that the political game thus rigged was unavoidable, imposed sanctions on athletes from countries such as the United States, France, Germany and Ukraine for also being responsible for the Ukrainian war, namely by sabotaging the possibilities of peace negotiations, fuelling the conflict with weapons and violating commitments made, such as the Minsk Agreements. In this context, only athletes who publicly declared themselves against the expansionist and warmongering U.S. regime, against the autocracy of NATO and the European Union, based on anti-democratic bodies – because they are not elected – such as the European Commission and the European Council, would be admitted to the Games. The dimension of the audacity and the corresponding scandal would be enough to exonerate the IOC or even cancel the Games.
“Our” leaders no longer have the notion of ridicule and deliberately oppose the Olympic Charter itself, which is also completely disrespected by the IOC.
The text of the Charter is clear, precise, and drafted in such a way that there is no room for doubt as to the so-called “Olympic spirit”. In chapter 2 of the document, dedicated to “the mission and role of the IOC”, paragraph 5 stipulates that this body must act “to strengthen the International Olympic Movement (IOC), maintain and promote its political neutrality and preserve the autonomy of sport”; and Article 6 requires the IOC to act against “any form of discrimination against the Olympic Movement”.
Pierre de Coubertin summed up these concepts in a simple phrase, grossly violated by the agents who shaped the Paris Olympic Games: “We (in the IOC) are not technical advisors to policy, we are only the curators of the Olympic ideal”.
It would not be necessary to go any further to conclude that the Paris Olympic Games are a fraud.
The punishment imposed on Russian and Belarusian athletes by the collective West and the IOC as its transmission belt also reveals the pettiness of the arrogant, but insecure, sportingly fearful, who have neither the capacity nor the courage to assert their reasons and resort to constant tricks, in this case the most basic and denounceable, to impose force through arbitrariness. What is it in the interest of these persistent falsifiers, in politics and, by extension, in sport, that one day, in 1925, Baron Pierre de Coubertin said that “the Games are global, all competitors can participate, without debate”; or that “the Olympic Games are for the world and all nations should be admitted to them”?
In addition to being fraudulent, due to the lack of respect for Olympism, the Paris Games are also a manifestation of sports corruption – and that is not insignificant.
The responsibility, of course, does not lie with the athletes, who generally wish to compete regardless of their opponents, even those who are potentially superior to them. Therefore, they like sports and practice it at the highest level.
Sports corruption lies in the fact that some of the best athletes and teams in the world are removed, without any competitive or other infraction, which devalues victories, removes prestige and value from medals, harms the spectacle and influences the quality of some of the individual and collective competitions. Russia is usually one of the most medalled countries, with the ability to place in the first place of the unofficial ranking by number of awards. Between 1994 and 2020, Russian athletes won 426 medals, 149 of which were gold, numbers that are only surpassed by competitors from the United States. A significant number of Olympic trophies will thus be distributed this year to sportsmen and women who, under normal circumstances, would not win them. This means addiction, competitive corruption.
In sports jargon applied to victories with wounded or debatable merit, uncomfortable matters are usually settled by saying that for history what counts is who won and not who was absent, was removed or complained, for example, about an unmarked penalty, even if legitimate. Is this so? Or will the winner, at least, remember that he competed without the main rivals and the reality could have been different?
Is genocide an Olympic sport?
Russian and Belarusian athletes are subject to severe restrictions and anti-Olympic norms because their governments are involved in a military aggression that targets the ruling power in Ukraine; what happens after the Ukrainian regime nazified by the 2014 coup promoted by the United States and the European Union – which overthrew a democratically elected president – carried out a military aggression of more than eight years against the Russian-majority populations of the eastern and south-eastern territories of the country and ordered the civic segregation of all citizens who are not considered “pure” Ukrainians.
Everything is possible: the Olympic participation of athletes from Morocco, despite the fact that their government practices a policy of occupation, violence and permanent violations of human rights against the sovereign people of the Western Sahara; and, above all, that athletes from Israel, the country responsible for 75 years for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, whose methods are illustrated by the extermination action underway in Gaza – a strong indication of the attempt to achieve a “final solution” of the problem, can be present in Paris.
The behaviour of the Zionist State has been defined as “genocide” by the International Court of Justice, without disagreement from the International Criminal Court, but the seriousness of the meaning of these positions does not bother Israel, the European Union and the United States, a country that has now opened the doors of Congress to a speech extolling Zionist criminality, and even threatening Washington delivered by the eternal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Paris, during the rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games and a football match, whistles were heard against the Zionist presence, but that is the side for which the IOC and the collective West sleep best – and without problems of conscience. An equivalent situation was recorded in the last Eurovision Song Contest.
The participation of Israeli athletes, some of them – unlike the Russians – in the service of the genocidal Israel Defense Forces, is the fatal blow to what was left of Olympism, a clear demonstration of the hypocrisy of Western leaders and the IOC, an avowed lack of respect for athletes who compete loyally in the Games, an insult to the intelligence of public opinion in all countries of the world.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin defined the Olympic Games, he recalls, as “the celebration of humanity, a platform for peace and understanding”.
Respect for the words and ideas of the founder of the Olympic Games of the Modern Era is not something that motivates the current Olympic leaders and their guardians. Coherence and words are carried away by the wind; and Olympism was liquidated by the spirit of war and genocide of those who claim to defend it.
A test of the police state
Paris is in a state of siege. Citizens need special cards to access certain areas of the city, the legendary secular Parisian culture has been cancelled through the closure of museums and other spaces of humanist enjoyment, the number of armed police officers on the streets is much higher than the number of athletes participating in the Games, on this floor it will be higher than the residents of the city, many of them fleeing to places where the image of a war environment is only shown on TV; In short, fear is afraid of fear.
The neoliberal and authoritarian powers of the European Union do not miss an opportunity to test the assembly of mechanisms inherent to a police state. Urban violence served as an argument for the Swedish government to define areas and neighbourhoods of restricted access in Stockholm, ghettos intended mainly for immigrant communities, authentic virtually walled cities; the Olympic Games now serve for the so-called “security means” to exercise the use of intensive surveillance, inch by inch, to consider each citizen a potential criminal, perhaps an agent of Putin, to scrutinize the movements of people, to bar spaces due to simple suspicions, or even intuitions. Police arbitrariness became the rule, the control of freedoms became law.
Whatever happens in the French capital, don’t call it the Olympic Games. It is rather an international sports mega-festival rigged from a competitive and ethical point of view long before it started; a gigantic event with hints of a popular fair and a commercial event financed and sponsored by the profitable ostentation of transnational power and without control of the old and nouveau riche for whom the whole world is theirs. Pierre de Coubertin, much more than a century ago, saw sport as “a school of virtues”. Look at what this has led to, by the work of the not virtuous “Western civilization.”
Does anyone in Israel in a position of power truly understand what the expressions “human rights” and “rule of law” really mean? Developments over the past ten months in Gaza would suggest “No,” that Israel’s government, its legal system, and its constitution exist solely to empower the state to do whatever it wishes, which in the current version includes the genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people and the theft of their land and property to be incorporated into a Greater Israel that plausibly will include the already annexed Syrian Golan Heights as well as all of historic Palestine running from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
But even given the fundamental dishonesty over the Jewish state and what it represents, there is something truly frightening about some recent developments which suggest that the long running United States government pander to Israel and its presumed interests have poisoned the chalice, making Americans absolutely complicit in the Israeli war crimes and other assorted crimes against humanity. And the level of control over Washington by Israel virtually guarantees that it will only get worse.
I am, of course, referring to the recent state visit of the world’s leading war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, where he was worshipped by both Congress and the White House alike together with considerable fawning from the heavily Jewish-influenced media. Netanyahu, to put it succinctly, spoke for an hour in his address to the US Congress, emitting lie after lie. And the Congress critters responded with an outburst of love combined with total subservience, delivering 53 standing ovations, close to one per minute. The most exuberant ovation occurred when Netanyahu denounced the 50,000 or so demonstrators who surrounded the Capitol building to express their disgust at the Jewish mass murderer’s presence. Bibi called the protesters, some of whom were pepper-sprayed and arrested by a heavy police presence including 360 imported New York City Policemen fresh from their beatings of protesters at Columbia University, “useful idiots paid for by Iran.” That particular lie produced paroxysms of celebration among the leaping and waving Congressmen. Given that performance, does anyone need any confirmation that free speech seems to be off the agenda when it comes to Israel and the clowns who nominally represent the American people in Washington, who once upon time swore an oath to support the Constitution, but now consider speaking ill of the Jewish state to be a “hate crime.” Indeed, bills have been introduced in Congress to that effect.
It is interesting to go through his speech to determine what Netanyahu was trying to accomplish and what lies he thought he could get away with. Actually, he did nothing but lie while blaming most of his neighbors, particularly Iran, for the turmoil that Israel has caused in the Middle East for the past 75 years. And predictably, much of the coverage of the Netanyahu appearance in the mainstream media on the following day was toothless and even laudatory. It generally reflected what was hailed as Bibi’s “fiery speech” that “did not give an inch” which vowed to continue fighting until “total victory” is achieved. “It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.” Ironically, Netanyahu was right about the clash of civilization though he was wrong about who represented which side: Israel backed completely by the US is pure evil. And the Netanyahu visit should be seen as a call to arms. The Jewish state is struggling economically and militarily in its war of extermination in Gaza and it knows it is not in any shape to take on Hezbollah and Iran, so it has decided to let the United States do the heavy lifting. Reading between the lines on what occurred in meetings with the two presidential aspirants as well as with a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden, it is clear that Netanyahu expects American boys and girls to do his fighting for him as well as covering the costs.
American complicity in the genocide in Gaza as well as in two possible wars in Lebanon and Iran due to the Israeli embrace is a tragedy for all parties involved, but the damage being done to future generations of American citizens cannot be remedied. Our country has done many bad things, but this whole hearted alliance with unmitigated evil is a betrayal of the birthright of every American.
So how low can you go, but the tale of Netanyahu visits Congress was soon joined by another truly awful story that demonstrates that there is no bottom to the evil in the minds and hearts of Israel’s leaders as well as among a large majority of the Israeli people, which Mondoweiss calls a “genocide from above and below.” Few Americans are aware of the atrocities that occur by virtue of what the Israelis choose to call their legal system. There is a body of law that is applicable to protect Jews and their interests, but where those interests collide with those of the native Palestinians, be they Christian or Muslim, only one outcome is acceptable even when something comparable to a legal procedure takes place. This has enabled the horrible settlement movement with something like 800,000 Jewish settlers having stolen Palestinian land and other property and has meant that Palestinians who were driven from their homes by force when Israel was founded have no ability to return to their own homes. At its most extreme, severely injuring or even killing a Palestinian, which occurs regularly, often at the hands of the heavily armed settlers, is a crime that is almost never prosecuted. To cite only one recent example, Palestinian-America journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was wearing a clearly visible journalist vest was shot and killed by an Israeli army sniper in May 2022. In spite of repeated demands that her murder be fully investigated, no one was ever identified or punished for the killing. Israel has also killed 20 other journalists in the past several years with no one being punished. Often Israeli soldiers stand by and watch crimes involving Jewish perpetrators, never interceding to help the Arab victim. If the Palestinians resist they are immediately labeled as “terrorists” and have no rights of self-defense against the occupiers, be they army or nominally civilians.
A story that appeared a week after the Netanyahu visit illustrates perfectly the two-tiered justice in Israel and the occupied territories. There are currently nearly 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, the number having increased sharply since the war against Gaza began. Many are Gazans, but an increasing number are from the West Bank, which is also being targeted for “settlement” and eventual annexation. Many are held under what is referred to as “preventive detention,” in which they are not charged with a crime, do not appear in any court, and are held at the will of the Israeli army or police. In jail, they are frequently tortured and starved. If they are ever released, they show the signs of the torture and Israeli human rights groups, among other witnesses, have provided substantial evidence of what is taking place behind closed doors. Israel soldiers are, for their part, not shy about what they do to Palestinians, posting photos and videos online of dead Palestinians, torture in detention areas, and the gleeful destruction of Gazan homes and property.
The story is as follows: There are a number of detention centers run by the Israeli Army that are generally used to torture Palestinians prisoners, not in the old fashioned “intelligence” role to obtain “information,” but just for the entertainment of the soldiers who are the jailers. Sde Teiman, one such center in the southern Negev desert region, recently made the news due to a particularly outrageous bit of torture engaged in by ten of the soldiers in charge of the prisoners. Conditions in Sde Taiman reportedly included “Electric shocks, amputations due to bad conditions, severe beatings, surgery without anesthesia, playing loud music until inmates’ ears bleed, deaths due to bad sanitary conditions, systematic torture and sexual abuse.”
A Palestinian from Gaza was reported serially sodomized and otherwise raped at the detention site using various implements even including a cell phone which was inserted in the man’s rectum and turned on for the amusement of the Israeli soldiers. The victim also had a wooden stick inserted in similar fashion and it was believed that he was only one of a number of other prisoners who were treated in that same way, which appears to be systemic throughout the detention facilities run by the army. The activity was only exposed when the victim began bleeding heavily both internally and externally and was unable to walk with a “serious wound in his rectum area”, which may have occurred if or when the phone was removed from inside of him and he was taken to a hospital where what had taken place was revealed. The army, somewhat uncharacteristically, sent some military policemen to the center to detain the soldiers for questioning but the suspects fought back using pepper spray and building barriers. When nine of the men (one went AWOL) were eventually taken to a nearby military base at Beit Lid, the MPs were confronted almost immediately by an angry crowd of civilians, consisting largely of settlers and ultra-nationalists, led by several Likud party parliamentarians who demanded that the soldiers be set free. Something like a melee ensued. The unruly crowd chanted its support for torture and even called for the summary execution of the Palestinian prisoners, which has been an “option” supported by some in the Netanyahu government.
The rioters were so aggressive that they actually broke into the Israeli military base and there was considerable support for their actions even coming from Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who said he was “shocked” to see IDF troops being detained for questioning “in a way that is suitable for arresting dangerous criminals.” He added that the soldiers were doing a “holy job” at the base. Far-right Knesset member Simcha Rotman called the troops “heroes,” instead attacking Israel’s “justice and enforcement systems” for detaining them.
Typically, later in the day, when asked by the press about the rape accusations, US State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel refused to say whether gang raping and torturing Palestinian prisoners would be considered a war crime, even if conclusively demonstrated by witnesses and other evidence. Patel explained “So the reports of abuse are deeply concerning, and we have been clear and consistent with Israel and the IDF that they need to treat all detainees humanely and with dignity in accordance with humanitarian law.” He said that the US was going to let “due process” play out in this case. The western media that is bothering to cover the story are refusing to even use the word “rape” or “sodomy” in reference to the allegations, with the BBC describing how the soldiers are accused of “severely mistreating a Palestinian prisoner” while the New York Times prefers to call it “suspected abuse”.
At the heart of the discussion is the fact that Israel’s Knesset uniquely has a proposed law that was first formulated in 2022 by current National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir which would give automatic immunity to any soldier or policeman who kills or seriously injures any Palestinian. The immunity does not apply if the victim is a Jew. The law still has not passed through parliament, but many conservatives in Israel believe it is the guideline used by the military and judiciary de facto. Ben-Gvir has, in fact, denounced the questioning of the nine men as “shameful,” adding that the Israeli security establishment should support the soldiers and “learn from the prison service: light treatment of terrorists is over. Soldiers need to have our full support.” Ben-Gvir is also supporting a separate bill that would authorize the systematic execution of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. It also does not apply to Jews. In a video statement, Ben-Gvir said that Israel should be able to kill Palestinian prisoners with a “shot to the head.” He also recommended that Palestinian prisoners be given just enough food to keep them alive until the execution law comes into effect.
So, when it comes to human rights Israel lives in another parallel universe where there is one set of rules for Jews and other for gentiles. Perhaps the easily visible brutality evident in the recent Netanyahu speech to Congress coupled with stories like that out of Sde Teiman and the daily horror inflicted on the Gazans will bring about some kind of wake-up for the American public, which has been heavily propagandized and continues to believe in the myth of the perpetual victimhood of the Jewish people. The real victims of the “miracle of Israel” are those in western countries that the Jewish diaspora continues to buy and manipulate as well as the poor Palestinians who are forced to live under a form of daily repression and humiliation that is almost unimaginable.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
“It was not the highly visible acts of Congress but the seemingly mundane and often nontransparent actions of regulatory agencies that empowered the great transformation of the U.S. commercial banks from traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending businesses into providers of wholesale financial risk management and intermediation services.” — Professor Saule Omarova, “The Quiet Metamorphosis, How Derivatives Changed the Business of Banking” University of Miami Law Review, 2009
While the world is absorbed in the U.S. election drama, the derivatives time bomb continues to tick menacingly backstage. No one knows the actual size of the derivatives market, since a major portion of it is traded over-the-counter, hidden in off-balance-sheet special purpose vehicles. However, when Warren Buffet famously labeled derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction” in 2002, its “notional value” was estimated at $56 trillion. Twenty years later, the Bank for International Settlements estimated that value at $610 trillion. And financial commentators have put it as high as $2.3 quadrillion or even $3.7 quadrillion, far exceeding global GDP, which was about $100 trillion in 2022. A quadrillion is 1,000 trillion.
Most of this casino is run through the same banks that hold our deposits for safekeeping. Derivatives are sold as “insurance” against risk, but they actually add a heavy layer of risk because the market is so interconnected that any failure can have a domino effect. Most of the banks involved are also designated “too big to fail,” which means we the people will be bailing them out if they do fail.
Derivatives are considered so risky that the Bankruptcy Act of 2005 and the Uniform Commercial Code grant them (along with repo trades) “super-priority” in bankruptcy. That means if a bank goes bankrupt, derivative and repo claims are settled first, drawing from the same pool of liquidity that holds our deposits. (See David Rogers Webb’s The Great Taking and my earlier articles here and here.) A derivatives crisis could easily vacuum up that pool, leaving nothing for us as depositors — or for the “secured” creditors who are junior to derivative and repo claimants in bankruptcy, including state and local governments.
As detailed by Pam and Russ Martens, publisher and editor, respectively ofWall Street on Parade, as of Dec. 31, 2023, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., Citigroup’s Citibank and Bank of America held a total of $168.26 trillion in derivatives out of a total of $192.46 trillion at all U.S. banks, savings associations and trust companies. That’s four banks holding 87 percent of all derivatives at all 4,587 federally-insured institutions then in the U.S.
In June 2024, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board jointly released their findings on the eight U.S. megabanks’ “living wills” – their resolution or wind-down plans in the event of bankruptcy. The Fed and FDIC faulted all of the four largest derivative banks on shortcomings in how they planned to wind down their derivatives.
How Banks Guarding Our Deposits Became the Biggest Gamblers in the Derivatives Casino
Banks are not just middlemen in the derivatives market. They are active players taking speculative positions. In this century, writes Professor Omarova, the largest U.S. commercial banks have emerged “as a new breed of financial super-intermediary—a wholesale dealer in financial risk, conducting a wide variety of capital markets and derivatives activities, trading physical commodities, and even marketing electricity.” She notes that the Federal Reserve has allowed several financial holding companies to purchase and sell physical commodities (including oil, natural gas, agricultural products and electricity) in the spot market to hedge their commodity derivative activities, and to take or make delivery of those commodities to settle the transactions.
It was not Congress that authorized that expansive definition of permitted banking activities. It was the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), part of the “administrative deep state,” that permanent body of unelected regulators who carry on while politicians come and go. As Omarova explains:
Through seemingly routine and often nontransparent administrative actions, the OCC effectively enabled large U.S. commercial banks to transform themselves from the traditionally conservative deposit-taking and lending institutions, whose safety and soundness were guarded through statutory and regulatory restrictions on potentially risky activities, into a new breed of financial “super-intermediaries,” or wholesale dealers in pure financial risk. …
Moreover, some of the most influential of those decisions escaped public scrutiny because they were made in the subterranean world of administrative action invisible to the public, through agency interpretation and policy guidance.
The OCC’s authority to regulate banks dates back to the National Bank Act of 1863, which grants national banks general authority to engage in activities necessary to carry on the “business of banking,” including “such incidental powers as shall be necessary to carry on the business of banking.” The “business of banking” is not defined in the statute. Omarova writes:
Section 24 (Seventh) of the National Bank Act grants national banks the power to exercise all such incidental powers as shall be necessary to carry on the business of banking; by discounting and negotiating promissory notes, drafts, bills of exchange, and other evidences of debt; by receiving deposits; by buying and selling exchange, coin, and bullion; by loaning money on personal security; and by obtaining, issuing, and circulating notes.
No mention is made of derivatives trading or dealing.
The powers of banks were further limited by Congress in the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which explicitly prohibited banks from dealing in corporate equity securities, and by other statutes passed thereafter. However, the portion of the Glass-Steagall Act separating depository from investment banking was reversed in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000. Omarova writes that this allowed the OCC to articulate “an overly expansive definition of the ‘business of banking’ as financial intermediation and dealing in financial risk, in all of its forms, and … this pattern of analysis allowed the OCC to expand the range of bank-permissible activities virtually without any statutory constraint.”
What Then Can Be Done?
The 2008 financial crisis is now acknowledged to have been largely a derivatives crisis. But massive efforts at financial reform in the following years have failed to fix the underlying problem. In a Forbes article titled “Big Banks and Derivatives: Why Another Financial Crisis Is Inevitable,” Steve Denning writes:
Banks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to trade in derivatives in many of the same ways they did before the crash, but on a larger scale and with precisely the same unknown risks.
Most of this derivative trading is conducted through the biggest banks. A commonly held assumption is that the real derivative risk is much smaller than the “notional amount” stated on the banks’ balance sheets, but Denning observes:
[A]s we learned in 2008, it is possible to lose a large portion of the “notional amount” of a derivatives trade if the bet goes terribly wrong, particularly if the bet is linked to other bets, resulting in losses by other organizations occurring at the same time. The ripple effects can be massive and unpredictable.
In 2008, governments had enough resources to avert total calamity. Today’s cash-strapped governments are in no position to cope with another massive bailout.
He concludes:
Regulation and enforcement will only work if it is accompanied by a paradigm shift in the banking sector that changes the context in which banks operate and the way they are run, so that banks shift their goal from making money to adding value to stakeholders, particularly customers. This would require action from the legislature, the SEC, the stock market and the business schools, as well as of course the banks themselves.
A Paradigm Shift in “the Business of Banking”
In a September 2023 paper titled “Rebuilding Banking Law: Banks as Public Utilities,” Yale law professor Lev Menand and Vanderbilt law professor Morgan Ricks propose shifting the goal of banking so that chartered private banks are “not mere for-profit businesses; they have affirmative obligations to the public.” The authors observe that under the New Deal framework, which was rooted in the National Bank Act of 1864, banks were largely governed as public utilities. Charters were granted only where consistent with public convenience and need, and only chartered banks could expand the money supply by extending loans.
The Menand/Ricks proposal is quite detailed and includes much more than regulating derivatives, but on that specific issue they propose:
While member banks are permitted to enter into interest-rate swaps to hedge rate risk, they are not allowed to engage in derivatives dealing(intermediation or market making) or take directional bets in the derivatives markets. Derivatives dealing and speculation do not advance member banks’ monetary function. Apart from loan commitments, member banks would not be in the business of offering guarantees or other forms of insurance.
Would that mean the end of the derivatives casino? No – it would just be moved out of the banks charged with protecting our deposits:
The blueprint above says nothing about what activities can take place outside the member banking system. It says only that those activities can’t be financed with run-prone debt [meaning chiefly deposits]. In principle, we could imagine a very wide degree of latitude for non bank firms, subject of course to appropriate standards of disclosure, antifraud, and consumer and investor protection. So securities firms and other nonbanks might be given free rein to engage in structured finance, derivatives, proprietary trading, and so forth. But they would not be allowed to “fund short.”
By “funding short,” the authors mean basically “creating money,” for example through repo trades in which short-term loans are rolled over and over. In their proposal, only chartered banks are delegated the power to create money as loans.
Expanding the Model
University of Southampton business school professor Richard Werner, who has written extensively on this subject, adds that banks should be required to concentrate their lending on productive ventures that create new goods and services and avoid inflating existing assets such as housing and corporate stock.
Speculative derivatives are a form of “financialization” – money making money without producing anything. The winners just take money from the losers. Gambling is not illegal under federal law, but the chips in the casino should not be our deposits or loans made with the backing of our deposits.
The Menand/Ricks proposal is for private banks, but banks can also be made “public utilities” through direct ownership by the government. The stellar model is the Bank of North Dakota, which does not speculate in derivatives, cannot go bankrupt, makes productive loans, and has been highly successful. (See earlier article here.) The public utility model could also include a national infrastructure bank, as proposed in H.R. 4052, which currently has 37 co-sponsors.
The “business of banking” can include making money for private shareholders and executives, but that business should be junior to the public interest, which would prevail when they conflict.
Unfortunately, only Congress can change the language of the controlling statute; and Congress has been motivated historically to make major changes in the banking system only in response to a Great Depression or Great Recession that exposes the fatal flaws in the existing system. With the reversal of “Chevron deference,” however, the OCC’s rules can now be challenged in court. A powerful citizen’s movement might be able to catalyze needed changes before the next Great Depression strikes.
A financialized economy is not sustainable and not competitive. The emphasis should be on investment in the real economy. That is the sort of paradigm shift that is necessary if the U.S. is to survive and prosper.
We saw it with Covidiocy, we see it with Climate Alarmism and they are trying to create fear of Russia to justify massive amounts being spent on armaments. All of it bullshit.
Der Friedensstifter 