Editor's note: This site gives a fair amount of attention to American "neoconservatives" because their policies are wreaking havoc in the Middle East and, following Trotsky's dictum, they use permanent war to create changes to their liking. Even though being held off in Iraq, they will not learn the error of their ways any time soon and constitute a continuing menace to humankind.
"Muravchik is himself the exemplar of the neocons' Trotskyist roots, having served as youth leader of the Shachtmanite "third camp" Social Democrats, USA, the Young Peoples Socialist League...".
"Like the Marxists, who complain that communism didn't fail because it was never really tried, the neocons are full of excuses for the embarrassing implosion of their ideological hopes and dreams."
by Justin Raimondo
You have to give the neoconservatives credit for tenacity. Any other political or ideological group saddled with their record would crawl off into the shadows to expire without fanfare. Not the neocons. Vampire-like, they rise from the crypt of Bush's "global democratic revolution," fangs extended and hungry for fresh blood. There isn't enough garlic in the world to deter them - I doubt that even a pointed stake in the heart would suffice. The War Party, it seems, is immortal - like evil itself.
They told us the Iraqis would greet their American "liberators" with showers of rose petals; instead, U.S. troops are caught in a hail of bullets. They said Saddam Hussein was harboring "weapons of mass destruction," including an advanced nuclear weapons program, that posed a deadly threat to America; the closest they could come, once we'd invaded and combed the country for many months, was a storehouse of some very old mustard gas - the bad guys' WMD of choice, circa 1917. They proclaimed that the invasion of Iraq would lead to democratic revolutions throughout the region; what we got was Hamas, Hezbollah, and a flood of recruits to al-Qaeda's bloody banner. They assured us it would be a "cakewalk"; it turned into a death march.
Instead of changing their names and getting as far from the crime scene as possible, the neocons - or, at least, some of them - are not only lingering, they're openly proclaiming their intention to visit fresh disasters on us. The most explicit such statement comes from Joshua Muravchik, a former leader of the Young Peoples Socialist League who now inhabits the heady heights of that neocon Olympus over at the American Enterprise Institute. Muravchik, author of Exporting Democracy, a pre-9/11 polemic in which he outlined what was to become the Bushian policy of "global democratic revolution," is as pure a neocon as exists outside of Michael Ledeen's study. Undaunted by the massive failure of the democratist crusade, he writes in Foreign Policy magazine of "Operation Comeback," in the form of a memo to his partners in crime. The subject line is: "How to Save the Neocons." Which raises the question: save them from what - public obloquy? The penitentiary? A lynching?
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |