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Old September 7th, 2011 #21
Serbian
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Islamist Neocons?

The West's latest tactic in the war on terrorism

by Justin Raimondo, September 07, 2011

The effort to paint the Libyan rebels as freedom-loving democrats is visibly faltering, especially in view of the rise of Abdelhakim Belhaj, alias Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, as the top military commander in Tripoli.

Belhaj’s biography is interesting, to say the least: the founder of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), he traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s, where he met Osama bin Laden and fought against the Soviet-backed regime. After the war, he eventually returned to Libya, where he founded the LIFG and took the nom-de-guerre Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq. An Islamist revolt in Eastern Libya, led by the LIFG, was defeated by Gadhafi in 1996, and Belhaj fled the country for his old stomping grounds in Afghanistan.

He was welcomed by the Taliban and al Qaeda, where he was especially close to Mullah Omar. LIFG set up two training camps in Afghanistan, one of which was headed up by Abu Yahya, now Al Qaeda’s top ideologue, also a Libyan national. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the LIFG was listed as an Official Terrorist Group and Belhaj was targeted by the US.

The CIA traced him to Malaysia, in 2004, and he was arrested at Kuala Lumpur airport. They shipped him to Bangkok, where he was held in a secret CIA prison, “renditioned” back to Libya, and jailed by the Gadhafi regime, where he says he was tortured. Freed after a seven-year stint in the hoosegow – due to the efforts of Gadhafi’s son, Saif – Belhaj underwent a “deradicalization” conversion – I’m sure the torture helped – and renounced “extremism.” As the Guardian reports:

“The British government encouraged and helped publicize the Libyan ‘deradicalisation’ effort, modelled on what was being done with former jihadis in Egypt. In a program overseen by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, the LIFG produced a 400-page theological document entitled Corrective Studies explaining its renunciation of violence. Ironically, in an al-Jazeera film in March, Belhaj praised the mediation of Saif al-Islam for his release. Gaddafi’s son said that the men who had been freed ‘were no longer a danger to society.’”

The British investment in “deradicalization” paid off when Belhaj and his associates in the ex-LIFG formed their “Islamic Movement for Change” and called for NATO to intervene on the rebels’ behalf. Soon after the assassination by Islamists of the rebels’ top military commander, Abdul Fatah Younes – a former Interior Minister in Gadhafi’s government who defected to the rebel camp amidst much ballyhoo – Belhaj was made chief of the Tripoli Military Council, the Libyan rebels’ equivalent of the Pentagon, and given the official imprimatur of Western elites. As the Guardian notes, citing jihadi “expert” Noman Benotman:

“The experiences of the LIFG leaders in armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Libya and Algeria have forced them to mature politically, recalculate strategically, moderate behaviorally, modify their ideological beliefs.”

Modified them to allow for NATO intervention on behalf of an emerging Islamist emirate, lorded over by “Emir” Belhaj?

Benotman, himself a former LIFG fighter, now works for the Quilliam Foundation, which is described by the Guardian as “a UK government-funded counter-radicalization think tank in London.” The Quilliamites are the institutional expression of the West’s latest grand strategy in the endless “war on terrorism,” a campaign of ideological warfare aiming to split the Islamist movement into pro- and-anti Western factions. The Libyan intervention is the culmination of this co-optation strategy.

The Foundation is named after William “Abdullah” Quilliam, a British solicitor of radical political opinions who converted to Islam, in 1882, on a trip to North Africa, and returned to London to found a uniquely British variant of his adopted religion. With a small group of British converts around him, he founded a mosque, a Muslim college, and wrote several books, claiming Queen Victoria (who ordered five copies of The Faith of Islam) among his readers. The Victorian equivalent of the EDL, however, apparently made life difficult for Quilliam and his group, and “Abdullah,” as he was now known, made off for Turkey, where he was designated the “Sheikh of Britain.”

This is where the trail gets murky, but it seems Quilliam returned to Britain in 1914, under an assumed name, “Prof. Henri Marcel Leon,” where he continued his activities on behalf of Islam. An alternate story is that he stayed abroad until just before his death in 1932.

The same murky dodginess permeates the activities of the Foundation that bears his name. Funded by the British government, and now simply called “Quilliam,” the organization deploys its “experts” – ex-jihadis of one sort or another – whenever some event requires a pro-government “spin.” It is a replication of the CIA’s orientation during the cold war, when a cadre of ex-radicals was recruited to do Washington’s bidding in the fight against Communism. By aligning with anti-Communist socialists, particularly ex-Trotskyists whose “Stalinophobia” had become an obsession, the CIA funded and helped organize the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which included such luminaries as Irving Kristol, Stephen Spender, and James Burnham. By mobilizing socialists in their anti-Communist crusade, the geniuses over at the CIA hoped to split the left-wing movement internationally and undermine Soviet support. This tactic was deemed especially crucial in Europe, where pro-Moscow Communist parties controlled the labor movement and had gained new prestige as leaders of the anti-Nazi Resistance. There the CIA deployed followers of Jay Lovestone, the former American Communist party leader, who had formed his own ostensibly communist party in the US and later developed extensive ties with US government agencies on the trail of the Reds.

The Quilliamites are, in short, the Islamist equivalent of neoconservatives – those migrants into the conservative movement from the left who later went on to become the loudest and most bloodthirsty advocates of an all-out war against the Soviet Union.

That the Quilliamite strategy has its uses as an instrument of Western foreign policy is underscored by the “success” of the Libyan operation, which funneled money, arms, and most importantly militarily experienced Islamist cadre into Libya to commandeer the rebel movement. The assassination of the former rebel commander-in-chief, and, in effect, an Islamist coup d’etat inside the rebel camp, was the logical outcome of this policy.

If you’ve been baffled by the installation of an Islamist regime in Libya by force of NATO arms – well, now you know. We’re aiding one wing of the Islamist movement in order to fight the “extremist’ wing, on the theory that we can domesticate these tigers and turn them into tabby cats.

If ever a policy was destined to provoke blowback of the worst and deadliest sort, then this is certainly it. The unintended consequences of building up an Islamist movement, not only in Libya but throughout the Middle East, are too obvious to require much explanation. Suffice to say here that the citizens of the newly-minted Libyan “emirate” – forced to live and suffer under a regime of imposed Sharia law – will pay the price of our “strategic” cleverness. So much for the myth that the West is “exporting democracy” throughout the world. What is being exported here is a cadre of Western proxies, whose role as servitors of Washington, London, and Paris is clothed in the religious robes of Quilliamite Islam.

One fully expects a repetition of this ploy in Egypt, and throughout the Muslim world. As the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, one thing is clear: we in the West have learned nothing about how to avoid the unintended consequences of our interventionist policies.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2...amist-neocons/
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Old September 7th, 2011 #22
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ZOG's neocohens often make triumphs on imaginary victories and 'good news' to keep up the spirits of the deluded people.
 
Old September 12th, 2011 #23
Mike Parker
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America’s ‘World Revolution’: Neo-Trotskyist Foundations of U.S. Foreign Policy

by Dr. K R Bolton

May 3, 2010

The ideological foundations of U.S. foreign policy have neo-Trotskyite foundations. Hatred of the USSR since the time of Stalin was the primary motivation for Trotskyists to the point where a significant faction considered the USSR and Stalinism rather than America and capitalism as the major obstacles to world socialism. This faction was co-opted into the Cold War and has provided the ideological impetus for U.S. foreign policy ever since.


Leon Trotsky

Abstract

America has been the center of ‘world revolution’ since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to shape the post-war world in a single image of liberal-democracy. The policy has been one of internationalism, and the Bush description of it as a ‘new world order’ in launching the war on Iraq is the latest name. While conservatives bothered much about the USSR and Red China, the heart of ‘world revolution’ lay in Washington. Because the policies of the USA and the USSR often coincided on the world stage, in particular promoting decolonization in order to fill the void with their own versions of neo-colonialism, such policies have often been mistaken for ‘Soviet communism.’ While the ‘Soviet threat’ lies in ashes, U.S. hegemony proceeds apace, destroying reticent nations with bombs where debt and foreign aid does not work. The ideological origins of American globalist foreign policy received impetus and ideological direction from sources arising from the Trotsky-Stalin split. The Moscow Trials continue to reverberate as a major historical event throughout the world. Whatever might be said about the judicial processes of the trials, the charge at the time that Trotskyists were agents of foreign capital became reality within a few years of the trial, as Trotskyist hatred of the USSR became all-consuming. This essay examines the manner by which Trotskyism metamorphosed into a primary ingredient of US foreign policy doctrine.

“Global Democratic Revolution”

In 2003 President George W Bush embraced the world revolutionary mission of the USA, stating to the National Endowment for Democracy that the war in Iraq is the latest front in the “global democratic revolution” led by the United States. “The revolution under former president Ronald Reagan freed the people of Soviet-dominated Europe,” he declared, “and is destined now to liberate the Middle East as well.”[1]

The origins of this US “global democratic revolution” are to be found in an unlikely and far-away source: the Trotsky-Stalin split and the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938. Such was the hatred of the Trotskyists and certain allied socialists towards the USSR from Stalin onward, that this “Opposition”, came to regard the USSR as the primary bulwark against world socialism and saw in the USA the only means of resisting Soviet world power, to the extent that these Leftists were eventually found supporting America in Korea and Vietnam, and ultimately present American foreign policy throughout the world, including the war against Iraq.

At Trotsky’s Villa

The tendency for this historically significant shift of Trotskyists and sundry allied socialists towards a pro-U.S. position can be discerned among the personnel of the sub-commission of the Preliminary Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, or the Dewey Commission if one prefers less of a mouthful. The Dewey Commission emerged from the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, as a supposedly “impartial body,” that had been initiated by Prof. Sidney Hook, a leading Trotskyist and who was to play a major role in pro-US machinations during the Cold War. It was fronted by the venerable Dr John Dewey, who had been one of Hook’s professors. The “impartial enquiry” was itself the suggestion of Trotsky who had “publicly demanded the formation of an international commission of inquiry, since he had been deprived of any opportunity to reply to the accusations before a legally constituted court.”[2]

The sub-commission went the Mexico to question Trotsky at the villa he was given by Diego Rivera. Those on the sub-commission included socialists and Trotskyists of various types, who exercised a deferent attitude towards Trotsky, which caused the only independently minded commissioner, the author and journalist Carleton Beals, to quit in disgust.[3]

A look at some of those involved with the Mexico hearings and their subsequent political orientations is instructive. John Chamberlain, a “left-leaning liberal” journalist, by his own description,was in 1946 among the founding editors of the libertarian journal The Freeman.[4] Another founding editor of The Freeman was Suzanne La Follette, the Dewey Commission’s secretary whom Beals had described as having a ‘worshipful’ attitude towards Trotsky in Mexico.[5] Trotsky’s lawyer at the Mexico hearings, Albert Goldman, a Trotskyist who had joined the American Communist Party in 1920, was expelled for Trotskyism, and was one of a faction who broke with the official line that World War II would weaken Trotskyism, joined the Workers Party, and ended up as one of those who came to see the USA as the primary bulwark against the main enemy of socialism, the USSR. The sub-commission’s reporter was Albert M Glotzer, also a Trotskyist who had been expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 and with Max Shachtman founded the Communist League and subsequent factions, including the Workers Party, and the Social Democrats USA, of which Sidney Hook was an honorary president.[6]

Shachtmanism

The line pursued by leading Trotskyist Max Shachtman is of importance in considering the development of Trotskyism as a significant influence on US foreign policy. Shachtman was one of Trotsky’s primary representatives in the USA.[7] Expelled from the Communist Party USA in 1928 Shachtman co-founded the Communist League and the Socialist Workers Party, but split to form the Workers Party of the United States in 1940 with James P Cannon and James Burnham et al, which became the Independent Socialist League and merged with the Socialist Party in 1958; which in turn factionalised into the Democratic Socialists and the Social Democrats USA.[8]

Shachtman’s opposition to the USSR diverged from the official Trotskyist line and became known as the “Third Camp.” Trotsky and the Fourth International advocated during World War II a so-called “defence of the Soviet Union.” Trotsky and the Fourth International held that in the event of an attack on the USSR by capitalist or fascist states, the Soviet Union must be defended since, although it was a “degenerated workers state” controlled by a bureaucracy rather than the proletariat, the fact of its having a nationalised economy was the crucial point. Trotsky held that the armed proletariat and the crisis generated by war would lead to the post-war defeat of Stalin by another revolution.

By 1940 Shachtman was in dispute with the Workers Party and the Fourth International over the issue, and declared that Trotskyists should pursue a defeatist policy for the USSR in the war. It is of interest that Shachtman’s main ally was James Burnham who was to become a principal ideologue of American Cold War strategy. Shachtman wrote to Trotsky and the Fourth International spelling out his line of “true Trotskyism”:

The Fourth International established, years ago, the fact that the Stalinist regime (even though based upon nationalized property) had degenerated to the point where it was not only capable of conducting reactionary wars against the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, and even against colonial peoples, but did in fact conduct such wars. Now, in our opinion, on the basis of the actual course of Stalinist policy (again, even though based upon nationalized property), the Fourth International must establish the fact that the Soviet Union (i.e., the ruling bureaucracy and the armed forces serving it) has degenerated to the point where it is capable of conducting reactionary wars even against capitalist states (Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, now Finland, and tomorrow Rumania and elsewhere). This is the point which forms the nub of our difference with you and with the Cannon faction.

War is a continuation of politics, and if Stalinist policy, even in the occupied territory where property has been statified, preserves completely its reactionary character, then the war it is conducting is reactionary. In that case, the revolutionary proletariat must refuse to give the Kremlin and its army material and military aid. It must concentrate all efforts on overturning the Stalinist regime. That is not our war! Our war is against the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy at the present time!

In other words, I propose, in the present war, a policy of revolutionary defeatism in the Soviet Union, as explained in the statement of the Minority on the Russian question – and in making this proposal I do not feel myself one whit less a revolutionary class patriot than I have always been.[9]

There is a significant reference in Shachtman’s statement from which the shape of post-war Trotskyist ideology and the rationale for which it went over the American camp during the Cold War, and subsequently, can be discerned: The USSR had reached such a “degenerated” state, pursuing a thoroughly reactionary course, that it could now only act in interests inimical to socialism even in its actions against capitalist states. The USSR was therefore henceforth seen as the major obstacle to world socialism, as a dialectical regression.

After World War II Shachtman laid down a line in which specific Cold War policy can be seen:

The Stalinist parties are indeed agents of the Kremlin oligarchy, no matter what country they function in. The interests and the fate of these Stalinist parties are inseparably intertwined with the interests and fate of the Russian bureaucracy. The Stalinist parties are everywhere based upon the power of the Russian bureaucracy, they serve this power, they are dependent upon it, and they cannot live without it.[10]

By 1948 Shachtmanism as the Cold Warrior apologist for American foreign policy was taking shape. In seeing positive signs in the Titoist break with the USSR, Shachtman wrote:

In the first place, the division in the capitalist camp is, to all practical intents, at an end. In any case, there is nothing like the division that existed from 1939 onward and which gave Stalinist Russia such tremendous room for maneuvering. In spite of all the differences that still exist among them, the capitalist world under American imperialist leadership and drive is developing an increasingly solid front against Russian imperialism.[11]

Hence, “American imperialism” was in 1948 already seen by the Shachtmanists as a necessary bulwark to “‘Russian imperialism.” Shachtman saw the post-war world in terms of two contending power blocs, headed by America and Russia, and from a dialectical perspective regarded the American-led bloc as the side that required supporting. This led the Shachtmanists and certain other socialists to positions far removed from what would normally be considered “Left-wing.”

By 1950 Shachtman, now writing as head of the Independent Socialist League, stated that Stalinism is the primary problem faced by Marxism, which required an international response:

The principal new problem faced by Marxian theory, and therewith Marxian practice, is the problem of Stalinism. What once appeared to many to be either an academic or “foreign” problem is now, it should at last be obvious, a decisive problem for all classes in all countries. If it is understood as a purely Russian phenomenon or as a problem “in itself,” it is of course not understood at all.[12]

Hence this not insignificant faction of Trotskyism, through its detestation of the USSR, had placed itself firmly in the American camp in relation to the international situation, the “Cold War.”‘

Natalia Trotsky

While Shachtman was at loggerheads with Trotsky over the dialectical line to be pursued over the USSR, would Trotsky have continued to pursue the “defence of the USSR” vis-à-vis the Cold War scenario had a Stalnist assassin not liquidated him in 1940?

There are strong indications that Trotsky might have endorsed the Shachtman line had he lived into the Cold War period. Dialectical materialism is innately pragmatic according to the perceived historical mission of the “proletariat” and its “vanguard” party. The programme of the Fourth International itself, drafted by Trotsky, was described as a “transitional programme.” Trotsky’s position regarding the defence of the USSR against a fascist or capitalist attack on its territory was also subject to change depending on the historical circumstances. The fundamental difference between Shachtmanism and the Fourth International was that the so-called Third Camp of Shachtman, Burnham et al saw Stalinist Russia as more of a regressive step in the process of socialism than a Russia in which capitalism might be installed (keeping in mind that Russia had gone from feudalism to socialism without the intervening phase of capitalism as part of the Marxian dialectical process of history). Trotsky believed that a revolution could topple Stalin and revert Russia back to the Bolshevik path.[13] Shachtman did not, and saw the war rather as only increasing Stalin’s power in Russia and beyond. While Trotsky was confident in 1939 that a war between Hitler and Stalin would result in the arming and revolutionising of the proletariat not just in Russia but in Eastern Europe, increasing conditions under which Stalin would be overthrown while Hitler would be defeated simultaneously, he stated of the war in conclusion:

It may accelerate the process of the revolutionary regeneration of the USSR. But it may also accelerate the process of its final degeneration. For this reason it is indispensable that follow painstakingly and without prejudice these modifications which war introduces into the internal life of the USSR so that we may give ourselves a timely accounting of them.[14]

That Trotsky might have endorsed the Shachtman line, and henceforth the reorientation towards the USA in the Cold War, had he lived, is given a strong indication from this being precisely the line his widow and long time comrade, Natalia took in 1951 precisely when the period of the Cold War had started to unfold. In a letter to the Executive Committee of the Fourth International and to the Socialist Workers Party in the USA she stated:

Obsessed by old and outmoded formulations, you continue to consider the Stalinist state as a workers’ state. I cannot and will not follow you on this point…. It should be clear to all that Stalinism has completely destroyed the revolution. And yet you continue to say that Russia is still, under this iniquitous regime, a workers’ state.

This is a precise rejection of the pre-1940 formulae of her husband in regard to the “defence of the USSR as a degenerated workers state,” describing this attitude as representing “old and outmoded formulations.”[15]

Laying down a course that was to push neo-Trotskyists such as Shachtman, Burnham and Hook increasingly into the U.S. camp during the Cold War (which she referred to as the “third world war”), and beyond to the present day, Natalia stated in alluding to the Korean War:

The most intolerable is the position on war to which you have committed yourselves. The third world war threatening humanity places the revolutionary movement before the most difficult and complex situations, the gravest decisions…. But faced with the events of recent years, you continue to call for the defence of the Stalinist state, and to commit the whole movement to it. Now, you even support the Stalinist armies in the war which is crucifying the Korean people.

I cannot and will not follow you on this point…. I find that I must tell you that I find no other way out than to say openly that our disagreements make it impossible for me to stay any longer in your ranks.[16]

Sundry Trotskyite groups continue to adhere to Natalia’s stance.[17]

Congress for Cultural Freedom

It was from such an anti-Soviet milieu among the Left that the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) emerged. A CIA front to co-opt Leftist-intellectuals to the U.S. side during the Cold War on the shared basis of anti-Sovietism, the CCF came out of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom organised in 1938 with John Dewey.[18] In 1948 Hook’s Americans for Intellectual Freedom came to the attention of the Office of Political Coordination, a newly formed branch of the CIA. From these the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was founded in 1951.

The founding conference of the CCF was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in 1949, as a provocation to the Soviet-sponsored peace conference at the Waldorf supported by a number of the American literati. The CIA article on the CCF states:

A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sidney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.[19]

It should be kept in mind that when the CIA, and even someone as well-informed as Frances Stonor Saunders refers to Hook et al as being “anti-communist,” this was nothing of the kind; they were anti-Stalinists, with Trotskyism being the predominant line. Hook was a co-founder of the American Workers Party and promoted its merger with Socialist Workers’ Party to form the Workers Party of the United States, although Hook did not join. Hook did however become the honorary president of the influential Social Democrats USA, another Trotskyite deviation.[20]

Hook was editing The New Leader, a Marxist publication whose executive editor from 1937-1961 was a Russian emigrant, Sol Levitas, a Menshevik who had been mayor of Vladivostok[21] and who had worked with the Bolshevik leaders Trotsky and Bukharin.[22] Saunders quotes Tom Braden of the CIA as stating that The New Leader was kept alive through subsidies that Braden gave to Levitas.[23] Partisan Review[24] was another Leftist magazine saved from financial ruin by the CIA and certain CIA-connected wealthy patrons such as the Rockefellers, after an appeal for funds from Hook.[25]

Hook had stated at the start of the Cold War:

Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses–yes, even among the soldiers–of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time to come will be internal. I can find the people.[26]

This position expressed by Hook was essentially neo-Trotskyist and what became official U.S. Cold War doctrine can be discerned. Hook pursued the same line as that of Shachtman, his colleague James Burnham, and Natalia Trotsky. During the 1960s, Hook critiqued the New Left and became an outspoken supporter of the Vietnam War. In 1984 he was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the annual Jefferson Lecture, “the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities”.[27] On 23 May 1985 Hook was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Reagan. Edward S Shapiro writing in the American “conservative” journal First Principles, summarises Hook’s position thusly:

One of America’s leading anticommunist intellectuals, Hook supported American entry into the Korean War, the isolation of Red China, the efforts of the United States government to maintain a qualitative edge in nuclear weapons, the Johnson administration’s attempt to preserve a pro-western regime in South Vietnam, and the campaign of the Reagan administration to overthrow the communist regime in Nicaragua.

Those both within and outside of conservative circles viewed Hook as one of the gurus of the neoconservative revival during the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, President Reagan presented Hook with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being one of the first “to warn the intellectual world of its moral obligations and personal stake in the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.”[28]

Again, there is the disingenuous description of Hook as an ‘anticommunist’, obscuring the fundamentally Trotskyist origins of both neo-conservativism and post-World War II American foreign policy.

Shachtmanism and the Cold War

During the 1960s Shachtmanism aligned with the Democratic Party while maintaining an influence in the New Left. By the 1960s they were supporting America’s policy in Vietnam, just as Natalia had supported America in Korea. In 1972 the Shachtmanists endorsed Senator Henry Jackson for the Democratic presidential nomination against Leftist George McGovern whom they regarded as an appeaser toward the USSR. Jackson was both pro-war and vehemently anti-Soviet, advocating a “hawkish” position on foreign policy towards the USSR. Like Hook, Jackson was also awarded the Medal of Freedom by Reagan in 1984.

At this time Tom Kahn, a prominent Shachtmanist and an organizer of the AFL-CIO, was Jackson’s chief speechwriter.[29] Kahn became pivotal in the development of American foreign policy during the Cold War and after. Many of Sen. Jackson’s aides were to become prominent in the “neo-conservative” movement, including Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, all of whom had been involved to some extent with Trotskyism at an early stage, and all of whom became prominent in the Administration of George H W Bush, as well as being noted for their hawkish stance on foreign policy.

Tom Kahn, who remained an avid follower of Shachtmanism, explained his mentor’s position on Vietnam, while insisting that Shachtman never compromised his “socialism”:

His views on Vietnam were, and are, unpopular on the Left. He had no illusions about the South Vietnamese government, but neither was he confused about the totalitarian nature of the North Vietnamese regime. In the South there were manifest possibilities for a democratic development.… He knew that those democratic possibilities would be crushed if Hanoi’s military takeover of the South succeeded. He considered the frustration of the attempt to be a worthy objective of American policy.…[30]

This position can be readily seen as neo-Trotskyist. The line has been consistent, and inevitably led to a pro-U.S. position.

National Endowment for Democracy

Just as the Congress for Cultural Freedom was to a significant extent a Trotskyist response to the Cold War, the post-Cold War era required a new response, and again Trotskyists of the Shachmanite-Hook lines took the forefront.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was established in 1983 at the prompting of Tom Kahn, and endorsed by an Act of Congress introduced by Congressman George Agree. Carl Gershman, a Shachtmanite, was appointed president of NED in 1984, and remains so.[31] Gershman was a co-founder and an Executive Director (1974-1980) of Social Democrats USA.[32]

Congressman Agree and Kahn believed that the USA needed a means apart from the CIA of supporting subversive movements against the USSR. Kahn, who became International Affairs Director of the AFL-CIO, had been in close contact with Solidarity in Poland, and had been involved with AFL-CIO meetings with Leftists from Latin America and South Africa. [33]

Kahn started his political activism with the Young Socialist League, the youth wing of Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League and the Young People’s Socialist League, which he continued to support until his death in 1992.[34] In particular, he supported Shachtman’s opposition to the USSR as the primary obstacle to world socialism,[35] and built up an anti-Soviet network throughout the world in “opposition to the accommodationist policies of détente”.[36] There was a particular focus on assisting Solidarity in Poland from 1980.[37]

The neo-Trotskyists had in fact created, under U.S. auspices, precisely the anti-Soviet underground network that Stalin had feared, and that had been alleged against the Trotskyist and Bukharin Opposition bloc during the Moscow trials of 1936-1938. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the Moscow trial allegations – and confessions – what was alleged by the Stalinists during the 1930s had become reality shortly after World War II, and played a significant role in the destruction of the Soviet bloc.

Racehlle Horowitz’s eulogy to Kahn ends with her confidence that had he been alive, he would have been a vigorous supporter of the war in Iraq.[38]

NED is funded by the U.S. Congress and supports “activists and scholars” with 1000 grants in over 90 countries. NED describes its program of “democratic initiatives” (sic) as operating in Poland (through the trade union Solidarity), Chile, Nicaragua, Eastern Europe (to aid in the democratic transition following the demise of the Soviet bloc), South Africa, Burma, China, Tibet, North Korea and the Balkans. “Serbia’s electoral breakthrough in the fall of 2000″ was achieved by supporting “a number of civic groups.” “More recently, following 9/11 and the NED Board’s adoption of its third strategic document, special funding has been provided for countries with substantial Muslim populations in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.”[39] The programme and strategies are thus very similar to those funded by George Soros.Islamofascists — The New Stalinists

While Putin’s Russia remains a major concern of the present cadre of neo-Trotskyists, Islam has become a significant new world bogeyman for the neo-Trotskyists to continue what amounts to the present-day version of the permanent revolution. The neo-Trotskyists have conjoined the words Fascist and Islam to coin a substitute for Stalinism as the perpetual villain: Islamofascism.

The term Islamofascism seems to have been coined and has been popularised by “neo-conservative” Stephen Schwartz, Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. Schwartz takes credit for being “the first Westerner to use the neologism in this context,” making reference to its use by George W Bush and “other prominent figures,” which was written of by Schwartz in 2001 in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Schwartz states that the term should be used precisely in regard to certain Islamic movements and states, “because of their congruence with the defining characteristics of classic fascism, especially in its most historically-significant form — German National Socialism.”[40]

The background of Schwartz is as a supporter of the Trotskyist Fomento Obrero Revolucionario during the 1930s. Writing for the Cold War-derived magazine National Review, which had many Trotskyists at its formation, including in particular James Burnham, Schwartz states:

To my last breath I will defend the Trotsky who alone, and pursued from country to country, and finally laid low in his own blood, said no to Soviet coddling of Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic.… to my last breath, and without apology. Let the neo-fascists, and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.[41]

Schwartz continues to affectionately refer to Trotsky as “L.D.” (Lev Davidovitch), writing: “To a great extent, I still consider myself to be one of the great disciples of L.D.”

Schwartz states of the origins of the “neo-conservative movement”:

And the fact is that many of the original generation of neoconservatives had a background of association with Trotskyism in its Shachtmanite iteration — that is, they belonged to or sympathized with a trend in radical leftism that followed the principle of opposition to the Soviet betrayal of the revolution to its logical end. The Shachtmanites, in the 1960s, joined the AFL-CIO in its best Cold War period, and many became staunch Reaganites.[42]

That American foreign policy is fundamentally Trotskyist can be discerned through the ideological statements on foreign policy that use terms such as “creative destruction,” “constant conflict”, and “American world revolutionary mission”. For example, Maj. Ralph Peters, a prominent military strategist, appears to have coined the term “constant conflict.”[43] He writes of America’s world revolutionary mission, stating candidly:

We have entered an age of constant conflict…. We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent…. There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the U.S. armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.[44]

Michael Ledeen, in similar terms to that of Peters, and in thoroughly neo-Trotskyist mode, calls on the USA to fulfil its “historic mission” of “exporting the democratic revolution” throughout the world.[45] Like Peters, Ledeen predicates this world revolution as a necessary part of the “war on terrorism,” but emphasises also that “world revolution” is the “historic mission” of the USA and always has been. Writing in the National Review Ledeen states:

…[W]e are the one truly revolutionary country in the world, as we have been for more than 200 years. Creative destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically, and that is precisely why the tyrants hate us, and are driven to attack us. Freedom is our most lethal weapon, and the oppressed peoples of the fanatic regimes are our greatest assets. They need to hear and see that we are with them, and that the Western mission is to set them free, under leaders who will respect them and preserve their freedom.[46]

Conclusion

Trotskyism provided the ideological basis for U.S. foreign policy, orientating U.S. foreign policy as a development from Wilsonian global liberal-democracy to what has become America’s “world revolutionary mission.” Trotskyist motivation came very shortly to be dominated by a hatred of the USSR, seeing Russia as the major obstacle to world socialism, and the USA as the only force capable of halting the USSR. From the neo-Trotskyist perspective, dialectically, capitalism became preferable to Stalinism. Capitalism represented a stage towards socialism; Stalinism was an aberration historically. Trotskyists readily joined with the CIA during the Cold War, and in the post-Cold War world have continued to have an influence, in particular ideologically, as it is now expressed by non-Trotskyists from Ledeen to Reagan and Bush. The ideology has not been repudiated by Obama.

“The permanent revolution” has been substituted for “constant conflict,” and “creative destruction;” Stalinism has been substituted for Islamofascism; Russia has been replaced by the USA as the “one truly revolutionary country in the world;” and the “world proletarian revolution” has metamorphosed into the “global democratic revolution.” Have the allegedly “paranoid” concerns of Stalin been vindicated?

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/...eign-policy/0/
 
Old February 13th, 2012 #24
Mike Parker
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How’s that Arab Spring working out for you, neocons?

Published: Tuesday, February 07, 2012
By Paul Mulshine / The Star Ledger


George W. Bush: What made him think liberating our enemies was a good idea?

Last year when the Arab Spring was going strong, neoconservative deep thinker William Kristol offered this deep thought: “We can’t make all right with the world. But we can make some things in the world a little better.”

Says who? Islamic fundamentalism is on the rise all over the Mideast. And the other day, we learned how the leaders of Egypt employed their newfound freedom: They announced they are going to put 19 American aid workers on trial. Their alleged crime? Spreading democracy.

That in itself ought to represent a fitting end to the so-called “neo” conservative strategy in foreign affairs. Add in the rise of those Islamic fundamentalist parties in Libya, Syria and, for that matter, Iraq, and any rational thinker would have to conclude the neocon experiment was the biggest failure in the history of American foreign policy.

The reason for its failure is not hard to find. Like bad generals, the neocons were fighting the next war with the tactics from the last. Promoting democracy worked like a charm when it came to the Cold War. Why wouldn’t it work in the so-called “War on Terror”?

Elliott Abrams is still trying to figure that out. Abrams was part of the Reagan administration team that so nicely dissected the Soviet empire. When he joined the administration of George W. Bush as an adviser on global democracy strategy, Abrams assumed the same tricks would work in the Mideast.

In a recent article in the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Abrams makes the case that the Arab Spring proves “neoconservatives were right all along.”

To his credit, Abrams at least gets the categories right. He doesn’t pretend that the opponents of the neocons are the members of the Obama administration, who differ only in detail with the neocon agenda. He correctly notes that its opponents are the “realists,” those ex-diplomats, ex-CIA spies and ex-military men who are under no illusions about the wisdom of liberating people who don’t share our interests.

Abrams spends most of the essay arguing that things might still work out fine in the Mideast. But he also allows that “the pessimists might yet be proved right — any comparison of the Arab lands to Eastern Europe suggests that many positive elements are missing, not least the magnet and model of the European Union.”

He’s getting warm. But the real problem with any comparison of the Mideast to Eastern Europe is that there is no comparison.

That was obvious in 2004 to one of the more prominent realists. John Mearsheimer is a political science professor at the University of Chicago and a military veteran. In 2003, he predicted that the initial invasion of Iraq would go well, but the occupation would be a disaster.

After that debacle arrived on schedule, I called him and asked why the realists got it right and the neocons got it wrong.

Simple, Mearsheimer said. The neocons assume that the impulse that’s hard-wired into humans is democracy. It’s not. It’s nationalism. The nationalistic urge worked to our advantage in the Cold War. The Soviets were occupying the nations of Eastern Europe. The people of those nations shared, with Americans, the goal of getting rid of the Soviets.

In the Mideast, he said, the neocons managed to turn the nationalistic urge against us by invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. “When you occupy their countries, people fight back,” he said.

In retrospect, that hardly seems like a particularly deep insight. The neocons still haven’t figured it out. On the question of invading Iran, the consensus of all the Republican presidential contenders not named Ron Paul seems to be that the third time pays for all.

It still hasn’t occurred to these deep thinkers that the current crisis with Iran has its roots in the democratic revolution of 1979. Once the Iranians had liberated themselves from a dictatorship, they promptly created a republic that reflected their values rather than ours.

Like the newly liberated Egyptians, these people put their own interests above America’s. Why do these Mideasterners persist in doing that sort of thing?

Perhaps they don’t have the benefit of reading Kristol and Abrams, as we do.

HERE'S that column in which I quoted Mearsheimer in 2004. It was in my pre-blog era, so I present it now for your reading pleasure. Note how Kristol seems not to have learned a single thing in the past eight years:

On Friday, this page ran a column by leading neoconservative Bill Kristol on the issue of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's botched handling of the Iraq war. The day before, an interoffice e-mail gave a synopsis of the column:

"Bill Kristol says it's time for Rumsfeld to go," the e-mail read. "He blames everybody but himself."

For a second there, I thought the "he" in that second sentence applied to Kristol rather than Rumsfeld. There's a lot of blame to go around for this mess, and Kristol certainly deserves his share.

Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard, the magazine that, true to its name, sets the standard for neoconservative philosophy in America. That philosophy differs from old-fashioned conservatism in the area of foreign policy. Old-fashioned conservatives want either to crush potential enemies or leave them alone. The neocons can't figure out whether they want to conquer them or cuddle up to them.

That sort of thing never works. But instead of admitting that the conquer-or-cuddle philosophy is flawed, Kristol blamed Rumsfeld for its execution.

"All defense secretaries in wartime have made misjudgments," he wrote. "Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But has any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?"

Good question. Let's apply it to Kristol and the other neocons. Here's how Kristol envisioned the war back in September 2002:

"We can remove Saddam because that could start a chain reaction in the Arab world that would be very healthy, and it would weaken the radicals who use terror, who sponsor terror. I think the single best thing we can do is hurry up and get rid of Saddam."

Oops. Instead of weakening the radicals, the neocons managed to create thousands of new ones.

As for the old-fashioned conservatives, they saw this one coming. A month before the war began, Pat Buchanan predicted, "This Wilsonian ambition will end in disaster for this country."

John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and a military veteran, foresaw exactly where things would go wrong. He predicted that the initial invasion of Iraq would go well but the occupation would be a disastrous diversion from the so-called "war on terror."

"Every dollar spent occupying Iraq is a dollar not spent dismantling terrorist networks abroad or improving security at home," Mearsheimer wrote just before the invasion. "Invasion and occupation would increase anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and help Osama bin Laden win more followers."

He got that right. I phoned Mearsheimer the other day and asked him where he thought the neocons drifted from reality.

"They thought you could go into Iraq and effect regime change and produce a new democracy that would be stable and pro-Israel and that would let us have bases," he said. "Then you move on to the next target."

Instead of moving on, they're stuck in Iraq. Neocons posed as realists, but their conception of human nature was anything but realistic, he said.

"They believe democracy is the most powerful political ideology," he said. "You go in and remove the regime and this democratic impulse that's hard-wired into every individual would manifest itself and Iraq would become a democracy."

The problem, said Mearsheimer. is that the impulse that's hard-wired into human nature isn't democracy. It's nationalism.

"Once you trigger nationalism, an insurgency invariably results," he said. "When you occupy their countries, people fight back.”

He added, "We were successful in the Cold War because it was the Soviets who were occupying Eastern Europe."

But now we're the occupiers - and we're stuck. Instead of going on to Syria or Iran, the United States is stuck sorting out a deadly and expensive mess in Iraq.

So much for that "chain reaction in the Arab world" Kristol anticipated, the one that would be "very healthy." It's not too healthy for the Americans in its way - and the lack of armor on their vehicles is just a tiny screwup in a vast universe of bad moves.

Mearsheimer doesn't expect the neocons to admit that the fault lay more in their strategy than in its execution. "I don't expect them to take the blame," he said. "Rumsfeld is going to be the fall guy."

Perhaps so. And if the defense secretary feels like writing an opinion piece giving his views on how well the editor of the Weekly Standard is doing his job, The Star-Ledger will be glad to run it.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine...g_working.html

Quote:
These guys' recent ancestors, and their ilk, were Trotskyites for Pete's sake. They still honor the memory of Lenin's Left hand man who founded the Red Army, which ordered the murders of the Romanoff family in a Yekaterburg cellar.

While it's too late now, George Washington's warnings about meddling in other nations' affairs and avoiding massive debt remain true. Foisting our wretched situation on others...especially in the Ummah....is bizarre. Mohommedans, across the board, see us as occupying satans with no moral grounding. Worse, there's obvious truth in their charges. We've aerial bombings, drones, invasions, assassinations and misery to the Ummah. Now, we even support al qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood to destroy our own interests. We have the Israelis deliver weapons we supply to the Palestinians...that the Palestinians will use to kill Israelis. A glimpse of Rodham tells us it's all insane.

The record shows, Obama labored in a Saul Alinsky organization for years, while Rodham dedicated her college years to his Neo-Marxist views, seeking him out for an interview. Alinsky advised infiltrating government, churches etc. and underming them. The current attack by Obama on Roman Catholics is in line with these Alinsky tactics, as Pelosi arrogantly complains about the Catholic "conscience thing".

Let's remember, Alinsky even dedicated his most important book, "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer, who at least won his own kingdom....according to Saul.

Neo-Cons and Neo-Marxists agree on one thing, like Lucifer...overthrowing the world. They're the opposite of George Washington, and...as we've seen...a once great nation is diminished by their revolutionary beliefs. With them around, spending our troops' lives and our very fortune, we're as safe as the Romanoff Family in 1918.
 
Old January 14th, 2016 #25
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Neocons at National Review: ‘Stop Calling Us Neocons!’

What do you do after you ruin your reputation?


Daniel McAdams
(Ron Paul Institute

When pondering the intellectual decline of political movements, it is hard not to call to mind the former flagship publication of the Buckleyite wing of conservatism called National Review. Where once learned men (and women) made their case from the heights of argumentation and erudition — a force to be reckoned with, like it or not — the publication has over the years accelerated to absurdity, devolved to inanity, shrunk into a whiny club of simpering sycophants screaming full force in an empty echo chamber. An exercise in intellectual onanism, today’s NRO has nothing to say about the future because it remembers nothing of the past. It is conservatism not only without a conscience, but without understanding of that which it purports to conserve.

It may be debatable whether there was ever a Buckleyite movement wholly separate from the neoconservative impulse, or at what point the worms began eating into the flesh of the magazine. But that the neocons hijacked the magazine, silenced any conservative vein of thought not in harmony with their heterodox and revolutionary views (can one be at the same time a conservative and a revolutionary?), and proceeded to redefine what passes as modern conservatism to suit their alien agenda cannot be denied.

So now that the neoconservatives have successfully burrowed themselves so deeply into what was once the conservative movement that they have killed the host, they look around at the destruction they have wrought and scream, “don’t blame us!”

Thus we find ourselves faced with chief whiner of the National Review universe Jonah Goldberg, a man absolutely fearless at the thought of sending others to die in disastrous wars overseas but cowering at the thought of placing himself in harm’s way, arguing that we must not call him and his cohorts what they actually are. In his latest little bitch session in some corner of NRO, he tells us that, “The Term ‘Neocon’ Has Run It’s Course.”

Don’t call us neocons, he says, because the word has no meaning, it never had meaning, and you’re all just a bunch of anti-Semites if you continue to use it. Here is a summary of Jonah Goldberg’s argument for why we should not call the neocons neocons:

1) Neocons were never that interested in foreign policy at first. The neocon was merely, in the words of Neocon Godfather Irving Kristol, “a liberal who was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.”

2) Neoconservatism is not even an ideology at all, but rather, as Kristol averred, a “persuasion.”

3) Neocons like Jeane Kirkpatrick did not advocate rapid liberalization in authoritarian countries, but preferred gradual change. In other words, regime change through the National Endowment for Democracy rather than a US invasion.

4) Neocons were not that radical in their anti-communism, in fact they were more dovish even than the standard National Review writer during the Cold War.

5) Democrats like Bill Clinton also wanted regime change so you can’t just blame the neocons.

6) It’s not fair that neocons get the blame for the disastrous 2003 Iraq war. Lots of others joined them in advocating for the war but they all turned against it while the neocons held steadfast in support.

7) Critics of neoconservatism are actually just anti-Semites. Their criticism of neoconservatism as an intellectual movement is just cover for their hatred of, as Jonah indelicately puts it, “Hebraic super-hawk[s].”

8) We’re all neocons now, so stop calling us neocons. Every Republican is a super hawk, we won, history has ended, so let’s bury those old Cold War terms and just accept that the neocons are the masters. Move along, nothing to see here.

“Meanwhile,” Goldberg concludes, “the Right is having a long overdue, and valuable, argument about how to conduct foreign policy. Keep it going, just leave neoconservatism out of it.”

Ah yes, let’s have a debate about foreign policy with a pre-condition that everyone agree with the neocon view of foreign policy — pre-emptive war, American exceptionalism at the barrel of a gun, military Keynesianism, national security state at home, NSA surveillance of Americans, gunboat diplomacy without the diplomacy, and so on.

Sorry Jonah. Not going to happen. Sorry that history is a cruel judge of your disastrous movement, but don’t count on the rest of us to pretend something isn’t what it is. Neocon

http://russia-insider.com/en/politic...eocons/ri12203
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