Re: The weird men behind Bush's war

[utopian <utopian@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not
> the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist
> movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist
> liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of
> militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or
> political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics,
> including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak
> nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for
> "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after
> President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the
> permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism.
> Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as
> the Palestinians.
>
I don't think that it is sufficient to say "Most neoconservative defence
intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right" and then say
"morphed" from "the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement" into
"neoconservative" without at least citing one individual by name. How does
the "morphing" take place?

I say this without contradicting the well-know fact that many early American
communists from Lovestone on, including ex-Trotskyists, ex-left-wing
socialists, and ex-Stalinists became right-wing ideologues. But there are
several problems with this analysis. First, these figures seemed to have
started out as right-wingers. Second, the ex-socialist types operated
primarily as either ideological opponents or secondary aides to the primary
leaders of U.S. imperialism, i.e., they never rose as high as Bush's
neocons. Third, the ability that they brought worked primarily against the
Marxism of Stalin's Soviet Union and the Third International. These figures
that played this role have died off or are in their 90s. Morphing seems
closer to the "past lives" of Shirley Maclaine than to any real analysis.

Utopian