[Marxism] The Rockefeller dynasty, Christian missionaries and neoconservatism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Oil

Neo-conservative's roots were planted first by Rockefeller
A strange marriage a century ago between Christian missionaries and
cut-throat capitalists created the world's first billionaire, and it's a
marriage still working for men like Harper and Bush
By Dan Adleman

Modern day neo-conservatism is usually associated with the Project for the
New American Century, a "think tank" of prominent right-wing warmongers
(including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Richard
Perle, John Bolton, and Francis Fukuyama) who got together in 1997 to argue
for a new "Pax Americana," whereby the global order "must have a secure
foundation on unquestioned US military preeminence" with full-scale
domination of not only the world and its resources, but also space and
cyberspace.

In 1998, PNAC sent a letter to then-President Clinton, urging him to
declare war against Iraq on the basis of its proximity to Iran and Israel
and its rich oil reserves: "While the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides
the immediate justification [for war], the need for a substantial American
force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam
Hussein. . . . And even should US-Iranian relations improve, retaining
forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in
US security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region."

PNAC luminaries like former Assistant Secretary of Defense and current
World Bank president Paul.Wolfowitz and Alan Bloom (who set up shop at the
University of Toronto and formed the kernel of what later developed into
the so-called Calgary School, the ideological wing of Harper's
Conservatives), claim direct intellectual lineage from Leo Strauss, a
post-WWII German philosopher who (perhaps rightly) saw democracy as being
rife with nihilism and constantly in jeopardy of falling victim to the
tyranny of the majority.

In response to this, he advocated a kind of modern Machiavellian
aristocracy that would use the "noble lies" of religion and nationalism to
manipulate the dumb, hedonistic masses into doing the bidding of the
natural ruling elites. And it was this very policy of calculated deception
and manipulation that the Bush administration used to coerce the American
public into getting behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A true genealogy of neo-conservatism, however, should begin well before
Strauss' ideas began to shape the minds of young Wolfowitz and Bloom, and
should reach back to John D Rockefeller Sr.

Rockefeller Sr, the founder of Standard Oil, used Christian missionaries in
the American west to soften up and gather intelligence on the Native
American communities that inhabited oil-rich land. In Thy Will Be Done:
Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, authors Gerard Colby
and Charlotte Dennett point out that the evangelization process insidiously
mollified the natives, weakening their communal social structure and
subverting their will to defend themselves against exploitation. In 1902,
Rockefeller's right-hand man, Baptist preacher Fred Gates, wrote him a
letter praising their exploits: "We are only in the very dawn of commerce,
and we owe that dawn to the channels opened up by Christian missionaries. .
. . The effect of the missionary enterprise of the English speaking peoples
will be to bring them the peaceful conquest of the world." Little could
Gates or Rockefeller have known just what a profound impact this symbiotic
neo-conflation of seemingly disparate agendas would have on the trajectory
of the American empire.

full: http://www.republic-news.org/archive/141-repub/141_dan_adleman.htm


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