Fascism Galore

THE LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS
By David Arthur Walters

The awful truth about torture - the President who refuses to prosecute crimes condones them.

The truth was always out there. The United States of America tortures political prisoners. After torture was redefined by pettifogging lackeys to exclude torture, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who had far more political prisoners penned up in Cuba at once than did Fidel Castro during his entire dictatorship, insisted that this great nation of ours does not use “torture.” But only fools are fooled by the words of professional prevaricators and pathological liars.

The awful truth about torture, that it causes a great deal of suffering to everyone concerned, including the interrogators themselves, and that it does not work, certainly does not bother patriotic people who hate the enemies of their pater, whether that father is in heaven or on earth. Anything whatsoever, otherwise condemned as immoral, is justified under the rubric of patriotism. Of course lying is satanic. Yet it is said there can be no god without a corresponding satan, no truth absent lies; in sum, no good without complementary evil. In any case, as history proves, to call a liar a liar is not to condemn him when he is a patriot who believes he is doing the right thing sanctioned by that heavenly father whose authority is far greater than that of any earthly father.

Carl Schmitt, doctor of jurisprudence, author of philosophical totalitarianism, tutelary father of several policies of the Bush administration, embraced lying as the right way to get the right things done. Lying is a necessary means to obtain the right end, he thought, especially in a democracy, where so many factions are at odds. Torture, if contrary to law, would be quite all right according to his extralegal approach: he argued in favor of the implementation of emergency dictatorial powers so that the “right” thing could be done. For instance, he condoned Hitler’s indefinite suspension of the Weimar constitution.

Ultimately, as the Prussian forefathers of Germany’s New Conservatism – adopted by American thinkers and dubbed neo-conservatism - who admired and misinterpreted Hobbes insisted, might is right, hence might makes right, not vice versa. Does not the deity, especially the deity identified by the pagan term “god”, stand for the absolute, unmitigated power that everyone wants and worships? They admired Machiavelli too. Machiavelli had a much better world in mind than the one at hand, but his experience told him that many devious means were necessary for its realization. However, to paraphrase the lawyers, a prince should do his best avoid the mere appearance of impropriety, especially when his methods are improper. Those methods might included covering up his improper conduct – are lawyers disbarred for the mere appearance of misconduct, when no misconduct can be proved?

The truth was out there. We suspected it all along – the highest officials of this great nation of ours were lying about the evidence which they said gave the nation preemptory cause for destroying a sovereign state, and about the methods for obtaining further evidence from suspects, including torture. But the awful truth is no problem for those who appreciate the use of prefabricated pretexts for doing whatever they want to do. Moreover, if one lies long enough, the lies seem to be true. The interrogators believed the infamous prisoner had already told them everything he knew without being tortured, and certain line officers thought the brutality to be completely unnecessary, but a highly placed lawyer opined that torture was necessary even if no useful information was to be gained. Indeed, the CIA, under sway of the prevailing hysterical confabulations, faithfully believed that he must know something else. The fact of the matter was that there was no way to tell if the prisoner was withholding information, but as long as interrogators believed there must be some information, that was sufficient ground to continue the torture.

Officials came over from headquarters to watch the last session of torture. Maybe the officials enjoyed it, but other observers did not – the tormenting of the prisoner reportedly distressed his captors, who were traumatized by the depths of misery and degradation the captive was subjected to.” Despite their distress, they believed the torture was necessary. Those in favor of the brutality have associated their discomfort with normal human sympathy, and their willingness to continue the brutality with their sense of service to a higher, supposedly just cause. But we suspect their discomfort was due to their sense of the grave injustice that they were doing, and the doing of it was continued due to their subservience to authority. We give them credit for their distress, for the true Fascist Type would have thought nothing of the distress, or would even have enjoyed the suffering in the subject. Notwithstanding that credit, their distress indicates they knew they were doing wrong, and they should be charged with war crimes. So should the CIA officers and administration lawyers who gave the go-ahead, and so should the president and vice-president if they ordered or condoned the brutality that is presently degrading the United States far more than it debased the captive at the time.

In his defense, former Vice President Cheney claimed that the brutality did not go too far. He probably feels, if the face of political evil does not lie, that it did not go far enough. Other former officials of the Bush administration believe the brutality was righteous. Michael V. Hayden and Michael B. Mukasey publicly stated that the revelations of torture due to the declassification of the documents “will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gather in the past, and we will came to sorely regret on Sept 11, 2001.” In other words, revelations of criminal activity including crimes against humanity committed under the guise of patriotism will convert the perpetrators into the same sort of law-abiding cowards and weaklings they are supposed to be serving by doing their illegal dirty work for them. This brings to mind the question as to who the cowards are – are they not the bullies and thugs who hide behind the big guns?

Now President Barrack Hussein Obama, who is billed as the instrument of CHANGE, has eschewed recriminations. If there are no punitive consequences for reprehensible conduct, it shall recur time and time again – perhaps when the current president feels covert torture must be relied upon to save the nation from an imminent threat. President Obama does not plan on prosecuting the interrogators who were merely doing their patriotic duty under orders from higher-ups. “We were only doing what we were told, we doing our patriotic duty,” claimed Nazi officers charged with crimes against their fatherland and humanity. “Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” President Obama declared. Not to lay the blame is to condone the behavior of those who should be blamed and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. No doubt President Obama would pardon the likes of President Bush and Vice President Cheney if they were indicted for patriotic crimes. So what has changed in this regard? Nothing: except that we Americans speak of our homeland instead of our fatherland or motherland. Patriotism is still the last refuge of scoundrels, if not the first one.

The Spice of Life

Variety is essential to life. The free market propaganda to impose Totalitaria.

Not only is variety the spice of life, variety is essential to life. Yet when we were suddenly confronted with a global economic disaster during the Asian Crisis, most Americans passively stood by as our business and political elite scurried about the globe and prescribed the cause of the disaster as its remedy, insisting that our monolithic political economy, a plutocratic synthesis of business and government, should be the global political economic order.

Yes, the antidote prescribed was the poison itself; what we need, they said, is more of the same business as usual. The advocates of the new world order preach unrestrained private capitalism, as if General Electric were a mom and pop store. The power elite insists that "free" exchange is the Yellow Brick Road to total utopia, and they cynically identify their desire to dominate the world with "democracy". They publicly worship the idol of competition because they want to open up foreign markets and dominate them so they can unload their surplus instead of sharing it with the people they have exploited for that surplus; its just distribution by virtue of fair exchange would greatly diminish the profits of the vested interests, who are in the business of getting something for nothing, and the obscene salaries drawn by the managerial class would have to be eliminated. The democratic freedom of their free market, free trade, and free exchange is the freedom to corner most of the freedom and democracy for themselves.

Of course the Asian Crisis has receded into the past and is for most people a mere blip on the screen if they can remember it at all. What is so typical about it is that the cause of the disaster was recommended as its cure. Of course "reforms" are usually proposed and passed to reduce the probability that the same thing will happen again. Notwithstanding the ancient doctrine of eternal recurrence, history does not repeat itself precisely, so it invariably appears that one reform or another really worked. Another kind of crisis invariably occurs in short order. It seems to differ from all the others - each crisis seems to be one-of-a-kind. Hence new sorts of tweaks, adjustments, and upgrades are recommended to maintain the machine. The machine is said to be guided by an invisible hand, but in fact the engineers have carefully laid out plans to keep the expanding servile class alienated from the means of production while grinding their wages down to the minimum; to that end millions of people must be kept desperately unemployed and convinced they are somehow at fault, lest they revolt and turn to crime.

Very few hard working couples take time off from their two or more jobs and householding duties in order to protest against the systematic reduction of the population to automatons. Part of our training in the American Way of Gilded Individualism is to compete with other individuals in hopes we will get filthy rich so we can engage in conspicuous consumption of objects. Cultural depth does not count until one has enough money to buy the leisure required to acquire it. The objective competition to get one up or over on other individuals naturally leaves every one feeling very empty and undignified when not dutifully consuming fast food and entertainment in the few spare hours left over from work. Competitive as we are, it is highly unlikely we will be moved to unite to effect radical reform of the system, or follow in the footsteps of our treasonous forefathers, revolt and set up a new government. We may commiserate for an hour or two about the faults of the system and bemoan our spiritual impoverishment; but please do not ask to put our wooden shoes in the machine works, for that would be self-destructive, in terms of the self we know so well - a cog in the machine.

We are domesticated to the idea that making money is the meaning of life. We affirm on a daily basis by almost every deed that our economic religion is the one and only true religion for the entire world. Yes, a few heretics question the dogma of the zealous free market missionaries, but their ranting is smothered by the popular public bonfires of the internationally organized media, with an occasional reference to hysterical, anti-inevitability blasphemy. When something goes wrong when our free trade and democracy is imposed on folks, then only more of the same business as usual will do - the alternatives are anathema, the evils of red devils.

"After all, is not the Eternal Truth revealed in the Holy Book faithfully kept by our Glorified Bookkeepers?" asks the High Priest. "Do not the Credits exceed the Debits, the Good the Evil, the Pleasure the Pain? After all the Sacrifices, does not the Black Ink exceed the Red that has been shed?"

Never mind that the calculations leave us feeling cold and dead. Never mind that we have too little time for Love, and that we feel like strangers in our own land. No, we must lord it over the earth and convert the heathen to Our Image, for that is the Mission of This Great Nation of Ours Under The One and Only God of the Demeaning Religion. As proof of our faith, we shall baptize all of them in a flood of Digital Tokens and teach them the Generally Accepted Principles of the Sacred Bookkeeping System. Never mind, again, that what the Lord gives He can take away at will, crushing the inhabitants flat as matzo that they may get to know Him better.

But let us not be too cynical and pessimistic, for suitable economic mythologies corresponding if not precedent to advancing "scientific" technique are an indispensable aspect of civilizations. For instance, a technique of primitive household management requires at least some belief in the virtue of submission to the household god and relevant myths for the household discipline to be effective. The lord of the estate owes more reverence to the god than his retainers, for he has more at stake. A few retainers, wanting their liberty, might take it and flee the well-ordered household, choosing bare subsistence and the terrors and opportunities of the wild over the security of the prevailing order, thus restricting the extent of the settle order. It is this glimmering of individual liberty and the occasional association of such deviants combined into voluntary and sometimes violent opposition or revolution that tends to soften the behavior of the authority in its efforts to keep retainers necessary for the expansion, upkeep and defense of the estate; that is, the estate's fortune will grow greater in accordance with the managed spread of personal liberty, the spiritual power that creates all wealth.

The spread of liberty has been a gradual process even with rapid technological advances. It is important to keep in mind that, in the context of the international evangelism, the modern economic rituals and symbols as well as the infrastructure corresponding to the raising of the material standard of living of the average individual in America to a level envied in developing nations have taken many years to fabricate and construct. Furthermore, we should know that our material success is not due to the relatively recent reformation of economic theology, but is the result of thousands of years invested in the cultivation of personal liberty by means of love and war.

Yet our current authorities would suddenly impose on the whole world what has taken centuries to cultivate. The stage of development of its fractions, its social cultures and political organizations, are virtually ignored. The neoconservative ruling elite considers other, more traditional cultures and economies inferior to their own. Having no heartfelt respect whatsoever for the identity, integrity and character of other peoples and their native ideals, our most powerful adherents to monetary dogma, believing that money is the Holy Spirit of mankind, approach them with electronic trinkets and mirrors and hotdogs; no sooner has a bite been taken, they pull out their laptops and proclaim: "There is only One Way to Total Utopia. Submit to Free Market. Be saved!"

Well, for many of us domestics, that idol might be good enough for the time being, although we are familiar enough with the defects we hope someday to cure: indeed, some of us still suspect in it an inherently fatal, selfish flaw; and even the more so as teenage maidens of the formerly great "evil empire", now converted to our doctrine in its neofascist form, sell themselves into slavery to organized gangsters. Remember: it took ages to fashion our adored idol, and other peoples have their very own idols, most of which are much older than ours. Those peoples are accustomed to karmic millennia, and not the instant cures of our miraculous faith healers offering snake oil with professionally manicured hands.

Only by following troops on devastated grounds have we worked a few dramatic imitations of our economic miracles. The peace and prosperity achieved in reconstruction was an aftermath of conflicts based on broadly accepted moral grounds, a spiritual fight among highly "civilized" cultures for freedom in order against the evils of Totalitaria. And now we would impose our own, seemingly kinder version of Totalitaria on cultures that despise us for the imposition. There will be as much if not more collateral damage, but it will be done in a civilized manner. Tragically, the destructive factor of our touted "creative destruction" has yet to achieve its end. Neoliberals led by neoconservative fascists are wreaking havoc on alternative cultures and economies. Oh, but it will work in the long run, or so they say; and they say even more of the same business as usual is needed to finish the job; and may the god of the new world order forbid social welfare programs, for the costly collective-unconscious commitment to human welfare is a savage superstition that must be painfully adjusted to the dictates of their Long-Term Advantage.

We should reconsider the economic exploitation of foreign nations in the holy names of Free Market and Democracy. The business mate of the political-economic alliance seems to form the worst sort of relationships on foreign soil; relationships that have too often resulted in domestic embarrassments and shame, if not more violent repercussions. The ruling elite of Big Business has in effect profited by the conversion of the middle class to the underclass and the subjugation, terror and death of poor people, many of whom are, ironically, capable of starting a successful enterprise with a direct loan of $100 and the political liberties taken for granted where those dollars are minted.

Surely it is high time for dogmatic economic pretexts to be abandoned and naked motives examined in the light of day. Could it be that all this talk about democratic Salvation is a neurotic defense of the relentless drive to expand Corporate's markets at great human cost so consumers can consume more and more and more, as if they were gusanos? More of what? The United States is still relatively well off. A few get luxuries and the rest have more or less garbage, trash, and junk. Is there not some better occupation? Must Quantity be our god and Quality sacrificed when we have fouled our bed and are choking in the waste of abundance?

As a people we should be deeply embarrassed by much of the global economic activity of our business and political ministers and shamed by our silence while their false, obsolete excuses ring in our ears. We know for a fact that the prevailing economic myths are obsolete and have been led to suffering, starvation and the eventual mutual murder of millions in world world war. Every reasonably well education person knows that the successes of our collective enterprises are due to the moral and political regulation of economic activity. Yet, we have time and time again stood by and even applauded and personally invested in corporations and traders running rampant and unrestrained beyond our borders, leaving peoples and economies in ruins, trampling the poor, basing their privileged freedom on the sweat of low-wage slaves or the simple jockeying of relative monetary positions made particularly profitable by the havoc and turmoil fast bucks thrive on. That sort of freedom is directly proportional to the positive degree of wealth - it is not fair trade, and social injustice has been its fruit. Unless such activities are restrained and harnessed to good ends, no miracle will save us from bad works, at least not until we are crushed and crawling on our knees in ashes and renting our sackcloth. Even those dire circumstances, in retribution for our past advice, someone having a good day will tell us in our bad day that we will have to suffer painful adjustments for awhile, because, by decree of the god of Long-Term Advantage, we will be finally released from the grips of karma.

A good prophecy of doom is one that does not come true because people listen to it and take appropriate actions as free people. It becomes more apparent every day that we may be standing on the verge of an economic disaster that shall make the Great Depression look like an extended picnic. While the brainwashed masses in their habitual momentum maintain blind faith in the fantastic ambiguous myths that cradle the causes of such catastrophes, the social gyroscope shall eventually wobble out of control as each effort to maintain its equilibrium becomes more desperate. Even then, alarmed by the growing probability of personal misfortune, the preachers of political economy shall hold fast to those doctrines that would force every exception into the rule. They shall adjure the flocks in telecast sermons to keep the faith that abstracts economic behavior from the whole man and places it on an altar to be worshipped as the embodiment of "scientific" law. The principle of this law is that the evolution of intelligently organized greed will inevitably save the world, providing that it is organized into a single system. Their enthusiasm causes them to forget that all organizations, no matter how large they are, are subject to even the most improbable accidents and final dissolution - if there is only one organization, the whole lot is at once damned.

Hardly anyone today doubts the merits of resisting Totalitaria as represented by such personal idols as Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Yet few are given to resist the monomaniacal pseudo-conservative ("neoconservative") thinking that is leading the United States of America to become an empire even more evil than the empire neofascist leaders loved to hate. The subordination of minds to a particular political-economic concept is the beginning of the end of freedom, for freedom is about the moral evaluations that create personal identity. The small child expresses the natural struggle for variety when he or she states the first, momentous declaration of independence in the little word "no". Too many of us have been rendered indifferent to freedom by propaganda that fashions every mind in its image.

Eventually repressed passion is bound to rebel, dragging the mind with it. For a single organization is the absolute negation of all organizations - multiple organizations can only achieve perfect identity in death. When our prefabricated whale submerges it shall sink for want of inspiration; we shall find within no bulging bourgeois belly to carry us to the far shore. We must resist unto death the watery grave. We must bring about a restoration of independent thinking to keep us afloat. each individual must strive to obtain a degree in liberty. For variety is not only the spice of life, it is essential to life.

Vituperative Recriminations


Shortly after I impetuously submitted my anti-neoconservative polemic to radical publishers and reflected on what I had written, I was somewhat taken back aback by my vituperation disrespecting the president of the United States of America and the neoconservative forces of darkness he represents. Surely this aversion I feel for him and what he stands for, I mused, is hypocrisy at the very least, in fact the very thing I denounce him for.

The more I know about political religion, the more I despise the neoconservative neofascists. I confess that I have lately gone so far as to satanize the president and his staff, drawing horns on their heads and swastikas on their foreheads. In fact I think my behavior proves the validity of a dogma set forth by Carl Schmitt, one of German's foremost neoconservative pioneers, that politics is to discover who your enemies are so you can hate them and get rid of them.

But hate is anti-Christian; that is, if Christianity is a religion of love and toleration. I do not know for certain because I am not a confessed Christian - I was brought up in the Judeo-Christian culture, and could not help being influenced by it. Christian love is not supposed to be the hate-others-based group-love of the Hebrew tribes. Some Jewish rabbis are still wont to declare that it is a sacred duty to hate thine enemies - but do not rejoice at the moment they fall.

Perhaps Marcion was right in his attempt to take the Jew out of Jesus in order to make Christianity a religion in its own right. When he compiled the first Christian testament, he discarded all texts as spurious except Paul's letters, and Luke's gospel excised of its Jewish content. Ironically, Marcion's hero Paul was a Jew and a Pharisee to begin with. Saul of Tarsus, we are told, saw the Phantasm of the Loving Alien on the road and was duly converted. He eventually wrote the Christian Magna Carta of freedom and toleration to the Galatians, thereby replacing complex discriminatory Law with simple Love. However, Paul's loving letter is flawed by a hateful vituperation against all those who might disagree.

No doubt the Phantasm of The Loving Alien arose from the guilt Saul of Tarsus felt for persecuting dissident Jews; or rather it evolved from the seed of love we find in every human being, a seed cultivated by the Jews and especially the Pharisees - the hateful defamation of Pharisees by Christians is really a shame, for there would be no Christianity without them. The converting love was a fanatic love: the convert would clear the air of smoke, rendering it limpid that all may inhale its purity and be inspired forevermore not to smoke and so on.

When love alone did not work as well as expected, except for those sexual libertines who believed to own mates was a sin, the cruel old law was reverted to; and then it was rationalized that Jesus Christ came not to destroy the law but to fulfill it. Wherefore today we have a ruling neoconservative cult of frustrated Jews who call themselves born-again fundamentalist Christians. They worship the prehistoric ambivalent god, the arbitrary god who is randomly cruel and merciful. They worry constantly over the deployment of genitalia and weapons. They declare themselves absolutely in favor of life and the death penalty - they lovingly forgive the condemned man before killing him, thus relieving themselves of anxiety over their hypocrisy - a suitable ritual can justify anything. Their political religion always finds an enemy and they are willing to kill enemies in the name of state and god. Their leader can do no wrong: he declared his political hero to be Jesus Christ, implying that his savior is a lying politician beholden to Caesar.

If the frustrated Jews were really Old Testament Jews, they would not hail their Caesar in the Senate - they would revolt and assassinate him forthwith. For to give Caesar his due is one thing; but to love and obey Caesar, to turn one's cheek and forgive Caesar, to treat him as if he were god on earth, would not only be mistaken and immoral but would be blasphemous as well. The Christianity that forgives all, even after confession, repentance and restitution, is inherently evil to the either/or man. Although one might parole the penitent, the evil must never be forgiven. Evil must not be ignored, for he who ignores evil is good for nothing. A line between the forces of good and evil must be drawn; thus spake the real Zarathustra, and morals improved in Persia until the Manicheans and Zurvanites blurred the distinction and restored the perverse god of hypocritical monotheism. To hate evil and to love good are the right things to do. To overthrow Caesar is right. May the Judeo-Christians revolt. But no, they embrace their emperor in unholy wedlock of church and state, as if he were Byzantine and Orthodox.

What possesses me, a mass man, a social creature, to hate President Bush and his ministers? Can I blame my passion on a god? Men are good and evil. Wherefore the ambiguous religion of hate-based love or love-based hate was projected onto an ambivalent, incredibly cruel and merciful one-god. And the one-god is short on mercy wherever the fundamentalists are concerned. Marcion's mission to replace Law with Love, and to rid Christianity of its Jewishness failed. His church at one time was greater than the 'catholic' church. The catholic elite did not have just cause to persecute the first great heretic for professing the Phantasm - The Stranger and his Alien Love.

Marcion bought a church franchise in Rome; they took it back from him, so he went out on his own and the flock grew and grew. Inquisitors were sent out with a warning: be careful when you enter their churces, for it is very difficult to tell from their conduct the difference between them and us. The catholics had no sound reason to suppress the marcionite church for the sake of catholicism, for the genuine source of universalism resides in every human being. Love and hate flow from that source. Alas, the individual, who is inherently rebellious by virtue of natural love of absolute liberty and the will to persist forever without impedance, is not the omnipotent being he would be. He is set apart from others by his individuality; the society of others may for the Good of their society restrain his love of anarchic or godly liberty, and, by means of public law arising from tried and proven folkways, define what is prohibited.

But when the suppression of anarchic liberty is unjust and overbearing, the love of liberty may be organized by hatred to revolt. I feel that happening to me when I see a photograph of the president and his ministers, or read another absurd speech about forcing democracy down the throats of the world, or hear more about their tyranny and its effect on the poor. When love does not work, we tend to hatred. When we try and try again to get our fair share but cannot join the pack who would hoard the social good for themselves; when the old adage "If you can't fight them, join them" is rendered inapt by prolonged rejection; a new adage arises: "If you cannot join them, fight them unto the death."

What can one do when he humbly seeks gainful employment everywhere, but despite his talents and skills, or even because of them, he is kicked like a dog onto the street to die a premature death? That is social murder.

Now that I reflect on my vituperations against the forces of darkness intimidating the world, I am beginning to understand that I too am only human. This is a matter of life or death to me. When my open palm is greeted with a closed fists; when I am called un-American for speaking out against the Second Bush War against Iraq; when I am called a traitor because I impugn the policies of the liars, thieves, and murderers who preside over the business now governing politics; when I am treated like a panhandler because I seek employment; I tend to vituperation.

Perhaps I am take my frustration out on an abstract scapegoat, but I don't think so. One thing I have had that had been dependable: taste. The present government of the United States of America has a foul taste, and I believe it must be overthrown to save the state. Although I am generally happy-go-lucky, I despise the lying neofascistic neoconservative cult leading the pseudo-liberal anti-democratic forces against the people of the world. More specifically, I detest President Bush and his ministers. I sincerely believe they should be in prison, and not at the head of government. I sincerely believe something must be done to curb the forces of darkness emanating from corporate board tribalism, or else the world shall soon be lost for good.

Now I know why a man who has been a pacifist his whole life might wind up wanting revolution in the end. His pacifism was probably compensation for his tendency to violence. Since hate and love are Siamese twins, we might want to look at the other side of a man's hatred instead of simply saying it is wrong to hate. We might go to the cause of his hatred, to the ideals he loves, the ideals he knows have been betrayed by the traitors he despises. Perhaps then a lamp might be lit to organize the forces of love and light to overcome the forces of hate and darkness.

Neoconservative Pseudoconservatism


Neoconservatism differs from true conservatism and is correctly called pseudo-conservatism because true conservatism appertains to the theory and practice of true liberty; that is, liberty based on proven moral worth, on what is right, rather than on brute might and its idol, material wealth. True conservatives would conserve liberty - that is their prime directive - but true liberty is not anarchic: without ruling principle (arche) or rational leaders (archons). True conservatism is an historical or timeless concept appertaining to the moral conservation of the principle of liberty, to freedom in order. Such an order is natural to man, whose special nature as the human species is moral - a term that until recently denoted the operations of the rational mind including the regulation of the human spirit of liberty by virtuous mores of the highest order.

Marcus Cato was the best practitioner of true conservatism in Roman times. He aimed to conserve morality as well as personal property. He was mild-mannered in private but severe in the exercise of his public duties; a frugal man and the only Roman official whom could be fully trusted with the public treasury, a treasury he once filled by diplomatic means instead of the militant means beloved by Caesar and Pompey. Pompey bragged about the twenty talents of gold and silver in spoils he had contributed to the treasury; but Cato bragged that, without horses or men, he had brought in, through diplomatic means, far more money, seven-thousand talents of gold and silver, than Pompey had contributed via all his conquests. Of course if we count the lands, peoples, animals, and goods, and the expected additional revenue of fifty to eighty-five million dinarii a year listed on Pompey's tablets - set up because a two-day procession was inadequate to display all the spoils - we think Pompey had more to brag about.

In any case, Cato's true conservatism differed in important respects from the amoral or immoral principles of today's neoconservatives, who identify morality with the limitation of murder to perceived enemies, the heterosexual deployment of genitalia, the ownership of women, wombs and other forms of wealth. The economic objective of neoconservatives and neoliberals, who idolize Competition and who tend to speak of gigantic nodules of the corporate oligopoly as if they were mom and pop stores, is to restrain production and competition and trade, that false shortages and cheap labor might be fully exploited. Their unrestrained lust, greed, prevarication and hypocrisy indicates that they have been, in a word, corrupted by the very sin some of them claim is original to the human race.

Cato, in marked contrast to Julius Caesar and President Bush, was devoted to curbing corruption and thwarting usurpation by preserving the laws constituting the traditional republic. But our neoconservatives identify ’democracy’ with publicly unregulated, privately regulated capitalism, controlled by an unelected executive elite. They overlook or condone the squandering of public and private trusts by corporate trustees. They admire robber barons and bemoan the arrest and imprisonment of such ruthless and unsavory leaders of enterprise as Michail B. Khodorkovsky, the Russian business oligarch and founder of the Yukos oil company who was awarded public property in rigged auctions for pennies on the dollar.

Neoconservatives praised Mr. Khodorkovsky as a visionary entrepreneur, a business genius who made a huge profit off of the assembled public assets and who wound up rubbing shoulders with the Western political elite and oil company magnates; they bemoaned the multi-billionaire's conviction by a Russian court, a conviction they perceive as a serious blow to "democracy" and the "free" market - meaning an unregulated oligarchic market in the hands of an unelected business elite. On one point the neoconservatives are right: the prosecution of Mr. Khodorkovsky was "politically motivated" and selective; the prosecution and conviction orchestrated by the most powerful crook in Russia was a violation of the socialist and democratic privileges available to the neofascist elite, a travesty of the honor ideally had among the top thieves, members of The Thing, whose crimes are preferably legalized by bribed legislators.

French and Dutch voters rejected that kind of democracy, waging a "democratic intifada" against the unaccountable and irresponsible power elite behind the anti-democratic European constitution. The party elite on both left and right (as if the polity still has two wings) held hands but lost their bid to get the "free" market or "neoliberal" constitution sanctified by the people. The gap between the elite and the people is one of credibility - the people no longer believe the elite because the evidence has proven them to be pathological liars. The invisible Hand supposedly guiding the free market casino is a filthy and stingy hand: Mammon gave the Hand a license to steal; the truly devout people would cut it off. Not that the people abhor fair trade, which is available in a two-handed market. IF the purportedly obsolete principles of liberal economics can still be the great boon as advertised, THEN let the product be fairly distributed, sayeth the voice of social good, the voice traditionally associated with ethical Good if not God. Now is not the time to preach reduced benefits and less protection of labor to wage slaves in the name of false democracy.

The "free" market neoliberals and neoconservatives alike are appalled by the upset of their united European gilded apple cart. The antisocial regressives share an essential predilection for the unrestrained accumulation of capital in a few hands. Wherefore they share as well a prejudice against providing for the social welfare. It is the very nature of neoconservative puritanism to create a dire need for charity.

Back in the United States, President Bush nominated Christopher Cox, a devotee of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unrestrained greed and gilded individualism, to the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cox worked in the Reagan White House during the good old corrupt days. Congressman Cox has had his main financial support from big business, lawyers and accountants. He fought against accounting rules designed to curb corruption; he was a sponsor of the bill that made it easier for the crooks presiding over the likes of Enron and Worldcom to bilk investors out of billions of dollars. He is expected to do whatever he can to gut security regulations once his nomination is confirmed. He will replace the Republican "traitor" who dared to vote with Democrats to do the right things: William H. Donaldson. Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama senator to heads the Senate Banking Committee expected to confirm Cox, expects Cox to unite the SEC so that the right-wing neoconservatives who lead the Republican Party can get their way. Shelby does not realize that a democratic consensus moves to the truth and not with the Republican neoconservative party line.

"I have long thought that the lack of consensus on a number of big issues was very troubling, with 3-2 votes, and especially with a Republican chairman skipping form the two other Republicans on several big votes,”“ said Senator Shelby.

President Bush, whom we distrust for the good reason that he is a professional liar and hypocrite, declared: "As a champion of the free-enterprise system in Congress, Chris Cox knows that a free economy is built on trust." Now he would trust the security of the Social Security trust funds to his trusted colleagues, who comprise one of the greatest legally organized gangs of thieves the country has ever known.

Despite the apparent difference between the major parties today, despite the occasional resort to ideological rhetoric, the leaders of the parties have the same objectives: power in all its forms. In reality the power elite are anti-ideological or "pragmatic." A few ideological speeches are made by politicians to get the vote. But to take office they must take the hypocritical oath and forswear practicing the principles they professed to get elected.

Everybody knew that in the first place; yes, people who voted had high hopes for a few days, until the promises were broken yet again according to business as usual. And then they did not want to hear their candidate called a mass murderer and a liar and a fool, for acceptance of such castigations as true would imply that they too were, at the very least, morons (fools). Their candidate was for states rights, but he immediately runs to a federal court to contest a state election; he was against nation building, but he immediate proceeded to build nations; he was for free trade, but he immediate proceeded to restrain trade; he was for Jesus Christ, but he immediately rushed to war - indeed, he was groomed for war by his father and his father's ministers; that was actually the only plank in his platform. And he was very popular because he rushed to war. Hail Caesar! He can do no wrong nor will he admit wrong. Hair Caesar! With him in office, who needs a god? Hail Caesar! But the war is not going well, and the evidence can no longer be ignored even by the ignorant. The god is unmasked of the mask projected by fear and mass delusion.

Oh, it was all a game, really, a real illusion, and the people were deceived again. Forgive the people for creating a moronic public monster; after all, the people had very little say in selecting the candidates that they were privileged or allowed to vote for, and they have been trained to allow experts to decide what is best for them so they can work all day, and attend to their families, sports and other idle entertainments on weekends. Who kills whom and how the reproductive organs are employed are the main political considerations. Yes, the "democratic" election was just a game; a political ritual presided over by the power elite. And the neoconservative faction is the most cynical political game-player of all. First of all, its intellectual proponents embrace lying as necessary to move the masses. The neoconservatives have lied so much that they have become pathological liars who are prone to lying about their intentions and deeds even when they have good intentions and are doing good deeds. Some neoconservative leaders have made Hitler's famous fatal mistake: they have lied so often that they believe their lies.

The neoconservative lies go unnoticed and we hear "Hail Caesars!" all around. Journalists who must rehash the termitic pap of their colleagues, meet current deadlines, and keep their speaking engagements have no time to immerse themselves once again in the study of ancient Roman history and the Second and Third German Reichs: they have difficulty understanding the classical underpinnings of what is going on today, for the imperial presidency has no ideology. For instance, Knight Ridder's Washington correspondent, Steven Thomma, writes:

"Bush's vision defies ideology and makes labeling it difficulty. He sounds like a traditional conservative when he talks about the military or partially privatizing Social Security. But he would also expand government powers and send budget deficits soaring in was that conservatives and liberals find abhorrent."

If only "conservatives" and "liberals" themselves really knew the meaning or meaningless of their labels today. What the professional journalist does not recognize, because the very thought seems politically incorrect and insulting to his class, therefore revolutionary to him, is that President Bush is a neo-fascist, a neo-Roman imperialist. Indeed, an important difference between Julius Caesar and President Bush is that assistants carrying the fascist fasces that bind the dark forces of corporate board tribalism precede President Bush. Mind you that the neofascist neoconservatives are generous among themselves but stingy with the working majority and downright hostile to the poor. Julius Caesar was not only generous to his aristocratic friends; he was generous to the commoners as well. Of course the reason for Caesar's magnanimity to the plebs and their aspiring leaders may be attributed to their alleged disposition to rebel against the republican senate - an inclination today's Americans need to actually cultivate forthwith. The conservative majority in the Roman senate, under the leadership of the true conservative, Marcus Cato, would have blocked Caesar's climb to power, wherefore Caesar used the disaffected plebs to advance his interests. Alas, when the United States became Untied Hates of American rushing to its neoconservative disgrace, America had a Cato Institute but no Cato in the U.S. Senate to stand up to the popular tyrant.

We find the same anti-ideological and irrational primitive thinking of neoconservatism in the convenient arguments of Mussolini and Hitler. There really is no such thing as a consistent fascist philosophy or ideology. Whatever is convenient to the moment may be said; as long as the masses are marched around in circles to music and absurd slogans, as long as they have some bread and circus and think they are going somewhere, all is well for the power elite. If it were not for the fact that President Bush's popularity derives from a voting majority whose circumstances are relatively comfortable, he is a perfect candidate for postmodern ceasaristic dictator. Of course his popularity is waning; the canard is now a lame duck; fortunately, the U.S. Constitution provides for the virtual assassination of caesars.

Whether the neoconservative faction spreading the forces of darkness of corporate board tribalism over America will soon be a dead duck remains to be seen. Something had better change pretty soon or the living shall see hell surface on earth again. We cannot depend on the divine providence of an invisible hand: Cato remarked on the unreliability of divine providence: "Pompey, when he did not thing wisely or honestly, was always successful; and now that he would preserve his country, and defend her liberty, he is altogether unfortunate."

Nonetheless, the Stoic must do his duty in the face of that fickle fortune called divine providence by arbitrary men who would do anything to get what they want. Only good persons who do their duty are truly free: the wicked, who are owned by their irrational passions, are slaves. There will be hell to pay if the neoconservative movement is not thwarted at once. Otherwise, the process is likely to accelerate until the middle class is gutted out and the United States becomes just another American republic with an enormous gap between rich and poor, beset by revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, governed by dictatorial presidents and military juntas and the like. The liberals in fact if not in theory joined the neoconservative intellectual and moral decline some time ago. Those who dare call themselves liberals today are most often wolves in sheep's clothing. High ideals are ritually stated but deeds do not match the words. Authorities on both sides of the aisle are undemocratic and impudent. Pathological liars preside over the nation, over its business, political, military and religious institutions. Professional liberals cling to faith, not works; to advertising, not news; to form, not content; to images, not facts; to illusions, not realities. The writing is truly on the wall. But it seems that the people have been rendered illiterate by the trivial partisanship.

Partisan ideology has been reduced to rhetorical cover for the pragmatic pursuit of that happiness which is associated with the vast accumulation of power in its various form; the predominant form today is economic wealth, measured by units of monetary exchange. When examining neoconservative behavior today, we should keep its Roman origins in mind. Today President Bush is wrongly associated with Marcus Cato in the popular mind, while Julius Caesar is deemed to be a liberal democrat, in large part because of Ted Turner's well meaning movie, Caesar, wherein the politics of the leading men, especially Cato's views, were misrepresented. In point of fact, we find a much greater similarity in political disposition between President Bush and the emperor. Cato stands apart as the true conservative, the conservator of political liberty: in fact, Cato was the last man who defended the Roman Republic from popular tyranny.

Notwithstanding the personal differences between Julius Caesar and George W. Bush, Jr. and their different social and political circumstances, the 'neoconservative' presidency of George W. Bush, Jr. is a quasi-caesaristic 'democratic' dictatorship of popular greed and militarism rooted in the imperial aspirations of the populist dictators of the Roman Empire. The irrational spirit of the First Reich of the Roman Empire was revived by the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. Popular imperialism, as modified by the "barbarians", has been ably represented in modern times by Kaiser Wilhelm II of the Second Reich and Adolph Hitler of the Third Reich. President Bush is today's Anglo-American-Saxon neoconservative representative of caesaristic dictatorship. Postmodern neoconservative thought is a branch of the anti-ideological thinking derived from the "New Conservatism" of Germany. Students of neoconservatism may find various aspects of the subject illuminated in the works of Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes, Nicolo Machiavelli, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Heinrich von Treitzschke, Max Weber, General von Bernhardi, Friedrich Meinecke, Carl Schmidt, Wilhelm II, Adolph Hitler, Leo Strauss, Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice among others.

Carl Schmitt's works are particularly instructive. Schmitt is best known for his friend-foe political theory to the effect that politics is for finding out who your enemies are so you can kill them; in his own words: "Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy." Schmitt provided the "totalitarian” jurisprudential justification for Hitler's suspension of the Weimar Republic’s democratic constitution. Der Fuehrer, The Father of the Third Reich, conceived himself at the time as the democratic embodiment of the German people: in one speech, Hitler even claimed to be the most democratic of all democratic leaders because he actually exercised the will of the people. During times of crisis, Hitler was, like the Kaisers, Tsars and Caesars before him, moved to take extraordinary emergency measures to protect the empire from liberalism. Unlike the earlier Roman dictators, whose term and power was strictly limiter, Hitler made the crisis perpetual, asserting one pretext after another in order to unite the folk in hate, in hate-others based self-love; wherefore the democratic-republican Weimar constitution would never be restored.

Carl Schmitt indoctrinated Leo Strauss, who, in turn, immigrated to America and indoctrinated Paul Wolfowitz, President Bush's former assistant secretary of defense. Wolfowitz's role in justifying the pre-emptive, second Bush War on Iraq gained him the presidency of the World Bank, where he is pressing the free-market reforms responsible for the further impoverishment of peoples and the destruction of their national and ethnic cultures. Their new president outraged the staff at World Bank; he is apparently re-engineering the staff - downsizing them. Wolfowitz got into prestigious colleges, dodged the draft, buried himself in bureaucracy, got himself a political post, and proved himself to be generally incompetent. More recently, Wolfowitz responsible for the 46-page war plan, 'Defense Planning Guidance', the plan that President Bush used for the second Bush War on Iraq. The plan contradicts the conservative principle of political pluralism and repudiates democratic ideals.

For instance, the Four Freedoms outlined by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his January 6, 1941 speech: freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from fear and want. Now the plan to destroy the four freedoms has been implemented: the Establishment's press and other media hides the truth under a basket and sells neoconservative packs of lies - the liberal editors and journalists have become wolves in sheep's clothing. And with the help of its media, the Establishment propagates fear and intimidation while gutting out the middle class and augmenting poverty throughout the land. As for religion, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, the United States of America is a born-again, fundamentalist "Christian nation", with all the hatred and bigotry that the history of hate-based love implies, including the fervent wish that all non-Christians roast eternally on spits in hell's fires - the neoconservative or pseudoconservative religion is pseudo-Christianity. However that may be, we should heed well the following words from Roosevelt's speech when we behold America's temporary kaiser:

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Yes, Paul Wolfowitz was in charge of justifying President Bush's mad policy of world provocation. Post-Cold-War pluralism was to be replaced with the arrogant world domination of a sole superpower - the United States of American - an attack on which was an attack on civilization itself. Wherefore that great nation soon became the Untied Hates of America. World power was equated with oil: Oil = Power. The objective was no longer to "deter" or to "contain" rivals, but to impose a "new order" that would make it impossible for any other country to "generate global power." The born-again neoconservative president in the name of his god and holy father, the absolute power, the incomprehensible origin of the leadership principle, would do that. Like the National Socialists and Nazis of German empire and Reich, any and all effective means to achieve world domination are righteous - might is right. Hence the ideals of Western Civilization - Humanity, Law, Progress - are repudiated. According to the underlying pragmatic "philosophy" of the Wolfowitz plan, truth is irrelevant: lies may be used as instruments. The plain objective is to destroy inferior economic and national life. To that end, the mighty have a right and a duty to strike pre-emptively.

No, Paul Wolfowitz and his Hobbesian, Machiavellian, neoconservative company are not true conservatives. And neither was Caesar. Although Caesar had a traditional background, he was more "pragmatic" than Cato. Caesar wanted to be a priest; he believed he was descended from a goddess. Caesar, like President Bush, viewed the state as his divinely given instrument, the laws of which he would gladly suspend in crises that he might rule as a popular dictator. Thus was Caesar more flexible, non-ideological, and amoral than Cato, who was a Stoic backbencher in the senate until he rose to debate Caesar and win the execution of the five Cataline terrorists. Cato's personal mission was integrity: an uncompromising adherence to a rational moral code based on the natural law, a code dominated by such concepts as justice, equality, simplicity, frugality.

The ancient philosophers put justice before the other virtues. Plato put the ideal in the mouth of his Protagoras, who related the word of god (Zeus), that a person without a sense of justice should be put to death. Plato's Protagoras argued that every person has a right to discuss justice, for everyone competent has a sense of justice no matter what his status might be. Plutarch, when noting how the nobles hated Cato for his exercise of justice, said, "There is no virtue, honour and credit for which procures a man more odium than that of justice; and this, because more than any other, it acquires a man power and authority among the common people." And it acquires authority for this reason: "A man has it in his power to be just, if he have the will to be so, and therefore injustice is thought the most dishonourable, because it is least excusable." A man of great integrity would necessarily be just.

Neoconservatives and other political and economic primitives represented by President Bush believe personal loyalty to self, family, clan and The Thing is the sine qua non of integrity, to the disregard of rational moral virtues - they identify their gang as the only patriotic gang: "Those who are not for us are against us." President Bush prefers to reward his friends for their loyalty despite of and even because of their ruinous conduct. Caesar rewarded his friends too, but he as well as Pompey and Cato brought enormous sums into the public treasury - President Bush has virtually bankrupted his nation. Of course there are remarkable differences between "great" political men, most often adjudged "great" according to their victories and the number of people killed; for instance, Stalin's photos and statues are being dusted off: the majority of Russians have reconsidered the elite dictator of the democratic proletariat, and they have voluntarily adjudged him to be a "great" man. Ironically, Ataturk, who resorted to pogroms killing hundreds of thousands of people to unite Turkey, is a great hero idolized by Turkey's Western allies, while hit-man Saddam Hussein, who united Iraq, is denounced as a despicable little Iraqi in underwear - yet the might of the United States has done worse to his people and still have not united them.

Unlike President Bush, a man who must leans on his father's ministers and refer to an unknown god as the source of his critical decisions, an anti-intellectual whose pronouncements are so absurd that they are published as entertaining books, Caesar was truly his own man, had a brilliant intellect, was a crafty, eloquent speaker and a literary man. Furthermore, Caesar, Cato and other brave military leaders actually marched on foot with the troops and fought beside them, unlike President Bush and his intellectual hawk Paul Wolfowitz - Wolfowitz was white as a ghost and he trembled like a leaf after he got a small taste of the war he had fomented - a little rocket attack on his hotel in Iraq. Furthermore, Cato, once he went to war refrained from pompous celebrations and false smiles. When Caesar advanced on Rome and Pompey, short of troops, left the city to consolidate his forces, Cato soon followed him: "From that day," writers Plutarch, "he never cut his hair, nor shaved his beard, nor wore a garland, but was always full of sadness, grief, and dejection for the calamities of his country, and continually showed the same feeling to the last, whatever party had misfortune or success." Undoubtedly a civil war is due cause for a true conservative's grief, particularly when he knows that the winner will take all and the history of the republic will therefore end - Pompey did not trust ally and general because he knew Cato would resist his own tyranny if he won the war.

We shall face a similar situation of violent civil discord in the near future if the neoconservative fraction is allowed to continue to pervert and dismantle the progressive consensus of liberty. The greatest danger to the world today is President Bush and his court of misleaders, who are now being amply rewarded with key posts for their malfeasance and vicious conduct. The president, however, is not the greatest threat to democracy: the chief dangers to democracy that he perpetuates are ignorance, war, and social injustice. Someone else of the same neofascist faction will try to occupy the highest post in the land when President Bush vacates: ignorance, blood lust, and greed will do its best to elect that man. In other words, the real enemy is US, particularly the comfortable lot of Have's who tend to vote from fear of losing their gains instead of from courage of traditional principles they are no longer aware of.

Both Caesar and President Bush lusted for war; Caesar believed Rome had a right and a duty to wage pre-emptive war. His affection for violent aggrandizement, to be had through the conquering of inferior enemies by a purportedly superior Roman culture, was attractive to the populace that craved power, especially to those persons who had little of it and thought they might get a great deal more. By the way, the thirst for power today is in part slaked by the possession of oil reserves, a powerful energy resource - Cato's energy resource was the Stoic Fire. Both Caesar and President Bush have been blamed for war crimes. We may take some comfort that the alleged war crimes of the United States under its Commander-in-Chief are much more civilized than Caesar's: perhaps 300,000 Muslims have been killed in a civilized manner during the Second Bush War on Iraq. Caesar's troops brutally massacred 300,000 barbarians.

As for Cato, he objected to and desisted from war crimes. When the senate moved to declare public thanksgiving for Caesar's slaying of the Germans, Cato thanked god for sparing the republic and its army from destruction for Caesar's misdeeds, madness, and folly. He said Caesar should be turned over to the Germans for the just expiation of his crimes. He warned the senators that Rome need not fear the Britons or the Gauls, but should fear Caesar himself. Several years later, after Cato was proved correct, and decided to side with Pompey against Caesar, Scipio took command of Pompey's army in Africa and wanted to slay the inhabitants of Utica who had sided with Caesar. Cato protested in council and saved them from death. He later took his own life rather than be spared by Caesar and subjected to his tyranny, and the Uticans said that the only free and undefeated man, their savior, was dead. America, where is your Cato?

Someone has noted that pro-life President Bush is pro-death penalty, and has claimed that Caesar, on the other hand, was opposed to the death penalty. We do recall that during the presidential debates prior to his first term, President Bush bragged with a gleam in his eye and a smile on his face that he had shown no mercy on condemned prisoners while governor of Texas, although the legal extent of his mercy would be to give them a few more days of life to make final appeals. He said elsewhere that his political hero was Jesus Christ, who was subjected to the ultimate penalty by the Romans at the behest of the Jews, whose ancient history and ambivalent deity the fundamentalist U.S. president, a frustrated Old Testament Hebrew, admires so much and relies on to make his critical decisions.

As for the status of the death penalty sixty years before Jesus was born (the Jews may have already abolished it), we recall that in one famous case Cicero, the Roman consul, argued that five Cataline terrorists be put to death in accordance with the senate's historical right to act as a virtual dictator in extreme circumstances, instead of offering them their constitutional right to exile - a most important civil right. Caesar's brilliant counter-argument against the death penalty - that death provides relief from life and that brutal life imprisonment without possibility of parole would be the ultimate penalty because it would be worse than death - was not a merciful argument at all; it was posed for political and personal reasons: to subvert the republic and gain more power and glory for himself. Cato stepped up and provided an equally eloquent argument for the death penalty in that particular case, and the conspirators were put to death. Cato put justice before mercy and charity and fine arguments, so that the most evil deed of all, an attempt to destroy the republic itself, might not be rewarded.

Not that Cato was cruel or insensitive to the common people's needs. Cato had food justly distributed to the poor. He did not object to some of Caesar's distributions as such. Caesar certainly was more than compassionate to the poor than President Bush is today. Cato, a staunch opponent of vote-buying and -selling and the leading proponent of campaign finance reforms, objected to the fact that Caesar's bribes were designed to subvert the laws of the republic, to destroy it and establish an absolute dictatorship over what we might term today a populist totalitarian or caesaristic state, aspects of which are admired by neofascists to this day.

As we know, President Bush is fond of lavish galas for wealthy supporters to boost his image while waging war and creating huge deficits so social benefits can be cut. Caesar was vainglorious, rejoiced in war, and he was a big spender as well. Cato, on the other hand, was not given to vain pursuits; he was no party pooper, but he insisted that cheap entertainments were as amusing as lavish ones - those who attended his parties agreed. Caesar, the Son of Venus and pontifex maximus (chief bridge-builder, high priest, pope) worshiped power and covertly adhered to the doctrine that puts might before right and the arbitrary Almighty before rational righteousness. President Bush, a son of god and a Son of Reagan, is big spender who denounces big government while enlarging it and running up the largest deficit in history. Despite his talk about democracy and his willingness to impose his version of democracy on the world whether the peoples of the world likes his version or not. He is not a democrat. Nor is he a true conservative. A positive comparison of President Bush with either Thomas Jefferson or Marcus Cato insults Jefferson or Cato. An analysis of the big corporate and wealthy personal interests the president over-represents reveals him as a neo-roman neofascist.

Finally, President Bush is a neoconservative, a pseudoconservative. Neoconservatism is pseudoconservatism.

The Low Browed Race
The result of the neoconservative struggle for existence.

The pseudo-Darwinian notion of the neoconservative regressive faction, that if the strongest are allowed to struggle for their existence freed from governmental regulation, then the human race will naturally if not religiously progress to higher levels of civilization, is exposed as patently false by the very existence of civilization itself, for the historical progress of civilization has been in the protection of the weakest from the strongest, an advance associated with the progress of liberty - liberty happens to be Lady Liberty when personified.

For instance, it is often remarked that the progress of a civilization can be measured by the relative status of the physically weaker sex. Morals matter more than might wherever Lady Liberty presides. Yet the neoconservatives fall back upon the irrational premise, that might is right, a premise that wrought havoc on the world when taken up with a vengeance by the paranoid neoconservative leaders of the Second and Third Reichs.

Likewise, today's neoconservative prejudice is based upon related delusions of persecution and grandeur, a feeling of superiority and a related fear that the superior status felt or wanted will be lost to the moral regulation of the hated liberals, who look to the duly constituted democratic state instead of blind instinct or blind faith for the progress of humanity. Ironically, the neoconservatives, if given enough rope to hang themselves, wind up with a much larger and more expensive and repressive government than the liberal government they hated so much.

It is only human to believe that we are superior when we are in comfortable circumstances. Affluent Americans have been led to believe, even contrary to their professedly universal faith, that they as individuals deserve their wealth and comforts, while the impoverished deserve their poverty and miseries. When the Great Asian Tsunami left a million people homeless in its wake, affluent Americans were quick to come to their aid, yet they still maintained, in respect to the homeless on their own streets, that homeless people want to be homeless - that is why the most of them have chosen to be addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Social disaster is not a natural disaster, not a matter of chance, or so the neoconservative reasoning goes. Unfortunate people have chosen poverty, homelessness, addiction, disease and insanity because they are, unfortunately, morally inferior people.They are most likely morally inferior because they were born that way. Their weakness should not be reinforced by coming to their aid by means of involuntary taxation of our society of selfishness. Individuals should get what they deserve and the government should get off of the backs of the few "economically active" people, those economically higher people who should prevail if the race is to progress instead of degenerate. Since truly "economically active" people are big producers who produce much more than they consume, the income tax should be replaced by a consumption tax so that those who consume a greater share of their smaller income will pay the highest proportion of taxes.

At least we no longer hear proposals that women with unnaturally narrow hips be left to die in childbirth and that premature babies be sacrificed to uphold the progress of the superior portion of the human race. Still, we have due cause to believe that, if the neoconservatives were allowed to struggle for their existence without government interference, the race would be left with a very low brow.

Religious Democracy

The United States wants to liberate the world from tyranny whether the world likes it or not. The current United States government, a neoconservative government sometimes loosely referred to as a fascist-style government (OED: right-wing authoritarian government) would destroy all those sovereign nations that are “on the wrong side of freedom,” thus freeing the world for exploitation of the “free” market dominated by the United States and its allies. All that would be accomplished in the holy name of democracy.

Of course religious democracy has never been adequately defined to everyone's satisfaction, although it has been claimed by almost everyone modern to be the best form of government.

“Chaos,” stated the historian Guizot in La Democratie en France, is now hiding under one word – democracy. This is now the ultimate and universal word all seek to appropriate as a talisman.” Furthermore, “Such is the power of the word democracy that no government or party dates to exists or believe it can exist without inscribing that word upon its banner.”

Still today we find the word democracy mouthed by some of the most repressive regimes known to humankind, if not actually emblazoned on the titular banners of their states. On the left, the Marxist-Leninist conception of the elite dictatorship of the proletariat was democratic inasmuch as it was a prelude to the abolition of class rule and the realization of a utopia of democratic freedom. On the right, even Hitler played the democratic game, especially just prior to the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch – both German Nazis and Italian fascists presented their movements as higher forms of democracy when the cooperation of industrial labor was wanted. More towards the center, we recall the German democratic socialists who forfeited their internationalism. Even Muslim theocracies have been called democratic.

The most liberal definition of democracy has not been fully realized anywhere in the world, including in the United States of America, where paranoid enthusiasts sincerely believe their country to be the very apotheosis of democracy and hence the highest civilization in the world. Effective political democracy in the United States is impeded by the absence of social-economic democracy, which is anathema to the plutocratic power elite. Universal suffrage, the essence of political democracy, obtains in the United States; yet the comfortable majority of voters, not the adult majority of voters, maintain the democracy for the wealthy. Relatively contented voters are more than adequately represented by the affluent class who preside over business and its federal, state and local governments, and the mainstream media, while the underclass is underrepresented and considers voting an act of futility. Hence U.S. democracy sanctions poverty, homelessness, hunger, illness, bad education, drug addiction, crime, and so on.

Another hindrance to effective political democracy in the United States is the political ignorance cultivated by its pragmatic schools, not only the ignorance of the general population but also the ignorance of the dumbed-up or stultified power elite, who are resting on their molding laurels, so to speak, believing that classical liberal education, whose object is liberty, is inutile, not only for the people at large but for themselves as well. After all, who needs a liberal education now that we have been liberated by our democracy and by our high technology? And who needs history now that we are the living-end of history, capable of solving everything social by divine intuition if not by scientific thinking?

Another hindrance to democracy in the United States is its traditional imperial aims, its urge to conquest. The North American War for Independence was in fact a civil war fomented by traitors and supported by a small minority of the population: less than ten-percent, including those who bore arms. If the question of independence had been democratically voted up or down by all adult residents, there would be no United States as we know it today. Studies have shown that the cause for treason was predominantly economic and not political. The objectives were seizure of sacred private property, repudiation of debt, and the abolishment of British taxation for the protection of the life and property in the colonies.

If the truth were to be told, even if it seems to insult human nature, we might say that the expansion and settlement of the United States was led by a violent minority of ruthless criminals organized for the purpose, criminals whose crimes included theft of lands and mass murder. That is, the American set of Chosen People, frustrated Old Testament Jews, in possession of gunpowder and the manifesto of Moses’ guilty conscience – the Ten Commandments – seized yet another land promised to them by their instinctive greed.

However that might be, students of history almost unanimously agree that war and democracy are antithetical. War is international anarchy. Victory in war relies on brute force, secrecy, deceit, abuse of human rights, and dictatorial leadership. Revolutionary democracies have proven to be tenuous at best, and are soon overthrown by a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Putin. But the United States, in accord with its grand delusion of grandeur, would free the world for its brand of democracy, and it would do so by using its powerful military machine to reduce tyrannical orders to chaos. But prolonged dictatorships would be required to achieve any sort of democracy where it is not wanted; and such a democracy would be one in name only. This is not simply the liberal or left perspective: it is a conclusion shared by the conservative right.

For instance, Carl Schmitt, a German father of American neoconservatism, believed that English-style, constitutional liberalism was corrupting the world and would have to be set aside by a militant German dictatorship. Schmitt, a German New Conservative, was the German doctor of jurisprudence who provided the Nazis with legal justification for Hitler's suspension of constitutional law under his dictatorship.

While English liberalism would strike a balance between individual liberty and the state order, thus protecting people - first of all the capitalists - against state encroachment, German "liberalism", following Hegel and Napoleon along neo-Roman lines, held that individual freedom is only found within the state order. Therefore it follows that the state should be magnified as an imperium or reich presided over by a succession of Kaisers (Caesars or Tsars), who would conquer and incorporate the world, thus liberating the barbarians for the New World Order. That sort of "liberalism", sometimes associated with "Caesaristic" or "popular democracy," is anathema to the liberal philosophy of the English Whigs, John Locke, Alexander Hamilton, Louis-Phillipe of France, and others, whose liberalism constituted government without democracy, or freedom without democracy - the United States was not founded as a democracy nor is it yet fully a democracy, hence the ongoing "revolution with the revolution." A government so constituted that it guarantees certain civil rights is not necessarily democratic.

Early Roman dictatorships were legally established to meet emergencies; the powers of dictators were strictly limited and they served for a brief period of time. However, as warfare become more constant, Roman dictators, backed by their armies, cast off their limitations, including the Senate, until the dictatorial power was virtually absolute. True conservatives have struggled to conserve the principles of liberty against the encroachment of dictators since those Roman times; Cato the Younger, the ascetic Stoic, being the model for true conservatism. Today's neoconservatives are called "so-called" conservatives, or "pseudo-conservatives" because, despite their pretention to higher moral ground, to democracy and liberty, and to limitation of government, they tend to exercise their power arbitrarily, immorally or amorally, all to the expansion of government, particularly militant government, while consolidating power among the modern, almost invisible aristocracy - the power elite. A real sort of democracy only exists among the power elite, who control the general populace - the range of goods consumed, the politicians voted for, the designation of enemies, et cetera.

The politico-religious, either/or fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism intimated by the U.S. neoconservative administration, the members of which preach an intolerance for ambiguity attributed to the F-type or fascist personality, reminds us of Schmitt's modern elaboration of the ancient notion that, in times of crisis, constitutional law must be superseded by the arbitrary law of a supreme dictator.

The German New Conservatives, whom American neoconservatives study but rarely mention by name since fascism became politically incorrect, were moved to respond to a crisis which they attributed to liberalism and its despised Weimar democracy. The L-word, and not "democracy", was the key dirty word, associated not only with English capitalism but with communism - both were supposedly Jewish conspiracies. Hitler, claiming he was doing the general will of the German folk, espoused popular democracy in opposition to constitutional democracy, as if he were yet another Kaiser (Caesar) or Caesaristic dictator. Hitler's admirer, Mussolini, who switched from socialism to fascism, also saw himself as the people's tribune, and roundly denounced Liberalism in several speeches – nevertheless, a British intellectual said that Mussolini was one of the most "liberal" leaders in world history.

The fact that many Nazis were atheists or pagans was inconsequential as far as Schmitt was concerned. He believed political thought evolved from religious thought, therefore there exists a natural identity of religious and political thinking. In other words, ideologies are political theologies. Neoconservative politicians, for example, who speak of "one nation under God" cannot call God for a witness, and are in effect deifying the state. Modern ideologies are in large part perverted religions combined with perverted politics. The purpose of politics, as Schmitt saw it, was to distinguish friend from foe and to kill the foes.

The fascist ideology of might-makes-right sets action above and before thought, which is a reflex justifying the action taken in the name of God or State or Folk and the like abstractions for doing whatever one wants to do in the first place. Fascism was, and still is, anti-ideological and anti-intellectual. Today's neoconservatives prefer the term "pragmatism." They may profess intellectualism, but a close examination of their Harvard and Yale rhetoric exposes its fundamental irrationality and anti-intellectual prejudice. All the better if neoconservatives may rely on "God's mysteries" or "God's will" to justify their self-contradictions and explain away their arbitrary judgments. That is not to say that the neoconservatives are stupid; they are not stupid: they are cynical and Machiavellian in their resort to seemingly rational yet absurd pretexts.

"You are either for us or 'agin us, I mean U.S, the Leader of World Civilization, against Whom an attack is an attack on civilization itself, and if you are 'agin us, you are Evil, for this is a war between Good and Evil. My Political Hero is Jesus Christ, whose Father is God of the Old Testament, the Terrorist Almighty. It is up to me, the Supreme Elected Leader, to decide what is good for the world, even over its dead body, whether the world likes it or not, because I am on the Right Side of Freedom, and the buck stops with me. I am the Supreme Warlord and Prince of Peace, the Final Arbiter of God's Law." (Harvard and Yale graduate)

In his discussion of the nineteenth-century German attempt to personalize the state, in opposition to the personality of the absolute prince, Carl Schmitt noted: "The juridic formulas of the omnipotence of the state are, in fact, only superficial secularizations of theological formulas of the omnipotence of God." As early as 1922, Schmitt said that "all significant concepts of the theory of the modern state are secularized theological concepts." (The Concept of the Political)

Germany failed to make a personality of the Reich under the Kaiser Wilhelm II, then found a charismatic personal leader among the dregs of society, Adolph Hitler, who was glad to save his people from the crisis of liberalism by creating a world war on liberalism. Today the United States in its liberal crisis has regressed, from government by an abstract state, to government by a personal leader, who is charismatic to those who love him, and who is obliged to keep the United States in a state of permanent crisis. The double-standard of President Bush Jr. is obvious, at least to those who are not subject to his charisma, as he ignores the most basic democratic and libertarian principles abroad during his violent campaign to make the world free for the imposition of his democracy; a general pretext for war when other pretexts are found wanting.

Whatever the form of democracy may be, if it is to be realized it must be imposed, ideally by persuasion instead of violence, on competing interests. Or so it seems. We fall into certain logical contradictions with this sort of thinking, but the absurd can be rationalized away by those who want to have their way. Schmitt (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy) states:

"It belongs to the essence of democracy that every and all decisions which are taken are only valid for those who themselves decide. That the outvoted minority must be ignored in this only causes theoretical and superficial difficulties. In reality even this rests on the identity that constantly recurs in democratic logic and on the essential democratic argument... that the will of the outvoted minority is in truth identical with the will of the minority."

With that in mind, be prepared for the contradiction that will render the proposition and the logic of democracy as absurd and ambiguous as any perfected religious dogma:

"The minority might express the true will of the people; the people can be deceived, and one has long been familiar with the techniques of propaganda and the manipulation of public opinion.... Even at the beginning of modern democracy one comes across then remarkable contradiction that the radical democrats understood their democratic radicalism as a selection criterion that distinguished them from others as the true representatives of the people's will. From this there arose in practice an extremely undemocratic exclusivity, because only the representatives of true democracy were granted political rights."

How are we to reconcile the apparent contradiction - if there be a general will - between minority and majority rule? That much is easy for an experienced dialectician. The contradictions are the opposing moments of the same general will, which, of course, already latently exists, but needs to be revealed by voting for the limited choices put before him by the leadership.

"In democracy the citizen even agrees to the law that is against his own will, for the law is the General Will and, in turn, the will of the free citizen. Thus a citizen never really gives his consent to a specific content but rather in abstracto to the result that evolves out of the general will, and he votes only so that the votes out of which anyone can know this general will can be calculated."

We have not yet defined democracy except to say its essence is universal suffrage. Democracy certainly resembles religion thus far. We think contemporary 'democracy' has something to do with the political economy of the United States, which is apparently to be imposed at gunpoint, for example, on the Iraqi people, now that their constitution and state has been pre-emptively destroyed and their country devastated. Truly free elections must not be a key term for their democracy, since the election of spiritual government, or Muslim theocracy, is not to be permitted for fear of fanaticism, no matter how democratic the Muslim assemblies might be – a Christian theocracy would suit the U.S. administration better.

We who claim that our own government is not theocratic have good cause to doubt that claim now. Schmitt said of Western democracy: "What counts as democracy in Western European states today is for them only the trickery of capital's economic dominance over press and parties, that is, the lie of a falsely educated popular will. Communism would be the first true democracy."

Whatever democracy is, people must be educated to it or it will not work. Schmitt points out that democracy assumes a series of identities, such as between the governed and governing, the subject and sovereign, the people and their representatives, the state and the electorate, and so on, So the people must be brought to the right state of mind, the one consistent with democracy, the one that expresses the general will. Incidentally, Schmitt expounded at length on the new 'Total' concept of the time - Totalitarianism.

"The people's education unfolds: The people can be brought to recognize and express their own will correctly through the right education....The consequences of this educational theory is a dictatorship that suspends democracy in the name of a true democracy that is still to be created.... During a transitional period dominated by the dictator, a democratic identity can still exist and the will of the people can still be the exclusive criterion."

But they cannot put aside the dictator and elect a tyrant, nor can they, as far as the U.S. is concerned, set up a communist government or primitive form of democracy, and so on.

Tyranny is the key to understanding "democracy," writes Schmitt, but once the monarchies fell, the noun became increasingly difficult to define, for it was in effect dynamically defined by its struggle against the monarchic principle. Indeed, that seems to be its fundamental value: its opposition to the tyranny of one over many, or opposition to a few over the many. Well, then, this might seem absurd, but a government does not have to be democratic to be democratic, providing that it prohibits tyranny: it can fight fire with fire, tyranny with tyranny, in order to obtain the true democracy of the future, a state governed by the general will of the people who survive.

All power to the people!

"The belief that all power comes from the people takes on a meaning similar to the belief that all authoritative power comes from God. Both maxims permit various governmental forms and juristic consequences in political reality," writes Schmitt.

We have encountered some awful dictators in our time, and we have had difficulty distinguishing their tyranny from that of a despotic monarch. And we recall again that true conservatives feared that Caesar - who wanted to bring Rome into good order - would become a dynastic King of kings. Well, Caesar, to end civil war, waged civil war. The sensationalist poet Lucan said that only Cato, the old-fashioned, true conservative whom he idolized, stood for Liberty; that Cato alone stood as the last man between Caesar and tyranny.

Today, in view of the terrible damage an elected dictator or 'mon-arche' can do by political and divine right in the names of democracy and god, in his first two years in office, we might see little difference in effect between U.S. presidents, temporary kings or dictators, and hereditary kings - except more of the hereditary kings may be morons by virtue of incest.

However that may be, we learn from Schmitt that Democracy is the modern orthodox political religion even when led by a dictator. A dictatorship by a violent minority may be required to oppose tyrants. It is always democratic to overthrow tyranny, wherever it may be found. Only a democratic constitution may be legitimately imposed; that is, a constitution that does not contradict the will of the people, which a minority of informed men will be glad to define for everyone else. If an illegitimate or undemocratic constitution is imposed somewhere, the people's right to self-determination must be restored by direct intervention. Otherwise the "democratic principle of nonintervention" applies. Of course the liberation of peoples of the world from tyrants does not violate the democratic principle of nonintervention, it simply creates the environment for the principle of nonintervention.

From this absurd ideological morass we might conclude as we began, by saying that a dictatorship may be needed to establish true democracy in Iraq, and in any other country the United States would free for democracy. Indeed, it may be time for conservative and liberal people of the United States to suspend their democratic principle of nonintervention against their own government that their state might be saved from its decline and fall. Of course such pessimism might be premature. John Quincy Adams shared the imperial aspirations of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Clay, Lincoln and other founding fathers, who reasoned that security is in greatness of size and strength: the bigger the nation, the better, for trouble in one part is less likely to disturb the whole. It follows that nobody is really safe until brought under one, global government. Of course John Taylor eloquently disagreed, and advocated pluralism; that is, alternatives. Well, on July 4, 1821, John Quincy Adams stated his reservations about the quest for American Empire:

“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy…. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”

No, she would not be self-governed. God only knows how long the militant delusion of grandeur will last. The president of the United States takes vain pride in being a “war president” and does so by vulgar reliance on spurious divine right, to make war in his personal god’s name. Because he prays, war must be called for, war must be all right, for he is his god’s high priest on that subject.

Militarism has been the death of great regimes and empires. Militarism is in fact the nemesis of the innovation and creativity that can win lasting peace. When will enough be enough? Even many generals doubt the sort of militarism engaged in by the U.S. Commander-in-Chief. Good generals, after all, do not want wars per se: they want victory. Much could have been made of the victory in Afghanistan, yet resources were diverted to Iraq on flimsy pretexts.

Will the United States, like Tamerlane, squander its resources on diversions, attack Iran and Syria, and ignore the real threat to democracy, in Russia? Will President Bush Jr. be remembered by the world many centuries hence as some sort of self-idolizing monster? Yes, Tamerlane dissipated his forces in aimless expeditions into Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and India, instead of consolidating his gains in Eurasia and succeeding to the empire of Genghis Khan. After doing his proper business for 19 years, he digressed. Staying on track would have been enough to make Samarkand the power center of Eurasia instead of Moscow. But no, Tamerlane wanted to wage war in a vicious circle.

Arnold Toynbee remarked that Tamerlane’s “self-stultification is a supreme example of the suicidalness of militarism.” We should consider well the apparently suicidal tendency of the neoconservative U.S. government, which finds its anti-democratic unity in war abroad, in patriotic religion and bigotry, in war against the poor at home.

Quoted Sources:

Schmitt, Carl, THE CRISIS OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY, Transl. Ellen Kennedy, Cambridge: MIT

Schmitt, Carl, THE CONCEPT OF THE POLITICAL, Transl. George Schwab, New Brunswick: Rutgers

Posted by: David Arthur Walters / 8:38 AM