The roots of the Neocons run deep ...

Posted under hglindquist to the Bob Herbert forum in the NYTimes website, Thursday, July 28, in response to his Op/Ed column "Oil and Blood":

hglindquist - 7:39 AM ET July 28, 2005 (#28622)

The roots of Straussian fascism, the political philosophy of the Neocons, run deep.

Gordon Wright, history professor, wrote the following in The Ordeal of Total War: 1939-1945, with its 1968 Copyright:

"The German resistance did differ markedly in its composition and general outlook from the resistance norm in occupied Europe. By necessity it was much smaller; perhaps by necessity also it was more elitist in spirit, more suspicious of the masses, more doubtful about the practicality of political democracy. Its members were inclined to see Nazism not as an antiparlimentary political system but as a moral and political illness affecting the whole Western world. In Germany an atomized, secularized society had succumbed to demagogic dictatorship, as might happen to mass societies anywhere; the German masses had been corrupted, and could only be saved by an elite which would restore morality. Their dominant mood strongly resembled that of the German conservatives during the 1920's, when the source of evil had not been Naziam but liberal democracy. Some of them had hoped to turn the rootless mass into an organic Volk; some had even, for a time, seen this as Hitler's mission. Disillusioned by that experiment, they were not prepared to look to the masses as active allies in restoring sanity and balance to the nation. More than anywhere else in Europe, the German resistance looked to an elitist, decentralized regime with deep Christian roots. Only thus, they believed, could a mass society be prevented from slipping once again into some kind of totalitarian abyss."

Repeating for emphasis, "The masses had been corrupted, and could only be saved by an elite which would restore morality."

The Neocons, in their minds, are this elite saving the Western world. What they don't seem to understand is that leaders who save us from ourselves are dictators.

The question we should always ask of our leaders, Are they using fear to advance their agenda? or are the helping us to understand--in the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt--the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

You can read more about Professor Wright at:

http://www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1463/310.pdf