General Stock Ideas

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Here's an excellent analysis of the Neocons and their ideological leader, Leo Strauss -

The way these people think and their world view is so foreign to the average person that it's difficult to comprehend. Most people see peace, progress, and prosperity as the ideal situation for the world. But in Strauss' book 'On Tyranny', he refers to this peaceful world as the 'Universal and Homogeneous State', and says it has to be avoided at all costs.

In Strauss' view, if the possibility of conflict goes out of the world, then there is no chance for what he calls the 'nihilistic revolution'. So rather than prosperity and a peaceful world, his goal is a society dominated by strife, war, and political conflicts.

Strauss is the ideological guru for the Neocons, the most powerful faction running US foreign policy during the Bush/Cheney years and soon to be the dominant faction again. How can these people think like this? The founding Neocons were originally Trotskyites (Communists who supported Trotsky over Stalin) who became virulently anti-Soviet (ie - Neo-Conservatives) after the Soviets began arming and backing the Arab States in the Middle East in the early 1950s.

Like other Communists, Trotskyites believed in world revolution, ie violent bloody conflict to achieve a political end. So Strauss and the Neocons retained their revolutionary zeal and methodology, toward the goal of what Leo Strauss called 'nihilistic revolution'.