Esalen, the CIA & Ancient
Aliens Part 2
While
in a trance state, Cayce would channel messages that mirrored many of the
teachings of Saint-Yves, Blavatsky and Bailey about the Atlantean origins of
the Tibetan and Egyptians civilizations. Following the tradition of Fabre
d’Olivet and Saint-Yves, Cayce refers to events on Atlantis as happening
several hundred thousand years “before Ram entered India.” According to Cayce,
refugee Atlanteans arrived in Egypt after the sinking of their continent in 10,700
BC, bringing with them the records of their civilization, which were deposited
in the “Hall of Records” buried beneath the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx.
When they will be uncovered, human civilization will be transformed. As Cayce
explained:
With the changes that will be wrought,
true Americanism, the universal thought that is expressed and manifested in the
brotherhood of man, as in the Masonic order, will be the eventual rule in the
settlement of affairs of the world.47
In the 1970s, ARE received a sudden
infl donors, and is now a powerful organization which has supported
archaeological work in Egypt and elsewhere to try to fi civilization and the
Hall of Records predicted by Cayce.48 Many of the projects’ remote
viewers reported encountering pyramids during their sessions. So when Lambert
Dolphin Jr. took charge of the SRI expedition to Giza in the 1970s, primarily
aimed at searches for hidden chambers beneath the Sphinx, he had information
about the plateau derived from these sessions.49 In 1973, ARE
selected Mark Lehner to be their “insider” among academic Egyptologists, and
paid for his training. ARE and Lehner also collaborated on a number of projects
investigating the Giza Pyramids with SRI. Most important of these was a study
headed by D. Joseph M. Schoch, to determine the possibility of water erosion on
the Sphinx. Schoch, like all the authors of the new Egyptology, also drew on
the work of Schwaller de Lubicz. De Lubicz began his study of Luxor in 1938, fi
nding, he believ ultimate examples of synarchy, because they were ruled by a
group of initiates.
His conceptions of Egypt were shaped
by Saint-Yves, who believed that the Sphinx was created by the Atlanteans many
thousands of years before the rise of Egypt. Saint-Yves placed the end of Atlantis
at around 12,000 BC. Schwaller de Lubicz therefore proposed that the erosion on
the Sphinx resulted from of exposure
to water, caused Atlantis . by a gre
Also
conducting work at Giza in the late 1970s coinciding the SRI’s projects
was James Hurtak. Although Hurtak ha
he has retained close contact with
Jr, who according to Hurtak, “shared private
insights” about Giza with him.50 In 1977 and 1978, following up on a
tradition found in Masonic lore, Hurtak and a number of colleagues undertook a
private expedition to Giza, where they measured the angles of the shafts of the
King’s and Queen’s Chambers to test the hypothesis that they were aligned with
certain stars and constellations, namely Orion and Draco, and the star Sirius.
One of the most infl uential book
Robert K. G. Temple’s 1976 The Sirius Mystery , which presents the
hypothesis that the Dogon people of Mali in west Africa preserved a tradition
of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings from the Sirius
star-system. Temple’s attention was fi rstDogondrawnbyArthur Mto.Young,the myth
who with Puharich and others had been one o with The Nine through Dr. Vinod in
1952. Young introduced Temple to the subject of the Dogon through a French book
called Le Renard pale, which he in turn received from Harry Smith. Known
as a surre a member of the OTO and claimed that Aleister Crowley was “probably”
his biological father. 51 Known for experimenting heavily in
hallucinogenic drugs, Smith became a hero of the Beat generation of the 50s and
the Hippies of the 60s, and in the last Gratefulyears Dead.He of
his produced the Folkways anthology, which became an such artists as Bob
Dylan and received a Grammy in 1991 for his contribution to the music industry.
Temple’s The
Sirius Mystery attracted the attention of the CIA, MI5 and the Freemasons.
Temple was approached by Charles E. Webber, 33rd degree Scottish Rite and an
old friend of his family and Mason, who had been high-ranking generations for
generations, and asked him to join the Masons, in order to be able to discuss
the book without divulging the order’s secrets. Webber told Temple:
We are very interested in your book
The Sirius Mystery. We realize you have written this book without any knowledge
of the traditions of Masonry, and you may not be aware of this, but you have
made some discoveries which relate to the most central traditions at a high
level, including some things that none of us ever knew.52
The “mystery”
that is central to the book is how the Dogon allegedly acquired knowledge of
Sirius B, the invisible companion star of Sirius A. And he tries to show that
the knowledge of the Dogon originated in the civilizations of ancient Egypt and
Sumeria. Temple believed the Dogon preserved the memories of the visit of an
amphibious, extraterrestrial race called Nommo, who descended to Earth in an
“ark” from the Sirius system. These beings, who are hypothesized to have taught
the arts of civilization to humans, are claimed in the book to have originated
the systems of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the mythology of Greek civilization and
the Epic of Gilgamesh among other things. Temple’s theory was largely
based on his interpretation of the work of ethnographers Marcel Griaule and
Germaine Dieterlen. However, some doubts have been raised about the reliability
of their work, and alternative explanations have been proposed.53
The claims about the Dogons’ astronomical knowledge have been challenged.
Nevertheless, these speculations form
the basis of what is called the Ancient Astronauts hypothesis. Also known as
Ancient Aliens, it attempts to connect the occult legend of the Sons of God of
the Bible, or Lucifer and the Fallen Angels, who supposedly created the Aryan race
on Atlantis, with extra terrestrials. A leading proponent of the hypothesis was
Zecheriah Sitchin. Born in Soviet Azerbaijani, but raised in Israeli, American
author Sitchin received a degree in economics from the University of London,
and taught himself Sumerian cuneiform. However, Sitchin wrote his books at a
time when only specialists could read the Sumerian language, and since then,
sources such as the 2006 book Sumerian Lexicon have made the language more
accessible to non-experts. Sitchin’s ideas have been rejected by scientists and
academics, who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory, and
criticized for flawed methodology and mistransla and scientifi c claims.
According to his
interpretation of Mesopotamian iconography and symbology, outlined in his 1976
book The 12th Planet and its sequels, Sitchin attributes the creation of
the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he equates with the
Nephilim of Genesis, and which he asserts were a race of
extraterrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. The Sumerian myth
of the Annunaki is recognized by scholars as being connected to the story of
the Anakim, or Sons of God of the Bible. The Annunaki are the seven judges of
the Underworld, the children of the god Anu, who had once lived in heaven but
were banished for their misdeeds. Effectively, the Annunaki are part of the
common motif of giants, or Titans, found throughout the ancient dying-god mythologies.
According to Sitchin, however, 50 Anunnaki, inhabitants of a planet named
Nibiru, came to Earth approximately 400,000 years ago with the intent of mining
raw materials, especially gold, for transport back to Nibiru. To assist them in
their efforts, they genetically engineered slaves to work the mines, creating
homo sapiens, the “Adapa” (Archetypal Man) or Adam of occult theology. Sitchin
further claimed the Anunnaki were active in human affairs until their culture
was destroyed by global catastrophes caused by the abrupt end of the last ice
age some 12,000 years ago. Seeing that humans survived and all they had built
was destroyed, the Anunnaki left Earth after giving humans the opportunity and
means to govern themselves.
The Ancient Astronauts hypothesis is
related to the “White Gods” theories, the belief that ancient cultures like
those of the Egyptians and the Maya of South America, were visited by Caucasian
civilizers who were ignorantly worshipped by primitive peoples as “gods.”
Popularized by the works of Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin, these
theories fall into a category of pseudohistory known as Mayanism, derived
originally from Freemasonry and Theosophy. During the eighteenth century,
speculations associated Mayan history with Biblical stories of Noah’s Ark, the
Tower of Babel, and the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. This included speculation
about legendary culture heroes such as Votan and Quetzalcoatl. In the early
nineteenth century, Alexander von Humboldt and Lord Kingsborough contributed
further to such speculation, and who were in turn cited by Godfrey Higgins,
whose Anacalypsis (1833) contributed to the emergence of perennial
philosophy and claims that all religions had a common origin in an ancient
Golden Age. Higgins proposed the existence of a secret religious order, which
he labeled Pandeism, for the worship of a pantheon of gods, that he purported
had existed from ancient times, which at one time had constituted a grand world
empire, and maintained that the institutions of Christianity were borrowed from
the Essenes. However, the preface to Vol. I, Higgins warned of the cryptic
nature of much of the book:
I think it right to warn my reader,
that there are more passages than one in the book, which are of that nature,
which will be perfectly understood by my Masonic friends, but which my
engagements prevent
me
explaining to the world at large.
In the late nineteenth century,
Charles Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg became convinced that the ancient Maya
culture could be traced to the lost continent
of Atlantis. Brasseur’s work influenced
the pseudoscience and pseudohistory of Désiré Charnay, Augustus
Le Plongeon, Ignatius L. Donnelly, and James Churchward. Le Plongeon and Donnelly in
turn infuenced H. P. Blavatsky
and Rudolf Steiner who introduced misconceptions about
the ancient Maya into early New Age
circles. These ideas became part of a belief system fostered by psychic Edgar Cayce and later popularized in the
1960s by author Jess Stearn. Attempts at
a synthesis of religion and science, a common theme in Mayanism, are one of the contributions
from Theosophy. Alice Bailey’s husband, Foster Bailey, wrote that Freemasonry was a
remnant of the “primeval religion” that
had once been common on the whole world, citing the pyramids of Egypt and South America as “witnesses” of this
ancient world religion.” 54
Mayanism experienced a revival in the 1970s through the work of Frank
Waters, a writer on the subject of Hopi mythology. In 1970, Waters was
the recipient of a Rockefeller
Foundation grant to support research in Mexico and Central America. This resulted in his 1975
book Mexico Mystique: The Coming Sixth World
of Consciousness, a discussion of Mesoamerican culture strongly colored by Waters’ beliefs in astrology, prophecy, and
the lost continent of Atlantis. Notions
about extraterrestrial
influence on the Maya can be traced to the
book Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Däniken, whose “ancient astronaut”
theories were in turn influenced by the work
of Peter Kolosimo (1922–1984) and especially Jacques Bergier and Louis
Pauwels, the authors of The Morning of the Magicians. These latter writers were
inspired turn influenced by
the work of
Peter Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels, the authors of The Morning
of the Magicians. These latter writers were inspired by publications by
Charles Fort (1874- 1932), and by the fantasy literature of H. P. Lovecraft,
especially in “Part One:
Vanished Civilizations,” where they s
alien-constructed civilizations of the past.55 However, contributi
also included notions of lost continents and lost civilizations, especially as popularized
by Jules Verne, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and H. Rider Haggard.
The
“White Gods” theory is popular amongst White supremacists, Christian Identity
groups, ancient astronaut theorists and pseudoarchaeological and Atlantis
writers. White gods theorists typically make reference to various South American gods
supposedly identified a Typically, accounts of these gods refer to
them as “civilizers” who instructed their societies with various skills. Most
common is the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl who, like Hermes and the other dying-gods
of the ancient Middle East, was also related to Venus, the dawn, and pertaining
to merchants, arts, crafts and knowledge.56 There were other
deities, among the Maya in particular, whose identities seemed to merge closely
with those of Quetzalcoatl. One was Votan, a great civilizer, whose principal
symbol like that of Quetzalcoatl was a serpent.
The story of Votan in Mexico dates back to at least the late seventeenth
century, when Constituciones was diocesanas
fidelrs to bispado de relate Chiappa (1702) by
Francisco Nunez de la Vega, Bishop of Chiapas, as reported by a Jesuit priest
named Francisco Javier Clavijero. These clerics associated Votan with the
Biblical stories of the Tower of Babel and as proof that these Native Americans
regarded themselves as descendants of Noah. In 1773, Ramon de Ordonez y Aguilar
attested that Palenque was built by Votan who travelled back and forth to the
Middle East.57
The similarity
between the names Votan and Wotan, a variation of Odin, has also been the
source of much confusion. Assertion of a relationship between Votan and Odin is
found in the work of geographer Alexander von Humboldt who wrote Vues des
Cordillères (1810). Ignatius L. Donnelly, in Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World (1882), in a chapter titled “The God Odin, Woden, or Wotan,”
repeats Clavigero’s reference in the context of speculation about Atlantis and
(following Brasseur de Bourbourg) also suggests that Votan built Palenque. In Histoire
des nations civilisées du Mexique et de l’Amérique Centrale (1857), Charles
Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg had claimed that Votan was an ancient Phoenician
legislator who had migrated from the Middle East to the Maya, built Palenque,
and established an empire to have once covered all of Mexico and part of the
United States. The story of Votan was further associated with the Atlantis
legend by Lewis Spence, whose 1940 book Occult Causes of the Present
War seems to have been Nazithe f occultism.58 In Atlantis
in America (1925), Spence iden name for Quetzalcoatl” based on the account
by Nunez de la Vega.
Votan has also
been cited in the literature of neo-Nazism, like that of Miguel Serrano, that
associates him with Quetzalcoatl who was to have come from Venus, as proof that
these civilizations were founded by Aryan extra-terrestrials. Some Mormon
scholars believe that Quetzalcoatl, who has been described as a white, bearded
god who came from the sky and promised to return, was actually Jesus Christ
who, according to the Book of Mormon, visited the Americas after his
resurrection.
Notions
about extraterrestria lMaya of
South America can be traced to Chariots
of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, which brought widespread popularity to
ancient astronaut theories. Däniken’s book, titled Gods from Outer
Space in the US and Return to the Stars in Britain, was an immediate
best seller in the United States, Europe and India, and subsequent
books, according to von Däniken, have been translated into 32 languages and
together have sold more than 63 million copies.59 The book’s
television adaptation, In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973),
was hosted by Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone. Von Däniken did not
credit Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians in his books,
until a lawsuit forced him to disclose the sources he paraphrased In Chariots
of the Gods? von Däniken reproduced a drawing of the Sarcophagus
of Palenque, the Mayan city-state in
southern M seventh century, and compared the pose depicted on it of Pacal the
Great,
the city’s famous ruler, to that of the 1960s
Project Mercury astronauts. He interpreted drawings underneath him as rockets
and offered it as evidence of a supposed
extraterrestrial Maya:
influence
In the center of that frame is a man
sitting, bending forward. He has a mask on his nose, he uses his two hands to
manipulate some controls, and the heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal
with different adjustments. The rear portion is separated from him; he is
sitting on a
complicated
chair, and outside of th like an exhaust.
To acquire an
understanding of von Däniken’s sources, we can consider that in his 1970
follow-up to Chariots of the Gods he writes of Blavatsky’s Book of Dz
yan, which he describes, much as H. P. Lovecraft did, as “older than the
earth,” and claimed that chosen people who simply touch the book will receive
visions of what it describes, through “rhythmically transmitted impulses.”60
Dz yan “is supposed to contain the primordial ancient world, the formula
of creation, and to tell of the evolution of mankind over millions of years.”
The book originated “beyond the Himalayas,” and its teaching reached Japan,
India and China and traces of its ideas were found in South America. It was
among the books of vast size guarded by secret fraternities in China. The
Church Fathers failed to suppress this secret doctrine which was transmitted
orally from generation to generation. Von Däniken quotes from the book at great
length, discussing how its seven stanzas of creation are a perfect account of
alien visitation, and notes, “Mahabharata , Cabbala, Zohar, Dz
yan. Identical as to facts that point in one direction. Are they accounts
of things that really happened?”61
Von Däniken
claims that ancient art and iconography throughout the world illustrate air and
space vehicles, and artifacts of an anachronistically advanced technology. To
support his theory, he makes mention of the chariot of Ezekiel and the “wheel
inside a wheel” as referring to a spacecraft. He also discusses the Ramayana
, where the gods and their avatar chariots” called Vimanas.
There are many mentions o the Ramayana, which dates to the 5th or 4th
century BCE.62 However, much of the information proffered by ancient
astronaut theorists on Vimana is derived from channeled information, as
is the case with most of their absurd theories. They rely on a text known as
the Vimanika Shastra, the existence of which was revealed in 1952 by G.
R. Josyer, who asserted that it was written by an Indian
mystic
named Pandit Subbaraya Shastry the years 1918–1923. A study by the a
departments at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1974 concluded
that the aircraft described in the text were
“poor concoctions” and that the author showed a complete lack of understanding
of aeronautics.63
The
Seventies Part 1
The
cultural transformations of the 60s all marked the thorough success of the
Frankfurt School’s strategies, which used the left-wing politics of the 60s to
pass through their bogus Freudian fantasies of the liberated self. Their
mission accomplished, the leading intellectuals of the “non- communist left,”
who had been responsible for nurturing the leftist ideals that helped shape the
countermade-culture,complete ideological flip to-the fotherop extreme of the
political spectrum. Reinventing American conservatism to align it with
neoliberal economic principles, they became known as neoconservatives. As these
neoconservatives gained control of the American administration, the Cold War acquired
new intensity the 1970s, when they redefined the country role by reviving the
notion of its mission to defend democracy around the world.
As reported by
Justin Raimondo in Reclaiming the American Right, with the end of the
CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), “the core group later came to be
known as the Neoconservatives.”1 The CCF had faced an embarrassing
scandal when its connections with the CIA and its publication of Encounter
were made in 1962, in press articles, especially Ramparts, the New
York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post. Irving Kristol
then left Encounter and left-wing politics, to become the leader
of the neoconservatives. The funding for his activities would continue to derive
from the CIA fronts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and ExxonMobil.
For Kristol and the other Neoconservatives,
their original distrust for Stalinism supposedly turned to an outright
rejection of communism as they drifted to the right. As Robert Lind wrote in a
2003 article for Salon:
Most neoconservative defense intellectuals
have their roots on the left, not the right They are products of the influential
Jewish-America sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed
into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into kind
of militaristic and imperial right winoh precedents in American culture or
political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party’s tactics,
including preventive warfare such as Israel’s 1981 raid on Iraq’s Osirak
nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for
“democracy.” They call their revolutionary ideology “Wilsonianism” (after
President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky’s theory of the permanent
revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism.
The reason for
the hundred and eighty-degree turn was offered by Kristol who explained: “a
neoconservative is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Denounced as
traitors by their former friends, they were mocked in the left-leaning
publication Dissent as “neoconservatives” and the slur became their
slogan.
Kristol and the
Neoconservatives’ worldview was inspired by German-Jewish political philosopher
Leo Straus. As a youth, Strauss was “converted” to political Zionism as a
follower of Zeev Jabotinsky. He was also friends with Gershom Scholem and
Walter Benjamin of the Frankist School, who were both strong admirers of
Strauss. He would also attend courses at the University of Freiburg taught by
Martin Heidegger. After receiving a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1932, Strauss
left his position at the Academy of Jewish Research in Berlin for Paris, where
he established a life -long friendship with Alexandre Kojève. Because of the
Nazis’ rise to power, he chose not to return to his native country and ended up
in the United States, where he spent most of his career as a professor of
political science at the University of Chicago. Prior to teaching at the
University of Chicago, Strauss had secured a position at The New School of
Columbia University where he joined the Frankfurt School exiles.
A
significant influence on Leo Str Nazi past, was influential among the
Frankfurt School, like Walter
Benjamin.2 Schmitt’s highly positive reference for Leo Strauss was
instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to
leave Germany, when he ended up teaching at the Rockefeller- funded University
of Chicago. In turn, Strauss’s
critique an The Concept of the
Political led Schmitt to make signifi ca second edition.
Strauss’ fascist tend through his and Schmitt’s mutual friend, Alexandre
Kojève. Kojève and Strauss both played a major role in Schmitt’s postwar
“rehabilitation.” In 1955, Kojève addressed a group of Düsseldorf businessmen
at Schmitt’s invitation, and Schmitt attempted to arrange a private meeting
between Kojève and Hjalmar Schacht. 3 Throughout his career in the
US, Strauss regularly sent his leading disciples to study under Kojève in
Paris. For example, Strauss’s top protégé the late Allan Bloom travelled to
Paris annually, from 1953 up until Kojève’s death in 1968, to study Kojève’s
Nietzschean fascist beliefs. Bloom would consider Kojève to be one of his
greatest teachers.4
According to
Steven B. Smith, “Strauss believed that modern philosophy began with
Machiavelli, through his ‘realism’ and rejection of the utopianism of the
ancients, and his desire to describe a political order more in tune with the
brutal nature of humanity.”5 Strauss believed Machiavelli
contributed to three waves of European thought, marked by attempts to provide a
rational basis for human morality. First were the liberal theories of Hobbes
and Locke and their notions of natural rights, followed by Rousseau, Hegel, and
Marx who fixed laws in history Nietzsche,.Thewhose critique third pha of reason
prepared the way for the “radical historicism” of Heidegger, who Strauss called
the “highest self-consciousness” of modern thought.6 Strauss
described how upon hearing Heidegger in 1922 it slowly became evident that
Heidegger was preparing a “revolution” in thought the likes of which had not
been experienced since Hegel.7 This was despite Heidegger’s
association with Nazism. In fact, Strauss himself concedes that Heidegger, who
had never praised any other contemporary political movement or leader, even
refused to denounce the Nazis long after Hitler had been “muted.”8
Strauss shared
Heidegger’s condemnation of modernity, but Strauss viewed Heidegger as falling
victim himself of the fundamental problem of modernity, which was the nihilism
that ensued from the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which would explain his
false hope in the promise of Nazism. According to Strauss critic Luc Ferry,
Strauss took over Heidegger’s critique of modernity, but gave it a more
directly political meaning.9 While Heidegger proposed a
deconstruction of history to discover the meaning of Being, Strauss proposed a
similar deconstruction also through a return to the Greeks. Praise for the
wisdom of the ancients and condemnation of the folly of the moderns, according
to Shadia Drury, was the entire basis of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural
Right and History. As Drury explained:
Strauss is not as obscure or as
esoteric as his admirers pretend. There are certain incontestable themes in his
work. The most fundamental theme is the distinction between the ancients and
the moderns—a distinction that informs all his work. According to Strauss,
ancient philosophers (such as Plato) were wise and wily, but modern philosophers
(such as Locke and other liberals) were foolish and vulgar. The wise ancients thought
that the unwashed masses liberty; and giving them these sublime treasures was
like throwing pearls before swine. Accordingly, they believed that society
needs an elite of philosophers or intellectuals to manufacture “noble lies” for
the consumption of the masses. Not surprisingly, the ancients had no use for
democracy. Plato balked at the democratic idea that any Donald, dick, or
George 10 was
equally fit
To Strauss, the
ancients recognized the absence of any natural right to liberty. For Strauss,
they correctly recognized that there is only one natural right: the right of
the superior to rule over the inferior. In On Tyranny, Strauss referred
to “the tyrannical teaching” of the ancients which must be kept secret for two
reasons: to both spare the ignorant masses the humiliation and to protect the
elite from reprisals. As Drury further explains:
Of course, Strauss believed that the
wise would not abuse their power. On the contrary, they would give the people
just what was commensurate with their needs and capacities. But what exactly is
that? Certainly, giving them freedom, happiness, and prosperity is not the
point. In Strauss’s estimation, that would turn them into animals. The goal of
the wise is to ennoble the vulgar. But what could possibly ennoble the vulgar?
Only weeping, worshippin masses. Religion and war—perpetual war—would lift the
masses from the animality of bourgeois consumption and the pre-occupation with
“creature comforts.” Instead of personal happiness, they would live their lives
in perpetual11 sacrificet
As with Marx and
capitalism, the neoconservatives attacked liberalism as containing the seeds
for its own destruction through historicism, relativism and nihilism. The
reason for resorting to religion was that, to Strauss, the problem with
liberalism was that it led to relativism. Relativism was a problem because it
removed society’s belief in one absolute truth, particularly religious truth.
This was not because Strauss believed that such a belief was possible. On the
contrary, he rejected all possibility of such truth, regarding religions as
“heroic delusions” and “noble dreams,” and said of Judaism that “no nobler
dream was ever dreamt” and concluded that “it is surely nobler to be victim of
the most noble dream than to profi it.”12 Rather, these delusions,
or “noble lies,” were necessary for the masses who would succumb to nihilism
for their inability to manage the awful truth that there is no truth. But for
Strauss, the “philosopher,” who is equal to Nietzsche’s Superman, can create
and manipulate delusions for the sake of society, but is himself beyond the
truth and conventional morality, but he was required to keep his sacred mission
secret from the rabble.
Strauss’
apologists who question his impact have often pointed out that Strauss managed
to avoid all discussion of modern politics. However, as Shadia Drury explains,
“He was a very secretive thinker who expressed his ideas with utmost
circumspection.”13 To understand the role that he saw for himself,
it is simple enough to consider how he interpreted the role of a philosopher.
To Strauss, there are “gentlemen” and there are philosophers. The “gentleman”
is the urban patrician who derives his income from agriculture. He must be a
man of moderate wealth, or wealthy enough to be free from toil to pursue noble
or honorable things. He devotes himself to the well-being of his estate, his
household and his city. He is well-bred and public-spirited. He is the type of
man described in Plato’s Republic as the lover of honor and reputation.14
He is the citizen par excellence. According to Strauss, while the best regime
is the tyrannical rule of the philosopher, the best practical regime is the
rule of “gentlemen” who are favorably disposed toward philosophers, and so
allow them to direct political affairs in a “remote manner.”15
As Drury also
noted, “There is an uncanny resemblance between Strauss’s view of the
philosopher-prophet and the Sabbatean conception of the Messiah.”16
The Sabbateans, through the doctrine of holy sin believed, as Scholem pointed
out, that “the elect are fundamentally different from the crowd and not to be
judged by its standards. Standing under a new spiritual law and representing as
it were a new kind of reality, they are beyond good and evil.”17
Strauss also betrayed otherKabbalah . For Strauss,influences Kabbalistic from
numerology became one of the most important clues for deciphering the secret meaning
of the texts. Strauss was notorious for att number of the chapters in
Machiavelli’s Prince and to Locke’s numbering the paragraphs of his Two
Treatises. Strauss notes that Machiavelli’s Prince consists of 26
chapters, which is the same numerical value as the letters of the sacred name
of God in the Hebrew Tetragrammaton. Additionally, Strauss highlighted
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy where, in relation to a critique of the
Aristotelian conception of the eternity of the world, Machiavelli notes that
religions tend to change two or three times every 5,000 to 6,000 years. This
passage indicates Machiavelli’s belief that religions have a typical life span
of 1,666 and not more than 3,000 years, corresponding with the date of the
appearance of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi.18
Strauss shares
the Kabbalistic view of knowledge as both dangerous and erotic. The Kabbalah
was considered dangerous because its heretical tendencies could lead to
excommunication, an uninitiated. Like the Kabbalists, Strauss associates the
tree of knowledge with philosophy, with sin, the fall, and the devil. In Persecution
and the Arts of Writing,
Strauss insists that all the great
authors of the Western tradition are esoteric writers for precisely these same
reasons. Kabbalistic theology is highly erotic through its religious
interpretations of the interplay of God as the masculine quality in relation to
the Shekhinah as the feminine aspect, or the relation of the “lover” and
the “beloved.” Likewise, Strauss often relates that philosophy is a
manifestation of Eros. To Strauss, Philosophy is the quest to understand
man’s true nature, which is Eros, as opposed societal con constructs. Eros,
like nature, is the enemy of society, marriage, and order. The fact that the
Bible uses the same word for knowledge as for sexual relations reinforces the
Kabbalah’s identification Eros. The Greek words for “philosophy” is phil sophia,
or love of wisdom, Metis the Zeus.But first Strauss’s conception wife of Eros
is also connected
to the fact that he points out that
the greatest philosophers, those who manage to rise above convention
altogether, were pederasts.19
For Strauss,
Kojève’s End of History is the result of all the errors of modernity and its
values of liberalism, and was equivalent to the tragedy predicted by Nietzsche,
as being the days of the Last Man. The error of liberalism is that it has
departed from the wisdom of the ancients, who recognized the inevitability of a
natural hierarchy among men. And while Strauss recognizes that the End of
History is fated to produce itself, in a Hegelian sense, he believes that it
will perish only to renew the cycle of history in Nietzsche’s sense of an
“eternal recurrence.” As Strauss explains, “There will always be men (andres)
who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity.”20
In a world where “there is no longer a possibility of noble action and great
deeds,” the rebels against the universal homogenous state may be “forced” into
a “nihilistic revolution that is not “enlightened by any positive goal.” 21
As Shadia Drury comments, “What is ironic is that such radicalism passes for
conservatism in America.”22
Essentially, the Straussian basis of
neoconservatism is that “liberalism,” which is the source of western liberal
democracy and free market capitalism, is in crisis because of the Enlightenment
principles on which it is based, and which were articulated by Kant, Locke and
Adam Smith and put into practice in the United States by Jefferson and Madison.
The main anti-liberal philosophers were Nietzsche, Heidegger and Carl Schmidt.
Effectively, Neoconservatism was triggered by
the repudiation of the politics of the American New Left. As journalist and
writer of neoconservative ideology Jacob Heilbrunn related, “Neo-conservatism
was turned into an actual movement by Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz,”23
and as Podhoretz explained in an article in the leading neoconservative
publication Commentary for which he was a long -time editor,
neoconservatism “came into the world to combat the dangerous lies that were
spread by the radicalism of the 1960s and that were being accepted as truth by
the established liberal institutions of the day.”24 As Adam Curtis
explained in the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares : “Strauss
explained it was the very basis of the liberal idea, the belief in individual
freedom, that was causing the chaos because it undermined the shared moral
framework that held society together. Individual this inevitably25 According
led to Irving Kristol: conflict.”
If you had asked any liberal in 1960,
we are going to pass these laws, these laws, these laws, and these laws,
mentioning all the laws that in fact were passed in the 1960s and ‘70s, would
you say crime will go up, drug addiction will go up, illegitimacy will go up,
or will they get down? Obviously, everyone would have said, they will get down.
And everyone would have been wrong. Now, that’s not something that the liberals
have been able to face up to. They’ve had their reforms, and they have led to
consequences that they did not expect and they don’t know what to do about.26
Podhoretz’s Commentary
was originally a journal of the liberal left, but became a major voice for
neoconservatives in the 1970s. As Benjamin Balint described it, it was the
“Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left Into the Neoconservative
Right.”27 Historian Richard Pells concludes that “no other journal
of the past half century has been so consistently influential, or so central to
the m political and intellectual life of the United States.”28 Commentary
was published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which was also
responsible for the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. In the
1970s, AJC spearheaded the fight to pass
anti-boycott legislatif Israel.
In particular, Japan’s defection from the boycott was attributed to AJC persuasion.
In 1975, AJC became the first
Jewish organization to campaign against
the UN’s “ Zionism is Racism” resolution, succeeded in 1991. AJC
played a leading role in breaking Israel’s diplomatic isolation at the UN by
helping it gain acceptance in WEOG (West Europe and Others), one of
the
UN’s five regional
The theoretical
framework for neoconservative foreign policy during the final Cold years War was
articulated of by the Jeane Kirkpatrick, in “Dictatorships and Double
Standards,” published in Commentary in 1979. Though she ultimately
became a conservative, as a college freshman in 1945 Kirkpatrick joined the
Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party of
America, influenced by her grandfa and Socialist parties in Oklahoma. Kirkpatrick
had also been involved with the League for Industrial Democracy from 1960 to
1965 known as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), part of the network
of the Tavistock Institute’s Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which had been
instrumental in creating the New Left in America.29 Kirkpatrick
eventually criticized the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter, which supported
detente with the Soviet Union. She went on to serve the Reagan Administration
as Ambassador to the United Nations.
Ultimately,
the social upheavals of the sixties caused by liberalism were perceived by the
neoconservatives as a “rotting” through America’s lack of self-confi dence and
belief in its of identity, the neoconservatives took hold of Strauss’ notion of
the need to resort to Noble Lies. They would fabricate the mythos that America
was the only source for “good” in the world, and should be supported, otherwise
“evil” would prevail. Of the purported threat that came to be exaggerated by
the neoconservative lobby, Adam Curtis explained, “this dramatic battle between
good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught his
students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay.”30
Towards
building the reinvention of America’s role in the world, the neoconservatives
took advantage of that resulted from America’s defeat in Vietnam and the
Watergate scandal. Primarily responsible for escalating the involvement of the
US in Vietnam were McGeorge Bundy and McNamara who, along with Dean Rusk, were
reportedly the authors of the controversial Report from Iron Mountain,
which called for the need to maintain perpetual war. In the documents, “an
established and recognized extraterrestrial menace” is also listed among the
possible “substitute institutions for consideration as replacements for the
nonmilitary functions of war.” McNamara was Secretary of Defense under John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to 1968, and served as President of the
World Bank from 1968 to 1981. Dean Rusk, an important participant in the
formation of the Bilderberg a top official with the
CFR and
then the head of the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Report from Iron Mountain
was first published then editor E. L. Doctorow. According to the report, a
panel called the Special Study Group met at an underground nuclear bunker
called Iron Mountain in 1963 to examine what problems would occur if the US
entered lasting peace. A member of the panel, a professor naming himself “John
Doe,” decided to release the report to the public. The report concluded that
peace was not in the interest of a stable society. Because war was a part of
the economy, it was necessary to conceive a state of war for a stable economy.
The government, the group theorized, would not exist without war and nation
states existed in order to wage war. War also served a vital function of
diverting collective aggression. They recommended that bodies be created to
emulate the economic functions of war.
However, Leonard C. Lewin, claimed to have
been the author of the work. Nevertheless, the report was reviewed in the book
section of The Washington Post by Herschel McLandress, the pen
name for Harvard professor John Kenneth
Galbraith, where he claimed t authenticity, because he had been invited to
participate in its creation.31 Others have suggested it is merely a
parody of the disturbing material produced by the popular think-tanks. Whatever
the case may be, the conclusions mirror those discovered several decades
earlier by Norman Dodds, as expressed in minutes of the tax-exempt foundations.
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