Originally posted on the ‘AALS Section on Minority Grps. mailing list’
It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli “Neoconservative” Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so.(1) Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda. But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, their Undersecretary of War Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-Cons inhabiting the Bush Jr. administration.
These pro-Israeli Neo-Cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in its Department of Political Science. The best exposé of Strauss’s pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor of Political Philosophy Shadia B. Drury.(2) I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago’s Political Science Department by Strauss’s foremost protégé, co-author, and later literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago’s Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury’s devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process that has been inflicted by Chicago’s Straussian Neo-Con cabal. (3)
The University of Chicago routinely trained me and innumerable other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-Con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. Years later, the University of Chicago became the “brains” behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his lawyers at the Bush Jr. Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka “Feddies”), (4) which originated in part at the University of Chicago. Feddies wrote the USA Patriot Act (USAPA) I and the draft for USAPA II, which constitute the blueprint for establishing an American Police State. (5) Meanwhile, the Department of Injustice’s own F.B.I. is still covering up the U.S. governmental origins of the post 11 September 2001 anthrax attack on Washington D.C. that enabled Ashcroft and his Feddies to stampede the U.S. Congress into passing USAPA I into law. (6)
Integrally related to and overlapping with the Feddies are members of the University of Chicago “School” of Law-and-Kick-Them-in-the-Groin-Economics (e.g., Richard Posner, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Epstein,etc.), which in turn was founded upon the Market Fundamentalism of Milton Friedman, now retired but long-time Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” have raped, robbed, looted, plundered, and pillaged economies and their respective peoples all over the developing world. (7) This Chicago gang of academic con-artists and charlatans are proponents of the Nazi Doctrine of “useless eaters.” Pursuant to Friedman’s philosophy of Market Fundamentalism, the “privatization” of Iraq and its Oil Industry are already underway for the primary benefit of the U.S. energy companies (e.g., Halliburton, formerly under Vice President Dick Cheney) that had already interpenetrated the Bush Jr. administration as well as the Bush Family itself. Enron.
Although miseducated (8) at Yale and Harvard Business School, the “Ivies” proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundie himself. The Neo-Cons and the Fundies contracted an “unholy alliance” in support of Bush Jr. For their own different reasons, both gangs also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. (9)
According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, intentionally taking offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. (10) Most of the Straussian Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration and elsewhere are Israel-firsters: What is “good” for Israel is by definition “good” for the United States. Dual loyalties indeed. (11)
In addition, it was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-Cons who set up a special “intelligence” unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and sheer propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media (12) in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq’s oil. (13) To paraphrase advice Machiavelli once rendered to his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. (14) As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago’s Neo-Con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli’s The Prince. We students had to know our Machiavelli by heart and rote at the University of Chicago.
As for the University of Chicago overall, its biblical Gospel is Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). (15) Of course Bloom was another protégé of Strauss, as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his Bloom-biographical novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, formerly on the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom is still worshiped and his elitist screed against American higher-education still revered on a pedestal.
In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom’s protégé Philip Gorman, leaking national security secrets to his mentor during the Bush Sr. war against Iraq. Strauss hovered around the novel as Bloom’s mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the éminence grise of Ravelstein. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies. On the basis of Ravelstein alone, Wolfowitz warrants investigation by the F.B.I.
Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian Neo-Con cabal, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. ’72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. ’69 (the CIA’s Iraqi puppet), Abram Shulsky, A.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’72 (head of the Pentagon’s special “intelligence” unit), Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. ’79 (Bush Jr’s roving pro-consul for Afghanistan and then Iraq), as well as faculty members Bellow, X ’39, and Bloom, A.B. ’49, A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’55, together with Strauss. According to the University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom’s rant “helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy.” (16) It is correct to assert that Bloom’s book helped to popularize Straussian “ideas,” but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly assert that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the “ideals of democracy.”
Does anyone seriously believe that a pro-Israeli Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product such as Wolfowitz could care less about democracy in Iraq? Or for that matter anyone in the Bush Jr. administration? After they stole the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were Feddies? (17) Justice Clarence Thomas is a Straussian to boot. (18)
At the behest of its Straussian Neo-Con Political Science Department, in 1979 the entire University of Chicago went out of its way to grant the “first Albert Pick Jr. Award for Outstanding Contributions to International Understanding” to Robert “Mad Bomber” McNamara. (19) In other words, the University of Chicago itself maliciously strove to rehabilitate one of the greatest international war criminals in the post-World War II era. (20) Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! The University of Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.
Endnotes
1. See, e.g., Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance 108 (2003).
2. Shadia B. Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). See also Alain Frachon & Daniel Vernet, The Strategist and the Philosopher: Leo Strauss and Albert Wohlstetter, Le Monde, April 16, 2003, translated into English by Norman Madarasz on Counterpunch.org., June 2, 2003.
3. See also David Brock, Blinded by the Right (2002).
4. George E. Curry & Trevor W. Coleman, Hijacking Justice, Emerge, October 1999, at 42; Jerry M. Landay, The Conservative Cabal That’s Transforming American Law, Washington Monthly, March 2000, at 19; People for the American Way, The Federalist Society (August 2001); Institute for Democracy Studies, The Federalist Society and the Challenge to a Democratic Jurisprudence (January 2001).
7. See Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (2003), at 5 et seq.
8. See Chomsky on Miseducation (Donald Macedo ed. 2000).
10. White House Press Release, President Discusses the Future of Iraq, Washington Hilton Hotel, Feb. 26, 2003.
11. Nasser H. Aruri, Dishonest Broker, 193-216 (2003). See also Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine (2002); Cheryl A. Rubenberg, The Palestinians (2003).
12. Norman Solomon, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media (1999); Noam Chomsky, Media Control (1997).
13. Seymour M. Hersh, Selective Intelligence, New Yorker, May 8, 2003; Michael Lind, The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush’s War, New Statesman – London, April 7, 2003; Julian Borger, The Spies Who Pushed for War, The Guardian, July 17, 2003.
14. Machiavelli, The Prince 147 (M. Musa trans. & ed. 1964): “. . . and men are so simple-minded and so dominated by their present needs that one who deceives will always find one who will allow himself to be deceived.” This Bilingual Edition of The Prince by Mark Musa was the one preferred by Joseph Cropsey to teach us students.
15. But see Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (1996).
16. Between the Lines, University of Chicago Magazine, June 2003, at 54
17. Vincent Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America (2001); Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy 11-81 (2003).
19. McNamara Receives Pick Award Amid Protests, University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1979, at 4.
20. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot (1993); Robert S. McNamara, In Retrospect (1995).
