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DOMINION
AND DECEPTION
By Gillian Norman
jilinda@globalismnews.com
“One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to
name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he
is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of
reputation and kingdom many a time."
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince: Concerning The Way In Which
Princes Should Keep Faith, Florence, 1532
“You can fool some of the people all of the time and
those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
George W. Bush, joking at a Gridiron Club dinner,
Washington, D.C., March 2001
“Goodbye Jack Daniels, Hello Jesus!" So it was that
George W. Bush says he met the Messiah as he switched the bottle for the
Bible on a summer day after his 40th birthday. When he was young and
irresponsible, he was really irresponsible, he admits, but all that has
changed. Now, they say, his Christian faith permeates his daily life; he
starts each day on his knees, reads the Bible and devoutly attends church.
The air in the White House is said to be scented with the fragrant incense of
prayerfulness, and presidential speeches are spiced with religious metaphors.
Bush envisions himself fulfilling a divine calling, as he
heads a global battle that pits the forces of good against the forces evil.
He claims God speaks to his mind, directing his actions and inspiring his
presidential policy decisions. He says he “felt the call" before his
inauguration as Texas governor in 1999, as he listened to Methodist pastor Mark
Craig preach on Moses' reluctance to lead. It spoke conviction directly to
Bush’s heart for abrogation of responsibility. Assembling leading pastors at
the governor’s mansion for a laying-on of hands, he announced the news:
"I've heard the call, I believe God wants me to run for president."
Bush’s testimony appears to the sincere evangelical to be
genuine; his heart was changed in a “born again” experience, through a
personal encounter with Christ leading to repentance, reconciliation with
God, and a conviction of God's plan and purpose for his life. Desperate for a
breath of moral fresh air after the putrid impropriety that disgraced the
Clinton White House, honest Christians who never question the meaning of the
word “is”, were swayed by Bush's invocation of the name of “Christ”. He was,
by his own admission, “one of them”.
Few doubted and even fewer publicly questioned the veracity
of Bush’s “born again” claims. But, hey, hey, in those exuberant days that
brought the warm glow of Christian fellowship right to the heart of the
election campaign, who would have dared to mouth a ripple of doubt? And who
could have foreseen that in pursuing their quest for a leader of integrity
and compassion in action, the Christian churches, armed with the Bible in one
hand and the flag in the other, were just about to exchange one liar in the
White House for a better one.
Dominion and
deception go claw in glove. From empire to empire there have always
existed foul creatures in elegant attire lurking beneath the mud of political
intrigue with megalomaniac intent. Deeply dark elites have always wielded
untold influence beneath the mantles of anonymity that keep the powers behind
the powers hidden from the public eye. Yet today, as the autocratic American
Empire performs its awesome debut on the global stage, some of these
dangerous schemers have boldly emerged from their subterranean refuge to
reveal their previously hidden lust for power, and are now, in public
statements and policy papers, baring their visible teeth.
These nefarious elitists – all too often naively scorned as
paper tigers by sensible folk who dismiss conspiracy theories – may have a
smile as sweet as sugar and spice, but they also have a nasty snarl and a
fearsome bite. The deception that promotes their bid for dominion is the
claim that American military dominance over the world is best for everyone,
and that this policy – disguised as “democracy” – is endorsed, even directed
by God.
The new elite that slipped from the shadows to direct the
Bush administration foreign policy are neoconservatives, or neocons, who have
formed an unprecedented right-wing alliance of former leftists and liberals.
Their ideology is paradoxical, spawned in that fetid breeding ground where
right meets left, producing a hybrid offspring that resembles a power-hungry,
pro-Zionist mutation of Trotsky's ideas on permanent revolution. This new elite now openly promotes a
glorious vision of American supremacy based on a messianic ideology that
exalts American culture as superior in every way to the cultures of other
nations.
Under the motto “peace through strength,” their aim is to
subjugate every aspect of American society to the bare-fisted control of the
state, as part of a military crusade for complete U.S. global dominance. Like
the wolf in disguise who fooled Little Red Riding Hood, their voracious
blood-lust is masked by soothing reassurances of good intentions. Only this
time the wolf is far more ambitious. It is the people of America and the
nations of the world who are lined up for lunch under the guise of
benevolence. But first, the trusting victims must be convinced that the
hungry wolf is just as benign as lil’ ole granny in a frilly nightgown.
The elite made its first move from the shadows of power to
the spotlight when a draft of the Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) on U.S. grand
strategy was leaked to the New York Times in 1992. This literal Pax Americana
– American Peace – was framed along the same lines as the Pax Romana, and
foretold a world in which global U.S. military intervention would become
permanent.
Surprised commentators described the policy document as
stunning in the clarity and ambition of the new U.S. military vision. The
proposed strategy called for U.S. military pre-eminence over Eurasia by
preventing the rise of any potentially hostile power. It also established a
new policy of pre-emptive action against any state suspected of developing
weapons of mass destruction. Written
more than a decade ago by former Pentagon analysts Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy
Security of Defense, and I. Lewis Libby, now Vice President Cheney’s
chief-of-staff, this prospective defense strategy has today become the
backbone of America’s aggressive foreign policy, and many aspects of it are
included in the important document outlining 2002 National Security Strategy.
As Richard Perle put it: "The President of the United States, on issue
after issue, has reflected the thinking of neoconservatives."
Cleverly masked in the rhetoric of justice and benevolence,
the new doctrine promoted by the Bush Inner Circle is characterized by a
distinctly Machiavellian tinge. Niccolò Machiavelli, the political
philosopher who served the Italian government in the 16th century, wrote that
the true purpose of political power is to maintain and extend itself. It has
nothing at all to do with the welfare of the people, nor with principles of
right and wrong.
Machiavelli taught that it was useful to promote morals,
ethics and religious convictions among the people for the purpose of
maintaining control and productivity. The ruler himself, while advised to
maintain a guise of morality and religiosity, was sanctioned in the covert
use of dishonesty, cruelty, murder, or any other means necessary to
perpetuate power.
The new elite, whose driving force is the pursuit of power,
believe they have a right to impose their rule by way of deceit. As disciples
of Machiavelli they consider themselves to be free from the constraints of
moral absolutes. Their philosophy also encourages them to promote religious faith
among the people, even though they themselves are not true believers. This
may, perhaps, explain why some of the elite clique who are secular Jews and
members of occult fraternities, have strategically embedded themselves with
the Christian Right, and successfully persuaded most influential evangelical
churches in America to serve their cause. The “born-again” George Bush
certainly knows just how important “faith” is to the 100 million professing
American Christians who form the Republican political power base.
In his book, The Prince, Machiavelli writes:
"Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all
the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to
have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to
observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to
appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with
a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and
know how to change to the opposite. And you have to understand this, that a
prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men
are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act
contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion… There is nothing more
necessary to appear to have than this last quality, inasmuch as men judge
generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody
to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear
to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves
to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend
them.”
Surrounded by policy
shapers with allegiance to a philosophy that advocates the shameless blinding
of the electorate, President Bush has aggressively pursued strategies
that have finally resulted in the imposition of new moral absolutes. Grounded
neither in truth nor in national interest, the ambitious Machiavellian clique
exploits religion only to rally support for the perpetuation of their own
power and profit. Ironically, this strategic deception and manipulation is
the exact antithesis of the faded values of the Christian community, who
remain entirely oblivious to the elite’s predation.
Like Machiavelli, the German Jewish political philosopher
Leo Strauss also taught that the elite, who transcend moral absolutes, should
exploit religious faith in order to autocratically control the masses.
Strauss became convinced, as a result of his experience of World War I, that
faith in human nature without God, as it was exalted in the Enlightenment,
was mistaken. He saw religion as the indispensable opiate of the people.
Deception, for Strauss, was a necessity in political life, and he considered
religion to be a desirable “pious fraud” – a fraud to be encouraged as a
means of control, through the imposition of “moral law”. Religion is
necessary for the people, he advised, but the rulers themselves – not bound
by the same moral laws they preach and impose on others – should maintain
only an outward form of religion, a convincing façade.
Leo Strauss emigrated
to the United States in 1938, where he obtained a fellowship with the
Rockefeller Foundation and a position teaching philosophy at the University
of Chicago. The eccentric opinions of this obscure German academic would
not be expected to hold much sway, except that Leo Strauss happens to be the
mentor of influential neoconservatives including William Kristol, former
chief of staff to Dan Quayle, and Paul Wolfowitz, now Deputy Defense
Secretary.
In 1997, members of the neoconservative elite formed a
number of interlocking think tanks and front groups dedicated to their
fundamental belief that “American leadership is good both for America and for
the world”. Several founder members were influential veterans of the Reagan
administration and future senior officials of the G.W. Bush foreign policy
team.
William Kristol
founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with the stated goal
to “promote American global leadership”. PNAC brought the neoconservatives
who promote global U.S. dominance together with powerful militarists in the
Bush administration such as Vice-president Dick Cheney, and Secretary of
Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Here, at PNAC, the neoconservatives and militant
hawks rub shoulders with influential Christian activists such as Gary Bauer,
and other prominent leaders of the Religious Right, who obediently promote
the neocon cause throughout the churches.
Influential think-tank warriors also formed several other
revolving door interfaces between high positions in government and top jobs
in the military-industrial complex. The Center for Security Policy (CSP), is
described as the “main battle tank” whose mission is to promote world peace
through American strength. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
(JINSA) links American defense policy with the security of Israel. The
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential Washington think tank, is
known as the heartbeat of neoconservative thought.
William Kristol is often described as “the crown prince” of
the neoconservative elite. His father, Irving Kristol, the “godfather” of
neoconservatives, credited with defining the neoconservative credo, was a
member of the American Trotskyists’ Fourth International in 1940, before
veering to the right. Other members of the neoconservative Inner Circle who
drive U.S. foreign policy include Undersecretary of Defense for Policy,
Douglas Feith; Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International
Security, John Bolton; and National Security Council director of Near Eastern
Affairs, Elliot Abrams, who was convicted in the illegal Iran-Contra scandal
run by George Bush Sr. in the 1980s, involving the sale of American weapons
to Iran to fund the CIA’s covert war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista
government.
Serving President George W. Bush as an international affairs
analyst is another neoconservative who was also implicated in the Iran-Contra
affair. Michael Ledeen, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident
scholar with alleged ties to the Italian P-2 Masonic Lodge, is a long-time
advocate of regime change in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon. He believes with
Machiavelli that it is the nature of humans to do evil, and that war is our
natural state. Violence, he claims, in the service of the spread of
“democracy”, is America’s manifest destiny. In his book, Machiavelli on
Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli’s Iron Rules Are as Timely and Important
Today as Five Centuries Ago, Ledeen unapologetically states that the purpose
of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people: “The goal
is power, which means the domination of others, and the winners revel in it,
savoring what Machiavelli calls the ‘sweetness of dominion’.”
Described by opponents as a "Nazi/Communist"
Michael Ledeen is pressing now for the overthrow of the same Mullahs from
whom he formerly profited by covertly peddling weapons. Putting his creed
into action, he has fuelled the flames of war from Nicaragua to Iraq.
The ideas of the neocons are forcefully promoted in several
important journals. Commentary, describing itself as "America's premier
monthly journal of opinion," is published by the American Jewish Council
and advocates regime change in all countries considered hostile to US and
Israeli interests.
According to the Weekly Standard, the neoconservative voice
with considerable influence in Washington, peaceful coexistence between the
United States and the rest of the globe is not an option. The Rupert
Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, published by William Kristol, promotes an
idealistic, assertive America that will, through the barrel of a gun, export
“pro-democratic” revolution around the world.
Yet even when the neocons promote war as a means of extending
democracy, the term “democracy” does not mean what is normally understood as
“democracy” - the participation of informed citizens in governance.
“Democracy” is instead used in an Orwellian newspeak sense to describe only
those acceptable outcomes that result from the manipulation of ostensibly
popular decisions by the controllers. A freely elected Islamic government in
Iraq would, for example, not be a desirable outcome, and would be considered
“undemocratic”.
Gerhard Spörl comments in a Der Spiegel article, “The
Leo-conservatives”,
(http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,259860,00.html) that a
conspiracy theory is developing in which the Bush administration is portrayed
as a puppet, controlled by the Straussian philosophy of the puppet masters.
“The practical consequence of this philosophy is fatal. According to its
tenets, the elites have the right and even the obligation to manipulate the
truth. Just as Plato recommends, they can take refuge in "pious
lies" and in selective use of the truth. It is precisely because of
these fundamental elements of a political theory Strauss represented
throughout his life that he is accused, in today's America, of having used
the Nazis to study the methods of mass manipulation. And "Straussians,"
such as Wolfowitz and other proponents of the Iraq war, are now suspected of
simply having used the Strauss' political principles for their own purposes.
When seen in this light, the partly fictitious reasons for the war against
Saddam Hussein represent the philosophical heritage of an emigrant from
Germany.”
The lessons of recent history clearly reveal that the
neocons’ world view, that will without conscience use deception as a means of
achieving dominion, has striking similarities with both Stalin’s communist dictatorship
and Hitler’s nazi ideology of National Socialism.
In Chronicles Magazine, Neocoservatism, Where Trotsky Meets
Stalin And Hitler,
(http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST072303.html)
Trifkovic writes: “In the Straussian-neoconservative mindset, those who are
fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only
one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior. That
mindset is America's enemy. It is the greatest threat to the constitutional
order, identity, and way of life of the United States, in existence today.
Its adherents have only modified the paradigm of dialectical materialism in
order to continue pursuing the same eschatological dream, the End of History
devoid of God. They are in pursuit of Power for its own sake – thus sinning
against God and man – and the end of that insane quest will be the same as
the end of the Soviet Empire and of the Thousand-Year Reich.”
Again like Machiavelli, Leo Strauss claimed that only if the
state is united by an external threat can political order be stable.
Furthermore, if no real external threat exists then one would have to be
manufactured, maintaining the citizens in total deception in order to
perpetuate the desired state of constant conflict. President Bush and his
neoconservative policy makers have repeatedly warned that the war on
terrorism – that found its moral justification in the provocative 9-11
attacks – would be a perpetual, global war against the forces of chaos and
disorder, necessitating the shredding of constitutional freedoms and the
imposition of sweeping totalitarian control.
America, a nation that likes to think of itself as an Empire
of Liberty has become an Empire of Dominion. The Pax Americana that the new
elite has now established as U.S. foreign policy clearly does not serve the
real interests of the nations that suffer under American conquest, neither
does it serve the interests of the American people – certainly not the best
interests of the Christian conservatives who believe his profession of
“faith”. Nor does the dominion of the American Empire serve the true
interests of the subservient allies that have depleted their budgets and
sacrificed their sons to join in what is increasingly seen as the coalition
of the naïve and deceived, the bribed and the blackmailed; the coalition of
those who are willing to sacrifice the good of their own nations to serve a
ruthless cabal whose openly expressed goals are to fuel the demands of a
power-hungry totalitarian American elite.
The adoption, under the guise of “compassion” in the Bush
administration, of the agenda of a deceitful neoconservative cabal is bitter,
since it was largely achieved on a wave of support from altruistic religious
conservatives. What they hoped for and sought was merely to re-establish a
moral anchor in American politics. George W. Bush gained support only because
many people believed him to be upright, a devout, spiritual man. The crucial
swing voters in the 2000 election were those who wanted a leader who would
take a stand for integrity.
But then, as George Bush joked at a Gridiron Club dinner in
Washington, D.C., the advice he had been given was clear: “You can fool some of the people all of
the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.”
The whispers of Machiavelli that echoed in the halls of the
Holy Roman Empire six centuries ago still resonate today: “There is one
prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, who never preaches
anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile…”
Gillian Norman, a former journalist,
heads Impact Multimedia Group in Australia, is editor of GlobalismNews:
Perspectives on the New World Empire -- http://www.globalismnews.com/ and is
writing a book, "Dominion and Deception".
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