[Peace-discuss] Russell Kirk on neocons

[John W.]

You'd think paragraph 2, especially, would be self-evident, a matter of
simple common sense.  But it's not, sadly.  It's not only neocons who have
embraced the notion of American exceptionalism - unless you define neocons
by that very standard.

John Wason


On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:07 AM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

 Russell Kirk was lambasted in 1988 for his wisecrack against US attitude
> toward Israel and the Neocons.
>
> ...in foreign policy the Neoconservatives have opposed manfully - or, in
> the case of Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, womanfully - the designs and
> menaces of the Soviet Union. They have been well aware that America is not
> merely opposing a national rival, but (graver peril) combatting an armed
> doctrine - as Burke said of British resistance to the Jacobins two centuries
> ago. Sometimes, true, they have been rash in their schemes of action,
> pursuing a fanciful democratic globalism rather that the national interest
> of the United States; on such occasions I have tended to side with those
> moderate Libertarians who set their faces against foreign entanglements. *And
> not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel
> Aviv for the capital of the United States - a position they will have
> difficulty in maintaining, as matters drift in the Levant.* Yet by and
> large, I think, they have helped to redeem America's foreign policy from the
> confusion into which it fell during and after the wars in southeastern Asia.
> In this they have redressed the balance in the conduct of foreign affairs.
> In a little while, nevertheless, I shall utter some misgivings about
> possible long-run consequences of their understanding of America's
> international undertakings...
>
> As for the democratic aspect of this Neoconservative ideology, "the
> Constitution of the United States is not for export," as Dr. Daniel Boorstin
> puts it. To expect that all the world should, and must, adopt the peculiar
> political institutions of the United States - which often do not work very
> well even at home - is to indulge the most unrealistic of visions; yet just
> that seems to be the hope and expectation of many Neoconservatives. Such
> naive doctrine led us into the wars in Indo-China - the notion that we could
> establish or prop up in Vietnam a "democracy" that never had existed
> anywhere in southeastern Asia. Such foreign policies are such stuff as
> dreams are made of; yet they lead to the heaps of corpses of men who died in
> vain. We need to ask ourselves whether the Neoconservative architects of
> international policy are very different from the foreign policy advisors who
> surrounded Lyndon Johnson.
>
> *
>
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