← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · FadeTheButcher
Thread ID: 10251 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-10-05
2003-10-05 00:49 | User Profile
Just who are the Neoconservatives? Lets ask them. . . .
Irving Kristol is considered the "godfather" of Neoconservatism. He has a book describing the ideology, Neoconservatism: An Autobiography of an Idea. Perhaps you should check it out. Here is the introduction.
Is there a such thing as a "neo" gene? I ask that question because, looking back over a lifetime of my opinions, I am struck by the fact that they all qualify as "neo." I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-Socialist, a neo-Liberal, and finally a neo-Conservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.
One "neo," however, has been permanent throughout my life, and it is probably at the root of all the others. I have been "neo-orthodox" in my religious views (though not in my religious observance). This is something of a puzzle to me, for my own religious background was not at all conducive to such a perspective. It is true that my parent's household in Brooklyn was Orthodox Jewish, but only in observance - belief seemed to have nothing to do with it. My father would go to synagogue only once a year, on the High Holidays; my mother never went, though she kept a strictly kosher household. We took notice of the other main Jewish holidays too, but we never "celebrated" them. I received absolutely no Jewish instruction at home, nor did my parents seem to care very much about my own observance. It is true that they dutifully sent me to an old-fashioned yeshiva - two afternoons a week and Sunday mornings - so that I could learn to read the prayer book and qualify for my bar mitzvah. There we also read the first five books of the Bible, translating them from Hebrew into Yiddish - two languages I didn't know. (My parents spoke Yiddish to each other, but only English to the children.) I dutifully participated, learning to read Hebrew and memorizing the Yiddish translations. **Discipline was strict - if we misbehaved in any way, the rabbi would order us to stand up and then give us a stinging slap in the face. He also taught us to hate the goyim and to spit whenever we passed a church. **
Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, pg. 4
Norman Podhoretz from Commentary magazine is another prominent neoconservative. In one of his articles featured in The Essential Neoconservative he describes his hatred of blacks. . .
Why, then, have I permitted "My Negro Problem - and Ours" to be reprinted here, as I have dozens of times before, without revision? The answer, frankly, is that I have always been proud of it as a piece of writing (and I like to believe that its virtues as a literary essay have been another, and possibly even the main, factor in keeping it alive).
-- Norm Podhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, p.21
Here is another outtake. . .
I share this hope, but I cannot see howe it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration - let the brutal word come out - miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the "so-called Negro leaders" of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races [whites and blacks] is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.
I have told the story of my own twisted feelings about Negroes here, and of how they conflict with the moral convictions I have since developed, in order to assert that such feelings must be acknowledged as honestly as possible so that they can be controlled and ultimately disregarded in favor of the convictions. It is wrong for a man to suffer because of the color of his skin. Beside that clichéd proposition of liberal thought, what argument can stand and be respected? If the arguments are the arguments of feeling, they must be made to yield; and one's own soul is not the worst place to begin working a huge social transformation. Not so long ago, it used to be asked of white liberals, "Would you like your sister to marry one?" When I was a boy and my sister was still unmarried, I would have certainly said no to that question. But now I am a man, my sister is already married, and I have daughters. If I were to be asked today whether I would like a daughter of mine "to marry one," I would have to answer: "No, I wouldn't like it at all. I would rail and rave and rant and tear my hair. And then I hope I would have the courage to curse myself for raving and ranting, and to give her my blessing. How dare I withhold it at the behest of the child I once was and against the man I now have a duty to be?
-- Norm Podhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, p.18
Yet my sister's opinion's, like print, were sacred, and when she told me about exploitation and economic forces I believed her. **I believed her, but I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart. **
-- Norm Porhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, pg. 6
When I ran home to my mother crying for an explanation, she told me not to pay any attention to such foolishness, and then in Yiddish she cursed the goyim and the schwartzes, the schwartzes and the goyim. Carl, it turned out, was a schwartze, and so was added a third to the categories into which people were mysteriously divided.
-- Norm Porhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, pg. 7
To the Negroes, my white skin was enough to define me as the enemy, and in a war it is only the uniform that counts and not the person.
-- Norm Porhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, pg. 12
And what about me? What kind of feelings do I have about Negroes today? What happened to me, from Brooklyn, who grew up fearing and envying and hating Negroes? Now that Brooklyn is behind me, do I fear them and envy them and hate them still? The answer is yes, but not in the same proportions and certainly not in the same way.
-- Norm Porhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative pg. 14
The hatred that I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlorded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps, that I am constantly beign denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? **I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone. **
-- Norm Porhoretz, The Essential Neoconservative, pg. 15