Tuesday, 17th of February, 2004

Via Ken MacLeod, an article from The Nation by Michael Lind, former neoconservative, on the liberal origins of neoconservatism, and what it's become today: A Tragedy of Errors. Worth reading for the historical perspective, and for perhaps an unravelling (slightly) of how the neocons are related to hard-line pro-Likud Zionism (and why it's not the case that to criticise the neocons is to be anti-Semitic…)

Lind contends that the neocons see themselves as latter-day Churchills, battling against liberal appeaser Chamberlains on the one hand, and totalitarian anti-democracies on the other. Now, as criticism of the neocons' New World (Dis)Order grows (not least because of the lies and mistakes revealed in the WMDs fiasco), their strategy is on the one hand to accuse all critics of using the term "neoconservatism" as a smokescreen for anti-Semitism, and on the other hand to claim that there is no such thing as neoconservatism (recalling a similar strategy with postmodernism: Claim that po-mo encourages sloppy thinking, raising cool-sounding verbiage above reasoned argument and disallowing any criteria for assessing different theses, and the retort will often be that "there's no such thing as postmodernism anyway" – which is entirely beside the point.)

Quote: "David Brooks and his colleagues in the neocon press are half right. There is no neocon network of scheming masterminds–only a network of scheming blunderers. As a result of their own amateurism and incompetence, the neoconservatives have humiliated themselves."

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