What Is Neoconservatism (Neocon)?
By Julio
Severo
Important notice:
An expanded and updated version of this article, titled “What Is
Neoconservatism? Who are the Neocons?”, is found in this link: http://bit.ly/2yR8WhO
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| Hillary Clinton |
Recently,
former U.S. President George H. W. Bush and his son, former U.S. President
George W. Bush, were reported as indicating that they would vote for the
official Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Both Bushes never
backed Donald Trump, the official Republican presidential candidate.
How
could both Bushes, who are Republicans supposed to advocate pro-life and
pro-family values, despise Trump for socialist Hillary, who is pro-abortion and
pro-sodomy?
What
has a conservative in common with a socialist?
In
pro-family terms, nothing. In neocon terms, everything. In 2014 George W. Bush
described Bill Clinton as a “brother from another mother” in a gushing
interview about their surprising friendship, according to Daily Mail.
He
added that his own father “serves as a father figure” to Clinton, who pushed
the elder Bush out of office in 1992.
The
Daily Mail reported that after becoming president, Clinton frequently sought
Bush Sr.’s advice, just as Bush Jr. did with Clinton when he was elected
America’s 43rd president.
Did
these mutual advices include abortion and homosexuality? After all, before
Obama, Clinton was the most prominent pro-abortion and pro-sodomy U.S.
president. In contrast, Bush was generally pro-life and pro-family.
Does
their friendship involve moral clashes? No, because their union is not based on
pro-family interests, but only on neocon interests.
A
real conservative Christian would never do vote for socialist Hillary. But a
neoconservative (neocon) would do it.
What
is a neocon? Neoconservatives are present in both the Democratic and the
Republican Parties and their focus and priority is not to conserve pro-life,
pro-family and Christian values. They want to conserve and expand the U.S.
military and political hegemony around the world. Neocons work with any U.S.
president having this focus, whether a right-wing Bush or a left-wing Obama.
U.S.
neoconservatism focuses on foreign policy as its main concern, to keep the
United States as the only superpower molding the New World Order.
The
term “neoconservative” was popularized in the United States in 1973 by socialist
leader Michael Harrington, who used the term to define the ideology of Irving
Kristol, Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Daniel
Bell was a Jew who once described himself as a “socialist in economics, a
liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.”
Daniel
Patrick Moynihan was a Catholic member of the pro-abortion and pro-sodomy
Democratic Party.
Irving
Kristol, dubbed the “godfather of neo-conservatism,” was a powerful liberal writer
during the 1950s and 1960s. He had grown disenchanted with the Democratic Party
by 1970 and switched to the Republican Party, welcoming the name
“neoconservative” for the band of liberal intellectuals he brought with him.
Kristol
described a neoconservative as a “liberal mugged by reality.” He was immensely
persuasive in the shaping of the neocon movement, especially among Catholics.
During
the Cold War era, most neoconservatives vigorously opposed the Soviet Union.
Even though most neocons stand against communism, their ideology, which gives
no priority to the Christian values that founded America, is basically
socialist, except for the exacerbate warmongering and expansionist nationalism.
Hillary Clinton is an example. She is opposed to North Korea, an officially
communist nation. She is supported by most capitalist conglomerates in the
world, but she is opposed to pro-family and Christian values. In a sense, she
is capitalist. In a sense, she is socialist. But in every sense she is neocon.
In
American politics, a neoconservative is someone presented as a conservative but
who usually do not participate in the March for Life and do not stand up for
traditional marriage. Neocons emphasize putting America first in a very
militaristic nationalism. They support attacking and even overthrowing foreign
governments, even when the result is more persecution of Christians. Some
neocons have profited immensely from the military-industrial complex.
Even
though neocons praise the Iraq War, the DailyMail said that this war “was one
of the biggest mistakes made in the history of modern America.”
Both
George W. Bush and senator Hillary Clinton approved it. From a Christian and
humanitarian perspective, this war was a total disaster for Christians.
Before
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were over 2 million Christians. Today, they
number less than 300,000. The U.S. military presence in Iraq did not protect
Christians and even after the genocide, the U.S. has massively opened its
immigration doors to Muslims, not their Christian victims.
The
ten Islamic terrorists who attacked the U.S. on 9/11 were not from Iraq. They
were from Saudi Arabia. Even so, the U.S. did not invade and attack Saudi
Arabia, which is, in fact, the biggest sponsor of worldwide Islamic terrorism.
The U.S. invaded Iraq as if the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqis.
The
difference is: Iraq under Hussein was an enemy of Saudi Arabia, which has been
always a friend and ally of U.S. neocons, including the Bushes, the Clintons
and Obama.
The
U.S. invasion of Iraq left a predictable vacuum that resulted in the murder of thousands
of Christians there and the rise of ISIS. During the Republican presidential
primaries in 2016, Donald Trump humiliated the neocons’ insistence on war in
Iraq, Ukraine, Libya and Syria.
The
highest priority of the neoconservatives has been to increase military action
by the United States in the Middle East and to expand it to a confrontation
against Russia. There is a revolving door between some neocons and highly paid
positions in the defense industry, which may explain the constant
neoconservative demands for more wars.
Neoconservatives
favor expensive foreign interventionism with massive federal spending, often to
replace a dictator with a new system of government that may be worse,
especially for Christians. Sometimes this is expressed as a desire to install a
democracy in a culture incompatible with it.
The
neoconservative position was discredited in the failure of democracy in Iraq,
Libya and Afghanistan. In all of these nations, which were home to Christian communities
and churches, a measure of tolerance was replaced by Islamic radicalism and
purge of Christians after U.S. interventions, and today no Christian church is
left in Afghanistan.
In
contrast to traditional conservatives, neoconservatives favor globalism through
U.S. hegemony, downplay Christian values and are unlikely to actively oppose
abortion and the homosexual agenda. Neocons do not care about the evangelical
foundation of America and they do not care about making alliances with Islamic
terror groups to confront Russia. Neocons favor strong active U.S.
interventions in world affairs.
On
foreign policy, neoconservatives believe the mission of the United States is to
install democracy around the world. When fulfilling this mission, both Bushes
talked about a New World Order.
A
second main line of development of neoconservatism was strongly influenced by
the work of German-American political philosopher Leo Strauss. Some of Strauss’
students include former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz under George
W. Bush. Wolfowitz, an American-Jewish neocon, had a known affair with Shaha
Riza, a Muslim woman who grew up in Saudi Arabia. (It reminds current CIA
director John Brennan, who converted to Islam in Saudi Arabia. U.S. neocons
want to be close to Islam, but not close to Christian Russia.)
According
to Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic
Policy in the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street
Journal, Wolfowitz created the Wolfowitz doctrine, which is basis for the U.S.
foreign policy toward Russia. His doctrine regards any power sufficiently
strong to remain independent of Washington’s influence to be “hostile.”
The
Wolfowitz doctrine justifies Washington’s dominance of all regions in the world.
It is, according to Roberts, consistent with the neoconservative ideology of
the U.S. as the “indispensable” and “exceptional” country entitled to world
hegemony.
Roberts
said that “Russia is in the way of U.S. world hegemony” and that “Unless the
Wolfowitz doctrine is abandoned, nuclear war is the likely outcome.”
Yet,
the Wolfowitz doctrine can be used not only against Russia. In 2008 American
prophet Chuck Pierce told us, a small group of Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil,
that “God had removed his national anointing from the U.S. in 2008.”
“Pierce also
said that God was looking for another nation to grant this anointing. He told
that if Brazil got closer to Israel, God was going to give the anointing to
Brazil. Then he had a vision about what would happen if Brazil began to develop
into an international power: He saw the U.S. government encircling and stifling
Brazil economically and militarily. He saw the U.S. filled with envy. He saw
the U.S. totally determined to hinder Brazil’s economic rise. What I understood
from his vision is that the U.S., as the only superpower today, will not accept
the rise of any other nation to rival its hegemony. The development of every
nation is to be under the submission of U.S. interests, and these are wicked
interests, because the U.S. government has abandoned the Lord long ago. The
U.S. sees the economic rise of other nations as competing with its power.“
Perceiving
or not, Pierce described neocons, who demand all the nations to be dependent on
the U.S.
Neoconservatives
are often described as “conservative,” but their positions on social issues are
mixed. There are two main groups of neocons:
·
There
are neoconservatives who hold to liberal positions on social matters, and are
unlikely to agree with Christian conservatives on issues like abortion, prayer
in school and same-sex marriage.
·
There
are neoconservatives who tend to have greater degrees of agreement with Christian
and cultural conservatives on social issues.
Neoconservatives
differ from libertarians in that neoconservatives tend to support Big Government
policies to further their military objectives.
Because
Trump has openly opposed neocons and their ambition for more U.S. military
expansion, Commentary, the leading neoconservative magazine in the U.S., said,
somewhat hyperbolically, that Mr. Trump is “the No. 1 threat to American
security” — bigger than the Islamic State.
The
big lesson in this U.S. election is the way neocons were exposed by Trump,
notwithstanding his imperfections. Because of this confrontation, WikiLeaks
founder Julian Assange said that Trump “has had every establishment off his side.
Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the
Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms
companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the
media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”
If
evangelicals are the only major group supporting Trump, where is the second
largest Christian group in America, Catholics? Why are not they supporting Trump?
Why most U.S. Catholics prefer neocon Hillary?
A
simple Google search shows that Catholics are predominantly mentioned as
predominantly involved in neocon politics and geopolitics.
A search for “Catholic neoconservatives”
delivers 3,100 results.
A search for “evangelical neoconservatives”
delivers just 43 results.
A search for “Protestant neoconservatives”
delivers just 4 results.
Evangelicals
and Protestants, in this search, account for about 1 percent of Christian
neocons. Religiously, Catholics are in the frontlines in the neoconservative
movement.
It is
not known why Catholics would sacrifice Christian and pro-life and pro-family values
for a foreign policy of U.S. ideological interventionism and expansionism that
slaughter other Christians. For example, in the Iraq War thousands and
thousands of Christians were sacrificed in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion,
approved by right-wing Bush. Later, left-wing Obama expanded the sacrifice when
his left-wing State Secretary Hillary Clinton helped create ISIS, which has
been torturing, raping and slaughtering Christians masses in Iraq and Syria.
The
U.S. foreign policy, carried by neocons in the Republican Party and Democratic
Party, has been very bad for Christians in the Middle East.
Most
Christians slaughtered in Syria and Iraq are Orthodox Christians. Because
powerful U.S. neocons are Catholics, some could wonder if they would approve such
invasion, meddling and massacres in Syria and Iraq if Christians there were
exclusively Catholic.
Actually,
the U.S. has been soft with Islamic terror against Middle East Christians in
the same way the Vatican has been soft.
A
conflict between Christian powers, motivated by a millennial hostility between
Catholics and Orthodoxies, but masked as insincere concerns about the communism
of the defunct Soviet Union, is everything Islam needs to advance more and keep
its yearly martyrdom of 100,000 Christians.
The
same Vatican that is soft with Islam is now more aligned, in terms of global
governance, with the U.S. government. There are scholarly works confirming that
the Vatican is very connected to the U.S. In fact, the survival of the
State-Church Vatican has been dependent on the U.S.
The
big question is: How did a nation born essentially Protestant and pro-Israel and
pro-Jews unite itself with a State-Church historically against Israel and Jews?
“Rome
in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism,”
by Peter R. D’Agostino, shows that in the past, the essential association was
between the Vatican and Italy. Now it is increasingly between the Vatican and
the U.S. In effect, the U.S. has become the Vatican’s new Italy.
Another
fundamental book is “Parallel Empires: The Vatican and the United States — Two
Centuries of Alliance and Conflict,” by Massimo Franco, which says:
“The Vatican
view [under Pope John Paul II] is that the American response to [Islamic]
terrorism, the battlefront of the third millennium, is too strident and more
likely to exacerbate the problem than to solve it. While Islamic fundamentalism
is the main threat to the West, Vatican officials press their arguments that
historically Islam and Christian communities have generally managed to coexist
in the Arab world.”
This
explains the soft U.S. stance on Islamic terror. But what does explain a hard
U.S. stance on Orthodox Russia?
For
centuries, Catholics advocated an Italian nationalism (and an overwhelming
majority of popes were Italian) because the Vatican was linked to Italy. Today,
Catholics, even in Brazil, the largest Catholic nation in the world, advocate
an exacerbated American warmongering nationalism. Why? For the same old reason:
The Vatican today is linked to the United States in many respects and
ambitions.
There
was a time, before the foundation of the Soviet Union, when Catholics, even
U.S. Catholics, wanted the supremacy of the Vatican. Now do Catholics heavily
involved in the neocon movement want the U.S. supremacy, not in pro-family
advocacy, but exclusively in military and political hegemony? Why?
Most
the U.S. suspicions of the current Russia come from Catholic neocons. Catholics
have for one thousand years had suspicions of the Christian Orthodox Church.
And today the largest Orthodox Christian nation in the world is Russia. Before
the birth of the Soviet Union, they had suspicions of Russia — for religious
reasons. During the Soviet Union, they had suspicions, rightly shared by
evangelicals, over Soviet Marxism. But after the Soviet Union’s downfall, why
do their suspicions remain?
They
had many suspicions of the largely Protestant and capitalist U.S. society, but
they overcame this prejudice. Why not in regard to an Christian Orthodox Church
that is fighting for the same pro-family values as a Reagan’s America would do?
Republican
presidential candidate Donald Trump has for the first time in the U.S. history confronted
neocons in the Democratic Party and Republican Party. He is not a conservative
in the Christian sense of having a history of pro-family advocacy, but he has
not the neocon advocacy of Hillary Clinton, shared by George H. W. Bush and
many other Republicans, to conserve and expand the U.S. military and political
hegemony, especially through NATO, at the expense of Christians values and even
Christian lives.
While
both Republican and Democratic neocons want greater U.S. military interventions
in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, which are not U.S. territories and do not have a
U.S. population, Trump wants the U.S. to stop this meddling, including NATO
meddling.
Trump
wants a partnership with Russia against Islamic terror, but neocons — including
Obama, Hillary and both Bushes — want a partnership with Islam against Russia.
Even
though personally Trump has a personal moral life as doubtful as Bill Clinton,
he is right and very courageous to confront neocons and their ambitions.
God
can use strange things and men to speak to people and nations. I believe that
He used Trump to speak the truth in the neocon issue. Much Christian blood has
been shed by neocons, through wars and Islamic violence.
How
has Trump confronted neocons? He blasted them over the Iraq War and the U.S.
meddling in Syria and Ukraine and demonization of Russia.
According
to DailyMail, Trump has “criticized Clinton’s handling of U.S.-Russian
relations while Secretary of State and said her harsh criticism of Putin raised
questions about ‘how she is going to go back and negotiate with this man who
she has made to be so evil’ if she wins the presidency.”
Demonization
of Putin and Russia is the core of the neocon passions.
The
Ukrainian case is a showcase of neocon ambitions. While Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton and George Soros were calling the Ukrainian revolution a people’s
revolution, in a WND report Savage said,
“The situation
in Ukraine has been painted as a conflict between Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the
so-called bad guys, and Ukrainian rebels, the so-called good guys who seek to
oust Russia from a position of influence in Ukraine and install a new
government that will be responsive to the Ukrainian people. Don’t believe a
word of it. The Ukrainian nationalists are fascists. Washington’s original
purpose for staging a coup in Ukraine was to move Ukraine away from Russia and
bring Ukraine into the European Union. In other words, the neocons and the
bought-and-paid-for ‘moderates’ in the Obama administration wanted to wrest
control of Ukraine from Putin’s hands and gain economic and energy control over
the country. As Dr. Stephen F. Cohen has pointed out, Western nations, with the
U.S. leading the way, have been provoking Putin for decades. We’ve expanded
NATO to include former Soviet states – Ukraine looks like the next target – and
we’ve attacked allies of Russia, including Libya and Iraq. The U.S. – along
with other Western nations – through our incursions into the politics,
economics and national security of Russia and several of its allies, has
effectively caused the situation that is now unfolding in Ukraine. Cohen is
right.”
Savage
points that Obama and his neocons, not conservatives, created a revolution in
Ukraine to draw it away from Russia and put it, eventually, into NATO’s orbit.
Obama
and his neocons want Ukraine in NATO and are willing to go to war over it. In
contrast, Trump has shown, so far, no willingness to follow neocon passions for
war in Ukraine against Russia.
Last September,
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko invited Trump for a meeting, but, according to DailyMail, “the
Ukrainian government says the Republican candidate blew them off.”
Yet,
Hillary Clinton met Poroshenko and promised him that she would stand with
Ukraine against “Russian aggression.”
The
best explanation about neocons’ intent was given by Savage, who said in WND:
“The neocons…
thrive on military conflict. When the world is at war, the neocons and the
defense contractors who work with them make enormous amounts of money. The
neocons don’t care which side you’re on, as long as they can work with you to
create a political situation that they can grow into a war from which they will
profit.”
Savage
is right. And Trump agrees with him, because Trump has been reading his books
and had a very positive interview with Savage. But neocon-minded individuals do
not agree. The Trevor Loudon blog said,
“If Trump is
elected, you will have the Russians… in the White House. Trump’s advisers are
very connected to Vladimir Putin and Russia. Trump himself has many ties as
well and is friends with Putin. This is why Putin will try to sabotage Clinton
with leaked emails, etc.”
Trump’s
approach to seek to get along with Russia and meet Putin is correct, but
despised by neocons.
It
impossible for socialists Hillary and Obama to get along with modern Russia,
especially after Russians passed a law banning homosexual propaganda to children.
Neocons
and their love of Islamic partnership against Russia and hatred of Russia are
the biggest challenge. In this respect, Trump’s confrontation with neocons is
to be commended and imitated.
The
heavy Catholic involvement with the neocon movement should be studied.
Even
though former U.S. President George H. W. Bush was a neocon, his son, former
U.S. President George W. Bush, was a good evangelical misled by neocons, who
filled his administration. Reagan also was misled by them. As said Scott
Lively, Bush was just their puppet. Many evangelicals have been duped by the
neocons’ warmongering nationalism.
Incredible
thing. Trump, a Presbyterian, has no history of confrontation with neocons and
no history of Christian activism. It is not known if his current confrontation
is sincere or not. But it is obvious that he showed who neocons are and what
they are after.
Perceiving
or not, he was used by God to warn evangelicals and other Christians.
With
information from Conservapedia, WND (WorldNetDaily) and DailyMail.
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