Above is the fifth part of an award winning documentary Power ofNightmares. The six part series neatly outlines the history of the neoconservative movement that helped to create our current Reform-Conservative government under Stephen Harper.
A growing 'Truth' movement has been slowly unravelling just what happened on 9/11 and the resulting Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
And as many people now realize, the War on Terror is against a phantom enemy. And the same people who fabricated the Soviet threat, engineered this latest horror.
It gave the neoconservative movement a huge boost.
But what it has also done, is sparked an idea in the minds of young Islam men, that America is truly evil, and it may now be up to them to eradicate an enemy that not only threatens their nations, but also their religion.
But where will this battle between phantom "Good and Evil" forces end?
Will we in the West see the destructive nature of the neconservatives, fuelled by the Religious Right; and seek a peaceful end to a struggle that emerged from the minds of mortals?
I hope so, because far too many innocent people have been killed for an ideology based on fraud.
Osama Bin Laden died in December of 2001, going to his grave denying any involvement in the attacks. He only gave money to small groups of militants who plotted the overthrow of governments in the Arab world. They were not organized. At least not organized in the way that they were portrayed.
Al Qaeda never existed. It was a phantom, and I think it's time we quit chasing ghosts.
The above video is Part one of six, from the award winning BBC documentary: Power of Nightmares.
In it they attempt to connect the recent struggles between Christian extremism and Islamic fundamentalism, to two men.
The Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who is believed to be the founder of the current terrorist network, including Al Qaeda; and Leo Strauss, the German political philosopher who was the man behind the neoconservative movement, that includes the Harper government.
I don't think it's quite that cut and dry, however. There were many contributing factors, on both sides. But one thing is clear: religious extremism is fueling both sides.
What I did find interesting from the video though, was Donald Rumsfeld's role in creating the fear around the possibility of a nuclear attack by the Soviets, during that Nixon administration. His arguments sound eerily like those he made to suggest that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Leo Strauss and Creating the Big Myth
Both Leo Strauss and Sayyid Quth, were profoundly affected by what they perceived to be the moral decay of society, and blamed it on liberalization. And both men set out to find a solution.
But the solutions they found, ended up being far worse than the original problem, because ultimately they validated barbarity; the end result of religious fervour and too much power.
And for Straussians, they also created a regime that necessitated extreme secrecy if they had any hope of maintaining what he called the 'Big Myth'.
It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity ... Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow.
... According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that "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."This dichotomy requires "perpetual deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to know and no more." (1)
And is this not what we are seeing from the Harper Regime? We are all on a need to know basis, and while his government is proving to be perhaps the most corrupt in Canadian history, this 'elite' leader struts around like he hasn't a care in the world, treating us to photo-ops and edited video, paid for by the taxpayer.
Before Stephen Harper seized power, Donald Gutstein wrote of the "noble lie."
What do close advisors to Stephen Harper and George W. Bush have in common? They reflect the disturbing teachings of Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who spawned the neoconservative movement. Strauss, who died in 1973, believed in the inherent inequality of humanity. Most people, he famously taught, are too stupid to make informed decisions about their political affairs. Elite philosophers must decide on affairs of state for us.
... A ruling elite of political philosophers must make those decisions because it is the only group smart enough. It must resort to deception -- Strauss's "noble lie" -- to protect citizens from themselves ... philosopher Jeet Heer recently wrote in the Globe and Mail. "For Strauss, the art of concealment and secrecy was among the greatest legacies of antiquity."
It's interesting that Paul Wolfowitz, who became "a major architect of President Bush's Iraq policy", was a student of Strauss. He has certainly mastered the big lie. It is also worth noting that Wolfowitz is "... currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.David Frum is also a member.
Time Magazine has suggested that violent factions of Islam, were the result of the followers of Sayyid Qutb, teaming up with Saudi militants being sent "... off to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan." As a result, they "... believed that the time for jihad against infidels and the neocolonialist West was now." (3)
Again, a bit too simplified, but one thing is for certain. Both sides couldn't be more wrong.
