Paul M Peterson

A monarch’s neck should always have a noose around it. It keeps him upright.
~ Robert A. Heinlein

Leo Strauss, King of Snobs
Leo Strauss, 1899-1973, was an American Philosopher. He lived in Germany before WWII and left for America at the beginning of the Nazi Regime. Strauss wrote an influential critique of modern political philosophy from machiavelli to present day. You can read his full biography here: Leo Strauss Biography.

In this critique, he argues, as Plato does, that the ruling classes need to maintain social structure by means of carefully constructed mythologies. This is the famous noble lie technique. Now, this blog post is not about Leo Strauss’s philosophy. It is about the legacy of those who have followed him.

The Leo-Con Legion, by name

Other Strauss acolytes include Irving Kristol and his son, Weekly Standard editor and former Dan Quayle chief of staff William Kristol, Gary Schmitt, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Secretary of Education William Bennett, National Review publisher William F. Buckley, Attorney General John Ashroft, Norman Podhoretz, Samuel Huntington Seymour, Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Q. Wilson, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, Michael Ledeen (author of the 1973 book Universal Fascism), most members of Project For A New American Century (PNAC).

These people are responsible for a great deal of bloodshed. Their “philosophy” amounts to a sequence of rationalizations. If the CIA, during operation paperclip, hired thousands of nazi scientists and academics, between the fifties and seventies, as has been documented and Leo Strauss was waging a covert propaganda campaign of his own during that time, should we be surprised when a generation later, the right wing starts to advocate perpetual war?

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