Modern day neo-conservatism is usually associated with the Project for the New American Century, a “think tank” of prominent right-wing warmongers (including Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, John Bolton, and Francis Fukuyama) who got together in 1997 to argue for a new “Pax Americana,” whereby the global order "must have a secure foundation on unquestioned US military preeminence” with full-scale domination of not only the world and its resources, but also space and cyberspace.
In 1998, PNAC sent a letter to then-President Clinton, urging him to declare war against Iraq on the basis of its proximity to Iran and Israel and its rich oil reserves: “While the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides the immediate justification [for war], the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. . . . And even should US-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in US security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region."
PNAC luminaries like former Assistant Secretary of Defense and current World Bank president Paul.Wolfowitz and Alan Bloom (who set up shop at the University of Toronto and formed the kernel of what later developed into the so-called Calgary School, the ideological wing of Harper’s Conservatives), claim direct intellectual lineage from Leo Strauss, a post-WWII German philosopher who (perhaps rightly) saw democracy as being rife with nihilism and constantly in jeopardy of falling victim to the tyranny of the majority.
In response to this, he advocated a kind of modern Machiavellian aristocracy that would use the “noble lies” of religion and nationalism to manipulate the dumb, hedonistic masses into doing the bidding of the natural ruling elites. And it was this very policy of calculated deception and manipulation that the Bush administration used to coerce the American public into getting behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A true genealogy of neo-conservatism, however, should begin well before Strauss’ ideas began to shape the minds of young Wolfowitz and Bloom, and should reach back to John D Rockefeller Sr.
Rockefeller Sr, the founder of Standard Oil, used Christian missionaries in the American west to soften up and gather intelligence on the Native American communities that inhabited oil-rich land. In Thy Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, authors Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett point out that the evangelization process insidiously mollified the natives, weakening their communal social structure and subverting their will to defend themselves against exploitation. In 1902, Rockefeller’s right-hand man, Baptist preacher Fred Gates, wrote him a letter praising their exploits: “We are only in the very dawn of commerce, and we owe that dawn to the channels opened up by Christian missionaries. . . . The effect of the missionary enterprise of the English speaking peoples will be to bring them the peaceful conquest of the world." Little could Gates or Rockefeller have known just what a profound impact this symbiotic neo-conflation of seemingly disparate agendas would have on the trajectory of the American empire.
John D Rockefeller would become America's first billionaire. And Standard Oil, accused of unethical monopolizing tactics, was eventually broken up into Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, and a number of other oil giants that still dominate the industry today. When a young Nelson Rockefeller took up the gauntlet of his grandfather’s vast economic empire and further diversified the family’s fortune into ranches, banks, mines, weapons, and supermarkets, he also parlayed his wealth into unprecedented political capital. He and his brother David, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank, went on to play integral roles in every administration from WWII onward.
As Eisenhower’s CIA liaison, Rockefeller focused his attention on Cold War strategy and psychological warfare. He later went on to serve as Nixon’s emissary to South America, where the Rockefeller family had enormous holdings. Later, after Nixon’s fall from grace, Rockefeller was appointed Gerald Ford’s Vice President. Long before corporate cronies like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush, the boundaries between business and politics disappeared as Rockefeller-the-warmongering politician went after communism with rabid ferocity and Rockefeller-the-businessman profited immensely from the war against Third World communism through both his massive investments in the military-industrial complex (including such corporations as McDonnell Aircraft, United Nuclear, and GE), and the economic opportunities that America’s tin-pot implants provided for Rockefeller’s oil, mineral, rubber, and ranching companies all over South America.
One of the primary spearheads of Nelson’s campaign was the Agency for International Development (AID). Working in concert with the CIA, AID and groups like the so-called Alliance for Progress posed as humanitarian missions meant to elevate South American Third World countries out of squalor, while in fact, they were merely quick injection systems for neo-liberal capitalism. Groups like the Alliance for Progress were merely corrupt consortiums of American businessmen eager to peddle “schemes to give latrines to the poor”(as Che Guevera sneeringly referred to it) without really helping the impoverished people of South America. In fact, most of these schemes were designed to take advantage of South America’s poverty by giving “aid” through private American banks (suc
These poor (and sometimes outright corrupt) governments would have to pledge not to nationalize or overtax the private oil, mineral, rubber, or fruit industries. And while private corporations and a few South American elites would accumulate the lion’s share of the wealth, the poor would have little to show for it but unmanageable tax debt. This approach formed the core of what became the IMF’s current modus operandi in the Third World, and it should come as no surprise that Chase Manhattan still leads the world in forking out the usurious loans that hobble Third World nations.
AID was also used to funnel CIA and corporate money into a little-known evangelical organization called the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). SIL was the sciency new name given to the Wycliffe Bible Translators, a shadowy organization whose official mandate was to bring the Word to the heathens. Its unofficial mandate, however, was directly inspired by Gates’ work pacifying American Natives in the name of dominion, commerce, and the Lord. But SIL went far beyond just softening and collecting intelligence on the potentially rebellious, ostensibly proto-communist tribes that inhabited the oil and mineral-rich land around the Amazon basin; the group also played an active role in removing these people from their homes by whatever means necessary.
According to Victor Halterman of SIL, this was often accomplished by seducing tribesmen with trinkets like knives, axes, and mirrors, “the kind of things the Indians can't resist.” And then the missionaries “explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money.” The missionaries would then move them to reservations (as in Ecuador, where many indigenous people died in the transition), or get them work on the giant new cattle farms (many of which were owned by Rockefeller’s International Basic Economy Corporation) that had begun to supplant the rainforest. In the end, the natives wound up virtually indentured to American corporations, but “settle[d] down at it when they realize[d] there's no going back."
This strategy was successfully deployed throughout the Amazon Basin in countries such as Ecuador, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru. And the consequent devastation to the Amazon rainforest, “the lungs of the planet,” and the people who inhabited it were incalculable. As a result, SIL was eventually denounced and kicked out of a number of countries, including Mexico and Brazil, and was banned from entry into Venezuela. At a Yucatan indigenous people’s conference 1980, SIL was officially denounced for using a scientific name to conceal its religious agenda and capitalist worldview that was hostile to indigenous traditions. But by that point it was already too late to do anything more than denounce.
The system that the Rockefellers established formed the kernel of the neo-conservative approach to world government. According to this model, three voracious forces unite to form a partnership for planetary parasitism. The most important of these forces, the American military-industrial complex, takes on the role as organizing principle, wielding the other two—high capitalism and Judeo Christianity—in order to further all of their imperial goals. While the American military-industrial will-to-power seeks to preserve the Pax Americana, high capitalism and evangelical Christianity are driven to spread both the market’s and Christ’s tendrils into every nook and cranny of the globe. In this sense, the neo-conservative system is a highly-evolved three-headed monster, like the fire-breathing chimera of ancient Greek lore, meant to further the rapacious pursuits of its three heads, even if they should be realized at the expense of the rest of the world’s well-being. Ominously, chimeras were also said to augur imminent storms.
In recent history, many (from both the right and the left) have begun to speculate that the pie-in-the-sky neo-conservative project has reached its logical conclusion and is now being torn apart by its many internal contradictions. Perhaps most prominent among these is the fact that while “free market” fundamentalists like Fukuyama preach the gospel of capitalism as the panacea to all that ails the Third World (inspired by David Rockefeller’s doctrinaire and self-serving assertion that private enterprise is the basis of political freedom), capitalist institutions like the IMF have been exposed as mechanisms to keep the Third World poor and in debt to the US government and juggernauts like Chase, Bechtel, and Halliburton (which are beholden only to their shareholders). The Third World is, however, smartening up to this dynamic and some countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, are wriggling free of the IMF by rushing to pay off their debts as quickly as they can; other countries are simply refusing to be integrated into the IMF circuit. Moreover, the Iraq War has illustrated the extent to which the agendas of giant corporations can be absolutely antithetical to the economic well-being of their host nation, particularly its lower and middle classes.
There are countless other contradictions causing the neo-conservative project to collapse in on itself; for example, there is heated debate within the Republican Party as a result of intractable opposition between high capitalism’s religious faith in technophilic utopianism and evangelical Christianity’s backward-looking refusal to believe in so many of the underpinnings thereof, not to mention capitalism’s hostility to the supposedly sacred web of life that makes its existence possible.
Another powerful tension has emerged as a result of the military-industrial-evangelical bulwark in Israel, which is perhaps the very crucible of the untenability of the neo-conservative project. At the best of times, the Middle East is an extraordinarily fragile equilibrium. The evangelical insistence that Israel be an exclusively Jewish state (in order to facilitate the mythical Rapture) which must be armed-to-the-teeth in order to defend itself against the satanic Muslim hordes not only disrupts this equilibrium (as well as the western world’s access to cheap oil), but also forces all the neo-conservative and Islamo-theocratic wagons to circle around each other with accelerating rapidity until someone finally fires off the first shot.
In fact, it is neo-conservatism’s imperial hubris that has forced Islamic and communist nations to unite and form a kind of doppleganger of the neo-conservative monster. Indeed, relations between nations like Russia, China, Venezuela, and Iran have become as tight as they are largely as a defensive mechanism in response to Uncle Sam’s spasmodic sabre-rattling.
Recently, in response to Dick Cheney’s hypocritical criticism of Russia’s human rights record, Vladimir Putin pointed out that Cheney had no such problem with oil-rich Kazakstan’s draconian government so long as its willing to be compliant with Uncle Sam’s demands for oil, commerce, and US bases. Putin went on to criticize “Fortress America” for its heavy-handed strong-arm tactics throughout the world and suggested that if the US continued to bully Russia or Iran, it would be fatally overstepping its bounds.
The notion of “Fortress America” conjures the image of Reagan’s imaginary “shining city on a hill,” a “tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace." Of course, 9/11 seared through this delusional archetype in an unprecedented fashion. Ironically, the Rockefeller brothers had been such a driving force behind the Twin Towers’ construction that the financial community had affectionately nicknamed the buildings “Nelson” and “David.” Given that 9/11 was also the anniversary of the bloody 1973 CIA-sponsored coup (a plot hatched by David Rockefeller’s cabal and overseen by Nelson’s protégé Henry Kissinger) that toppled Chile’s President Salvadore Allende (who had nationalized many Rockefeller interests in Chile) and replaced him with murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet, the attack on New York’s grand crystalline citadels takes on a startling new resonance.
Former American ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Chas Freeman, recently pointed out that “the United States is a City on a Hill, but it is increasingly fogged in.” He added, “We need a war on arrogance as well as a war on terror.” This brings to mind the other definition of chimera, an unrealizable dream, a castle in the sky. Now if floating Fortress America is so fogged in that its elites can no longer even see the secure foundation to which it was once attached, why is the Harper administration hitching Canada’s wagon so firmly to it? And what does that bode for the rest of us who are just along for the ride?
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