unz | We have a president who is belligerent towards Iran, who is sending
“boots on the ground” to fight ISIS, who loves Israel passionately and
who is increasing already bloated defense budgets. If one were a
neoconservative, what is there not to like, yet neocons in the media and
ensconced comfortably in their multitude of think tanks hate Donald
Trump. I suspect it comes down to three reasons. First, it is because
Trump knows who was sticking the knife in his back during his campaign
in 2016 and he has neither forgiven nor hired them. Nor does he pay any
attention to their bleating, denying them the status that they think
they deserve because of their self-promoted foreign policy brilliance.
And
second, Trump persists in his desire to “do business” with Russia. The
predominantly Jewish neocons always imagine the thunder of hooves of
approaching Cossacks preparing to engage in pogroms whenever they hear
the word Russia. And this is particularly true of Vladimir Putin’s
regime, which is Holy Russia revived. When not musing over how it is
always 1938 and one is in Munich, neocons are nearly as unsettled when
they think it is 1905 in Odessa.
The
third reason, linked to number two, is that having a plausible and
dangerous enemy like Russia on tap keeps the cash flowing from defense
industries to the foundations and think tanks that the neocons nest in
when they are not running the Pentagon and National Security Council.
Follow the money. So it is all about self-interest combined with tribal
memory: money, status and a visceral hatred of Russia.
The hatred of Trump runs so deep that a leading neocon Bill Kristol actually tweeted
that he would prefer a country run by bureaucrats and special interests
rather than the current constitutional arrangement. The neocon
vendetta was as well neatly summed up in two recent articles by Max
Boot. The first is entitled “Trump knows the Feds are closing in on him” and the second is “WikiLeaks has joined the Trump Administration.”In
the former piece Boot asserts that “Trump’s recent tweets aren’t just
conspiratorial gibberish—they’re the erratic ravings of a guilty
conscience” and in the latter, that “The anti-American WikiLeaks has
become the preferred intelligence service for a conspiracy-addled White
House.”
Now,
who is Max Boot and why should anyone care what he writes?
Russian-born, Max entered the United States with his family through a
special visa exemption under the 1975 Jackson-Vanik Amendment even
though they were not notably persecuted and only had to prove that they
were Jewish. Jackson-Vanik was one of the first public assertions of
neoconism, having reportedly been drafted in the office of Senator Henry
Jackson by no less than Richard Perle and Ben Wattenberg as a form of
affirmative action for Russian Jews. As refugees instead of immigrants,
the new arrivals received welfare, health insurance, job placement,
English language classes, and the opportunity to apply for U.S.
citizenship after only five years. Max went to college at Berkeley and
received an M.A. from Yale.
0 comments:
Post a Comment