What Is Neoconservatism (Neocon)?
By Julio Severo
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.
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| Hillary Clinton |
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.
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.
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.
Saddam Hussein was not a good man, but at least he protected Christian minorities much better than the U.S. did after the invasion of Iraq. The U.S. military mission in Iraq was a failure and eventually brought ISIS and chaos and genocide to Christians.
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.”
In my article “Brazil, the Next (Regional or Global) Threat to the U.S. Economic Supremacy?” I noted:
“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.
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.
While Trump has praised Russia and his advisers were supporting pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, neocons have openly praised the Ukrainian revolution as the best democratic example against dictatorship. The Ukrainian revolution was the biggest Soros revolution, massively funded by him.
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.”
While Obama, Hillary and neocons want Ukraine in NATO’s orbit and they are using the Ukrainian situation to strengthen NATO, Trump has again been in conflict with their interests.
“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.
Ronald Reagan tried Trump’s approach in the past, when Russia was the Soviet Union and was officially atheistic and communist. In that time, America under Reagan officially valued the Bible and Christian values. Today, the U.S. government officially despises these values, while Russia has officially left atheism and has embraced its Orthodox Christian Church.
It impossible for socialists Hillary and Obama to get along with modern Russia, especially after Russians passed a law banning homosexual propaganda to children.
Yet, if it was possible for evangelical Reagan to seek to get along with Soviet atheistic leaders, why should not Trump be commended for seeking to get along with a non-atheistic Russia?
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.
Portuguese version of this article: O que é neoconservadorismo (neocon)?
Source: Last Days Watchman
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