(Part 2) Top products from r/neoconNWO

So cleaning out my downloads folder today, I found I had a PDF copy of Irving Kristol's The Neoconservative Persuasion tucked away in a little cobwebbed corner of the hard drive, and I have no idea how it got there. Either I'm having serious memory loss, or the CIA has put four hundred pages of wonderful malware on my computer.

In any case, after having perused it for a short while, I can confirm that Mr. Kristol is a brilliant writer:

>Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical
term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation.
A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins
and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a
defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations
whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and
the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to
more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will
always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack
from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our
national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War
II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival
is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest
are necessary.

But I'm also finding that the views Our Glorious Founder, perhaps more than expected, don't necessarily align with those of this sub and a lot of modern Neoconservatism, at least from what I've read so far. From the same essay (emphasis added):

> And then, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics
where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is
surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign
policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite
neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to Professors Leo Strauss of
Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.)
These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist
would say). First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be
encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a
nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world
government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded
with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability
to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the
history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could
not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own selfdefinition,
was absolutely astonishing.

I get the feeling that many of the lines that jumped out at me as rather strange utterances from the Godfather of Neoconservatism are merely instances of miscommunication; Kristol had a very specific way of putting things -- supposedly "not having beliefs" on foreign policy is really, if you read further, a statement on the practicality and the importance of the lesson of history regarding that policy -- but the break between Kristol's philosophy of Neoconservatism and the modern persuasion -- for it remains, I'll agree with him, a "persuasion" and not a philosophy or a doctrine -- is very real and much more easily spotted than I'd previously assumed. As he says in this essay, however, our roots are in the American-led rules-based world order, not necessarily in the precise words of various moral justifications for it. Regardless of Kristol's particular suspicions of policies or institutions we might hold dear, he did a mighty fine job of defining this here ideology's place within American conservatism.

On just this, he opens:

> What exactly is neoconservatism? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates,
speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,”
and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of
us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending
on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: is there any “there” there?
Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had
my moments of wonderment.

And soon concludes, after mulling a bit on the subject of just where his "persuasion" should be in the world:

> Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past
century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forwardlooking,
not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its
twentieth-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican
and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight
Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies
are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican
Party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing
and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be
blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional
political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political
conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed
official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican
ones, which result in popular Republican presidencies.

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Tl;Dr

I'm glad I downloaded this, even if I don't remember it. I think I'm in for a wild ride.

Asked previously on Tuesday, but this sub is more active.

Any good recommendations for important conservative readings? Books, classic articles etc. Any good contemporary pundit is also welcome, especially if they write on international issues or for an international audience.

e: These seem v interesting

Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The City and Man, Leo Strauss

In case you guys haven’t seen it, there is a really well-written, insightful book comparing the United States to Rome in a positive way.

It is called Empires of Trust: How Rome Built — And America is Building — A New World by Thomas Madden. It’s a bit outdated, since it doesn’t consider Donald Trump and his attempts to tear down the new world order, but it is nevertheless an excellent rebuttal to people who think America is declining and that being like Rome is automatically a negative thing.

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Trust-Built-America-Building-/dp/0452295459?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-ipad-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0452295459

Have any of you read this and can recommend it? I thought it sounded really interesting.

Yep. Here's a good book on it as well Titled Secret and Sanctioned by the same author.

>Today when we think of covert operations, we think of American-backed mercenaries circulating through jungle camps of Contra guerrillas, CIA agents plotting coups against governments in Chile and Libya, or the lethal cigars used in an attempt to assassinate Castro. In the public imagination, these kinds of operations--often seeming to go over the line, and always hidden from Congress and the American people--are a recent innovation, a rogue offspring of the Cold War, and perhaps even a violation of the democratic ideals on which this country was founded. But in this fascinating volume, Stephen F. Knott demonstrates that such covert operations have a long history in the United States, dating back to the Founding Fathers themselves.

You are ready, padawan learner

Edit: And then I thought, weeeelll, not everyone likes academic writing like me. So here's
some more bite-sized Irving Kristol stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Before-Church-State-Sacramental-Kingdom/dp/1945125144

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/01/liturgy-of-liberalism

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/11/a-christian-strategy

https://www.amazon.de/Why-Liberalism-Failed-Politics-Culture/dp/0300223447

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/01/conservative-democracy

***

It's not that hard to find reasonable conservative critics of 'the liberal order' who are not calling for a LARP-y reconstruction of western institutions. Unlike the left, the anti-liberal right actually has states that it can point to (e.g. Hungary, Poland) as reasonably good cases of their politics at work.

awww yiss

Since it came up in that thread, this is your daily reminder that this is required reading if you aren't a commie

https://www.amazon.com/Strategies-Containment-Critical-Appraisal-American/dp/019517447X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1523814107&sr=8-1&keywords=strategies+of+containment+by+john+lewis+gaddis

Just read this book before then

https://www.amazon.com/Salafi-Jihadism-History-Idea-SHIRAZ-MAHER/dp/0141986263/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AS9G2MR5E5QMT5S7HDPD

https://www.amazon.com/Jihad-Saudi-Arabia-Pan-Islamism-Cambridge/dp/0521732360

http://www.defence.gov.au/ADC/Publications/IndoPac/Wimhurst_IPSP_Nov16_(updated).pdf

https://ctc.usma.edu/constructing-takfir-from-abdullah-azzam-to-djamel-zitouni/

https://www.managementboek.nl/code/inkijkexemplaar/9781783262878/the-father-of-jihad-engels-muhammed-haniff-hassan.pdf

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/sayyid-qutb-father-of-salafi-jihadism-forerunner-of-the-islamic-/10096380

If you want to understand the history and origin of modern Jihadism, you should start with Sayed Qutb. All jihadist Islamists (and note not all Islamists are jihadist), Sunni or Shi'a, derive their beliefs from him.

Islamism, the belief Islam should have a role in governance, has existed since the inception of Islam. Offensive jihadism on the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, is a modern phenomenon.

When Iran says they want to 'export the Islamic Revolution' and they act upon this statement through financing terrorism, this is offensive jihadism and was adopted from Sayed Qutb (who the Fedayeen e Islami, which Khomeini was a part of, was close to)

When ISIS says they want to "conquer Rome" (as in they want to establish a Caliphate in Europe), same principle but from a Sunni perspective.