Laurent Guyénot • August 20, 2021
With the Taliban back in charge in Afghanistan, methinks we will hear pretty soon about 9/11, the fabricated pretext for their overthrow twenty years ago. They have never been given a chance to defend themselves. When the time will come for a public statement, we might get a glimpse of Chinese officials in the background. They will point the finger at the U.S., who will react with intensified anti-Chinese propaganda. New developments are to be expected anyway. Here is my contribution for this hopeful twentieth anniversary.
The magic of 9/11
James Hepburn concluded his 1968 book Farewell America with those words: “President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and fake mirrors, and when the curtain fell, the actors, and even the scenery disappeared.”[1]
9/11 was also a stage trick of magicians—the same company, I believe. Not only did they make New
York’s tallest skyscrapers vanish into a cloud of smoke with the magic word “Osama bin Laden”. They also made planes appear and then disappear. Not just UA93, swallowed by the earth, or AA77, vaporized into the Pentagon. I mean also UA175, which supposedly crashed into the South Tower (let’s leave aside AA11, whose single ghostly image was supernaturally captured by the twice Emmy-Awarded Naudet brothers).Can a Boeing 767, essentially a hollow aluminum tube, cut through massive steel columns, wings and all, without even slowing down? If you haven’t seriously thought about it, here is a good place to start: https://911planeshoax.com/ . For my part, I was first convinced that no real plane were involved in 9/11 by Ace Baker’s 2012 film 9/11 The Great American Psy-Opera (begin with chapter 6 at 2:27). I made the following 18-minute collation of the most telling extracts:
Richard Hall has studied all the videos of the plane crash into the South Tower, and also concluded that there was no plane crash. However, he has pointed to a shortcoming in Ace Baker’s theory: it cannot explain why, in the fifty-or-so videos showing UA175 crashing into the South Tower, the trajectory of the aircraft conforms to the official data provided by the National Transport Safety Board in its “Radar Data Impact Speed Study” report. Something more than video compositing is involved. In 2012, Hall therefore proposed an alternative theory in this 23-minute video:
Just like the question of the technology used to bring down the towers, the question of the technology used to fake the planes is still not completely answered. Yet I think that, on the basis of what we know, the non-existence of flights AA11 and UA175 (including their passengers, of course) is a far more reasonable hypothesis than their existence.
The issue does matter, because the murder weapon is often the surest clue leading to the murderer. If there were no planes, we don’t need to waste energy searching for what kind of planes they were and who or what flew them. We just need to ask: Who controls what we see on television? And we know the answer to that question, don’t we?
I am not going to argue that 9/11 was essentially a Zionist coup. I assume that most Unz Review readers have already reached that conclusion. I refer those who haven’t to Christopher Bollyn’s work (his latest book is a good introduction) or to my own contribution, “9/11 was an Israeli Job”. What I want to do here is shed some light on the dark soul that plotted that incredibly daring operation.
We all understand that 9/11 was the brainchild of a conspiratorial network that included the crypto-Israelis who called themselves Neoconservatives—deceptively, for there is nothing “conservative” about them. What they wanted is trigger “World War IV” (they count the Cold War as WWIII, because it provided the context for the Six-Day War that doubled Israel’s size). “World War IV” was first proclaimed in November 20, 2001 by Neocon Eliot Cohen in an article for the Wall Street Journal. Then in February 2002 Norman Podhoretz wrote an article for Commentary titled “How to Win World War IV,” later expanded into the book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (2007). In 2004, the subject of a Washington conference by Eliot Cohen attended by Podhoretz and Wolfowitz was: “World War IV: Why We Fight, Whom We Fight, How We Fight.”[2]
WWIV was definitely the purpose of 9/11. Behind their public image, the Neocons are a Cabal comparable to the “Parushim” that intrigued for WWI, with influential members like Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) and his patron Samuel Untermeyer (1858-1940). Sarah Schmidt, professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, documented that initiates into the Order of the Parushim had to declare themselves “soldiers in the army of Zion,” and swear: “I hereby vow myself, my life, my fortune, and my honor to the restoration of the Jewish nation.”[3] After having reaped the Balfour Declaration from the blood and ashes of WWI, the same cabal pushed for WWII, with the same Zionist goal almost transparently announced on the front-page of the British Daily Express, March 24, 1933: “Judea Declares War on Germany” (Judea was one of the names envisioned for their new State). After WWII, they made every effort to blow on the embers of the Cold War in the Middle East, and assassinated Kennedy who wanted to end it.
From “Strauss Truth” to “9/11 Truth”
As Seymour Hersh pointed out in The New Yorker, May 12, 2003, the core members of the Neocons are former students of Leo Strauss or students of his students (the New York Times renamed them “Leo-Cons”). So there is a good chance that knowing about Strauss’s thinking can help us make sense of 9/11. And there is as much deception in what is being said about Strauss as there is about 9/11.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was a German Jewish scholar who moved to New York in 1937, and taught political science at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1969. There are diverging interpretations of his political philosophy: in Leo Strauss: Man of Peace (Cambridge UP, 2014), Robert Howse claims that the Neocons are poor students of Strauss, and that they misread their own warlike fantasies between Strauss’s lines. Catherine and Michael Zuckert, two students of Strauss, make him a passionate lover of American Democracy in The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2008). The titles of these two books somehow remind me of Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter’s autobiography, Passion for Truth. There is as much chance to find “the truth about Leo Strauss” in a book written by Chicago Straussians as there is to find “the truth about 9/11” in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Another of Strauss’s apologists, Benjamin Wurgaft, has absolved Strauss from the Neocons’ disastrous legacy by claiming that “the Strauss we know from his writings cautioned against applying political philosophy directly to public policy. . . . Real thinkers, thought Strauss, should avoid that world and its tendency to compromise the quest for philosophical truth.”[4] That is laughable: what kind of political philosopher would discourage his students from engaging in politics? Even if Strauss did, it is obvious that his disciples thought he didn’t, and what concerns us here is what the Straussians learned from Strauss.
If Strauss is not a peace-loving Jew, he must necessarily be a warmongering Nazi. That’s how William Altman, another Jewish author, portrays him in The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lexington, 2012). This is the equivalent of John Hankey’s effort to blame JFK’s assassination on the Nazis in his cartoon film Dark Legacy (2009).
I have read only bits of these books. My understanding of Strauss owes more to Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999) by Shadia Drury, whose arguments are conveniently summarized in her online interview by Danny Postel. I found Drury’s analysis to be a good starting point (I haven’t read her earlier book, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, which seems to have little more to offer), but, with only one entry for “Israel” in her index, it suffers from a huge blind spot, already evident from its title and its cover. I turned to reading some of Strauss’s key works in the hope of learning what Drury conceals. I have, with great difficulty, gone through half a dozen of Strauss’s books. My general conclusion is that Strauss is a super-Machiavellian pan-Zionist, something that no scholar, not even Drury, would dare say, but which goes a long a way towards explaining 9/11. This is what I wish to illustrate here.
Strauss and the Noble Lie
What Drury correctly grasped, I think, it the secretive and elitist nature of Strauss’s teaching. In print, Strauss expressed his most controversial views only cryptically by attributing them to past philosophers—often incorrectly, according to his detractors. He shared openly his true philosophy only orally with his close students, who happened to be exclusively Jewish (as Drury fails to remark). He took model on Moses Maimonides, whose “secrets”, he wrote, “may only be explained in private and only to such individuals as possess both theoretical and political wisdom as well as the capacity of both understanding and using allusive speech.”[5] In What is Political Philosophy? (1959), Strauss explains that philosophy or science seek “knowledge”, and therefore “endangers society,” whose element is “opinion”. “Hence philosophy or science must remain the preserve of a small minority”.
Philosophers or scientists who hold this view about the relationship of philosophy or science and society are driven to employ a peculiar manner of writing which would enable to reveal what they regard as the truth to the few, without endangering the unqualified commitment of the many to the opinions on which society rests. They will distinguish between the true teachings as the esoteric teaching and the socially useful teaching as the exoteric teaching; whereas the exoteric teaching is meant to be easily accessible to every reader, the esoteric teaching discloses itself only to the very careful and well-trained readers after long and concentrated study.[6]
In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss emphasizes the need for the wise to conceal their views, in order to protect the masses from the ugliness of the truth (yes, Straussian truth is ugly), and to protect themselves from reprisals.
Strauss’s “secret elitism” might arguably be a good thing if the elites he had in mind were really the “wise men”. Strauss probably thought so, but he also thought, obviously, that only Jews need apply, because the circle of his disciples was exclusively Jewish. He probably felt, like Samuel Untermeyer in 1933, that “the Jews are the aristocrats of the world.”
In several books on Plato, Strauss misused Plato’s concept of the “noble lie” (The Republic) to endorse the use of mass deception in politics. “There is no doubt,” Shadia Drury said, “that Strauss’s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers).” Quoting from Strauss’s The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws, Drury says that, “the real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise.”[7] As Strauss’s student Abram Shulsky wrote in “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence” (1999), for Strauss, “deception is the norm in political life”[8]—a rule that Shulsky applied as director of the Office of Special Plans, responsible for fabricating false intelligence on Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction”.
Strauss’s insistence on the necessity for ruling elites to use lies and myths in order to control the masses is a lesson well learned by the Neocons. It is under Strauss’s inspiration that Philip Zelikow, before being appointed Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, specialized in the art of crafting “public myths” by “‘searing’ or ‘molding’ events [that] take on ‘transcendent’ importance and, therefore, retain their power even as the experiencing generation passes from the scene” (his own words, as quoted in Wikipedia). In December 1998, he co-signed an article for Foreign Affairs entitled “Catastrophic Terrorism,” in which he speculated on what would have happened if the 1993 WTC bombing (already blamed on bin Laden) had been done with a nuclear bomb:
Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.[9]
In Drury’s words, “Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat; and following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured.”[10] This provided the justification for the Neocons’ invention of the “Clash of Civilizations” to replace the Cold War.
Strauss viewed nations as shaped entirely by their “regimes”, and is at the origin of the Neocons’ obsession with “regime change,” seen as a way to transform a nation into a totally different one—peoples being little more than shapeless lumps of clay. According to the Straussians Catherine and Michael Zuckert (read here), “the greatest threat comes from states that do not share American democratic values. Changing these regimes and causing the progress of democratic values constitutes [in the words of Irving Kristol] ‘the best method of reinforcing security (of the United States) and peace’ Thus, it is alleged, Straussians endorse a Wilsonian agenda of an active, even militant foreign policy aimed at ‘regime change’ and, in principle, universal implantation of liberal democracies throughout the world.” That is, of course, the exoteric Straussian sermon for American mass consumption. Even the Zuckerts have to concede: “One of the very difficult questions thrown up by the composite view of Strauss we have just summarized concerns the relation between the Wilsonian idealist side and the Machiavellian realist side. There is, to say the least, a tension between the two.”[11]
Strauss marveled at the power of television and cinema for shaping mass public opinion and emotion. He was an amateur critic of “Western” movies, a genre he regarded as a successful case of national mythic construction based on a clear-cut distinction between the good guys (us) and the bad guys (them). According to his pupil Stanley Rosen (speaking in Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, first episode at 8:49), Strauss’s favorite television show was the long-running Western Gunsmoke. This show “had a salutary effect on the American public, because it showed the conflict between good and evil in a way that would be immediately intelligible to everyone.” It is no coincidence that in 1980, the Neoconservatives bet all their chips on Hollywood Western actor Ronald Reagan, a man who once summarized his political vision in these terms: “The difference between right and wrong seems as clear as the white hats that the cowboys in Hollywood Western always wore so you’d know right from the beginning who was the good guy.”[12]
Strauss was well aware, like Neal Gabler, that Hollywood culture in general was the creation of Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe[13]. In the documentary Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream (1998), Gabler says that, “the grand irony of all of Hollywood is that Americans come to define themselves by the shadow America that was created by Eastern European Jewish immigrants.”
The Double-Decker Lie to Jerusalem
Strauss’s attachment to Judaism is probably the most esoteric part of his teaching, in the sense that it is the least public. Even Drury remains very elusive about it: she sticks to the fiction that the Neocons are American right-wing imperialists. She takes Irving Kristol’s self-professed American “nationalism” at face value, and she ignores that some of the redactors or close associates of the Project for a New American Century also wrote secret reports to Benjamin Netanyahu recommending an aggressive policy of territorial expansion.[14]
Drury quotes Harry Jaffa, one of Strauss’s first Ph.D. students, as saying that “America is the Zion that will light up all the world.”[15] She definitely misses the irony and the cryptic meaning: America will set the world on fire for Zion. That is what the Neocons have really been up to.
Here we have an illustration of the two-storied lie, a technique familiar to those that Schopenhauer called “the Great Masters of the Lie” (as quoted by his most famous Austrian disciple). Having lifted the veil of the Straussians’ “exoteric” lie (the myth of America versus Evil), Drury is convinced that she sees their “esoteric” truth (America needs the myth), when in fact it is just a more sophisticated lie. The truth is still one level under.
With his BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis is another example of an intellectual who barely scratches the thin surface of Neocon propaganda, and believes the thick layer of lies under it. Curtis believes that, during the Cold War, Strauss and the Straussians wanted to provide Americans with a mythic evil enemy, as a way “to rescue the country from moral decay, . . . to re-engage the public in a grand vision of America’s destiny, that would give meaning and purpose to their lives.” Of course, Curtis then has to explain why, under this lofty patriotic rationale, the Neocons drew the United States into illegitimate wars causing irremediable damage to the nation. Curtis couldn’t convince himself that the Neocons start world wars just to lift up Americans’ spirit. So he speculates instead that the Neocons are so stupid that they fell for their own lies: “what had started out as the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American people increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives. They began to believe their own fiction” (episode 1). And again in episode 2: “in the 1970s . . . Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and other neoconservatives had set out to reassert the myth of America as a unique country, whose destiny was to struggle against evil throughout the world. Now in power, they had come to believe this myth. They saw themselves as revolutionaries who were going to transform the world, starting with the defeat of the Evil Empire.”[16]
The Neocons are so self-delusional, according to Curtis, that they were deceived by their own lie a second time, ending up believing in the phony “War on Terror” that they had made up initially for the sole purpose of keeping the American morale high after the fall of the USSR. They had decided to create the fantasy of “a powerful network of evil, controlled from the center by bin Laden from his lair in Afghanistan . . . because it fitted with their vision of America’s unique destiny to fight an epic battle against the forces of evil throughout the world.” But again, according to Curtis, the Neocons started believing their own lie, which led them to innocently destroy the Middle East and American democracy in the process: “the neoconservatives were now increasingly locked into this fantasy, and next they set out to uncover the network in America itself.”
I wonder if Curtis himself believes what he is saying, or just pretends to. Whatever the case, it shows the efficiency of the two-storied lie. It is a dialectical strategy: the first-level liars must be able to count on the second-level liars and their useful idiots—the controlled opposition—to cover them while pretending to expose them. For example, Israel-firsters need a Chomsky to shield them from the accusation of treason and tell Americans with half-a-brain that, whatever bad Israel does, she does it because America makes her do it (“The Fateful Triangle” theory).
In the case of 9/11, Israel is hiding behind two false flags: under the first-level lie—“Al-Qaeda did it”—was planted the second-level lie (or half-lie)—“America did it”—, as the late and blessed Victor Thorn explained in 2011:
In essence, the “9-11 truth movement” was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. By 2002–2003, “truthers” began appearing at rallies holding placards that read “9-11 was an inside job.” Initially, these signs provided hope for those who didn’t believe the government and mainstream media’s absurd cover stories. But then an awful realization emerged: The slogan “9-11 was an inside job” was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised.”
The basic rule of all those tricks can be formulated like this: lie big to the masses, but have a smaller lie ready for the thinking few. The reason the big lie works best for the masses, by the way, was explained in 1925 by a famous Austrian anti-Semite:
In the primitive simplicity of their minds, they [the great masses] will more easily fall victim to a large lie than a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves, but would be ashamed to tell a lie that was too big. They would never consider telling a lie of such magnitude themselves, or knowing that it would require such impudence, they would not consider it possible for it to be told by others. Even after being enlightened and shown that the lie is a lie, they will continue to doubt and waver for a long time and will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere, and there must be some other explanation. For this reason, some part of the most bold and brazen lie is sure to stick. This is a fact that all the great liars and liars’ societies in this world know only too well and use regularly.
Strauss’s Jewish Supremacism
The Straussian deception must be understood as two-storied. Whoever thinks the Straussians’ exoteric fantasies are motivated by some form of concern for America (her values, her empire, etc.) is victim of their esoteric lies. The key for understanding the essence of Straussianism is the word that Curtis never pronounces in his three-hour documentary on the Straussians: Israel.
To get some insight into Strauss’s Zionism, we must turn to a primary source (that Drury, to her credit, mentions): his 1962 lecture at the Hillel Foundation, “Why We Remain Jews”, one of his recorded oral communications made accessible to the public in the 1990s.[17] Strauss begins his lecture by stating that, for once, “I will not beat around the bush in any respect.” Then he reveals that, “since a very, very early time the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the ‘Jewish question,’” which will come as a surprise to many. His main message to his American Jewish audience is: “return to the Jewish faith, return to the faith of our ancestors.”
Drury considers Strauss’s defense of the “Jewish faith” as a form of deception or hypocrisy, since Strauss is an avowed atheist and openly calls Judaism a “heroic delusion” and “a dream” (such as “no nobler dream was ever dreamt”). But the accusation is unfair, I think, because it neglects Strauss’s qualifications of “faith” and “dream”. First, Strauss clarifies that, by “faith”, he means not necessarily “belief”, but “fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas.” Secondly, immediately after calling Judaism a “dream”, Strauss adds that, “dream is akin to aspiration. And aspiration is a kind of divination of an enigmatic vision.” Although he doesn’t elaborate, it is clear enough: to Strauss, Jewishness is not God-chosenness, but self-chosenness. This is a very common view among Jewish intellectuals, akin to the Kabbalistic notion that Yahweh is like the collective soul of the Jewish people. In an “Essay on the Jewish Soul” (1929), for instance, Isaac Kadmi-Cohen writes that, “divinity in Judaism is contained in the exaltation of the entity represented by the race.”[18] That is why Jews can be non-believers in God yet believers in Yahweh’s promise. When Drury criticizes Strauss for being “interested only in the political advantages of religion,”[19] she should know that it is not necessarily a betrayal of Jewish tradition. The notion that prophecy has a “political mission” (Strauss, Philosophy and Law) is self-evident to many secular Zionists.
The central passage in Strauss’s lecture “Why we remain Jews” is a long quotation of Nietzsche’s Dawn of Day aphorism 205, in which Nietzsche predicts that the Jews will become “the lords of Europe”. After eighteen centuries of training in Europe, says Nietzsche, “the psychic and spiritual resources of today’s Jews are extraordinary.” Among other strengths, “they have understood how to create a feeling of power and eternal vengeance out of the very trades that were left to them.” Because of this, says Nietzsche (as quoted by Strauss):
at some time Europe may fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hand, which only casually reaches out. In the meantime it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes. Then they will be called the inventors and guides of the Europeans.
Strauss notes that “Europe” should now be replaced by “the West” in Nietzsche’s aphorism, and comments that it is “the most profound and radical statement on assimilation that I have read.” It may well be, in fact, the key to the Straussian agenda. Assimilation as dissimulation and as a long-term strategy for Jewish supremacism is the only assimilation that Strauss approves of.
In this same lecture, Strauss criticizes political Zionism as belonging to the wrong kind of assimilation, since it sought to create a nation like others. If Israel became a nation like others, Jewish identity would perish, because Jewish identity is based on the persecution inherent in the dispersion. Strauss calls for a “religious Zionism” that transcends the national project. He believes that Jews must continue to be a nation dispersed among other nations. Yet Strauss commends the State Israel for setting an example with its prohibition of mixed marriages, fulfilling “an act of national cleansing or purification”, “a reassertion of the difference between Jews and non-Jews.” Strauss also defended Israel’s State racism in the National Review: political Zionism, he wrote, “fulfilled a conservative function” by stemming the “tide of ‘progressive’ leveling of venerable ancestral differences.”[20]
Strauss’s emphasis on endogamy goes to the very heart of the Torah, which insists on the strict equality between monotheism and racial purity; committing idolatry (“serving other gods”) and marrying non-Jews are one and the same thing (e.g. Deuteronomy 7:3-4 and Numbers 25:1-2). All Jewish laws are essentially walls built around the sacred duty: keep the blood! “All is race—there is no other truth,” wrote another “assimilated” Jew.[21]
What Strauss says of other nations in relation to the Jewish nation also proves Strauss’s penetrating understanding and approval of biblical ideology: referring to “the anti-Judaism of late classical antiquity, when we . . . were accused by the pagan Romans of standing convicted of hatred of the human race,” he adds:
I contend that it was a very high compliment. And I will try to prove it. This accusation reflects an undeniable fact. For the human race consists of many nations or tribes or, in Hebrew, goyim. A nation is a nation by virtue of what it looks up to. In antiquity, a nation was a nation by virtue of its looking up to its gods. They did not have ideologies at that time; they did not have even ideas at that time. At the top, there were the gods. And now, our ancestors asserted a priori—that is to say, without looking at any of these gods—that these gods were nothings and abominations, that the highest things of any nation were nothings and abominations.
Strauss’s Radical Machiavellianism
Strauss’s adherence to the biblical program of Jewish world domination is the least mentioned, but arguably the most important feature of Strauss’s esoteric teaching. The second most important feature is his Machiavellianism.
Strauss greatly admired Machiavelli, the fifteenth-century political philosopher who rejected the classical notion that virtue should be the foundation of power, and asserted that only the appearance of virtue counts, and that the successful prince must be a “great simulator” who “manipulates and cons people’s minds.” In his Thoughts on Machiavelli, Strauss distances himself from the trend of trying to downplay the immorality of the author of The Prince, and instead agrees with the “simple opinion” that regards his political theory as immoral. Relativizing Machiavelli’s immorality, said Strauss, “prevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli; the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.” Machiavelli’s thought is so revolutionary, Strauss believed, that its ultimate implications could not be spelled out: “Machiavelli does not go to the end of the road; the last part of the road must be travelled by the reader who understands what is omitted by the writer.” For this, Strauss is the guide, for “to discover from [Machiavelli’s] writings what he regarded as the truth is hard; it is not impossible.” Machiavelli’s truth is not a blinding light, but rather a bottomless abyss that only the accomplished philosopher can contemplate without turning into a beast: there is no afterlife, and neither good nor evil, and therefore the ruling elite need not be inhibited by morality. Machiavelli, according to Strauss, is a patriot of a superior kind because “he is more concerned with the salvation of his fatherland than with the salvation of his soul.” For Strauss, only nations can be eternal, since men have no individual soul; therefore, there are no moral limits to what a (Zionist) patriot can do for his nation.[22]
Zionism and Machiavellianism are such twin concepts in the Straussian outlook that Strauss’s disciple Michael Ledeen, a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), hypothesized that Machiavelli was as secret Jew. “Listen to his political philosophy, and you will hear the Jewish music,” wrote Ledeen, citing Machiavelli’s contempt for the nonviolent ethics of Jesus and his admiration for the pragmatism of Moses, who was able to kill thousands from his own tribe in order to establish his authority.[23]
The Biblical Truth About Leo Strauss
Machiavelli’s crypto-Jewishness is plausible: his name could originate from the Hebrew Mashiah bé El, “Messiah of God.” In any case, his insight that fear is the most efficient means of governing is exactly what you would expect from a Levite. The threat of destruction in case of non-compliance to the Mosaic Law is a leitmotiv of the Torah:
And if, in spite of this, you will not listen to me but go against me, I shall go against you in fury and punish you seven times over for your sins. You will eat the flesh of your own sons, you will eat the flesh of your own daughters. I shall destroy your high places and smash your incense-altars; I shall pile your corpses on the corpses of your foul idols and shall reject you. I shall reduce your cities to ruins, etc. (Leviticus 26:27-31).
Fear of Yahweh’s wrath has been deeply internalized by the Jewish people, because it has always been the means by which the Jewish elites control their flock. The Holocaust religion is a secular version of Yahwism.
If a nation’s spirit results from the threat—real or imaginary—of its enemy, as Strauss believes, then Israel has the strongest spirit, because she sees the rest of the world as her enemies. The Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred,” as proto-Zionist Leo Pinsker wrote in his booklet Auto-Emancipation (1882).[24] There is a dialectical complementarity between the perceived threat of extermination and the struggle for world domination, for the latter is the only way to overcome the former. This is the essence of the Jewish paranoia inoculated by the Bible.
In conclusion, Strauss has a very clear vision of Israel as a unique nation destined—by the most noble dream—to rule over other nations, and even destroy them spiritually, by all immoral means possible. We may call his vision Machiavellian pan-Zionism, or simply Jewish supremacism. Whatever the name, it is thoroughly biblical, as biblical as the political philosophy of David Ben-Gurion, the “father of the Jewish nation.” In 1962, the same year as Strauss’s lecture “Why We Remain Jews,” Ben-Gurion was whining to President Kennedy about the imminent destruction of his newborn nation by the Egyptian Nazis, but at the same time he was predicting in the magazine Look that, within 25 years, Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[25] Indeed, Isaiah prophesied: “For the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem. Then he will judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples” (2:3-4). In other words, Israel will rule the world.
Isaiah, the Zionists’ favorite prophet, also said: “the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and . . . will be utterly destroyed” (60:12); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:6). This is the biblical blueprint of the Zionist World Order, also promised by Israel’s jealous devil in Deuteronomy: “devour all the peoples whom Yahweh your god puts at your mercy, show them no pity” (7:16); “he will raise you higher than every other nation he has made” (28:1); “You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none” (28:12).
If we don’t dig into the biblical roots of Zionism, we cannot understand Zionism. Ben-Gurion often said that, “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible.”[26] That statement should be taken seriously. If it is true for the Israeli leadership — and Benjamin Netanyahu would certainly not object —, then it is also true for all serious analysts: there can be no real understanding of Israel and its longtime goal, without knowledge of the Hebrew Bible. The Zionist conspiracy for world supremacy is written there in plain language.
Yahweh is a sociopathic god, and Yahweh is the god of Israel, therefore Israel is a sociopathic nation. This is the simple truth of Zionism, the equation from which 9/11 ultimately derives.
Notes
[1] James Hepburn, Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK, Penmarin Books, 2002, p. 269.
[2] Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, Enigma Edition, 2008, p. 193.
[3] Sarah Schmidt, “The ‘Parushim’: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 65, no. 2, December 1975, pp. 121-139, on ifamericansknew.org/history/parushim.html .
[4] Benjamin Wurgaft, “A Cabal We Deserve: Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and Public Intellectual Culture”, APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=1900150
[5] Strauss’s “Introductory Essay” to Moses Maimonides, The Guide to the Perplexed, vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. xiv-xv. On Strauss’s esotericism, read Nicholas Xenos, “Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror”. According to Xenos, Strauss learned from Maimonides that true philosophers “wrote for at least two different audiences. To one audience was addressed the so-called exoteric meaning of their texts, which was the edifying, superficial level, while to another audience was addressed an esoteric meaning, which is embedded in the text but which only some people are capable of drawing out.”
[6] Leo Strauss, “On a forgotten kind of writing,” in What is Political Philosophy? (1959), pp. 221-222.
[7] Drury’s 2003 interview on http://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_1542jsp/
[8] “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous)”, in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John Albert Murley, ed., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Régime, Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
[9] Ashton Carter, John Deutch, and Philip Zelikow, “Catastrophic terrorism: Tackling the new danger,” Foreign Affairs, 77 (1998), p. 80.
[10] Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, St. Martin’s Press, 1999, p. 23.
[11] Excerpt from pages 1-20 of The Truth about Leo Strauss, on press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/993329.html
[12] Quoted in David Hamilton Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth, Welsh Academic Press, 2001, p. 100.
[13] Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Anchor, 1989.
[14] Patrick J. Buchanan, “Whose War? A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest,” The American Conservative, March 24, 2003, on https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whose-war/
[15] 2003 interview of Drury on www.opendemocracy.net/en/article_1542jsp/
[16] The full transcript is available here: http://aireform.com/wp-content/uploads/200410..-The-Power-of-Nightmares-The-Rise-of-the-Politics-of-Fear-aall-three-episodes-combined-A.Curtis-53p.pdf
[17] Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 311-356, online here. An audio recording is also accessible here.
[18] Isaac Kadmi-Cohen, Nomades: Essai sur l’âme juive, Felix Alcan, 1929 (archive.org), p. 143.
[19] Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, op. cit., p. 56.
[20] Leo Strauss, “The State of Israel,” National Review, vol. 3, n°1, 5 January 1957, p. 23, quoted in Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, op. cit., p. 41.
[21] Sidonia, in Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli.
[22] Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 10-13.
[23] “What Machiavelli (A Secret Jew?) Learned from Moses”, Jewish World Review, June 7, 1999, on www.jewishworldreview.com
[24] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html .
[25] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Ducovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
[26] Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, p. 26.
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