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    Re: Raimondo: The Neocon Revival - you didn't really think they'd go away, did you? Archived Message

    Posted by Ken Waldron on February 22, 2019, 6:56 pm, in reply to "Raimondo: The Neocon Revival - you didn't really think they'd go away, did you?"

    "Originating as a split from the Trotskyite movement, these extreme leftists moved from one end of the political spectrum, over the course of several years, to the other. Motivated by their hatred of Stalin and their abandonment of the old Communist Party, the neocons – as they came to be known – became the most vocally anti-Soviet faction and advocate of a military confrontation with Russia."


    This kind of stuff seems to be being peddled out regularly these days, for some reason. This from the entry in Rationalwiki:

    "Neoconservatism first manifested in the early 1970s. It started among disaffected – mostly Jewish – liberals and some former leftists from the Schactmanite branch of Trotskyism who were upset at mainstream liberalism's "unwillingness" to confront the Soviet Union

    http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

    From which we move to Irving Kristol supposedly member of "... a small but vocal Trotskyist anti-Soviet group who eventually became The New York Intellectuals..."

    who shockingly:

    "...advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist."

    "...Trotskyism emerged as the most chosen standpoint among these anti-Stalinist Marxists. Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler and Nathan Glazer were members of the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League."

    No mention of Irving Kristol: the much mooted godfather of Neoconservatism amongst that bunch, but on the great man himself, whatever flaunting with socialism he did, and he might well have been an actual member of some leftie group or other, it came to a fairly sharp end by means of US army conscription:

    " Drafted into the Army with a number of Midwesterners who were street-tough and often anti-Semitic, he found himself shedding his youthful radical optimism. “I can’t build socialism with these people,” he concluded. “They’ll probably take it over and make a racket out of it.”
    In his opinion, his fellow GI’s were inclined to loot, rape and murder, and only Army discipline held them in check. It was a perception about human nature that would stay with him for the rest of his life."

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/us/politics/19kristol.html


    -So in effect by that time he was in the army at age 23 or so he had changed his mind & abandoned any left wing leanings he actually had. Apparently he seems to have decided based on his army experiences, that the working classes were actually scum.

    - Needless to say, this hardly provides the kind of Trotskyite intellectual provenance for Neoconservatism that a number of these references seem to be hinting at.





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