MULDER WAS RIGHT:

Invasion of the entryists: How did a cultish political network become the public face of the scientific establishment? (George Monbiot, December 9, 2003, The Guardian)

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners' strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.

In 1988, it set up a magazine called Living Marxism, later LM. By this time, the organisation, led by the academic Frank Furedi, the journalist Mick Hume and the teacher Claire Fox, had moved overtly to the far right. LM described its mission as promoting a "confident individualism" without social constraint. It campaigned against gun control, against banning tobacco advertising and child pornography, and in favour of global warming, human cloning and freedom for corporations. It defended the Tory MP Neil Hamilton and the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansers. It provided a platform for writers from the corporate thinktanks the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Frank Furedi started writing for the Centre for Policy Studies (founded by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher) and contacting the supermarket chains, offering, for £7,500, to educate their customers "about complex scientific issues".

In the late 1990s, the group began infiltrating the media, with remarkable success. For a while, it seemed to dominate scientific and environmental broadcasting on Channel 4 and the BBC. It used these platforms (Equinox, Against Nature, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Counterblast, Zeitgeist) to argue that environmentalists were Nazi sympathisers who were preventing human beings from fulfilling their potential. In 2000, LM magazine was sued by ITN, after falsely claiming that the news organisation's journalists had fabricated evidence of Serb atrocities against Bosnian Muslims. LM closed, and was resurrected as the web magazine Spiked and the thinktank the Institute of Ideas.

All this is already in the public domain. But now, thanks to the work of the researcher and activist Jonathan Matthews (published today on his database www.gmwatch.org), what seems to be a new front in this group's campaign for individuation has come to light. Its participants have taken on key roles in the formal infrastructure of public communication used by the science and medical establishment.

Frontpage Interview: Christopher Hitchens: Hitchens on Iraq, the War on Terror, the Left. . .and his own intellectual journey. (Jamie Glazov, FrontPage)

Frontpage Magazine: Thank you for joining Frontpage Interview Mr. Hitchens. I’d like to begin with your intellectual journey. You were, at one time, a man of the Left and, if I am correct, a Trotskyist. What led you to this political disposition? It is often said that a lot of our personal psychology and character lead us to our political outlooks. When you look back, does this apply to you in any way? Tell us a bit about your attraction to the Left, Trotskyism, Isaac Deutscher, etc.

Hitchens: A the time and place when I came to political awareness, which was in the early mid-1960s in England, the governing Establishment was that of the Labour Party in its most corrupt and opportunist form (and in Washington, which we all understood as the real capital) it was that of the Democratic machine of LBJ. The charm and appeal of the “social democratic” project was thus very slight. And, coming from a generation which had read Darkness and Noon and Nineteen Eighty Four before being exposed to any Marxist influence, the option of illusions in orthodox Communism did not seriously exist. I think it is this formative background that meant that, in Western Europe at least, the radical and insurgent spirit was attracted to one form or another of “Trotskyism”.

In 1968 - I of course like to think of myself as having been a “Sixty Eighter” or even soixante-huitard rather than merely a “Sixties person” - there seemed the chance not only of contesting the atrocious imperial war in Vietnam but of ending the dictatorial regimes of De Gaulle, Franco, Salazar and Papadopoulos, and of extending this movement across the Berlin Wall. And we have some successes to boast of: the battering that the old order received in that year was to prove terminal in the short run, both East and West.

One is in danger of sounding like an old-fart veteran if one goes on too long about this, but to have been involved in street-arguments in Havana while Chicago was erupting and Prague being subjugated was to feel oneself part of a revolutionary moment. What I didn’t understand then was that this was the very end of something - the revolutionary Marxist tradition - rather than a new beginning of it. But it had its aspect of honor and of glory. Its greatest culmination turned out to be in 1989, when the delayed or postponed effects of 1968 helped bring down the Berlin Wall altogether. It’s not very well understood by the mainstream, but many Czechs and Poles and East Germans of my acquaintance, with more or less “Trotskyist” politics, played a seminal part in those events. And I did my best to stay on their side through those years.

The figure of Trotsky himself, as leader of the “Left Opposition” to Stalin, has many deformities. But I still think he comes out of the twentieth century as a great figure of courageous and engaged dissent, and of the fusion of intellect and action. In my writing, I try to pay respect to the literary and intellectual figures associated with this tradition, from CLR James to Victor Serge. The best-known of this group is of course George Orwell, though he is often not celebrated for that reason.

I am anticipating your next question, but there is in fact a “red thread” that still connects my past to my present views. In discussing things with my Iraqi and Kurdish comrades over the past decade or so, for example, I was quite struck by how many of them came to the struggle against Saddam Hussein by means of some of the same memories, books and traditions that I did. The best of the Iraqi dissident authors, Kanan Makiya, whose books everyone simply has to read if they want to be part of the argument, is the foremost example.

A Troubling Influence (Frank J. Gaffney Jr., December 9, 2003, FrontPage)

At a black-tie dinner on November 5th, nearly 300 conservative activists and politicians gathered at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to recognize a prominent fixture in their community: tax-advocate and conservative coalition-builder Grover Norquist.

The talk that evening was of the honoree’s tireless efforts to advance his libertarian objective of down-sizing federal, state and local governments by reducing their revenues. He was toasted for organizing nationwide initiatives to memorialize Ronald Reagan, notably with the renaming of the capital’s National Airport after the former President.

Most in the audience were surely unaware that the effect of their tribute – if not its organizers’ intended purpose – was to provide urgently needed political cover for a man who has been active on another, far less laudable and, in fact, deeply problematic front: Enabling a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration. The growing influence of this operation – and the larger Islamist enterprise principally funded by Saudia Arabia – has created a strategic vulnerability for the nation, and a political liability for its President.

The association between Grover Norquist and Islamists appears to have started about five years ago, in 1998, when he became the founding chairman of an organization called the Islamic Free Market Institute, better known as the Islamic Institute.

All in the Neocon Family (Jim Lobe, March 26, 2003, AlterNet)

What do William Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, and Robert Kagan have in common? Yes, they are all die-hard hawks who have gained control of U.S. foreign policy since the 9/11 attacks. But they are also part of one big neoconservative family -- an extended clan of spouses, children, and friends who have known each other for generations.

Neoconservatives are former liberals (which explains the "neo" prefix) who advocate an aggressive unilateralist vision of U.S. global supremacy, which includes a close strategic alliance with Israel. Let's start with one of the founding fathers of the extended neocon clan: Irving Kristol. His extensive resume includes waging culture wars for the CIA against the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War and calling for an American "imperial" role during the Vietnam War. Papa Kristol, who has been credited with defining the major themes of neoconservative thought, is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, a neoconservative powerhouse on her own. Her studies of the Victorian era in Britain helped inspire the men who sold Bush on the idea of "compassionate conservatism."

The son of this proud couple is none other that William Kristol, the crown prince of the neoconservative clique and editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a front group which cemented the powerful alliance between right-wing Republicans like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Christian and Catholic Right leaders like Gary Bauer and William Bennett, and the neocons behind a platform of global U.S. military dominance. [...]

This list of intricate, overlapping connections is hardly exhaustive or perhaps even surprising. But it helps reveal an important fact. Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tighly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them grab control of the future of American foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the Left thinks President Bush staged the Thanksgiving landing at Area 51 with a plastic turkey and the commemorations of the JFK assassination showed that even many outwardly stable people are convinced it was a conspiracy, though no two of them agree on how or why it was done. Misanthropy has never seemed a more fitting response to humankind.

MORE:
Gray's Anatomy: a review of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
by John Gray and Al Qaeda And What It Means To Be Modern by John Gray (DANNY POSTEL, December 22, 2003, The Nation)

Among the most interesting of the postideological pilgrims is the British writer John Gray, a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. Gray's journey has taken him from championing the Thatcher revolution to becoming one of globalization's most savage critics; from writing Hayek on Liberty, a 1984 paean to the Austrian sage of free-market economics, to penning False Dawn, a 1998 jeremiad about the "delusions of global capitalism"; from frequenting Washington's right-wing think tanks to frequenting the pages of the Guardian and the New Statesman.

Straw Dogs represents yet another twist in Gray's journey. He is now a convert to the worldview of "deep" ecology. No longer is it the excesses of the free market or corporate globalization that exercises Gray. He's had it with the human race itself. "The destruction of the natural world is not the result of global capitalism, industrialisation, 'Western civilisation' or any flaw in human institutions." Rather, he explains, it is "a consequence of the evolutionary success of an exceptionally rapacious primate."

This will come as altogether welcome news to the captains of industry and the architects of the global economy; the ecological devastation they leave in their wake, according to Gray, has nothing to do with their exploits. And it will come as terribly disheartening news to anyone attempting to curb the more ferocious forms of environmental degradation. Kyoto Protocol--what's the point? Alternative energy--why bother?

Gray has had it not only with humans but with their self-aggrandizing self-image, with the pernicious intellectual scheme that he sees as the animating force behind their ecocidal rampages: humanism. Humanism, for Gray, commits two unforgivable intellectual sins: It claims that humans possess the capacity to shape their own destinies and that humans are above other animals.

This second claim rests on a peculiar distortion of humanism, one Gray compounds by idiosyncratically positing an antagonism between humanism and science. While Darwin "showed that humans are like other animals," humanists, he asserts, "claim they are not." An odd reading of modern intellectual history, to be sure. The Darwinian revolution was, on the contrary, hailed by humanists from the beginning as one of the high-water marks in humanism's struggle against religious irrationalism and superstition. Yet, in an odd reversal, Gray has turned humanists into enemies of science and evolution. Provided are no explanation, no argument, no reference to any specific humanists--just blanket assertion. This, I'm afraid, is all too characteristic of the method employed in Straw Dogs.

Even more consequential for Gray is the matter of shaping our destiny. Indeed, the essential conflict today, he maintains, is being "waged between humanists and the few who understand that humans can no more be masters of their destiny than any other animal." It is paramount for Gray that we junk the voluntarist fantasy of controlling our fate. "Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future," he writes, "than any of our hopes or plans." Gray is referring here to new patterns of disease that promise, in his words, to "trim the human population." From the point of view of Gray's newfound antihumanism, the specter of calamitous epidemics spreading across the planet is nothing alarming. On the contrary, the disappearance of vast numbers of "homo rapiens" (his term of endearment for the species) would be a healthy purge of the "plague of people" that has afflicted the overburdened earth, an act of self-equilibrating eco-cleansing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2003 10:05 PM