Free Republic

Since October 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has regularly referred to the concept of a "Mastermind" (ust akil, "supra-intellect," in Turkish) that, he says, is plotting against Turkey. This concept has been applauded by the Islamist pro-AKP media. Erdogan's December 12, 2014 speech, which focused on this "mastermind" concept, inspired the production of a two-hour "documentary" by one of the leading Turkish television channels, the pro-AKP A Haber. The film, titled "The Mastermind," first aired on March 15, 2015 and has been broadcast repeatedly since then; in addition, the Turkish Islamist pro-AKP media are circulating the film on their...

The Real Leo Strauss By JENNY STRAUSS CLAY Published: June 7, 2003 Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a ''cabal'' (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles. My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago. He was a...

The sordid tale now making the rounds in the "mainstream" press of a rogue Pentagon intelligence operation has all the elements of an urban legend: heavy breathing, a secret basement office "down by the ramp" and government officials who form a hidden alliance based on long-ago ties to an obscure but influential university guru. Only the work of a few good men with the courage to face up to this "cabal" - and a few crusader-journalists to help them - can make the demons scatter and scare the dark ones into the light. Or so the story goes on those...

The conservative Chicago theoretician was the source of Ozzie Guillen's baseball philosophy.

GEORG HEGEL was a German philosopher of the early 19th century. Hegel believed that history unfolds through a "dialectical" process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity "the absolute idea." History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea.Until recently it appeared that Marxism (which borrowed Hegel's dialectic but replaced "ideas" with economic systems and classes--hence "dialectical materialism") would represent Hegel's most enduring contribution to the...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

I'm surprised more Christians and others of deep religious conviction here in America aren't at least slightly put off by the philosophy of the Neoconservatives who are at the top of the current administration -- not Bush himself, who I believe is a man of genuine faith, but Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. -- and in particular the view formulated by their mentor Leo Strauss that religion is a useful illusion which should be encouraged among the common people because it promotes social order and mitigates the corrupting influences of selfishness and materialism. (The leaders themselves don't need to believe in...

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy BYLINE: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI BODY: President Bush has never been known as a bookworm. An instinctive politician who goes with his gut, he has usually left the heavy reading in the family to his wife, Laura, a former librarian. He is "often uncurious and as a result ill informed," his former speechwriter, David Frum, wrote in a memoir this year, adding that "conspicuous intelligence seemed actively unwelcome in the Bush White House." It is curious then that books by historians, philosophers and policy analysts have played a significant role in shaping...

Daniel Flynn's "Intellectual Morons" serves as a clarion call warning about the dangers of ideology. Flynn won ders why so many public intellectuals embarrass themselves by promoting foolish theories and opinions. The reason is simple, most of these individuals have abandoned rational argument in favor of ideology. According to Flynn, this blind adherence to ideology has led many scholars and activists to embrace ideas that are, at best, foolish and, at worst, dangerous. Each chapter chronicles the background and debunks the ideas of a prominent public intellectual.... Flynn is at his best when dealing with public intellectuals who are famous...

THIS is not the book to read if you wish to learn about Leo Strauss, one of the 20th century's great students of the history of political philosophy, or about his influence on the shape of neoconservatism and thereby on the Bush administration's transformation of American foreign policy in response to the 9/11 attacks. Yet Norton's book — chock full of factual errors, personal smears and fatuous assertions — is valuable for what it tells you about the debasement of intellectual standards at our leading universities. Before page 20 in this peer-reviewed and Yale-editorial-board-approved book, one encounters numerous mistakes. Some...

In his new book, Intellectual Morons, Daniel Flynn exposes the dangers of blindly following intellectual elites who support and promote idiotic ideas and theories. Chris Banescu, who recently wrote the review of the book, interviewed Flynn about the origins of the material and the impact its revelations will have on our culture. Chris Banescu: What inspired you to write this book? Daniel Flynn: My goal in writing Intellectual Morons is to get more people to think with their brain rather than their ideology. By exposing ideologically-inspired hoaxes and frauds, the book not only rebuts falsehood but helps immunize readers against...

On May 13, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy berated Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Senate Armed Services Committee, condemning "disaster after disaster" in U.S. Iraq policy. Well before the Abu Ghraib revelations, Kennedy has sought to transform Iraqi freedom from a philosophical and strategic issue into a partisan debate, without regard either to reality or result. On April 6, Kennedy called Iraq "George Bush's Vietnam." On March 5, 2004, Senator Edward Kennedy, speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations, took the president to task for allegedly exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq: "The evidence so far leads to...

Quite a few of President Bush's critics maintain that since some prominent members of the administration and their defenders are known to be former students of Leo Strauss or of Straussians, one can trace Bush's foreign policy to Strauss's political ideas. Straussians in Washington tend to be neoconservatives, and, in foreign policy, prominent neocons like William Kristol and Robert Kagan advocate a policy of "benevolent hegemony." In their argument, a benign American imperialism is justified for two reasons. First, it provides security against foreign attack; that is, it delivers "strategic benefits." But their real enthusiasm is reserved for its second...

Don’t Buy the BookSinger's Plague Calling Peter Singer controversial is of course, an understatement. Be that as it may, the controversial Princeton University professor of ethics packed a downtown D.C. bookstore Friday hawking his new book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (Dutton, 288 pages, $24.95). If the ethicist's reaction was any indicator, the event was less than a rousing success. This heavily Democrat crowd, weaned on the argumentation of Molly Ivins and Michael Moore, must have become so accustomed to any sentence with Bush's name in it ending with a punch line that,...

One of my colleagues and I have a running bet: Who can find the dumbest reference to "neoconservatism"? Until last week, the honor was Tina Brown's. In a Washington Post piece last year, she recalled "the New Deal for which neocons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as 'that man'"--the problem, of course, being that "neocons" did not emerge until 30 years after FDR's death, and the movement's founders vigorously supported the New Deal. But, in a new play, Embedded (opening later this week at New York's Public Theater), film star and director Tim Robbins outdoes even Tina Brown. Embedded,...

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq Danny Postel 16 - 10 - 2003 Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq. What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading...

The only way to begin to understand Leo Strauss’s political thought is by studying his writings. This may seem a simple rule of common sense. Yet a glance at the current controversy over Strauss’s supposed influence on contemporary American politics and foreign policy suggests that this rule is easily ignored. The controversy turns on a legitimate question: “What was Strauss up to?” - or, more precisely, “What was Strauss’s intention?” But it would be misleading to attempt to understand Strauss by ascribing to him an influence, whether beneficial or nefarious, on current policy debates, and then inferring from the alleged...

Bonnie Erbe's column "Playing into the radicals' hands" is onto something, but seemed not to make it explicit. Writing about the seemingly paranoid delusional behavior of Lt. Gen. William Boykin, she wrote, "Boykin's remarks seemed almost designed to stir up the very radicals the president is trying to quiet down." The flaw here is the assumption that because the president says he is fighting a war on terrorism, his goal is actually to reduce the incidence of terrorism in the world. That assumption is completely flawed. Bush's political ideology comes from a philosopher named Leo Strauss. Bush has said he...

Ron Smith's "Something to Say" Commentary Weekdays at 6:50AM | rsmith@wbal.com | Ron Smith Show Page Leo-ConsFriday, October 24, 2003    Ron Smith's Something to Say          Have you noticed that one is not supposed to say “neocon” any more? It’s suddenly a dirty word because to use it as identification for a particular school of political thought is said to be “anti-Semitic,” apparently because so many prominent new conservatives are Jewish.           They’re proud of that privately, but since the Iraq adventure has not gone as smoothly as they told us it would, they’d rather not accept public responsibility for...

Are the ideas of the conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss a shaping influence on the Bush administration’s world outlook? Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury – a leading scholarly critic of Strauss – and asks her about the connection between Plato’s dialogues, secrets and lies, and the United States-led war in Iraq. What was initially an anti-war argument is now a matter of public record. It is widely recognised that the Bush administration was not honest about the reasons it gave for invading Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the influential United States deputy secretary of defense, has acknowledged that the evidence used to...