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LaRouche Expose´ of Strauss’s ‘Children of Satan’ Draws Blood

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Just weeks after the LaRouche in 2004 campaign began na- tive director of the Project for the New American Century, tionwide circulation of 400,000 copies of the Children of an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, Satan dossier, exposing the role of is firmly in the Strauss camp.” fascist “philosopher” as the godfather of the neo- Among the Strauss cohorts named by Atlas were Martin conservative war party in and around the Bush Administra- Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Alexandre Koje`ve. Atlas tion, two major establishment publications have joined in the did not elaborate on who these mid-20th-Century European expose«. On May 4, published a long, lead Nietzschean existentialists were, and, he skirted around the article in the Week in Review section of its nationally read issue of Strauss’s own, notorious Nietzschean fascist beliefs. Sunday edition, titled “Leo-Cons—A Classicist’s Legacy: Nevertheless, Atlas’s article was generally read as an New Empire Builders.” Accompanying the article was a establishment shot across the bow at the neo-con apparatus, prominent color caricature of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul which has carried out a virtual coup d’e«tat against the Bush Wolfowitz, a leading Strauss disciple, dressed as a Roman Administration and is driving for a policy of imperial “per- gladiator, holding a copy of Strauss’ book On Tyranny, and petual wars” in the Middle East and North Asia. Beyond bearing a shield with a distorted depiction of the American the immediate issue of Leo Strauss, the idea that elements eagle. The article highlighted Strauss’s role as the intellectual of the establishment are openly turning to Lyndon LaRouche, keystone of an extensive network of neo-con chicken-hawks for intellectual leadership in waging a counter-coup, is send- inside the Bush Administration and their allies in think-tanks ing even bigger shock-waves throughout Washington and on the outside, who engineered the Iraq war; it also featured other world capitals. a half-page photo montage of the leading culprits, all of whom had been earlier identified in Executive Intelligence Review Fires a Second Shot and in the LaRouche in 2004 expose«s. The day after the New York Times published its “Leo- James Atlas, the author of a recent biography of Uni- Cons” expose«, respected investigative reporter Seymour versity of Chicago novelist Saul Bellow (whose fictional Hersh produced an even harder-hitting expose« of Strauss and biography of second-generation Strauss disciple Allan the Strauss gang inside the Pentagon, in the pages of the New Bloom, Ravelstein, included a character modeled on Paul Yorker magazine’s May 12 issue. Wolfowitz), penned the Times expose«. Atlas wrote, “To Hersh, too, picked up material first published by intellectual-conspiracy theorists, the Bush Administration’s LaRouche in 2004, Lyndon LaRouche’s campaign committee foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. for the Democratic Presidential nomination, LaRouche in Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has been iden- 2004. Borrowing from the Children of Satan dossier, Hersh tified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding included the Straussian roots of several Pentagon spooks, who editor of the Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White were behind the carpet-bombing disinformation campaign, House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, execu- which led to President Bush’s decision to launch the war

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© 2003 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. Leo Strauss’s, at the University of Chicago. Both men re- LAROUCHE ceived their doctorates under Strauss in 1972. Strauss, a refu- IN 2004 ★ gee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States in www.larouchein2004.com 1937, was trained in the history of political philosophy and became one of the foremost conservative emigre« scholars. He is widely known for his argument that the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric mean- ings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses.” ChildrenChildren of of Satan Satan Hersh provided his own list of Straussians, in Executive departments, as well as think tanks and foundations, adding Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelli- gence, to the list of known disciples. Former Central Intelligence Agency counter-terror center chief, Vincent Cannistraro, who at one point worked with Shulsky at a think tank, told Hersh that Shulsky’s politics were “typical for his group—the Straussian view. The group’s members reinforce each other because they’re the only friends TheThe they have, and they all work together. This has been going on ‘Ignoble‘Ignoble Liars’ Liars’ Behind Behind since the 1980s, but they’ve never been able to coalesce as they have now.” Cannistraro concluded, “September 11th Bush’sBush’s No-ExitNo-Exit WarWar gave them the opportunity, and now they’re in heaven.” Re- ferring to the alleged evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons $ Suggested 1 Contribution of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda, Cannistraro added, “They believe the intelligence is there. They want to believe it. It has to be there.” The dossier Children of Satan: The ‘Ignoble Liars’ Behind Bush’s No-Exit War, mass-produced by the 2004 campaign committee of Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche. The The Floodgates Burst pamphlet has provided ammunition for the “establishment” press Once the floodgates opened against the Straussians, with to attack the putschist disciples of universal fascist Leo Strauss, in the material in the Sunday New York Times and New Yorker and around the Bush Administration. magazine “lifted” from the LaRouche investigations, other investigative reporters quickly joined in. On May 6-7, there were two more U.S. media expose«s—by Joe Conason in the New York Observer and by Jim Lobe in Inter Press News against Iraq. First among the Strauss disciples peddling Agency (Lobe also writes frequently for Asia Times). In Eu- “spun” information, through Defense Secretary Donald rope, both Corriere della Sera in Italy and the Times in Britain Rumsfeld into the President, is Abram Shulsky, the chief of picked up on the Hersh and Atlas stories. Earlier, the French what LaRouche has labeled the “chicken-hawk intelligence daily Le Monde had published a long expose« of the Straussian agency” at the Pentagon. Hersh labeled the unit and his article cabal inside Team Bush. “Annals of National Security: Selective Intelligence.” Lobe’s article was of particular note, because he inter- He wrote, “The director of the Special Plans operation is viewed University of Calgary Prof. Shadia Drury, the author Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political of two books on Strauss and an investigative dossier on Alex- philosopher Leo Strauss. . . . The Office of Special Plans is andre Koje`ve. Koje`ve was Strauss’s life-long partner in intel- overseen by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, a re- lectual crime; a Russian emigre« based in Paris, he had been tired Navy captain.” Both Shulsky and Luti were highlighted part of the overtly fascist “Synarchist” circles in wartime and in the Children of Satan expose«, as being among the Straus- postwar France. sian “ignoble liars” behind the Iraq War. Drury made one criticism of Seymour Hersh’s New After elaborating the string of instances in which the Yorker article, disputing, correctly, the idea that Strauss had Shulsky-Luti unit passed on fake intelligence laundered from been a liberal democrat. “Strauss was neither a liberal nor a “outside intelligence agencies,” often through the Iraqi Na- democrat. Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in tional Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, the crooked banker who power is critical (in Strauss’s view) because they need to be is also a University of Chicago alumnus—along with Shulsky led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for and Wolfowitz—Hersh returned to the issue of Leo Strauss. them.” She distinguished between Plato and Strauss, in that “Like Wolfowitz,” Hersh wrote, Shulsky “was a student of Plato said that rulers had to be people with the highest moral

EIR May 16, 2003 National 63 standards, while Strauss insisted that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior. . . . You want a crowd that you can manipulate Earth to DNC: LaRouche like putty.” Drury also told Lobe that Strauss’s system of rule de- Is Number 1 in Support pended on getting the population to believe in an enemy im- age. “He maintains that if no external threat exists, then one by Anita Gallagher has to be manufactured. . . . In Strauss’s view, you have to fight all the time [to survive]. In that respect, it’s very Spartan. Peace leads to decadence. Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, The Democratic National Committee and the mendacious is what Straussians believe in.” This is the doctrine of the U.S. press are sounding an ugly dissonance with reality, as Straussians in Washington—such as Wolfowitz, Kristol, they struggle to hype and stage Democratic Presidential can- Shulsky and Schmitt—which leads them to pursue “aggres- didate forums in Ohio on May 17 and Wisconsin on June sive, belligerent foreign policy.” Drury criticized the Bush 13, while so far excluding Lyndon LaRouche—the candidate Administration, which she accused of having “no use for lib- who leads Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Sen. John Edwards (D- eralism and democracy, but they’re conquering the world in N.C.), and all the other “major candidates,” in money raised, the name of liberalism and democracy.” number of individual contributions, and number of contribu- In the May 7 edition of the New York Observer, Joe Cona- tors in those states! Nor is this a Midwestern regional anom- son made a cynical stab at the Straussian gang surrounding aly, for LaRouche leads the other nine Democratic candidates Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. “The genius of Donald in number of individual contributions nationwide, according Rumsfeld and his deputies in the Defense Department,”Cona- to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) figures through son wrote, dripping with sarcasm, “is currently among the March 31, 2003. mainstream media’s favorite themes. According to the con- LaRouche also leads in all categories of support in Iowa, ventional viewpoint, their military strategy in Iraq was practi- traditionally the first state in the nation to choose a Presiden- cally flawless, their political instincts are masterful, and their tial candidate, and thus bestow early momentum to the philosophical grounding is deep. (Some of them have even winner. read Leo Strauss). They’re just undeniably brilliant.” Speaking to the press on April 29, LaRouche explained, “The Federal Election Commission reports, and our supple- A Fight to the Bitter End mentary information on the extended support means, that, The sudden outburst of enthusiasm for Lyndon in terms of contributions, contributors, I’m the number-one LaRouche’s epistemological war against the neo-con cabal, candidate, presently, for the Democratic nomination for 2004. from some powerful elements in the American political insti- “Now, under those cirumstances, no party can claim to be tutions, is a significant indication that more and more people serious, and keep the frontrunner, the current frontrunner in are awakening to the extraordinary danger that the Straussian the campaign, from the controversy,” LaRouche told the “perpetual war party” poses to the very survival of the United South Carolina News Network on April 28, respecting his States as a constitutional republic. Prior to the outbreak of the exclusion from ABC-TV’s May 3 debate there. Reality Iraq War in March, there was a tremendous degree of naivete« swiftly imposed its own penalty on ABC-TV, when the net- about the power of the neo-conservatives and their grip on work effectively admitted how dull its “debate” would be, by such top Administration decision-makers as Defense Secre- cancelling the long-planned live coverage! tary Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney—neither of The organized-crime-linked Democratic Leadership whom personally has the profile of an ideological neo-con Council, founded with seed-money from Michael Steinhardt, (although Rumsfeld has long been associated with leading the son of Meyer Lansky’s jewel fence, has taken over the Strauss disciple Robert Goldwin, former Dean of St. John’s Democratic National Committee. The DLC exists to expunge College; he was Rumsfeld’s deputy both at NATO and at the the influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt from the party, and Gerald Ford White House; Goldwin is now with the neo-con its attempts to make the Democrats a “second Republican “Temple of Doom,” the American Enterprise Institute). Party” have resulted in defeat after defeat. For example, the The question remains, however: Will the present momen- Democratic Party loss of Congressional seats in the 2002 tum continue? Will U.S. political institutions recognize that mid-term elections, was only the third time in 100 years the Straussians are universal fascists, and will continue to when the opposition party failed to win seats in mid-term exploit the Sept. 11, 2001 “Reichstag Fire” to impose their elections; the nearest precedent is the Republicans’ massive political will on the President, until they are thoroughly loss of seats in 1934, after two years of FDR’s leadership. purged by the counter-coup that Lyndon LaRouche has been The DLC-dominated DNC is exerting heavy, if bizarre, pres- calling for? sure on the state Democratic parties to act like fools, and

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