Now,
the following is an extremely interesting treatment of Leo Strauss by the
Russian Academia, namely, Professor Yevgeni Mikhailovich Drohne, who was the
official reviewer of Leo Strauss for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (the
post-Soviet Great Russian Encyclopedia still in production has just [in
2010] reached the letter “L,” which means that it will reach Strauss only
in 2013 at best), and the modern Russian philosopher Boris Andreevich Mezhuyev.
Observe the smooth progression from Strauss’s esoterism to his “conspiracy
theory,” as
allegedly revealed by the actual neoconservative takeover of America during the
Presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2009), and perceptibly enduring, despite the
disastrous setbacks in Iraq and wherever Washington’s efforts to impose its
hegemony on the post-cold war world have been repulsed and ridiculed, even
under the current Obama Administration.
According
to Mezhuyev, “Strauss believed that ancient political
philosophers secretly held views that were different from those held by
the populations of their hometowns. For this reason, in their writings they
used codes accessible only to the chosen, to convey their higher truth, so that
none of the others would be able to understand. For Strauss, such esoterism of
the ancient philosophers reveals their moral superiority. Strauss understood
very clearly that without a belief in this higher truth liberal
democracy as a political formation is doomed to fail.” And here is
Drohne: “Strauss insisted that if a man has enough
intellect to figure out what he wrote in code in his books, then he is not
going to fight against it, because being smart enough to figure it out--and
thus potentially to belong to the inner circle--will by definition want to
participate in this game.” It’s on this principle that the
Straussian conception of neoconservatism has been based, its essence being the “creation of a reality with a double bottom: one for all,
and the other for the few.”
Dr.
Drohne continues his commentary on Strauss in 2004, as the results of the
neoconservative revolution in the United States were coming in with a vengeance,
having been made visible to all. “On bloodless takeover of power.”
Theoretically refined and successfully used in practice, the longterm mechanism
of this takeover would be as follows: “There are
several circles of disciples; and even those taken into lesser confidence can
be used for lesser tasks; whereas the closest disciples of the innermost circle
are initiated into the subtlest fineries of the teaching… outside the texts (!!!), that is orally,
entirely sub rosa. Thus we are raising several graduating classes of students
over the years and the initiated ones are now forming a kind of sect, helping
each other’s careers and making careers for themselves, keeping the teacher
informed and involved at all times… in this fashion after a few decades of this
practice, ours, without firing a shot, take control over the most
powerful country in the world.”
Such
is the Russian take on Strauss, and on whatever happened to America over the
last several decades. All this looks farfetched, and even preposterous, except
there is no smoke without fire here. Strauss has indeed been accused by the
American scholars and political theorists of being an accomplished intellectual
fascist, a sinister cult leader taking his cue from Messrs.’ Lenin and Trotsky;
and, from all that has been said about him, really capable of the worst
insinuated about him. But there is a repudiation of such a characterization as
well, and even some evidence to suggest that rather than being the father of
the American secret order of the neocons, he was no such thing, and that, in
fact, the neocons themselves, decades after Strauss’s death, appropriated his
name and his legend for their cause, basically making up all these sordid
associations and insinuations themselves.
So,
was there, indeed, a super-secretive and super-sinister oral teaching initiated
by Leo Strauss? Due to the super-hidden nature of this subject matter, the
truth is hard to come by. But the fact itself that such talk has active
currency, and that its sources are not some anti-Semitic bigots of the Protocols'
historical infamy, but American Jewish academics and political activists
themselves, brings forth several troubling questions, and the least troubling
of them, in fact, the least relevant of them, is whether the late Professor Leo
Strauss had anything to do with it at all.
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