Strauss and Deception

Abram Shulsky, who headed the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, whose work was used to override professional CIA analyses in favor of war, was, like the war’s primary intellectual inspiration, Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, as well as many other neoconservatives, an admirer of the late political philosopher and refugee from Nazi Germany Leo Strauss, who died in 1973. Together with Gary Schmitt, who heads the Project for a New American Century–the Washington think tank where the war strategy was originally conceived–Shulsky wrote an essay published in 1999 titled “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (by Which We Do Not Mean Nous).” In it, the authors argue that Strauss’s idea of hidden meaning “alerts one to the possibility that political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.”

Poor Leo Strauss. I imagine if he could see what was being done with his philosophy, it would be like Einstein watching a nuclear bomb…what have you done with my formula? Or maybe a little closer to blaming Hitler on Heidegger… In any case, I think it is possible that he may have been a bit misunderstood.

But perhaps I am being too nice. See the following links

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Leo_Strauss

http://www.alternet.org/story/15935