This is a theory about the underlying motivations of the Neoconservatives. The Neoconservatives are an American political cult that rose to power in the latter days of Vietnam and have only just begun to wane. It features very cynical and aggressive political moves, such as the establishment of “think tanks” to control perspectives, the use of “talking points” to control thought, total loyalty to other Neoconservatives, and a degree of absurd rhetoric not seen before in political history. The story of the Neoconservatives begins in World War II.
Nazi Germany directly or indirectly led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, several million of which were German Jews. The German people, Jews and otherwise, did little to stop the atrocities. Hitler was very popular and resistance was sparse, lacked capital, and was largely ineffectual.
This began a spiritual project of redeeming humanity for it’s failure to resist Nazism. After a period of fear and triviality in the 1950s, the 1960s saw the rise of leftists and a straightforward hope and expectation of democratic reality. During this decade what would later become the Neoconservatives were Marxists and Trotskyists. Israel under Zionist ideology was a socialist state (for Jews only). Neoconservatism is substantially Jewish due to it’s original ties to understanding WWII and the Nazism process of exterminating Jews.
What The Rocky Syndrome does is to reinterpret and challenge the notion of a “shift to the right” of the Neoconservatives following the fall of the American New Left of the 1960s.
The hippie culture of the 1960s was naive and straightforward. They believed that democratic reality would emerge out of natural human willingness and desire, especially if culture was directed in that way. Hence “free love”.
The Neoconservatives saw the fall of that movement as an indicator that, once again, humanity had failed. Humans could not be brought to democracy in straightforward, direct fashion, just as humans could not oppose fascism directly.
This led the Neoconservatives not toward a new political direction, but toward a new method of achieving what humanity could not achieve in either WWII or during the 1960s.
The Neoconservatives took themselves underground.
In the Rocky series of movies, Rocky leads a hard-scrabble life. He trains, and trains, using a poor man’s facilities, and finally is ready for his big bout. But even after all of that training, he gets in a ring with a man who is bigger, richer, and stronger. And Rocky is beaten to a pulp. He’s beaten (WWII human failure), and beaten (fall of the 1960s left), but finally just when all hope is lost and he seems to be gone he explodes in a manic flurry of punches, through a bloody haze, and defeats Goliath.
Langston Hughes speaks of this process:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Rocky’s dream deferred finally exploded. The question for the Neoconservatives became, how do we create Rocky? As Rocky is the American people, how do we create the American people such that they explode?
And their answer was obvious – beat the Americans to a pulp. Humanity had failed in WWII and during the 1960s because it was insufficiently devastated, insufficiently bloodied, insufficiently despairing. Therefore the Neoconservatives set out to remake America in order to save humanity.
The Neoconservatives then not just “moved to the right”, but became far rightists. They established totalitarian political control, abolished much of the welfare state, even went so far as to develop a sneer in order to enrage the populace. They use outlandish rhetoric and even more outlandish behavior. Rhetoric is very useful since it can enrage the populace without them actually *doing* anything against the populace.
The Neoconservatives are playing a very high stakes game of poker. They need to be competent enough to inspire great fear and incompetent enough to ensure their own ultimate failure. Only through both will their underlying motive reach it’s success.
They are playing out the movie Rocky from twin perspectives – Goliath and the director. They need to make sure the American people are traumatized and enraged but also make sure they don’t overdo it. As Nietzsche says, “What does not kill me only makes me stronger”. With every blow from the Neoconservatives, the American people are made stronger. Or so they hope.
Underlying the Neoconservatives is the feeling that they are deeply misunderstood, and in that respect they are correct.
George Orwell provides the means for the destruction of the Neoconservatives. Orwell denies the value both of schizophrenia (which forms the basis for the twin perspectives and seemingly opposite desires of the Neocons) and of torture as a means of self-improvement, both of which were supported by Nietzsche.
This whole thing is very ironic.
In the latter days of Vietnam Americans started officially using torture, thinking that only through embracing the “dark side” could they prevail. The inverted move from straightforward democratic movement to reactionary democratic movement (creating democracy through forcing a revolution) was a corollary to this “dark side” activity.
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