Bill Kristol Condemns Lying for Political Ends: Seriously
by Glenn Greenwald
Recently
by Glenn Greenwald:
Obama
Contemplates Executive Order for Detention Without Charges
On Fox News
yesterday, NPR's Juan Williams – who, just by the way, dutifully
spouts GOP talking points more reliably than any Fox commentator
other than Karl Rove – condemned President Obama for telling
"lies" about the Gates controversy. That prompted this
observation from Bill Kristol, in which he head-pattingly quoted
Williams:
Amid all
the blather about "teachable moments," I don't recall
anyone else making this simple but profound observation: "You
can't have a teachable moment if it's based on a lie." Another
way of putting it might be to say that it's not a "moment"
that's teachable, it's the truth that's teachable.
So a
moment in which everyone colludes to obscure the truth (which
seems characteristic of most "teachable moments" in
contemporary America) is not a moment of teaching; it's a moment
of deception, of misdirection, of obfuscation. Call it an
obfuscatable moment.
It's hard to
remember a statement in American politics as deceitful and obfuscating
as this one from Bill Kristol, pretending to condemn politically-motivated
lies. It's not hyperbole to say that the central political tactic
of neoconservatism is the "noble lie" – exactly what
Kristol self-righteously condemns here. The political philosopher
most revered by neoconservatives, Leo Strauss, explicitly advocated
such lies, as Philosophy
and Political Science Professor Shadia Drury documented:
[Strauss]
therefore taught that those in power must invent noble lies
and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they
are supremely fit. . . . Like the Grand Inquisitor, he thought
that it was better for human beings to be victims of this noble
delusion than to “wallow” in the “sordid”
truth. And like the Grand Inquisitor, Strauss thought that
the superior few should shoulder the burden of truth and in
so doing, protect humanity from the “terror and hopelessness
of life.
Though that
may be a bit of an oversimplification of Strauss' views, Kristol's
dad, Irving, the so-called Godfather of Neoconservatism, was
a devout follower of what he understood to be Strauss' belief
that feeding lies to citizens is necessary for good political ends:
Kristol
has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent
autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within
the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment
dogma that 'the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds
that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought
that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free,
but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between
philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization
and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil
and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by
tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly
negative, consequences."
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