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It's not that I find this entirely wrong, but there is something more subtle going on in the formative perceptions and consequent policies and actions of the US than just deception.
This is the way Jeffrey Fisher put it in an earlier thread:
``...i guess i've always thought of it less as a repression of the past than an embrace of `history' (that is, the discipline or process) as a kind of myth-making. in the context of rashomon, it's like saying that they've embraced their subject-positions in their understanding of fact/history and then can externalize that as objective reality..''
This process of embracing history as if it were a story that can be retold to express a particular view of the world, isn't exactly an outright lie---unless of course it is fabricated as in 1984 specifically as such. And it is not that current political propagandists are not working overtime to do just that with Iraq. They certainly are. But there is this other Rashomon-like process that has convolved with blatant spin-doctoring, that deforms historical understanding in a particular way, that makes war on Iraq or Afghanistan, and hence the Islamic world a much coherent development than it would otherwise be.
A good example of deforming history in order to creat a rational backdrop for proposing the ridiculous is easily found through out Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. For instance, I just finished Bloom's chapter on the Sixties. His entire focus in the period is actually on developments that took place late, namely the Black and Ethnic studies movements, mostly post-68. He makes the black and ethnic studies student lead reform the center piece.
What's wrong with this picture? The word Vietnam never appears in the entire chapter. There is literally no mention of the war, draft resistance, at all, nor the Chicago Democratic Convention, nor any of the race riots and assassinations, FBI surveillance, Conintelpro, or any of the rest of the egregious abuses of power by the government---and more particularly the always implicit and occasionally explicit support given to these abuses by college and university administrations across the country.
What am I saying? I think Shadia Drury overstates the case and simplifies it, making it appear that Strauss and company are darker, more conspiratorial than I think they are. And in doing so, I think she is missing something else that is more important.
Bloom adapted a peculiar version of the history of ideas from Strauss, and uses most of the first part of Closing of the American Mind to develop this view. The consequence is that his deformation of the Sixties chapter makes for a seamless continuation of a process seen as decay into mob rule, and loss of `values', etc, etc.
Much like the missing war in Vietnam in Bloom's chapter on the Sixties, what is missing in Strauss is any mention of concrete historical background to any of his readings of Machiavelli, Rousseau, or Nietzsche.
From reading Strauss, we would never know that Machiavelli was reflecting on the first secular and urban civil society to exist in almost a thousand years since the fall of Rome---at a time when the Church was still the primary social institution in most people's lives. In Strauss's reading of Rousseau, we would never know that Rousseau and the Enlightenment were extending the secular and rational understandings of all forms of social life and laying the foundations of social science and historiography---specifically as a reaction to the divine right of monarchies, hierarchical and traditional domination by Church authority and economic domination by the landed aristocracy and high bourgoisie. And of course we would never know that the industrial proletariat formed the overwhelming majority of urban life in Nietzsche's time. We would never know these details because all of Strauss's analysis takes place entirely in the ideal realm as if these writers were dis-embodied spirits. As a-historical and de-contextualized figures of course we can argue forever over what they really did or didn't mean by parsing their texts to perpetuity. All time and space of the concrete human condition disappear and we are left within this hermetic realm of values.
In a related vein, within US government policy and political context, we are never reminded of the hundreds of years of European colonial rule, the 20th C wars of liberation against US domination in the rest of the world, the primacy of oil and Israel security in the Middle East, or the Cold War manipulations by the US and FSU of virtually all the countries in the region. Essentially the Islamic world has no rational reason to dis-trust, loath, or dread the US or any of its actions. They are completely irrational and barbarous people, that we are trying our level best to bring up to democracy and civilize. And never mind those Haliburton trucks importing gasoline at twice the price of local and now probably illegal truckers.
Chuck Grimes