<DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> > What I find fascinating is how the greatly articulated nonsense that passes as the politics of the neoconservative elite that has been turned into the material of policy, can be so easily stripped of its finery and decoded as pure racist horse shit---if you have the nose for it. It's also not constructive to reduce all politics we hate to racism. Straussianism is not racist at the core, taht it, it does not turn on the notion of race. It is elitist and antidemocratic -- isn't that bad enough? > All of this reflection leads to a terrible sort of conclusion. That if the official academy is allowed to re-write history along the lines of the neoconservative twist---which is already at least two decades along anyway---then very likely any semblance to the history and culture I learned will most likely vanish. What I learned will simply not be the accepted view, but some kind of radical, suspect, and ideologically skewed interpretation. So who's gonna stop them? They've done it with the fench Revolution already. > I do dimly remember Jim Farmelant (thanks for the urls), Justin and others going on about Strauss and others, but I didn't understand the significance at the time. I am not sure I really want to add that sort of crap to an already impossible reading list, which I slog along with. There is something nausating about having to read these people just to figure out how they arrived at such despicable ideas. Strauss, unlike most Straussians, is worth reading; he's actually a valuable interpreter of Hobbes et al. There's book by a Canadian scholar, Shadia Drury, LEO STRAUSS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT, that will save you a lot of agony reading people are who aren't worth toilet paper (Jaffa, Bloom, etc.). jks</BLOCKQUOTE></DIV> <hr size=1>Do you Yahoo!? <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com">The New Yahoo! Search</a> - Faster. Easier. Bingo.