>Weimar as a __transitional stage between a society with formal freedoms
>and tolerance to an authoritarian one based on ideological homogeneity
>and a constant state of war__, was how I was reading it as well. The
>problem I guess I'm having with this understanding of Strauss and the
>followers we're now dealing with: Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Ashcroft,
>Rumsfeld, Robertson, etc., is that Nazism, the consequence of the
>liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic according to the neocons, was
>also an autocracy based on ideological homogeneity with a constant
>state of war mentality. In other words, the autocratic, centralized,
>homogenous structure/system the neocons feel is needed to keep evil
>forces/indivduals in check, is the exact structure needed by evil
>forces to effectively and absolutely wreak havoc -- the Nazi Holocaust.
> I mean, why did Leo Strauss or Irving Kristol and why do their neocon
>followers NOT see the homogeneous and centralized autocratic
>structure/system itself as the problem? The only difference seems to
>be how one views the autocrat in power. Good? Evil? A centralized and
>ideologically homogeneous autocratic structure can take either kind of
>autocrat -- as if we could ever really have an absolute and agreed upon
>definition of good and evil -- a long way.
>
>But I guess Chuck is right, the more you look into this thinking, the
>more confused and ludicrous it looks (my words really :))
Our gang still uses rhetoric of freedom, pluralism, and individualism to describe what we're defending in Our Way of Life - that's what the Terrorists hate about us after all. The Nazis, though, were very explicitly anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, and anti-individualistic. To the Bush gang, the state is supposed to reflect or subordinate itself to free individuals; to the Nazis, the individual was supposed to subordinate him- or herself to the state. Of course the Bushies are full of unfreedom and schemes to circumscribe individual freedom of thought and action, but still that's a big rhetorical difference. How does that fit in with the Weimar/Strauss/Shickelgruber analogy?
Doug