I was visiting a rather cultish news site and clicked on a link to Wayne Madsen’s blog looking for info on a pedophile scandal brewing in Tony Blair’s government.
In one sentence, Sarkozy has echoed the furtive beliefs of the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) and its neo-con adherents in the Republican Party, fraternal secret societies, and the seamier side of the Judeo-Christian fundamentalist Right that pedophilia is somehow genetic and, therefore, more common than thought and acceptable.
Have I been sleeping? Is this really a common neocon idea? Or did I click from one conspiracy web site to another? I find it easy to believe that neocons are preoccupied with pedophilia, if only because my image of neocons is that they’re preoccupied with every sexual practice aside from missionary position with the lights off. But I have difficulty believing that there is a majority that condones it.
Note that there is a large distinction between stating that something is genetic, and condoning it, finding it “normal” or believing that such individuals should be allowed to roam freely in society if they are going to act on their desires. To be charitable, he’s reading an awful lot into a remark that Sarkozy said he is “inclined to think that people are born pedophiles, and that it is also a problem that we do not know how to manage.”. To be less charitable, the author has a clear agenda and is authoring an unwarranted hit piece.
And you’ve got an odd idea about what “Neo-conservativism” is.
You’ve got them confused with paleocons. Neocons were liberals and leftists who joined the conservative movement for foreign policy reasons, that is, anticommunism.
Quick test. Name 5 prominent neoconservatives, and explain what makes those people neoconservatives as opposed to plain old conservatives. (Hint: “neo” does not mean “very”)
I am aware of nothing (outside really off-the-wall conspiracy sites) that would link “neo-cons” and pedophilia in any context.
In fact, it would almost appear that the site to which you linked is not using the word “neo-con” in the manner in which it was coined and continues to be used in the U.S.
Originally, the neo-cons–new conservatives–were a group of quite left-leaning folks, often in academia, who decided that “left” was not the appropriate direction to lean and reversed from being left leaning to right leaning. (Hence the concept of “new” conservatives.)
However, they did not give up all their earlier “liberal” traits and envisioned a world in which direct U.S. intervention was the best method of making “those people” do the right thing. They had no tradition of conservative financial ideology and no desire to refrain from “helping” people who needed their “intervention” and it was only their vaguely pro-business and anti-communist rhetoric that actually garnred them an association with conservastives, at all. (However, during the Reagan years, those two triats were enough to get them acces to the halls of power.)
What any of that has to do with sexual mores, particularly in relation to imposing sex on children, I have no idea. That is why the term “neo-con” as used in the linked article just looks odd.
Sounds like you’re dealing with a bunch of ultra-liberal whackjobs. I’ve heard theories along those lines (concerning a genetic basis for pedophilia) but I think it’s fair to say that those ideas are far from mainstream, among conservative Americans, liberal ones, and moderates.
Honestly, there’s a reason most people get their news from places like CNN.com and Foxnews.com.
I’d gently suggest too that you don’t understand the terminology you are using. I cannot call to mind a single instance of, say, Douglas Feith, Irving Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick (who I think would qualify) uttering the first word about sexual practices.
Rule one is generally no political digs in GQ. Rule zero might be if you’re going to make political digs, know what you’re talking about? Just a suggestion.
To give you guys a taste of the kind of site this is:
So this guy routinely gets calls from Saudi Billionaire sheiks, but Wayne Madsen lives by his own stern code, he makes his own rules and doesn’t care if those pencil pushers back at headquarters like it. So when those billionaires call up Wayne Madsen and demand he censor his message, he tells them to drop dead. Not like those guys over at DailyKos and Democratic Underground who obey orders. Fight on!
Thanks all. I suspected that Ray Madsen was playing fast and loose with the facts, and I didn’t make any distinction between neo-cons and other conservatives.
If neo-cons are ex-lefties, then why are Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld often cited as leading neo-cons? None of them were ever liberals, were they?
Wolfowitz grew up in a liberal family, although he came under the influence of Allan Bloom in college. He participated in the March on Washington and worked for Democrat (hawk) Scoop Jackson.
I would suspect that he is considered a second generation neo-con.
Prior to the WTC/Pentagon attack, Rumsfeld was not really known as a neo-con; he is more of a fellow traveller. I suspect that the same is true of Cheney.
Again, the prime focus of neoconservatism is foreign policy, not domestic policy. Many people in the neoconservative movement were social liberals, many were Jewish, and so forth. But they felt the threat from the Soviet Union to Western liberal democracy had to be countered by a strong American foreign policy. So they were critics of Nixon and Kissenger and suchlike.
I know “neocon” in the popular imagination has somehow morphed to “member of or cheerleader for the Bush Administration”, but really that’s a waste of a perfectly good word. Why change the word “neoconservative” to mean “Bush Toady” when we already have the phrase “Bush Toady” to describe such people?
Why? Liberal laziness, perhaps? Or maybe it’s just that enough time has passed since the late Seventies that people have forgotten who the original neo-conservatives were.
Over time, “neocon” has come to mean simply “any Republican I don’t like.”
The funny thing is, except for Wolfowitz, there were never many true neocons in the Bush White House. Practically all the leading neocons backed John McCain in 2000, which is why they’re all still writing columns at the Weekly Standard instead of holding jobs in the Bush White House.
Cheney and Rumsfeld do seem pretty on-board with the neo-con agenda, despite (as noted) never having been reformed liberals. Outside the White House proper, Wolfowitz and Feith probably qualify and have been very influential in the policy on Iraq.