Michael Burleigh
Bush’s Buddies
The Right Nation: Why America is Different
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 451pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Neoconservatism
By Irwin Stelzer (Ed)
Atlantic Books 328pp £19.99 order from our bookshop
In October, BBC2 broadcast a series called The Power of Nightmares, which claimed fundamental affinities between Islamist terrorists and US neoconservatives in their use of fear to mobilise mass support for their ‘paranoid’ views of the world. This updated Richard Hofstadter’s once famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, first published in 1965. In the programmes, terror became a ‘myth’ – symbolised by ‘orientalist’ Hollywood footage – exploited by Machiavellian followers of the Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss. Many readers may vividly recall little flailing dots hurling themselves from hundreds of feet up out of two burning buildings, or news of hostages in Iraq who had their heads sawn off in footage too disturbing for the BBC to broadcast.
The programmes inadvertently revealed the conspiratorial mindset of those who made them – an outlook shared by the corporation that broadcast them, as one can tell from Newsnight or the Today programme each morning and night.
Let’s explore the programmes’ subtext. A hidden Jew, Leo Strauss, had employed passages from Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s Discourses regarding what might be called the ‘noble lie’, so as to bind together an America disintegrating under the twin impact of the 1960s ‘counter-culture’ and the Vietnam
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma
'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa