Author: Jan Olof Bengtsson

The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel

Foreword by Paul Findley     Introduction by Paul Gottfried

Enigma Editions, 2008     

Amazon.com

Publisher’s Description:

Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons’ goal was not the spread of democracy, but the protection of Israel’s interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement has always identified closely with the interests of Israel’s Likudnik right wing, the discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives, including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as ready after 9/11 for retaliation.

Reviews:

“Absolutely essential.”  Mark Bruzonsky, former Washington rep., World Jewish Congress; founder, InternationalPeace.org

“This is a riveting book.”  Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., syndicated columnist; former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; and former associate editor, Wall Street Journal

“The time is right for an unvarnished examination of the origins, history, and agenda of the neoconservative policy bloc in Washington and in Tel Aviv. The Transparent Cabal helps to provide one.”  Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF (ret.), Ph.D.

“The timing of Dr. Sniegoski’s book could not be better. The only aspect of U.S. Middle East policy not in controversy is that no one knows what to do; Sniegoski’s book may help the debate break through this barrier.”  Joseph Douglass Jr., Ph.D., author, America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical/Biological Warfare and Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America

“I have known Dr. Sniegoski for many years. He is a thorough researcher with a capacity for independent thought and the courage to advance and defend his analyses.”  Wayne S. Cole, Ph.D., professor emeritus, University of Maryland

“Sniegoski leaves no stone unturned in exposing the Israeli-neocon alliance and its catastrophic consequences in the Middle East. Timely and important, his book should provoke a much-needed debate about who truly benefits from current US policies in the region.”  Jonathan Cook, author, Israel and the Clash of Civilisations

“That the security of Israel has been central to the foreign-policy worldview of the neo-conservatives is one of the least discussed and most taboo aspects of the movement. Sniegolski has long been among the most dogged researchers who have tried to bring this to light.” Jim Lobe, Washington Bureau Chief, Inter Press Service (IPS).

“Sniegoski breaks new ground and pulls no punches in his analysis of the neocon-driven policies that brought about war with Iraq. He broadens the inquiry into many areas that desperately need sunshine and clarity.” Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer, partner in Cannistraro Associates, national security consultants, and contributing editor, The American Conservative

“Telling the truth in America today is more professionally risky than ever before, but happily Sniegoski couldn’t care less. His rendition of recent American history is utterly absorbing.”  Thomas Woods, Ph.D., New York Times bestselling author, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History

“…a must read for anyone horrified by the disastrous course [neoconservatives] have set for U.S. policy.”  Kathy and Bill Christison, former CIA officials

“Sniegoski succeeds admirably in documenting the corrosive influence of the well-financed neoconservative lobby and its selling of a one-sided foreign policy to the Bush-Cheney administration.”  Rodrigue Tremblay, Ph.D., emeritus professor of economics and author of The New American Empire

“…required reading for all who wish to learn how American foreign policy has been hijacked, and who wish to reclaim it before it leads to another Middle East catastrophe.”  James C. Russell, Ph.D., author of Breach of Faith: American Churches and the Immigration Crisis 

“…devoted to saving the United States from an even worse mistake than its attack on Iraq. Patriots informed by this book will not be tricked into support of neocon war plans.”  Virginia Deane Abernethy, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Psychiatry (Anthropology), Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

“[The] book contributes to an eventual [Iraq war] post mortem by laying out present-day politics that should be public knowledge.”  James Kalb, New York City lawyer and writer

About the Author:

Stephen J. Sniegoski, Ph.D., earned his doctorate in American history, with a focus on American foreign policy, at the University of Maryland. He has had articles published in The World & I, Modern Age, Current Concerns, Zeit-Fragen, Telos, The Occidental Quarterly, Arab News, The Last Ditch, and elsewhere on subjects such as communism, political philosophy, World War II, and the American war on Iraq. His focus on the neoconservative involvement in American foreign policy antedates September 11, and his first major work on the subject, ‘The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel’, was published February 10, 2003, more than a month before the American attack.

Paul Findley is a former Congressional Representative from Illinois, elected as a Republican to the eighty-seventh and the ten succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1961 – January 3, 1983). He was appointed to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (1983-1994). He is the author of The Federal Farm Fable; They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby; A. Lincoln: The Crucible of Congress; and Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts about the U.S.-Israeli Relationship.

Paul Gottfried, Ph.D., is the Horace E. Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and a member of the executive board of the Historical Society. He is also contributing editor for Chronicles and Telos, and is editor-in-chief of This World. In addition to being an Adjunct Scholar at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Gottfried was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1984 and was recognized by Who’s Who in the World in 2000. He is the author of [etc. – readers of this blog will be familiar with him; if not, see the links on the Links page].

The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle    

Nation Books, 2009     

Amazon.com

2009 Publisher’s Description

We now live in two Americas. One – now the minority – functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other – the majority – is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority – which crosses social class lines, though the poor are overwhelmingly affected – presidential debate and political rhetoric is pitched at a sixth-grade reading level. In this “other America,” serious film and theater, as well as newspapers and books, are being pushed to the margins of society.

In the tradition of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges navigates this culture – attending WWF contests, the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies – to expose an age of terrifying decline and heightened self-delusion.

2010:

In this New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Chris Hedges has written a shattering meditation on American obsession with celebrity and the epidemic of illiteracy that threatens our cultural integrity. Reporting on such phenomena as professional wrestling, the pornographic film industry, and unchecked casino capitalism, Hedges exposes the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, and moral collapse around us. Empire of Illusion shows us how illiteracy and the embrace of fantasy have impoverished our working class, allowed for the continuance of destructive public policy, and ushered in cultural bankruptcy.

Reviews:

“Remarkable, bracing and highly moral, Empire of Illusion is Hedges’ lament for his nation.”  Maclean’s

“Each chapter of Empire of Illusion makes a strong case for how different illusions – of literacy, love, wisdom, happiness – taken together are destroying the American mind, culture and the nation itself.”   National Post

“Each chapter torches one of our cultural illusions.”  The Globe and Mail“Hedges is a fan of big ideas, and in Empire of Illusion, he draws upon the culture of professional wrestling and pornography, the elite university, positive psychology and the financial crisis to fashion a social theory of everything.”  Winnipeg Free Press

About the Author:

Chris Hedges, the author of the bestselling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and writes for many publications including Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones. He is also a columnist for Truthdig.

Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism

Princeton University Press, 2010     

Amazon.com

Book Description:

Democracy is struggling in America – by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms “inverted totalitarianism”?

Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive – and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a “managed democracy” where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today’s America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today’s politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy’s best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.

Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America’s political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.

In a new preface, Wolin describes how the Obama administration, despite promises of change, has left the underlying dynamics of managed democracy intact.

Reviews:

“[A] comprehensive diagnosis of our failings as a democratic polity by one of our most seasoned and respected political philosophers…Democracy Incorporated is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States – including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors.”   Chalmers Johnson, Truthdig

“[Democracy Incorporated provides] a rare, chilling analysis of intellectual critics of democracy. If democracy means more than occasional elections and protection of those rights that are compatible with economic and political elites’ interests, Wolin’s analysis of our democratic predicament is shocking, solid, and fundamentally correct.”  C. P. Waligorski, Choice

“Sheldon Wolin has produced an ambitious and broad-ranging book that examines the current state of democracy in America… Wolin argues that the unquestioned faith in the virtues of free market capitalism has dramatically narrowed the range of policy options that are on the table when debate turns to resolving the US’s ills…[T]his is a trenchant and powerful volume.”  Alex Waddan, International Affairs

“Of the many books I’ve read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process.”  Jonathan Crary, Artforum

“[W]e need to understand the deep roots of our present troubles ourselves and Wolin’s book is an excellent beginning.”   Toby Grace, Out in Jersey

“Democracy Incorporated acts as an antidote to unconstrained corporate power and an elitist obsession and should be widely read by all those who cherish democracy and civil liberty.”  Shih-Yu Chou, Political Studies Review

“[Wolin] provides a rich narrative of the struggle of elites and the demos from ancient Greece through the writing of the U.S. Constitution and into the present, and the corporate-managed politics that has emerged will survive no matter which party holds Congress or the presidency.”  Coleman Fannin, Journal of Church and State

“Despite being written shortly before both the financial crisis and the Obama victory, the main lineaments of his analysis are still alarmingly cogent.”  Tom Angier, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

“With his fundamental grasp of political theory and restless spirit to get at the essence of what threatens modern democracy, Wolin demonstrates that the threats to our democratic traditions and institutions are not always from outside, but may come from within. It is a book that policymakers and scholars of contemporary society should read and reflect upon.”  Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Business School, author of From Higher Aims to Hired Hands

“As we’ve come to expect from Sheldon Wolin, a tightly argued and deeply revealing book about the dangers of unconstrained capitalism for our democracy.”  Robert B. Reich, University of California, Berkeley

“For half a century, Sheldon Wolin has been one of the most distinguished and influential political theorists in the United States and a perceptive observer of the American political scene. In his magisterial latest book, Wolin shows himself at the height of his powers as he presents a highly original, sober, and persuasive account of a number of tendencies in contemporary American society that constitute a significant danger for the future of constitutional democracy. If totalitarianism establishes itself in the United States, it will be in the ‘inverted’ form Wolin analyzes in this important book.”  Raymond Geuss, University of Cambridge

“Wolin’s writing has a resonance that binds the canon of political philosophy to unfolding events and present circumstances. In Democracy Incorporated, he contends that the institutions and practices that Americans regarded as their defense against totalitarianism – and other forms of authoritarian domination–have failed them. There is nothing like this book. It is a major, potentially revolutionary contribution to political thought.”  Anne Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire

“Powerful and persuasive. Democracy Incorporated does exactly what great political theory should do: it provides a theoretical framework that allows the reader to see the political world anew. It left this reader with an almost nightmarish vision of American politics today, a nightmare all the more terrifying for being so compelling, so vivid, and so real.”  Marc Stears, author of Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State

About the Author:

Sheldon S. Wolin is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University. His books include Politics and Vision and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (both Princeton).