{"id":13895,"date":"2015-10-28T06:50:35","date_gmt":"2015-10-28T11:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13895"},"modified":"2015-10-28T06:50:35","modified_gmt":"2015-10-28T11:50:35","slug":"embracing-the-dark-side-a-short-history-of-the-pathological-neocon-quest-for-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13895","title":{"rendered":"Embracing The Dark Side: A Short History Of The Pathological Neocon Quest For Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/davidstockmanscontracorner.com\/embracing-the-dark-side-a-short-history-of-the-pathological-neocon-quest-for-empire\/\" target=\"_blank\">Embracing The Dark Side: A Short History Of The Pathological Neocon Quest For Empire<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>When\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightweb.irc-online.org\/profile\/kristol_william\" target=\"_blank\"><u>Bill Kristol<\/u><\/a>\u00a0watches\u00a0<em>Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/observer.com\/2015\/10\/bill-kristol-tried-to-defend-the-galactic-empire-on-twitter\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u>disturbance<\/u><\/a>\u00a0in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for\u00a0<em>Star Wars: The Force Awakens<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed \u201cbenevolent global hegemony.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine\u00a0<em>The Weekly Standard,<\/em>responded to scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the\u00a0<em>Standard\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0blog that justifies even the worst of Darth Vader\u2019s atrocities. In \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/Content\/Public\/Articles\/000\/000\/001\/248ipzbt.asp?nopager=1\" target=\"_blank\"><u>The Case for the Empire<\/u><\/a>,\u201d Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can\u2019t make a \u201cbenevolent hegemony\u201d omelet without breaking a few eggs.<\/p>\n<p>And what if those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker\u2019s uncle and aunt who were gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were \u201ctraitors\u201d who were aiding the rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.<\/p>\n<p>A year after Kristol published Last\u2019s essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dansanchez.me\/feed\/clean-break-to-dirty-wars\" target=\"_blank\"><u>influence<\/u><\/a>\u00a0of neocons like Kristol and Last.<\/p>\n<p>That war was similarly justified in part by the false\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/orig\/napoleoni.php?articleid=7988\" target=\"_blank\"><u>allegation<\/u><\/a>\u00a0that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.dansanchez.me\/feed\/how-statism-drove-iraqis-into-the-arms-of-terrorists\" target=\"_blank\"><u>Fallujah<\/u><\/a>, one of the most brutal episodes of the war, was also specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring Zarqawi.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Embracing The Dark Side: A Short History Of The Pathological Neocon Quest For Empire When\u00a0Bill Kristol\u00a0watches\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media\u00a0disturbance\u00a0in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for\u00a0Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Kristol [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[10307,5979,10308,1467,561,862],"class_list":["post-13895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-bill-kristol","tag-contracorner","tag-global-hegemony","tag-hegemony","tag-neocons","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13896,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13895\/revisions\/13896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}