A new organization, The Honest Conservatives, is creating discomfort among neoconservatives in the US, and their sponsored affiliates abroad. The group claims it is tired of the pretense that has gripped the conservative movement, and wants to free it to stand on the platform it really holds dear and important. The group’s founder, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “We have no aversion to conservatism or to most of its aims, instruments, or policies, but our chief difference of opinion is that it wishes its real platform to remain unknown, and we believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.”
The Honest Conservatives offers seven components of what it claims is a genuinely conservative platform:
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Society: The fundamental unit of society is not the family, actually, but the corporation – specifically the multi-national corporation. Therefore, it is nationalism which serves as the best support of the power structure, because only with nationalism are multi-national corporations immune from social judgment, moral scrutiny, and any transcendent critique. In short, when the nation is the fundamental basis for moral and social evaluation, multi-national profit centers are the most free to prosper. Therefore, patriotism should be the core emotionally-charged basis for marketing of conservatism to the public.
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Economics: The fundamental unit of the economy is not the dollar, actually, but corporate stock and its derivatives. Both money and stock can be printed at will, but money has universal distribution, and so is mainly useful for manipulating the economic activies of societies. Stock and its derivatives has a necessarily limited distribution, and so is the true currency among those who wield any economic control in any form. Stock and derivatives must be the true focus of all economic policies we create.
- War: Military conflict is inevitable, so continual war must be a conservative policy. The goal of war is to reduce fundamental cultural oppositions to society as we have envisioned it, whether these are social and political, religious (such as the Orthodoxy of Serbia, Russia, and Greece, the Islamism of Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Hinduism), or ethnic (such as African, Latin American, Sinic or Japanese). Rather than creating pretenses and pretexts for war, or blaming the wrong country, or cooking the books on who is manufacturing what weapons, conservative policy should simply be to choose the next target without offering causes beyond the logistical vulnerability of the target nation or people, and the practicality and convenience of conducting the next military campaign against them. As a correlary to this, conservatives who are not invested in military suppliers, the arms industry, or energy and commodity multinationals that directly benefit from war, are either non-believers, in denial, or most foolish. It should be the policy of conservatives to provide education on sound investment by conservatives based on ongoing conservative military strategy, since enriching more conservatives by this method is the surest way to preserve support for continual warfare, and to give conservatives the stronger advantage over opponents. Likewise, opponents of war who actually invest in and profit from war, even indirectly, should be wooed to shift allegiance or moderate their opposition, or else should be outed so they can own up to their conservative support.
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Warfare: In war, it is important to strike first, if possible, and deliberately utilize internationally banned weapons, apply torture, secret prisons, and create maximum disruption and hostility to civilian life, regardless of whether these methods produce intelligence value or even if they limit the ostensible conduct of the actual war effort per se . We should quit wrangling about words or pretending immediate effectiveness is the goal. It is specifically by these anti-civilian methods and the deliberate destruction of ethical boundaries that we quickly activate the amoral defensive rhetoric of neconservatives, neutralize the potential for moral outrage for fundamentalists (because of the inherent conflict between humanitarian concerns or civil liberties and divine authority bestowed upon the state and those who support or defend it), and we demoralize ideological opposition at home and abroad, since no one who lives a comfortable life feels comfortable standing together with those a state deems deserving of such treatment. In their hearts, if not in their minds, they wonder if the enemy, when a state devastates it in such a way, must have deserved it. Therefore, the policy of conservatism should not be denials that these methods are being used, or that what is being done constitutes torture or a war on civilians, but rather wholehearted support for comprehensive and total hostility using all available methods against civilian populations.
- Environment: Preserving the ecosystem is not only not important but incredibly harmful, because doing so inhibits the growth of corporate share value. Nearly every multinational corporation that underpins the US political-economic system (as well as the social system of work and religious system of submission that supports it), depends utterly on disrupting ecological systems, not preserving them. In fact, almost all viable multinational corporate enterprises engaged in providing food, clothing, shelter, energy, fuel, and military resources, are based on the concept that producing such goods under a consolidated form of control is essentially the science of disrupting nature. Disruption is the ultimate basis of commodity production as it relates to a global currency of stock and derivatives. It is as much a law of production as Newton’s third law of motion is a law of physics: the potential for consolidation and distribution of profit is directly proportionate to the degree of conceivable ecological disruptions. Therefore, fully acknowledging the consequences and the edicts of science, and conscientiously paying them no mind, not merely pretending they don’t exist or have produced inconclusive results (e.g. silly acts of climate science denial), it is ecological disruption itself that should be the explicitly favored policy of conservatives.
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Religion: Fundamentalism is the religious form of conservatism, rather than conservatism being the political form of religious fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are a critical bulwark against the growth of anti-conservative populism, but they can also be easily mobilized into a conservative populist front through their various exclusive media outlets. The most important tenets of religious fundamentalism that conservatives must inculcate, support, and foster with moral rhetoric as self-evident realities, are a special destiny of the US, the divine right of US corporations, the illicit character of creative venues of popular dissent (gender roles, sexual proclivities, spiritual awareness, ecological awareness, science, and political non-conservatism itself), and the divine protection of Israel (as an underpinning for consolidation of oil rights and political control in the Middle East). Therefore, conservatism should strongly encourage at least some form of participation in a fundamentalist religious movement, whether nominal or credulous, by all conservatives. It is the essential conservative credential and should, by policy, be regarded as such. Conservative policy should be to favor those who have shown their loyalty to its precepts by affiliation with some fundamentalist denomination in the U.S.
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Government: The United States should be a global empire. The sovereignty of individual nations is only valid if they also accept US hegemony. It is important to cement this way of thinking in the feelings, attitudes, and motivations of the average person, so that true citizenship in the empire is possible. Therefore, conservative policy should include highly restrictive immigration rules and concerted policies to stigmatize, limit, and emotionally charge immigration itself. Immigration contains the question of the fundamental basis for participation in an empire, and raises the question in a way that ideas about what constitutes full participation can be shaped and redefined along imperial lines. Rightly, the conservative reaction to differences from a monocultural norm, in areas like ethnicity and sexual proclivities, or the corellary issues of immigration and alternative marriage, are not really about racism or the attitude that sex is dirty, though those have in the past been useful pretenses to which to cater (the results of that, of course, having always been mixed). Rather, the creation and preservation, or even just the idea, of a monoculture itself is fundamental to the establishment (in reality, and in hearts and minds) of any global empire. That was true for the Romans, true even in the four failed attempts by Germany, and has been true of every socialist or totalitarian state (the USSR and China, most notably). It will be true on an even larger scale for the United States, as conservatives seek to impose a global monoculture. The goal of conservatives should be to make the world America , and to make America one thing. Therefore, it should be conservative policy to politically, socially, and rhetorically harass the creation of any micro cultures, breeding grounds of contrary conceptions of the world, within the US – that is those that are not themselves expressed in some way that still upholds or validates the monoculture we deem necessary to US global hegemony.
On its facebook page, recently, a spokesperson for The Honest Conservatives declared, again anonymously, that the Tea Party movement is an example of trending in exactly the opposite direction, toward even more pretense and concealment of goals and policies.
The Tea Party, one THC member said, “consists of people who use rhetoric like ‘trying to take America back to its roots’ to conceal the fact that they’re neoconservatives, because the conservative platform took such a beating under the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush administration.” That’s because, she explains, conservatism wraps its core policies in pretense, to begin with. “If it wasn’t so well defended by smoke and mirrors, it wouldn’t take such a beating in the first place. It’s counterintuitive. Once you start faking your reasons for something, and faking what you really think, to keep people from hating you, you demoralize your own strongest members. If conservatives would be shameless in putting forth our intentions and our reasons, we’d actually be stronger. It’s hard to knock down someone who doesn’t feel embarrassed or socially shamed when you accuse her of thinking what she actually thinks.”
So far, The Honest Conservatives’ numbers are small, but reports are that they are gaining supporters by the hour. The last few likes on their Facebook fan page occurred in just the past hour, for example.