JTO's response to AL: "I
borrowed a couple of sentences from Jim Lobe. I didn't sight the source
and therefore nothing I say should ever be considered again. I'm a very
bad man and I'm terribly ashamed of myself. Or possibly, AVfM and
particularly Paul Elam has been searching high
and low for any plausible excuse to purge all my writing from the site
and throw me under the bus."
***
By In a recent email from a reader of AVFM I’ll identify as “IR”, it was suggested that an AVFM article written by contributor John Hembling and published April 17, 2011, “appears to have several passages largely cribbed from this 2003 piece at Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935/leo_strauss%27_philosophy_of_deception”
The Alternet article was credited to author Jim Lobe.
The article by Hembling in question is this one:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/government-tyranny/leo-strauss-and-neo-conservatism/
AVFM takes allegations of plagiarism seriously and in the past we have removed and banned articles and authors we have determined were tainted by plagiarism. Some of these authors had significant followings among our readership and while I was aggrieved to lose them, the integrity of AVFM and our mission of compassion for men and advocacy of men’s issues must take precedence.
What exactly does “plagiarize” entail? I Googled the word, and got this primary result:
“pla·gia·rize ˈplājəˌrīz/ verb
1. take (the work or an idea of someone else) and pass it off as one’s own.”
In other words, plagiarism is a sort of intellectual theft. Copying someone else’s work word for word and representing the result as one’s own work is obvious plagiarism, but quoting someone is not generally plagiarism.
A harder question is when an idea is “borrowed” and substantially rewritten, but the source of that idea is not credited. I would contend that when a large number of common elements are discovered between two articles, the likelihood that the more recent article contains plagiarism grows and eventually the case for plagiarism becomes persuasive.
To that end, I have personally checked and discovered at least 5 examples of both ideas and writing that seem to have been cribbed, and in the case of example 3, outright copied by Hembling in his 2011 article without proper credit being given to Lobe’s 2003 article. Those 5 examples are as follows:
Example 1. From Hembling’s 2011 article:
Strauss was a political philosopher who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including University of Chicago.
Similar passage from Lobe’s 2003 article:
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and Shulsky’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, before his death in 1973.
Example 2. From Hembling’s 2011 article:
“Among Strauss’s students were the architects of the neo-conservatism which has dominated and defined the agenda of the democratic and the republican parties of the past several decades.”
Similar passage from Lobe’s 2003 article:
Strauss is a popular figure among the neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within and outside the administration.
Example 3. From Hembling’s 2011 article:
While outwardly professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical; divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. Unlike philosophical elitists such as Plato, he was unconcerned with the moral character of these leaders.
Nearly identical passage from Lobe’s 2003 article:
While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders.
Example 4. From Hembling’s 2011 article:
Shadia Drury, Professor of political science at the University of Calgary described this philosophy as one which requires an environment of “perpetual deception” in which the people are indoctrinated to a manufactured mythology, of simplistic character appropriate to their meagre [sic] powers of comprehension.
According to Drury, Straussian philosophy requires: “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.”
In Straussian philosophy, the “elite” believe that there is no morality and the only natural right is that of the superior to rule over the inferior.
Similar passages from Lobe’s 2003 article:
According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics at the University of Calgary, Strauss believed that “those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”
This dichotomy requires “perpetual deception” between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury.
Example 5. From Hembling’s 2011 article:
Strauss also believed that “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed . Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united and they can only be united against other people.”
A Straussian society then, requires a state of perpetual war.
Similar passage from Lobe’s 2003 article:A Straussian society then, requires a state of perpetual war.
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” he once wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people.”
“Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in,” says Drury.
From these 5 examples and particularly example 3, it is reasonable to conclude that a substantial portion of Hembling’s 2011 article was, in fact, plagiarized from Lobe’s earlier work.
AVFM offers our gratitude to reader “IR” who first alerted us to this situation,
AVFM offers our apologies to Jim Lobe for the uncredited use of his work.
AVFM also apologizes to our readers for this clear breach of journalistic ethics, and we promise that steps will be taken to remove the offending material.
AVFM reproves author John Hembling and urges caution to those who have used, or are considering using his work.
Thank you to everyone for your understanding in this regrettable case.
Publisher’s note: In light of this very disappointing development, Hembling’s post will remain up for approximately 24 hours so that readers can make the comparisons of the work themselves, after which the plagiarized piece and all other works from John Hembling on this site will be removed. I know we have had our differences since asking John to leave AVFM, but it never rose to the level of this kind of drastic action till now. We will not allow this platform to be used for the purpose of stealing the intellectual property of others and passing it off as original work. I extend my deepest apologies to Mr. Lobe and my assurances that this is the first I have known of this dishonest act. –PE
About August Løvenskiolds
Once he stumbled onto GirlWritesWhat's videos, August Løvenskiolds, aka The Bibo Sez, started eating red pills like they were tic-tacs. He likes debating feminists, but knows this stage will pass soon enough.Source
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JTO's story in question.
Leo Strauss and Neo-Conservatism
By : The scene:? A police car drives down a busy main street during the early Monday morning rush. The officer driving deliberately maintains a speed 10 mph below the posted speed limit. He knows nobody will pass him, and indeed, nobody does.
The drivers who would otherwise press 10 to 15 mph faster than the posted speed limit are constrained by their fear of the police officer’s power of authority. The man wearing his police uniform, driving his police car and exerting his power to slow the drivers around him takes his authority from the consensus of those other drivers. Everybody seeing the uniform, the badge, the police cruiser buys into the idea that this man is a figure of authority, and with this consensus, the illusion is made real. ??Later, this police officer will park his police cruiser, change into his civilian clothes and drive his own car to wherever he lives. There, he will eat his dinner just like each of his neighbors. He will take off his shoes just like each of his neighbors.
He will take off his clothes, and climb, naked into his shower, just like each of his neighbors. His body will metabolize the food he ate, and in the morning he brush his teeth, depilate, and defecate just like each of the other human beings living in the houses adjacent to his. ??When the city this man lives in raises his property taxes by $ 1000 per year, he will pay, just like each of his neighbours. Like them, he has subscribed to the consensus in which everybody agrees that “the city” has the authority and power to exact tribute from each person living under the city’s “authority”.
How is it that anyone, or any group of people in civil society have “power” to regulate, restrict the actions of, or to extract a portion of the income of other members of that civil society? It would be easy to imagine this is through force, the threat of penalty or violence or arrest. The real reason is that “authority” exists only by consensus.
During a theatrical magic performance, members of the audience don’t really believe the magician’s assistant is in actual danger of being sawn in half. They understand that the woman being cut in half is an illusion. So with this understanding, does the magician’s audience resent their deception by the magician? Of course not, a member of magician’s audience participates in their own deception by willfully suspending their disbelief. ??An unspoken consensus between the performer and the audience is established in which everybody present agrees that the magician “really can” cut his assistant in half.
The audience, through mutual consensus confers the illusion of power and authority on the magician. ??Aside from the willing consensus of the magician’s audience, he employs a continuous routine of misdirection, disinformation and manipulation on his audience. ??Like the magician’s atmosphere, proselytism and disinformation form a major component of the engineered consensus which maintains an accepted status quo in civil society.
At no point does a competent magician stop in the middle of his routine and break the illusion of his “power”. The magician’s intimation of his own authority and power must be maintained throughout the performance without letup. The performer who breaks the audience’s perception of that power will not be popular.
For the same reason, the “information” fed to the public must be continuous, to prop up the accepted public consensus of political and social reality. Just as a magician cannot break character midway through his act and keep his audience, political and social mythology which civil society accepts as “real” relies on the non-interrupted program of public narrative.
Myth: International finance is mysterious, complicated, and difficult to understand.
Almost every single television “news” station runs across the bottom of your TV screen a constant scrolling ticker filled with cryptic, complicated and intimidating financial market indexes and statistics during their “news” broadcast. Clearly, the information conveyed by these scrolling tickers is important, urgent, and deeply complicated.
These stations also bring in “experts” to “explain” the vagaries of the economic scene to us, the poor benighted viewers. These financial experts will intimidate us with a somewhat comprehensible description. The implication is of the viewer’s lack of background understanding of the complex and important fundamentals. ??This is all misdirection and bullshit.??Reality: International finance works like this:
The Central Bank (Federal Reserve) creates imaginary money by typing a large number into a computer.
The Central Bank (Federal Reserve) loans that imaginary money, at interest to your government, and to your banks.
Your government spends the money, and makes it into “real” money by forcing you to pay it back through taxation on your labor.
Your bank helps in the game of shifting that debt onto you by loaning some to you and increasing the interest rate of your repayment.
Everything else in finance is slight-of-hand to distract you.
Myth: A collection of disenfranchised fanatical Moslems are a credible threat to the largest military superpower in the world.
Reality: Politicians and news readers selling this story are counting on the audience never examining this absurd premise, and counting on members of the public to swallow whole the “boogeyman” of terrorism.
Myth: There is a difference between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Myth: You as an individual lack real power in civil society.
Myth: You as an individual are incapable of understanding the real world without the parental guidance of government or external authority.
There are a lot more of these subtle falsehoods, but listing and individually debunking them all is not the point of this article. Some of these lies are thousands of years old.
The lie of personal powerlessness is a re-framing of the biblical admonition to surrender control of your life to the self-appointed intermediaries to “god”; the church.
The myth of your personal inability to comprehend the big complicated world is a retelling of the biblical edict to surrender your personal accountability to an imaginary supernatural redeemer-figure.
These false “truths” are parts of the droning, hypnotizing message which permeates modern media-saturated western culture. As a mythology which underlies almost all content fed to the public through television and movies, the message is impossible to avoid. Understanding that a droning message permeates all of corporate created media gives one a tool to distinguish manufactured “truth” from observable reality.
The present culture of public deception promoted and maintained through corporate-controlled media is very real, and has it’s recent origin in the neo-conservative philosophy of Leo Strauss.
Strauss was a political philosopher who arrived in the United States in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including University of Chicago. Among Strauss’s students were the architects of the neo-conservatism which has dominated and defined the agenda of the democratic and the republican parties of the past several decades.
Strauss saw the use of deception in politics as a necessity. While outwardly professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical; divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. Unlike philosophical elitists such as Plato, he was unconcerned with the moral character of these leaders.
“Those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is no morality and that there is only one natural right the right of the superior to rule over the inferior.”
Shadia Drury, Professor of political science at the University of Calgary described this philosophy as one which requires an environment of “perpetual deception” in which the people are indoctrinated to a manufactured mythology, of simplistic character appropriate to their meagre powers of comprehension.
According to Drury, Straussian philosophy requires: “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.”
In Straussian philosophy, the “elite” believe that there is no morality and the only natural right is that of the superior to rule over the inferior”
This philosophy of neo-conservatism also holds that: “While the elite few are capable of absorbing the absence of any moral truth, the masses could not cope. If exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism or anarchy”
Strauss also believed that “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed . Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united and they can only be united against other people.”
A Straussian society then, requires a state of perpetual war.
Senator John McCain (a member of the council of Foreign Relations) was asked a question during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on January 3 2008
Q: “President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years..”
(McCain cut the questioner off to reply)
A: “Make it a hundred , we’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we’ve been in South Korea for 50 years, it’s fine by me”
It’s easy to dismiss McCain’s callous reply as the ranting of a man who’s gone completely bug-fuck crazy. Easy, until we realize that under a Straussian philosophy, a state of perpetual war is required to keep the dis-informed public under a social control.
Mr. McCain, only 100 years? Surely you can be more ambitious. McCain’s fellow Straussian; William Kristol is a co-founder of the Project the New American Century, but perhaps a longer view can be taken. Possibly even a Reich of a thousand years.
The list of Strauss’s students include:
Paul Wolfowitz
Donald Rumsfeld
William Kristol, founder of the Project for the New American Century
Abram Shulsky, former head of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans
Stephen Cambone, former Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
Richard Perle, former Defense Policy Board chairman.
Dick Cheney
Once we recognize this twisted philosophy, and that the followers of Strauss are the architects of modern neo-conservatism in both parties, as well as the CRF, the Project for a New American Century, it is easy to see that the apparent incompetence of the Bush administration is something entirely other than incompetence.
To describe Straussian philosophy, in such a way that it can be discussed without lengthy and repetitive explanations to the uninitiated, it requires a name or an adjective. Straussian philosophy is in every respect that matters, a philosophy of evil.
When individuals come to realize what is encompassed by the paradigm of political thought driving neo-conservative policy in America, a sea-change in public perception will occur. This is not just a possibility, the information is available, and people will find it, just as you have found this article.
Sea Change: Noun – a profound transformation.
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