his choice of the name Benedict XVI and how it corresponds to the prophecies of St. MalachyIt was perhaps an unthinkable outcome for all the liberal Western Catholics, socially active clergy in the Third World, especially South America; and those millions in Africa at risk of Aids, for the sake of a small piece of rubber.However, if viewed as an engine of power, the Church had clearly been transformed in the last 20 years into a bastion of reaction against humanism.Two pieces below will demonstrate the clear philisophical thread between Hitler's lawmaker, Pope Benedict XVI and his neo-con friends in the White House . . . Present day German neo-conservatism is a little bit different because it comes from Carl Schmidt. Schmidt was Hitler's court jurist and political theologian. He was a highly honored man until 1945 and even beyond. Schmidt said four weeks after the war came to its end that this is the time to forget and forgive. He was part of a government which was responsible for 50 million people dead and he wanted to forget and forgive. Nevertheless the neo-conservatives took Schmidt up and he became the real founder of their school. Some of Cardinal Josef Ratzinger's statements about the Church come from these sources - from Schmidt and his neo-conservative followers. The present neo-conservatism Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger are part of this German style of neo-conservatism. The American neo-conservative school doesn't have these deep philosophical roots; the unholy alliance of Jesus and Hobbes. The German neo-conservatives defined religion as a contingency-experience-management system which means that it should not be a wisdom religion like Taoism: it should not be a mystical religion like Hinduism and Buddhism; and it should not be prophetic religion like Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Because if you have wisdom religion people say, "this is not a very wise society", if you have a mystical religion then people want to intervene into these injustices of society. All that is very disturbing for capitalist society. So it is un-wisdom, un-mystical, un-prophetical type of a religion which the neo-conservatives want . . .Dr.R. Siebert(Dr. Rudolf Siebert is a professor of Religion and Society in the WMU Department of Comparative Religion.He recently occupied the Chair for Theology and Religious Studies at the University Of New Brunswick, Canada and at Rostock University, Germany. He is the author of numerous books and articles on political theology. )
Another writer, Ralf Dahrendorf (a member of the British House of Lords, a former Rector of the London School of Economics and also a former Warden of St. Anthony's College, Oxford) recently wrote of the thread that ties together the world of the Third Reich, and the world we now find ourselves in; one formed in the forge of the wasteland, in the fire of The Niebelung and fashioned by the neo-cons in Washington . . .While the Third Way lasted, however, another set of ideas, which originally seemed marginal and even absurd, gained ground. It built on the Friedman - Hayek conception of rolling back the social-democratic welfare state, but added a new set of ideas to the rudimentary state that remained - a state imbued solely with what Joseph Nye called "hard power." Such hard power means "law and order" within and military might without. It is a state for a Hobbesian world in which security is the highest value. Such notions go back a long way. In the 20th century, some trace them to the German American emigr? Leo Strauss, even to Carl Schmitt, Hitler's Jurist. More recently, authors assembled around the American magazine "Commentary" have espoused them. Washington think-tanks helped turn them into a powerful intellectual arsenal for the neo-conservatives who thrive within the Bush Administration (although the President himself is not one of them).
Ralf Dahrendorf Copyright: Project Syndicate/Institute for Human Sciences, June 2003
{Presumably the Pres is excluded because he hasn't a clue as to what is really going on . . .}
