Sunday, June 08, 2003



Eric Alterman talks about this in his book, "What Liberal Media?" -- What???
You mean you guys haven't read it yet?!?! You'll be glad that you did, if
ya' do! -- claudia


IN THESE TIMES

This article is permanantly archived at:
http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=216_0_3_0_C



By Salim Muwakkil | 6.6.03
Neocon Convergences
A funny thing happened while following the money trail of the
neoconservatives who have hijacked U.S. foreign policy. The path led to a
network of financial and intellectual resources that also is dedicated to
neoracism.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has been the economic fount for the
neoconservative notions of global affairs now ascendant in the Bush
administration. According to a report by Media Transparency, from 1995 to
2001 the Milwaukee-based foundation provided about $14.5 million to the
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the think tank most responsible for
incubating and nourishing the ideas of the neocon movement.

The Bradley Foundation also made grants totaling nearly $1.8 million to help
fund the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the influential group
that had urged an invasion of Iraq since its 1997 founding. PNAC, headed by
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, boasts a membership that includes
many players in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick
Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

The Bradley foundation also helped fund Samuel P. Huntington's neocon
classic The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, a
book that brought the domestic culture wars to the global stage. Hitting a
familiar, Eurocentric note, Huntington's book argued that the
Judeo-Christian "West" is the protagonist in an epic struggle of
civilizations against the "other" (this time the Islamic East). For a group
that supposedly has left Marxist thinking behind, these neoconservatives are
rigidly dialectic.

All of this wouldn't much alarm me; after all, the battlefield of ideas is
as good a place to fight as any. But then I began to notice other
beneficiaries of Bradley's largess since 1995, and I found some troubling
patterns. The foundation has provided nearly $2 million to the National
Association of Scholars, which played a key role in the anti-affirmative
action campaign known as the Californian Civil Rights Initiative and
regularly questions black-oriented scholarship. It has also given $1.8
million to help fund the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, a group
that provides guidance and support for 70 right-wing campus papers across
the country.

The Bradley Foundation seems to have a soft spot in its heart for the kind
of neoracist ideas that have gained currency in recent years. It has heavily
subsidized authors like Charles Murray and Dinesh D'Souza, whose work on
welfare and race has reinforced ancient stereotypes. Murray's book Losing
Ground argued that poverty is the result of personal failings and thus most
government anti-poverty programs should be eliminated. And his book The Bell
Curve (written with Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein) argued that
poverty is the result of genetic traits of a subclass of human beings. These
arguments were deployed to help convince conservative legislators of the
futility of affirmative action and other compensatory social programs. After
all, if African-Americans are genetically incapable of achieving racial
equality, we must rethink the goals of the civil rights movement.

David Horowitz, one of neoconservatism's most incendiary racial
provocateurs, has raked in nearly $4.5 million in grants from the Bradley
Foundation for his think tank, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.
Horowitz's combative tactics seem designed to ratchet up tensions between
blacks and Jews, a theme that seems to be a Bradley favorite.

It's clear to me that the Bradley Foundation has forged a link between a
neo-imperialist foreign policy and a neoracist domestic policy, and that it
provides generous funding to push these views in both realms. And Bradley is
just one of other like-minded foundations such as the Koch Family
Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundation, and
the Adolph Coors Foundation, groups examined in the report "Buying a
Movement: Right Wing Foundations and American Politics," by People for the
American Way.

The link that connects these views is the notion that Western civilization
is both the global ideal and the world's official arbiter. It's an old
notion: white supremacy unhinged-the same notion that justified the original
imperialism and slavery. What's particularly troubling to me is the lack of
domestic concern about this connection. Did the world not reach a consensus
on the dangers of racist reasoning and military aggression following World
War II?

That neocons are galvanized by race is no surprise. One of the founding
documents of neoconservatism is Norman Podhoretz's 1963 essay "My Negro
Problem-and Ours." In that famous Commentary essay, Podhoretz's comments
helped create a gap between blacks and Jews that has yet to be bridged.
Among other things, he suggested that the solution to America's racial
problem would be for blacks to accept miscegenation as an unobtrusive form
of genocide.

Victims of these evils see the link between neo-imperialism and neoracism
much more easily than the victimizers. And they fear this axis of evil much
more than the one concocted by Bush's speech writers. That's likely one
reason black Americans resisted overwhelming media propaganda and opposed
the Iraq invasion. The funding priorities of the Bradley Foundation show
those fears are not misplaced.



Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked
since 1983, and a weekly op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is
currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society
Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership
positions in the black community.


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Claudia D. Dikinis
http://starcats.com
Political & Personal Astrology for a New Millennium

"The arc of the universe is long, but it always bends toward justice." -
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.