Conspiracy theories can have their origin and be used equally by ultra-rightists, fascists, liberals, and Stalinists or other radicals. Such “theories” are an attempt to provide an answer to a “mystery,” that is the capitalist system, by those who refuse to use the methods of scientific socialism or Marxism. How to explain the sudden breakdowns in the economy, or sudden shifts in government policy, or failures in foreign policy and war? Who and what is responsible?

In the case of the “neo-con conspiracy,” this “theory” attempts to explain the ascendancy of the war party in the United States. Its proponents claim that a small group of Department of Defense officials, mostly Jewish, have captured the foreign policy-making function of Washington, especially on Middle East questions. Most variants of these claims state that those in this group are admirers of the rightist Likud party in Israel and believe that U.S. government policy should be closely aligned with it. A red-baiting variant claims to trace one strand in the intellectual genealogy of this small group’s views back to a “Jewish-Trotskyist” party led by Max Shachtman from the early 1940s on.

U.S. president George Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld employ officials like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith because they are effective servants of the U.S. government. Bush and Rumsfeld, however, who are not Jewish, are the top architects of Washington’s current foreign policy course, not their subordinates.

The war party is in the ascendancy because it corresponds to the deepest needs of U.S. imperialism in the present conditions. As the early stages of a world economic depression take hold, and inter-imperialist competition ramps up, control over the most vital resources in the world, oil for example, becomes an imperative for the world’s imperialist powers.

A majority of the billionaire families who rule the United States have become convinced that using U.S. imperialism’s overwhelming military superiority, and transforming their army into a more mobile and agile instrument capable of waging a number of wars at once, is necessary to defend their interests. Not only U.S. president George Bush but Democratic Party presidential candidate John Kerry is part of the war party. Having voted for the war, Kerry boasts he will lead Washington’s “war on terror” more forcefully than Bush and proposes to send more U.S. troops to Iraq to do the job.

Similarly, nearly all the imperialist powers have supported the Israeli state for the past 50 years as a bulwark of imperialism in the Middle East. Israel is a junior imperialist power, and often acts as a “cop” in the region. Washington supports Tel Aviv not because of a “Jewish lobby” in Congress or a “Jewish cabal” in the White House but because it serves the interests of the U.S. ruling class.

In addition, Israel’s existence is not a factor in the use and spread of anti-Semitism, which is governed by the laws of motion of capitalism and has existed in many virulent forms for decades and centuries before the founding of Israel.

The “neo-con” conspiracy theory is laced through and through with Jew-hatred, no matter what the political orientation of the writer or group that spreads it. To a large degree it has originated among ultrarightists such as Lyndon LaRouche’s fascist outfit and among Patrick Buchanan’s incipient fascist following.

The “neo-con” conspiracy claims, however, have also been picked up and adopted by prominent liberals. They have helped lend these claims credibility so that they have been repeated in major bourgeois publications.

The opening line to the article by Seymour Hersh published in the May 12, 2003, issue of the New Yorker is “They call themselves self-mockingly The Cabal,” referring to the “neocons” in the Defense of Department. A conservative supporter of the war party who worked in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans on Iraq says they do no such thing. David Rubin, writing in the May 18 National Review, a conservative magazine, asserts that the term (a Jew-hating one at that) originated among liberal opponents of Rumsfeld and Bush in the Pentagon and the CIA.

The article “Jew-hatred, red-baiting: heart of claims of ‘neo-con’ conspiracy” in the June 28 Militant quoted U.S. liberal writer Michael Lind alleging the existence of a “Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s which morphed into an anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history” (emphasis added). This argument echoed the standard Jew-hating frame-up of Jews as being “rootless” and “un-American.”

Jew-hatred is not in any way foreign to liberals and middle-class radicals. “Jewish control of Hollywood” or “a Jewish lobby dictates U.S. Mideast policy” are ideas promulgated frequently by insecure middle-class layers and various liberals and radicals.

Whether these people are fools who unwittingly help peddle Jew-hating poison or are conscious Jew-haters is beside the point. The content is Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism, no matter who spews it, is deadly for the working class and its allies. Taking this on is one of the central tasks of anyone who wants to build a revolutionary leadership of the working class.  
 
 
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