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Hersh also quoted a former Bush administration intelligence official as saying he quit because “they were using the intelligence from the CIA and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with – to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.”
Hersh found, too, that Wolfowitz and other key neo-conservatives at the Pentagon were disciples of the late political philosopher Leo Strauss, who believed that some deception of the population is necessary in statecraft. “The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea – actually Plato’s – that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians,” said Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University. [See The New Yorker, May 12, 2003]
Comments (4 of 4)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4The purpose of The Republic was something of a warning to all Athenians that without RESPECT for law, leadership and a sound education for the young, their city would continue to decay.
Plato wanted to rescue Athens from DEGENERATION by reviving that sense of community that had at one time made the polis great. The only way to do this, Plato argued, was to give control over to the Philosopher-Kings, men who had philosophical knowledge, and to give little more than "noble lies" to everyone else.
The problem as Plato saw it was that power and wisdom had traveled divergent paths -- his solution was to unite them in the guise of the Philosopher-King.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.
over in Engurland.
maybe bush has read some of Machiavellis works aswell...or maybe he had someone to read it to him.
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