Wright reports and promotes a series of three films by Robbie Martin called "A Very Heavy Agenda" which focuses on the relatively recent rise of "neoconservatives" and their agenda of world empire. The second of the three has now been released, and the third is expected next month. Although Wright provides an excellent description of the three parts and includes trailers, I have a problem with his and the filmmaker's perspective on the phenomenon of neoconservatism.
Both suffer from a short time historical time frame which lends support to a perspective advanced, in my opinion, by people primarily of a middle class background whose knowledge of history has been truncated by the US ruling class's educational system. This view has been popularized by such people as Naomi Klein especially in her recent book This Changes Everything which focuses only on the recent period dating from the Reagan administration (1981) to the present in which neoconservatives and their ideology have taken over control of the US from the previous nationally oriented capitalists.
This new faction has a decidedly global agenda to which the internal US interests are sacrificed to their obsession with power and wealth. This has very adversely affected the US middle class who benefited from their privileged position while the US capitalist ruling class had a much more nationalist perspective even though they engaged in imperialist adventures. This change was by no means a coup which seems to be suggested by many bloggers and writers in addition to Klein like Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin Barrett, and others. The neocon phenomenon was only a natural evolution of a capitalist state from a nation-based imperialist orientation to a global aspiring empire due to the coalescence of interests among US allied global capitalists and their unparalleled accumulation of wealth and power. The first such capitalist evolution in modern times was the Nazi-led Axis empire.
Having crushed this empire, a global agenda was first pursued by a new secret postwar US agency, the CIA, through the Anglo-American-European complex of nations. After assassinating (with organized crime's help) the Kennedy brothers and others that stood in their way, the CIA and their political expression, the neocons, first infiltrated the Reagan administration followed by the full development of neocon power and their agenda under George Bush #2. 9/11 was their first project which paved the way for all their invasions abroad and the curtailment of civil rights within the US. Now leaders of both capitalist parties talk openly about the US as an "exceptional nation" and its people as "indispensable". As Roberts explained:
If a country is “the exceptional country,” it means that all other countries are unexceptional. If a people are “indispensable,” it means other peoples are dispensable. We have seen this attitude at work in Washington’s 14 years of wars of aggression in the Middle East. These wars have left countries destroyed and millions of people dead, maimed, and displaced. Yet Washington continues to speak of its commitment to protect smaller countries from the aggression of larger countries. The explanation for this hypocrisy is that Washington does not regard Washington’s aggression as aggression, but as History’s purpose.
Because the US middle class (in addition to the working class) has been harmed by the rise of the neocons in the ruling class (as well as advances in worker-created technology that is "owned" by capitalists), only now are middle-class writers and bloggers complaining. Only now after the neoconservative capitalists have taken over and have implemented their neoliberal policies which have adversely impacted the US middle class are we seeing these people come out of the social justice woodwork and complain. The working class have always felt the heel of capitalist exploitation and oppression bearing down on their faces.
