The American neoconservatism

premise

In the wake of recent international events, public opinion has imposed a current of thought, the so-called "neo-conservatism", whose leading intellectuals, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, all belong to the entourage George W. Bush and are the direct and indirect computers of political and economic strategies of the United States. Some of these intellectuals have for years worked on the Project for the New American Century, a think tank that has been the meeting ground between the political idea of an imperial globalism decisionist-American-led, championed by such intellectual circle, and the forces economic liberalism of the major global multinationals and U.S. financial, or Halliburton, Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, Chevron Texaco, ConocoPhillips, the Warburg Merrill Lynch, Morgan, represented in the Bush administration, as well as the same President, by powerful figures such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. However, as we shall see below, despite the name that has been given circle of intellectuals, their thinking has the characteristics of a true revolutionary ideology.

In fact, the American neoconservatism represents the outcome of nihilistic thought old-(liberal) Conservative U.S. and more generally Anglo-Saxon. An outcome not at all unexpected and entirely legitimate if it is assumed the same of the American, or the religious ideology of the Puritan Calvinism. And 'well known that the roots of contemporary nihilism are found in fury "anti-theological" Luther, first, and Calvin, then.

Despite these disturbing characters, large sections of what, in Italy and in Europe, it is called (with expression utterly unable to identify its object of reference, but that we use for convenience) "traditionalist Catholicism" or with more political term, "right Catholic "have joined the neo-conservative ideology. What is even more alarming when you consider that, at least in some circles belonging to the world of traditional Catholicism, until yesterday, for obvious philosophical reasons, completely unresponsive to cultural fashion from the United States.

True and false clash of civilizations

The change of direction of the Catholic right they should, in all probability, the recent emergence of danger "Islamist". As was done in the face of the communist threat, this improvident Catholic right has sided with America in the perspective of the next Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations", justifying this choice in part as a choice in favor of the lesser evil and in part even as a choice in favor of "Christian civilization" embodied and defended by the United States. What was not understood, however, by these sectors of traditionalist Catholicism, is that Huntington's thesis is false.

From the perspective of well-known American analyst, between different civilizations that are grappling on the world stage, the "euro-American" would be a unique ie "Western civilization." This thesis is instrumental to the political hegemony of the U.S., which is now trying many, too many traditionalist Catholics.

If we must speak of a collision, it is more than obvious that we are facing a clash of everything inside the so-called "western world". It is the clash between "the religion of the God who became man and the religion of the man who claims to be God." A clash that, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI, only to change his mind at the end of his pontificate, he believed he could rescind nell'irenico embrace between the Church and the world. This battle, however, is now in its final phase, marked by the transition from modernity to post-modernity. The latter, while it shows the essence of luciferin and more recondite than the first, with which it is not in opposition but in continuity, on the other hand, because of its nihilism dissolver rationalist certainties of modernity, seems capable of ensnaring even the Catholic anti-modern illusion of being at the beginning of a rematch of the tradition to modernity.

In fact, from a Catholic point of view consistently, the passing of the centuries from medieval Christianity that led us through the transition to the interlude of Christian sixteenth and seventeenth century, the West today's global economy, it can not be read, flying over the great divide Protestant who is the real root of the West americanocentrico as a unitary process and growing.

Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century the historical development of Catholic Europe showed all the signs of what could have been a different modernity, in perfect continuity with the historical legacy of medieval Christianity. A concrete historical possibility remained then, unfortunately, not implemented mainly because of the fracture Protestant. In fact, in those centuries the scenario was centered politically momentous global hegemony of the Habsburg Spain (from which he could be born a Catholic globalization very different from the Anglo-Protestant present), culturally depending on the school of theological-juridical school of Salamanca (the which is responsible for the final clarification of Catholic doctrine on the naturalness of the political community and international law EUR-Christian, drawn from Vitoria, Suarez and Bellarmine), religiously on the Reform of the Catholic Council of Trent, whose beginnings were had with an advance of fifty in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella.

It 'absolutely necessary to keep in mind the historical turning point occurred in the sixteenth century in order to understand that there is not continuity between Christianity and the West and at that crucial dawn of modern Europe has unfortunately chosen to turn their backs on the Catholic Church and ripudiarsi as Christianity, thereby preventing the emergence of a different modernity and transforming itself in the current West apostate, intended nihilistic implosion.

The defeat of the Invincible Armada not only marked the beginning of the rise and decline of England's Anglican Catholic Spain, but also the epochal moment in which it begins, in the discontinuous historical process that has characterized the advance of modernity, the drift of Christian Europe, the modern successor to the medieval Christendom, to the West whose center of gravity is, no doubt, in the Anglo-Protestant.

When Michele Federico Sciacca distinguished between "Christian West" and "Occidentalism Enlightenment", just wanted to point out that an essential turning point in history. A distinction well-educated, on the basis of close criticism of Augusto Del Noce to secularization, even by Massimo Borghesi when, in an article a few years ago at the time of the first Gulf War, made a distinction between two Wests, one for the note of roots Christian and the other roots secularist, was born, the latter by the disaster Lutheran.

William J. Bouwsma, professor of history at Berkeley, recently described in a valuable historical essay (1), the decline of Europe at the dawn of modernity. According to the authoritative historian, in the period between 1550 and 1640 there were still a Christianity and a euro-Christian cultural community. But both the one and the other were swept away by the Reformation, by the appearance of national churches as a result of the closing of absolute states (superiorem not recognoscentes) Authority of the Church, by the spread in the wake of Lutheran theology and the philosophy of Descartes subjectivism and individualism. The momentous junction marked by age from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth century ruffled the identity of Catholic-Christian Europe at the very moment in history when the old continent had begun in the previous fifty years, its global expansion .

So, Bouwsma argues, "modernity" was born not so much as a positive outcome of a splendid renaissance, but rather as an attempt to answer part of a humanity in the Christian identity crisis, unease and anxiety that marked the beginning themselves of the post-medieval, and then post-Catholic. Restlessness and anxiety which took the form, still subsisting (think of the new religions, new age), magic, and, on the political level, a phenomenon closely related to it, as a political scientist who has demonstrated a keen Giorgio Galli, since recall the biblical image of the "monstrous", ie the emergence of the Hobbesian conception of the political community in the idea of the State-Leviathan opposed to Catholic doctrine of the state-own community school of Salamanca.

The vision of liberal Catholics, for example Baget Bozzo and Antonio Socci, namely that of Croce "because we can not call ourselves Christians," recently resumed, according to justify the pro-Western clash of civilizations, by Oriana Fallaci, split up, with no solutions continuity, a subsidiary of the West americanocentrico legitimate, that is what today is called "globalization," the alleged womb of the pre-modern Christianity.

Actually, that filiation is not legitimate because the long historical process that led to the decline of ancient Christianity and the parallel rise of the hegemony Occidentalist, there was, in fact, a deep rift formed by Protestantism. It 'true that the last claim and deep Occidentalism is, of great taste "anticristico" dell'inveramento of worldly Christian Promise of Redemption and Liberation of humanity.

It was not only Marxism to transpose the Promise of the United all'aldiquà from the afterlife. This undue transposition is also a deception typical of liberalism, which is manifesting itself most clearly in its own global stage when, in the name of globalization, humanity is mendaciously promised a future of peace and planetary well-being. Franco Cardini explained very well the long historical path that led through the intermediate step through the Christian Europe of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, from ancient Christianity to Europe-West today, centered on the Atlantic (2).

This process was not at all a linear completion of Catholicism but rather a gradual losing ground by the Catholic Church in the face of de-Christianization. The Europe-West today, that is what Sciacca called Occidentalism, is precisely abortion matricide of Catholic Christendom. Moreover, to think of it, the mystery of iniquity could not manifest itself historically in the ancient Christian lands and then, once almost completely eradicated from the Church life of the people once Catholics, globalize beyond the historical boundaries of Christianity. 250 years before the revolutionary declaration of human rights was the theological-juridical school of Salamanca, in Catholic Spain of the sixteenth century, to elaborate on Thomistic basis, ie Christian, human rights, and to clarify the basis of natural law community policy as part of its subordination to the moral judgment of the Pope, and thus consequently the distinction, not conflict, between Faith and Politics, Church and State.

But the historical fracture acted by Protestantism, and the resulting secular absolutism and statolatrico, produced at the beginning of modernity, a break, still unbridgeable, between the Catholic and medieval roots of modern Europe and its derived Occidentalist. The lack of continuity in the historical process, due to the fracture Lutheran-Enlightenment, has meant that those who were the fruits of civilization of Catholicism have been uprooted from their native plant life and arbitrarily nested on dry trunk of humanitarianism. Millenarianism, which underlies the modern Protestant, has made it possible, for example, counterfeiting liberal, ie normativist and giuspositivista, of natural law that has been so perverted in the contractarian conception of the origin of law and political and social forms.

But humanitarianism, today, at a time when the West goes global americanomorfo knowing his moment of triumph planetarium, is proving to be nothing more than a withered branch. The West's global humanitarian philosophy is sinking into nihilism and revealing their mere instrumentality. The philanthropic rhetoric of "liberal democracy" is revealed for what it really is, namely normativist mask of pure power relations. The mask is definitely fall with humanitarian international police operations last decade of the twentieth century and most recently with the Bush's unilateral war.

The postmodern deception is revealed openly in front of the disintegration of the nihilistic rationalism. The claim of autofondazione and absolute autonomy of human reason has proved inconsistent and, today, to save the sound from the bottom of a rationality dall'irrompere over-subrazionalismo, which define disturbing is an understatement, it is necessary to accept that the reason his natural limits, because these limits that characterize it in his high dignity as creatures, as the scope of its investigation, tomisticamente speaking, the fact of preambula fidei, and especially that it opens on high towards the Christian Mystery. A similar argument can be made for the Europe of today: if it does not take the full knowledge that they were not the least part of a broader West, organized around the American world power, and especially if it does not return to its Catholic roots (and return to these roots is not a matter of improbable preambles of constitutions), stating unambiguously that its claim of modern refound anticristianamente was chosen historical-philosophical suicide, has no chance of salvation, neither spiritual nor of civilization, and eventually drag in his parable of the dissolution of all those goods even nihilistic political, legal, social and civil rights that originally belonged to the Catholic heritage. The branches torn from the vine are intended to dry.

NOTES

1) See J. Bouwsma, The Autumn of the Renaissance, Oxford, Milan 2003.
2) See F. Cardini, Europe. The Christian Roots, The Circle Initiatives Editorials, Rimini 2002.