The corporate interests, now merged with government in the US, were following through with a strategy intended to lower the costs of corporations in obtaining oil. Oil was the life's blood that pumped through their veins. The fact that Communism was no threat was irrelevant; the corporations needed a threat so they could continue to justify control just as they do today with threats of extremist Muslims.
The individuals who then were organizing to oppose them were gulled by the threats of Communism; they believed the people who they thought of as fellow Americans. The real Conservatives were naive but honest. They included men like Taft and Barry Goldwater; Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. They came from diverse background but they shared a belief in the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the free market that America had never really had. They believed in individual freedom and the sovereignty of the individual before the existence of government. They dreams of freedom.
To men like Buckley, operating in the 50s and 60s, it must have been like stealing candy from a baby. Buckley's motives went deep. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., had been an oil man in Venezuela whose interests were truncated by the move in that country to take control of that resource.
Buckley had very personal motives.
Now it is clear that all of those closely associated with the small group who worked to eviscerate the role of the United Nations, manicure the political environment in the United States, and weld the corporations to government had ties to Big Oil. The small group included George H. W. Bush, Sr., Maurice Strong, and Robert O. Anderson. Big Oil understood how much they had to lose if Americans had real choices. This period is also marked by the disappearance of various better carburetors and other innovations that improved gas and oil efficiency. These patents were typically bought up by oil companies and never used.
Communism was a distraction that kept the eyes of Americans off the ball and allowed for the continued plundering of oil reserves in the Middle East – and elsewhere as they were discovered.
Back home, Buckley made sure that the use of the military as an adjunct for corporate leveraging against other countries continued by destroying the potential objections from within the Conservative Movement.
Using government in this way gave rise to a very different attitude about their own mis gotten wealth and about people who lived simple, decent lives. You see the fully developed attitude in this Straussianism, which expressed this as, “if you are destined to rule then you may rightly ignore the rules made for lesser men.” This is self serving and ugly and it is possible that the hyper intellectual rationalizations used by Buckley and the others came from their unconscious knowledge that their actions were morally and ethically bankrupt.
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