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Flanagan, Tom – The Calgary School
Stephen Harper's closest advisor, Tom Flanagan, is an academic famous for his stands against native land claims and rights, and who claims native people were Canada's earliest immigrants.
One of the closest looks at Stephen Harper and his closest associates was written by Marci Macdonald and published in Walrus Magazine:
"When Harper threw his hat in the ring for the leadership of the Alliance, Tom Flanagan, the Calgary School's informal leader, became his closest adviser. Harper and Flanagan, whose scholarship focuses on attacking aboriginal rights, entered a four-year writing partnership and together studied the works of government-hater Friedrich Hayek. He worked as Harper's national campaign director in the 2004 federal election [and was a senior campaign advisor in the 2006 election.] He is a senior fellow of the right wing think tank, the Fraser Institute. Flanagan is a member of a small group of like-minded ideologues from the University of Calgary's political-science department known as the "Calgary School."
In Saving America: Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives, Shadia B Drury writes:
"There is a growing awareness that a reclusive German émigré philosopher is the inspiration behind the reigning neoconservative ideology of the Republican Party. Leo Strauss has long been a cult figure within the North American academy. And even though he had a profound antipathy to both liberalism and democracy, his disciples have gone to great lengths to conceal the fact. And for the most part they have succeeded — as the article by James Atlas in The New York Times and the article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker indicate. This picture of Strauss as the great American patriot, who was a lover of freedom and democracy is pure fabrication. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"The trouble with the Straussians is that they are compulsive liars. But it is not altogether their fault. Strauss was very pre-occupied with secrecy because he was convinced that the truth is too harsh for any society to bear; and that the truth-bearers are likely to be persecuted by society — specially a liberal society — because liberal democracy is about as far as one can get from the truth as Strauss understood it."
Links and sources
"Our Benign Dictatorship", Stephen Harper and Tom Flanagan, Next City, Winter 1997
"The Man Behind Stephen Harper", Marci MacDonald, The Walrus Magazine, October 2004
Saving America: Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives, Shadia B Drury
Posted: May 10, 2007
Harper Index (HarperIndex.ca) is a project of the Golden Lake Institute and the online publication StraightGoods.ca
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