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- BUCHANAN VERSUS THE WAR PARTY:
AN EPIC BATTLE
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- Pat
Buchanan's blockbuster book, A Republic, Not an Empire,
- the
magnificent manifesto of conservative noninterventionism reviewed
in my
last column - has the War Party in a panic. Both the "right"
and "left" wings are up in arms, howling for the blood of the
heretic. How dare he challenge that holiest of interventionist holies,
World War II, the crucible of the Soviet Empire and the creator and
guarantor
of the modern Welfare-Warfare State!
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- THE LYNCH MOB GATHERS
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- From such worthies as Bill Kristol,
William Safire, Charles
Krauthammer, and all the usual suspects on the
neoconservative "Right,"
to Chris Matthews, the
Anti-Defamation League, Salon Magazine, and what
remains of the Popular
Front coalition of the 1930s, the chorus of condemnation
is not only
loud: these people are practically frothing at the mouth. This
impressive display of Left-Right unanimity underscores the narrowness of
the politically permissible and the reality of the ideological
dictatorship
we are living under. The war cries of the media lynch mob
are stunning
in their vehemence and their variety:
"Isolationist!" - "nativist"
- "racist" -
"fascist" - "Hitler-lovin' Nazi"
- the string of
epithets is endless, and you can feel the spittle on your
face as the
words, propelled by hyperventilated outrage, leap off the page.
All are
piling on Pat in a frenzied (and barely coherent) attempt to not
only
rebut his case for noninterventionism but to completely discredit
and
banish the subject from public discussion - permanently, if
possible.
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- A TEST
CASE
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- For the War
Party, this is a test case. If they can defeat
and destroy Buchanan on
this issue, then their job is made all that much
easier the next time
they want to launch a "humanitarian" invasion
of a sovereign
nation. The argument will go something like this:
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- THE ARGUMENT FROM
INTIMIDATION
-
- "So, you oppose sending U.S. troops to, say, Colombia,
or
to the Caucasus - what are you, some kind of
isolationist-nativist-racist-Nazi
Buchanan-loving subversive? What
about World War II? What about Hitler?!"
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- There will be no argument, no debate over the merits
of the issue - because the goal of Pat's opponents is to make rational
discussion of foreign policy a hate crime. The War Party has big ambitions
for the new millennium, and they aren't going to let the American
electoral
process trifle with their plans.
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- TRUMPING HISTORY
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- The desperation of these people, in their
frantic flailing
at Buchanan, reached comic proportions when they
pulled out their real
trump card - Donald Trump! Known as "The
Donald" to those New
Yorkers who have come to know and disdain him
over the years, the multimillionaire
casino operator and real estate
developer has had a reputation as a man-about-town
with a remarkable
penchant for vulgarity - both in his architectural tastes
and his
personal life - but never, until this moment, as an historian.
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- THE PLAYBOY
HISTORIAN
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- Alas,
the New York playboy's debut as a social commentator
specializing in
diplomatic history is not exactly auspicious. Trump bellows
that
Buchanan "is denigrating the memory of those who died in that
war." Does this also apply to critics of the Vietnam war - and, if
not, why not?
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- THE
DRONE
-
- "Pat
says Hitler had no malicious intent toward
the United States," Mr.
Trump said in an interview. "Well, Hitler
killed six million Jews
and millions of others. Don't you think it was
only a question of time
before he got to us? He tackled Europe first and
we were next. Pat's
amazing." What is amazing is a media that takes
The Donald
seriously. Asked if he had even bothered to read the book he
was
denouncing, Trump reassured his Newsday interviewer that "I've
seen the phrases we're dealing with." Phrases is right: at most,
Trump
skimmed a few sentences and was put through his paces by the Bush
team.
Here is the ugly reality of the smear campaign that is now going
into high
gear: since it doesn't matter what Buchanan actually wrote,
it wasn't really
necessary for Trump to read A Republic, Not an Empire
- given that he was
even capable of completing such a task. Indeed, it
would be better for
an attack drone such as Trump not to understand,
all the better to repeat
his baseless mindless smears.
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- A VULGAR
PLUTOCRAT
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- Trump,
the vulgar plutocrat and vainglorious peacock
of Manhattan high
society, is the perfect antipode to Buchanan, with his
penchant for
scholarly debate and almost monkish dedication to ideas. In
publicizing
Trump as a real contender for Pat's working-class base, the
Hate
Buchanan claque is going way way out on a limb, with one political
consultant quoted as saying that "blue collar guys look up to
[Trump].
The cars, the women, the money." The assumption that
"blue collar
guys" have no political ideas and opinions worth
discussing, and that
they will cast their votes on the basis of
something so facile as "the
cars, the women, the money," is a
remarkably blatant illustration
of the bottomless contempt the elites
have for ordinary Americans.
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- IT ISN'T WORKING
-
- The sneering tone is unmistakable, but there is also
an
undercurrent of fear: these smirking grand strategists, Bushians and
others, who are egging The Donald on, are genuinely frightened. They
loathe
Pat Buchanan and will do anything - anything - to stop him. But
the sniggering
pair-up of Buchanan and Trump in a championship fight
for the Reform Party
nomination, meant to denigrate and drag a great
man down to the level of
a smarmy clown, isn't working, and neither is
the smear campaign.
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- A GIANT AMONG PYGMIES
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- With every newspaper columnist, left and right, railing
against Pat and every TV talking head pontificating on the gravity and
horror of the Buchananite heresy, Buchanan is everywhere, on every talk
show, fighting back and more than holding his own. Pat squared off against
Rush on the radio, against Bill Preuss and the haggish Mary Matalin (will
you please cover that neck?). Matalin hectored him about
"anti-Semitism,"
smirking all the while, without offering any
evidence to refute. In the
past twenty-four hours, it seems, Pat has
taken on virtually every talking
head with an agenda and an axe to
grind. It is Pat versus both the "right"
and "left"
wings of the Establishment: a single man facing down
a mighty coalition
- a nearly equal contest, and at the very least an epic
one.
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- WILLYA LOOKIT
THAT?!
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- The
historical pronunciatmentoes of The Donald are not,
perhaps, the most
articulate and detailed, and the vindictive lies being
spread by Pat's
ex-friend Mona Charen, in which she seriously accuses him
of being in
favor of quotas - for white people! - are not the most convincing.
There is lots of vituperation, but not a lot of substance. So far the only
half-serious attempt to critique Buchanan's book comes in the pages of
the Weekly Standard. But Robert G. Kaufaman's hurried critique, snidely
entitled "Wrong from the Beginning," is even less convincing,
in its way, than The Donald's. For Kaufman employs the "willya lookit
that!" technique, in which the polemicist holds up a viewpoint with
which he disagrees as if its falsity is self-evident. But since Kaufman
does not bother to let us know why these views are false - or even
destructive
and evil - this technique, as employed by the author, has
the exact opposite
of its intended effect. In the end, Kaufman can only
make the argument
from authority, dropping names in a furious effort to
divert the reader
away from the fact that he has no argument.
"Buchanan's claims about
twentieth-century history are a
deliberate rejection of Republican foreign
policy notions,"
Kaufman avers, "both of the idealism of Ronald
Reagan's cold
warriors and the ostensible realism of Richard Nixon and
Henry
Kissinger."
-
- AND
YOUR POINT IS . . . ?
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- But - so what? That indeed is the whole point of A Republic,
Not an Empire: that it is high time we moved beyond the Cold War paradigm
of Nixon and Kissinger, and reclaimed the foreign policy the Founders
intended
us to follow. Do we really want to follow the doctrines of a
man like Kissinger,
for god's sake, whose policies prolonged a
disastrous land war in Asia?
Is the foreign policy of Richard Nixon
really such an ideal model for the
post-Cold War world? And why is the
advice of Nixon - as much as Pat no
doubt respects and even admires his
former employer - worth less than that
of George Washington and John
Quincy Adams?
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- A
CANARD?
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- Kaufman
writes:
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- "Buchanan revives
Charles Tansill's old canard that
an insidious combination of
pro-British sentiment, the interests of Wall
Street bankers fearful of
Britain's defaulting on its huge loans, Theodore
Roosevelt's
militarism, and Woodrow Wilson's zealous idealism dragged America
into
a costly war in defiance of our previous tradition and our national
interest."
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- THE
HAZARDS OF SELF-PARODY
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- But simply calling an idea a "canard" is hardly
an
argument or even an explanation: yet the reader who expects either from
Kaufman is in for a disappointment. As if to mock his readers, or
unconsciously
parody himself, Kaufman then goes on to take the
ultra-Anglophile position
that even getting involved in World War I was
not only inevitable but necessary,
since
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- "American security has always depended on a
European
balance of power, which a German victory would have
obliterated. It made
strategic sense for America to stay out of
European conflicts while Britain
operated as the effective balance,
ensuring that no continental power achieved
a decisive aggregation of
power. By 1917, however, Britain could no longer
contain German power
without the active participation of the United States."
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- HAIL
BRITANNIA
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- This
makes perfect sense - from the viewpoint of the
British Foreign Office.
England has historically resisted the consolidation
of a single power's
dominance over the European continent, depending on
the United States
to back her up when she wasn't quite up to the task of
playing the role
of the dissonant note in the concert of Europe. But if,
today, we have
a single European Union, with a single currency and a fast-evolving
army, dominated economically and demographically by a resurgent Germany,
then what was it all for? If even England, today, is integrating itself
into this continental super-state, then why did Americans die in the
Argonne
and Chateau Thierry? This is the question that Buchanan asks in
his book,
but Kaufman is hardly up to the task of even acknowledging
it, let alone
answering it.
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- THE ART OF UNDERSTATEMENT
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- In a sentence that takes the art of
understatement to
new heights, Kaufman writes: "Franklin Roosevelt
made mistakes, no
doubt, particularly in his dealings with Stalin's
Soviet Union"! If
handing over half of Europe to the horrors of
the Gulag can be fairly described
as a "mistake," rather than
a crime, then God is dead and everything,
as a half-mad German
philosopher once said, is permitted.
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- THE ART OF
HEADLINE-WRITING
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- Another headline was "Buchanan's Views on Hitler
Create a
Reform Party Stir," by Francis X. Clines [New York Times,
September 21, 1999] - as if, in challenging the wisdom and necessity of
World War II, Pat is trying to rehabilitate the German dictator. The
article
quotes very selectively from the book, a sentence or a phrase
torn out
of context. Clines avers that "in a separate chapter
criticizing the
power of numerous American ethnic groups over foreign
policy, Mr. Buchanan
writes, 'After World War II, Jewish influence over
foreign policy became
almost an obsession with American leaders.'"
He somehow fails to point
out that Buchanan is merely quoting the
well-known views of such notorious
anti-Semites as George Kennan, John
Foster Dulles, and Harry Truman. (p.
336) And, of course, up pops The
Donald, whom Clines quotes liberally -
it would be funny if it weren't
so pathetic.
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- TIME
AND AGAIN
-
- While we
have seen all this before - it happens every
time Pat runs for
President - there is a new edge of hysteria to the hate-filled
venom
that is filling the airwaves, the Internet, and the op ed pages of
the
nation's newspapers. There have been numerous "news" stories
about the controversy over this book, and they all have variations on a
single theme of "Buchanan is a Bigot," such as the Reuters
headline,
"Buchanan Book Stirs Charges of Anti-Semitism,
[September 21,1991].
But the story has nothing to do with the book: not
a word of the book is
cited as "evidence" of alleged bigotry,
there is only the victimological
braying of the Anti-Defamation League,
and vague accusations from various
authorities attesting to Buchanan's
inveterate evil. But the book mentioned
in the headline is completely
disappeared, and in its place there is only
the venom of the
professional character assassins, a kind of intellectual
Mafia
determined to enforce its monopoly in the realm of foreign policy.
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- THE BUCHANAN
CHALLENGE
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- These
strong-arm methods are not going to intimidate
Buchanan. The bipartisan
foreign policy of global interventionism that
has drained us of troops
and treasure for over fifty years is being challenged
by a very brave
and very able man. With the Reform party and a great chunk
of the GOP
in tow, Buchanan is intent on forging a new American majority,
a new
consensus in which a noninterventionist foreign policy is the linchpin
that holds the coalition together. A cool $13 million in campaign funds
awaits the Reform party's presidential nominee - God help the
Establishment
if Buchanan ever gets his hands on it.
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- ______________
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- Justin Raimondo is the editorial director
of Antiwar.com.
He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right:
The Lost Legacy
of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by
Patrick J. Buchanan),
(1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case
Against US Intervention
in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar
with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior
Fellow at the Center for Libertarian
Studies, and writes frequently for
Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
He is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(forthcoming from
Prometheus Books).
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- ______________
-
- Please
send this as far and wide as possible.
-
- Thanks,
-
- Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com
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