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Old February 29th, 2008 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Historical Enemies: William F. Buckley Jr.

# lawrence dennis Says:
28 February, 2008 at 7:54 pm

The following account helps put Mr. Buckley’s role in American politics in perspective:

Sam [Francis] mentioned a memo he had seen, actually a fatwa, issued by the Anti-Defamation League demanding that someone do something to stop his writing. The man who stepped forward to pull the trigger in that act of targeted character assassination was William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism, and a Catholic.

Once again the dynamic of this sortie in the culture wars was ethnic/religious. Buckley volunteered to go on a mission of the sort which had characterized his entire tenure as the editor of National Review. He was going to be the goyische front man (or trigger man) for the Jewish interests that had supported him since the inception of that magazine in 1955. In case you’re interested in the details, I recommend again Murray Friedman’s book _The Neoconservative Revolution_, especially the section on the role people like Martin Liebman, and Frank Meyer and William (Willi) S. Schlamm, and other “forgotten Jewish godfathers” played in the creation of National Review. In return for the favor, Buckley acted as their goyische hit man, rubbing out whomever they found convenient. Buckley, it should be noted, didn’t just treat Southern Protestants this way. By the time he got around to rubbing out Sam Francis, he had already knifed fellow Catholics like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran in the back.

http://www.culturewars.com/2007/Francis.htm
 
Old February 29th, 2008 #2
Alex Linder
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William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP—Sort Of

By Peter Brimelow

"There are no second acts in American lives", F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said. No-one exemplified this better than his fellow Irish-American social climber William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, who died early in the morning of February 27 at the age of 82.

This might seem an ungallant note to strike at a moment when Buckley is enjoying the posthumous plaudits of friend and (avidly courted) foe. But not the least evidence of Buckley’s unmistakable effeminate streak was a viciousness that showed in his flouting of such comforting conventions—for example in his 1995 obituary of the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, which the Mises Review’s David Gordon fairly described as "malicious spite." Buckley’s rationale (presumably) was that those of us who live by opinion must be prepared to die by opinion. If so, in this area at least, I agree with him.

Just as the gangsters in The Godfather reassured each other that their bloody clashes were just business, not personal, I’d say that my disagreement with Buckley was fundamentally political, although I do consider his character to have been among the most contemptible I have encountered in public life. However, in Buckley’s case, the political was personal and vice versa. It was his personal failings that ultimately accounted for the four-decade fizzle of his once-brilliant career—and for the fact that, regularly credited with the making of the modern conservative movement, he must also be indicted for its breaking.

Above all, he must also be indicted for the breaking, through out-of-control post-1965 mass immigration, of the nation that some of us thought the conservative movement was sworn to defend.

However, I must also note that Buckley himself was extraordinarily, almost hysterically, sensitive to criticism. My own relationship with National Review in the mid-1990s was fatally impaired by that fact that he believed and kept insisting to associates that I had once criticized him in print, although he characteristically declined to raise the matter with me man (so to speak) to man.

I had no recollection of ever criticizing Buckley in print. In fact, I recalled the direct opposite: unheroically maneuvering to avoid an assignment from the late Bob Bleiberg, then Editor of Barron’s, where I was then employed in the decent obscurity of financial journalism, to write an expose of the Buckley family’s controversial dealings in its public oil exploration companies. (In 1979, Buckley himself signed a consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission after allegedly attempting to avoid personal bankruptcy by unloading bad investments on a public company he controlled. "Bill isn’t as wealthy as he wants us to think," the Wall Street Journal’s Bob Bartley, himself all too culpable in the conservative movement’s failure to grapple with immigration, gloated to me at the time. He was right, as I realized later when I saw the extent to which National Review subsidized Buckley’s plutocratic life style.)

The point here: astonishingly, Buckley was deeply insecure. I believe he was all too aware that he exemplified Fitzgerald’s celebrated maxim. From the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951, through the founding of National Review in 1955, to his brilliant New York mayoralty race in 1965, rallying the conservative movement after the Goldwater disaster and discovering the crucial Reagan Democrats, he rode the wave of history. After that, despite the potboilers and the celebrity, he achieved nothing.

Buckley’s insecurity was brought home to me with particular force on Election Night 1996. My wife, Maggy, well known to the National Review circle, was in surgery eight hours that day for the breast cancer that ultimately killed her. I went straight from the recovery room to Buckley’s party. When I arrived, a Buckley courtier whom I will not name started across the room towards me. Buckley intercepted him and told him to go fawn on the talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whom Buckley apparently regarded as the guest of honor.

"I just want to ask Peter how Maggy is," said the courtier.

"She’s fine, talk to Rush," said Buckley.

Buckley, of course, did not know at that point whether my wife was alive or dead. But, clearly, he had more important things to worry about.

And that is the point of this story. Selfish sycophancy is not particularly shocking in American politics—it’s balanced, after all, by the fact that we don’t shoot each other over policy disagreements—but why did Buckley feel the need to flatter Limbaugh at all? Buckley was, when all is said and done, Bill Buckley, architect of the modern conservative movement (as we are now incessantly told). Rush Limbaugh was just—Rush Limbaugh. It was like comparing Moses to Jeremiah.

But Buckley didn’t see it that way. He yearned for Limbaugh’s approbation—and, no doubt, for his support in promoting whatever potboiler Buckley was currently emitting.

People I respect tell me that Bill Buckley was capable of great kindness. I never saw that side of him. I first met Buckley in the summer of 1978. I was invited to one of the regular dinners he and his noble wife Pat held at 73 East 73rd Street ("at 7:30!" his secretary Frances Bronson used to say) along with my friend and colleague from Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine, Barbara Amiel, then in the full flower of her extraordinary Sephardic beauty. (Subsequently, as the wife of media tycoon Conrad Black, Barbara became an intimate of the Buckleys and I gather Bill was recently at the Palm Beach wake held before Black’s imminent imprisonment for securities fraud. But Black was not the first to find that Buckley would not support him when it counted.)

What really surprised me then, and in subsequent years, was Buckley’s complete lack of interest in political debate. (I see Sam Tanenhaus, whom Buckley chose, completely inappropriately, as the biographer (Whittaker Chambers: A Biography) of his mentor Whittaker Chambers, and, significantly, as his own official biographer, has the same perception.) Then, and as long as I was invited to his table (which abruptly ceased after John O’Sullivan’s firing as editor in 1997), his conversation remained stunningly trivial.

In fact, I can see absolutely no relationship between the scintillating Buckley I had read about (my twin brother and I forced our English university library to resubscribe to National Review in the late 1960s) and the spaced-out Buckley I knew after 1976.

My joking theory: sometime after his New York City mayoralty race against John Lindsay in 1965 and his brother James’ victory in the New York Senate race in 1970, Bill Buckley was taken over by an alien from outer space. He simply ceased to function in a political sense, although his ego remained insatiable. (I suppose a more conventional explanation for this eclipse would be alcohol and prescription drugs.)

I do know that Buckley’s political ambitions were not merely symbolic. After his race against Lindsay, he convened a private meeting including F. Clifton White and long-time National Review Publisher Bill Rusher, both veterans of the Draft Goldwater movement, to discuss the question of how he could run for president. They assured him, very unimaginatively I believe, that it was unthinkable. So Buckley stepped aside. But had he and not James won the Senate race in 1970, he would have been a contender. It was a fatal mistake. Conceivably, it could have broken his heart.

Unquestionably, in my view, it explains the fratricidal savagery of Buckley’s 1992 attack on Pat Buchanan, a fellow Irish Catholic conservative who had dared to make the jump from pundit to presidential candidate. As a much-celebrated Catholic, Buckley must have known that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. But that does not mean he was immune.

After last year’s defeat of the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill, John O’Sullivan’s published a cover story in American Conservative magazine entitled Getting Immigration Right: How conservatives blocked the open-borders establishment. (Read Steve Sailer’s comments here.) It opened with an amusing account of how O’Sullivan, in his then-role of editor of National Review, maneuvered my own 1992 Time To Rethink Immigration? NR cover story, which he (perhaps too generously) said " launched the modern American debate on immigration", past the magazine’s proprietor, Bill Buckley. This whole opening passage was a salutary reminder of the extreme inhibitions that had prevented even established conservative intellectuals from addressing immigration policy up to that point.

And, alas, subsequently. The glaring omission from O’Sullivan’s article was the fact that after 1998 National Review "stopped stridently claiming opposition to immigration as a conservative cause", as Wall Street Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley accurately gloated (July 3, 2000), and did not return to the issue until some time in 2002. The reason for this, of course, is that Buckley fired O’Sullivan without warning and purged the magazine of immigration reformers (e.g. me).

In an embarrassing aside that he would have been better advised to omit, O’Sullivan implicitly denied these developments, although they were widely known. Of course, public silence was enjoined upon him by the terms of his severance agreement, which I am happy to say was negotiated by my lawyer.

Those of us who were personally injured by Buckley’s betrayal were obviously vitally interested in this story. We took enormous professional risks to broach the immigration issue. We were left, not merely without defense, but subject to poisonous abuse by the very opportunists and Republican publicists whom Buckley appointed to run the magazine in O’Sullivan’s stead.

But Buckley’s betrayal was not without wider significance. It raises the question of whether the current National Review editors’ belated opposition to the Kennedy-Bush-McCain Amnesty/Immigration Surge bill was anything more than an opportunistic effort to insert themselves at the head of a parade, which they will abandon when their assessment of their career requirements shifts. After all, the amnesty they now congratulate themselves on opposing was the monomaniacal obsession of a president they slavishly supported, although his views were obvious.

Indeed, O’Sullivan himself provided an example of this opportunism. He writes:

"Bill Kristol, representing many neoconservatives disposed to favor the bill, came out against it. He did so in part because it had serious drafting defects but, more importantly, because it was creating a bitter gulf between rank-and-file Republicans and the party leadership. That in turn was imperiling Republican objectives in other areas, notably Iraq."

I predict that Kristol will return to immigration enthusiasm once he has helped persuade Bush (or McCain) to attack Iran.

Why did Buckley fire O’Sullivan? Why did he let his magazine, founded to oppose the (Eisenhower!) Republican Establishment of its day, and which he claimed in its 1955 Mission Statement "stands athwart History, yelling Stop", be so completely captured by a combination of Republican publicists, Israel-First Likudniks and the cultural establishment?

Because the fate of National Review matters (mattered). And not just on immigration reform. As long-time NR Board member Neil Freeman wrote in the American Spectator, explaining his resignation:

"I thought then and I think today that if NR had opposed the [Iraq] invasion it could have made a decisive difference within the conservative movement and, radiating its influence outward, across the larger political community."

For the plain fact, politely unmentioned in most Buckley obituaries, is that Buckley and National Review have been complicit in leading the conservative movement, the Republican Party and the country into utter disaster. Conservatives have essentially nothing to show for their moment in power except two completely unexpected colonial wars in the Middle East. And this year's elections are widely expected to be a generational catastrophe.

The current editors of National Review have tried to claim that premature opposition to immigration was "racism" and thus legitimately subject to one of Buckley’s celebrated purges. But of course this is impossible to square with their recent opposition to amnesty (and legal mass immigration, although they don’t like to emphasize that).

A paranoid Wall Street friend has speculated that the completeness of the post-O’Sullivan takeover at National Review, which for example saw this once solidly Catholic magazine abandoning without explanation the War Against Christmas competition I had started there to such an extent that reference to the feast was completely expunged in 2000, was due to the arrival of a Goldman Sachs alumnus on the board and possible financial arrangements.

Ultimately, however, I believe the answer is personal. In late 1997, I had the job of telling Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose that Buckley had fired O’Sullivan. (Even National Review insiders were briefly deceived by the cover story that O’Sullivan had "resigned to write a book".)

Rose Friedman came to the point immediately. "It’s the Alaska cruise", she said. The Friedmans were regular attractions on National Review conference cruises, major money-makers for the magazine. And they had noticed that Buckley had been embarrassingly upstaged by O’Sullivan, who—whatever his other faults—is a wonderful extemporaneous speaker.

(Despite his reputation as an orator, Buckley in my experience was painfully poor—the only good speech I ever heard him give was on Bull Rusher’s 65th birthday, which, as Rusher pointed out sarcastically, was exactly the same as the speech Buckley had given on Rusher’s 60th birthday, and had in fact been fished out of Rusher’s own files that morning.)

Buckley had had no particular second thoughts about patriotic immigration reform—National Review had after all opposed the flood-unleashing 1965 Immigration Act, although it then fell silent. He was not particularly committed to war in Iraq, which he abandoned before his death, embarrassing his own editors. He was not, at least in the thirty years I knew him, particularly interested in ideas at all, and certainly not capable of the focused effort to required to master new ones.

What really motivated Buckley was ego and vanity. The current editors of National Review say: "If ever an institution were the lengthened shadow of one man, this publication is his."

I agree.

Peter Brimelow is editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)

http://www.vdare.com/pb/080228_buckley.htm
 
Old February 29th, 2008 #3
Alex Linder
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How I Was Fired By Bill Buckley

by Joseph Sobran

In October 1993 I was fired by National Review, the magazine I'd written for since 1972. It wasn't unexpected. Bill Buckley had threatened to fire me a couple of years earlier, and he writes in his book In Search of Anti-Semitism that he'd nearly fired me on yet another occasion, of which I'd had no inkling. So this time, when I wrote a column critical of him and disputing his account, it was a near certainty that the axe would fall.

Since my firing, Bill has privately circulated a selection of our private correspondence -- some of it deeply affectionate on my part -- and my columns about him. I have only one real quarrel with it: it's not in chronological order. This has the effect of making me look like a hypocrite for professing affection privately while publicly attacking him.

The critical fact is that my letters and columns praising him were written before (in one case, years before) I saw his book, or had any clear idea of its contents. Any reader who notices the dates on the various pieces can see this for himself. At the time I praised him I assumed he was incapable of anything treacherous. It's disingenuous of him to use what I wrote before this book was published as evidence of my inconsistency, let alone hypocrisy, when the book itself changed my view of him so radically.

To put it bluntly, if you betray a man, you have no right to complain that he isn't as nice to you as he used to be. That's the special nature of betrayal: it cancels everything in a friendship. It doesn't mean that you aren't still the same man you were before; but you certainly aren't the same friend you were before. Bill is probably smart enough to figure this out.

In his book, Bill wrote a number of things about me that were shaded in a way that made him look better, and me worse, than the way I recalled it. I wrote at the time that I'd be giving my version soon, but I put it off a while, knowing my version would probably mean the end of my many years at National Review, and I had to think hard before precipitating that.

Bill and I had been good friends for most of the 21 years I'd worked for him. But the friendship was strained in 1986, when he took the side of my attackers in a row over Israel. When Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter accused me of "anti-Semitism," Bill wrote a weird public disavowal of my columns on Israel, saying in effect that I wasn't anti-Semitic, but deserved to be called anti-Semitic. What made it so bad was that I knew he didn't even believe what he was saying. It was a failure of nerve. That was clear even from the disavowal itself, which included a sweaty digression on Jewish retaliatory power.

Earlier that year, he'd taken me to dinner to warn me of the dangers of being "perceived," as they say, as an anti-Semite. His book makes it sound like a long campaign to set me straight, but it wasn't like that at all. Bill didn't suggest I'd done anything wrong or that he disagreed with anything I'd written. But Norman Podhoretz was mad at me. That was enough. Later that evening when I told Bill about some Irish Catholic fans of mine who told me they prayed for me, he sneered, "You don't need those people." Bill denies having said this (I was fired for quoting it), but he said it, all right. In itself it would be a small thing, but it describes his own policy: ignore the Catholics, cultivate the powerful. (Try to imagine him writing a book against abortion.)

I continued in my wicked ways, criticizing Israel as an albatross for the U.S. In May the Zionist apparat went public in its smear against me, throwing the National Review into a total panic. There was hysteria in Bill's apartment the night he and the other senior editors discussed it: the disavowal had been prepared behind my back. This was the first I'd heard of it. Bill's statement didn't even mention the Podhoretzes by name, as if he was protecting their anonymity. Every other published account of the incident, on both sides, spoke freely of the Podhoretzes' role; but for some reason, National Review tried to pretend they had nothing to do with it. Furthermore, all responses from the magazine's readers -- who were overwhelmingly on my side -- were suppressed. (A couple of years later, when the Podhoretzes accused Russell Kirk of anti-Semitism, National Review was the only conservative publication that didn't even report it.)

I couldn't understand what the fuss was about. I'd merely applied conservative principles -- the things National Review stood for -- to Israel: it was a socialist country with no conception of limited, constitutional government, which discriminated against Christians, while betraying its benefactor, the United States, and turning the Muslim world against us. It seemed pretty clear-cut to me, and none of the reasons conservatives gave for supporting Israel made much sense.

Nobody really disagreed with me. That, in fact, was the problem. Nothing creates more awkwardness than saying things people can't afford to admit they agree with. Disagreement is manageable. It's agreement that wreaks havoc. If people disagree, they'll debate you. If they secretly agree with something, but are furious with you for saying it, then they'll try to shut you up by any means necessary. As Tom Stoppard puts it, "I agree with every word you say, but I will fight to the death against your right to say it."

Everything about the uproar puzzled me. After all, I was and am a columnist, not a political leader. I sit alone in a room and write things I hope will make sense to someone out there. I don't ask readers to accept things on my authority; I appeal to what is already publicly known. So what difference did it make what my motives were (supposing the Podhoretzes could know what they were)? Either my 700-word arguments made sense, or they didn't. Why should anyone get that excited? Why go to such lengths to prevent the relatively few people who like to read arguments from reading mine? But Bill acted as if it were a life-and-death matter.

With Bill's statement, National Review became, by default, a neoconservative magazine. It had virtually announced that its avowed principles didn't apply to Israel, and that its conservatism had no real separate existence from that of Commentary or The Public Interest -- both of which, in fact, were scooping National Review with feisty anti-liberal journalism. It was so eager to agree with, and especially to get along with, the power Zionists of Manhattan, that it wouldn't even defend its own from smears.

The most telling issue, in a way, was the Pollard case. Conceived in preoccupation with the Hiss-Chambers case, the magazine couldn't bring itself to condemn Israel for Jonathan Pollard's espionage. It demanded the death penalty for Pollard, but amnesty for those who had recruited him and paid him! Moreover, it showed no interest in whether the military secrets Pollard sent to Israel had been passed on to the Soviet Union, as some reports had it.

Here was the Hiss case of the Right. And some conservatives were evading the critical questions just as the Soviets' liberal partisans in this country had done a generation earlier. What the silence of most conservatives exposed was not disloyalty or treason, but insincerity. All their patriotic words were empty. It was all a game, or a way of making a living.

Looking back, I think I felt a strange subterranean anger from Bill dating from about that time. He didn't want to tell me how angry he was, because I was in the right. I was saying things -- obvious things -- he didn't have the courage to say. It was extremely frustrating to try to argue with him, because he would neither disagree nor concede anything. He would nit-pick, change the subject, accuse me of bad manners -- anything but say whether Israel was a worthy ally of the U.S. Once he wrote that I was "prayed over" at National Review, implying that my differences with the other editors were not merely intellectual, but spiritual; I could just picture editorial meetings in my absence, with those present kneeling to beseech the Almighty to guide this straying sheep back to the editorial consensus on Israel. Bill must be among Penthouse's most prayerful contributors.

When I wrote columns on Israel, Bill would write me peevish notes saying I was "obsessed." I had my own view on which of us was obsessed. Once, as I say, he said he would fire me unless I retracted a column on the Gulf War he took as implying that he was in effect working for Israel. I not only hadn't implied such a thing, I hadn't mentioned him, and hadn't even been thinking of him when I wrote the column in question; in fact the idea was so bizarre it had never occurred to me, and I was baffled that he inferred it. Now I think he was just looking for an excuse to get rid of me. I saved my bacon by writing a "retraction" whose irony escaped him. But I realized my days at the magazine were numbered. I came close to quitting several times. John O'Sullivan talked me out of it once; and once Bill and I had sharp words, and I told him he needed to learn the difference between an employee and a serf. He backed off for a while, but pretty soon he resumed dropping me ominous notes about columns he didn't like.

Once I wrote a column about the strange fear of Jews I found among people who were publicly friendly to them. Bill wrote me an angry note about that one too, thinking I had him in mind. That time he was partly correct. He was afraid people would know I was alluding to him. Well, at least I didn't use his name, which was more consideration than he showed me.

And again I thought, Gee, why all the fuss? I was just a writer. All I asked was to be let alone to write for my little public. Nobody was forced to read me, and my views didn't seem to be swaying public policy. Yet here was Bill, trying to put pressure on me behind the scenes. And he wasn't the only one. The Washington Times came under intense Zionist pressure to drop my column; so did my syndicate. They both held firm, showing more spine than Bill did. So I was able to ignore him and write.

In early 1990, as I recall, Bill told me he was writing an "essay on anti-Semitism" and asked for my views on the subject. Thinking he wanted to know what I thought, I wrote him a long memo. He neglected to tell me that I was one of his targets, and that he wanted my views for the purpose of quoting them against me in what became his most talked-about piece of writing in years. What he quoted didn't do me any harm, but I'd have appreciated at least a Miranda warning before going to all that trouble for him.

Bill's essay (it later became the first chapter of his book) consumed the entire Christmas issue of National Review. His attack on Pat Buchanan, naturally, got far more attention than his milder remarks about me; coming during Pat's presidential campaign, it did terrific damage and created lasting bitterness among conservatives. The whole essay (and book) defies paraphrase; Bill never defines "anti-Semitism," and he compounds the confusion by writing a prose refined of such coarse elements as nouns and verbs.

But most readers thought Bill's dragging his father's anti-Semitism into the piece plumbed new depths, even for the era of the Mommie Dearest genre. After all, nobody is easier to expose to public obloquy than your parents; unless they desert you, you are likely to know a lot about them, some of it unflattering. Most of the human race considers it ungracious to take advantage of them. (One of Bill's recent books was titled Gratitude.)

I think it tells you something about Bill's real attitude toward Jews that he thinks the way to propitiate them is by offering up a member of your own family -- Isaac sacrificing Abraham, so to speak. Actually, it smacks of the Soviet era, when children were urged to inform on their parents; nothing was private. Bill's own attitude reminds me of the way Stalin was regarded: public fawning, private dread.

Now Bill didn't really say anything very bad about either Pat or his father, because he didn't really say anything, period. His late style has declined into something approaching pure gesture, and meaning tends to get lost in it. All he really did -- to Pat, Will Buckley, and me -- was to juxtapose us with the word "anti-Semitism," which is in itself enough to create a foul impression, no matter what the logical and syntactical ligaments may be.

Bill himself used to be accused of anti-Semitism and even Nazism, which ought to have taught him something about loose charges. But he learned the wrong lesson: he learned that the best way to be safe from them is to make them yourself. When he caught on to that, he was like a kid with a very annoying new toy -- a noisy gun that he points at everyone.

In his essay-book, he continues to avoid mentioning the Podhoretzes' role, and he refrains from judging their conduct toward his fellow conservatives. In fact, it transpires in the responses to his first essay that he'd made a backstage deal with Norman Podhoretz to prevent me from writing about Israel and related Jewish topics. Imagine an editor giving another editor that kind of control over his magazine! And imagine letting such an arrangement become public knowledge! Why not just put Norman at the top of the masthead?

The finished book turned out to be as turgid as the first essay, except for the parts where others' replies were printed. I wrote a reply myself, and much of the rest of the book was Bill's attempt to belittle my arguments without meeting them. He didn't have the honesty to concede that I'd made any valid points about our "alliance" with Israel. It was one long act of appeasement, aimed only at getting back on the good side of the Zionist apparat.

The book may have done Bill some good, but it didn't do the Jews any good. Treating fanatical Zionists like the Podhoretzes as normative Jews is no favor to Jews. (You could even argue that it's an insidious form of anti-Semitism.) The book was written in a sort of nervously meandering prose that sounded as if the author had a gun at his head. It should have come with a ransom note.

In other words, the book is written in fear. Nothing in it suggests any appreciation of Jews, any savoring of distinctive Jewish qualities. Its real message is not that we should like or respect Jews; only that we should try not to hate them. But this implies that anti-Semitism is the natural reaction to them: if it's a universal sin, after all, it must be a universal temptation. If people are taught that the Jews are hated everywhere, they are not going to draw the conclusion that it's always the gentiles' fault. But this doesn't occur to Bill When he defends Jews, I sometimes feel like saying: "Bill! Bill! It's all right! They're not that bad!"

Though Bill professed concern for the survival of the Jews, it was his own survival he was worried about. What he'd told me on the disputed winter night back in 1986 was not that my columns on Israel threatened the Jews, but that they threatened my own future -- and thanks to him, that turned out to be partly true. But the Podhoretzes could never have hurt me the way he did.

I felt betrayed by that book, and by Bill's general conduct on the Jewish issue. But there was more to it than that. His mind had lost its edge. I kept waiting for him to come to his senses, not only on Israel but on other things too. I'd thought the whole conservative mission was to reduce government to "rational limits," as he once finely put it. But he was getting further and further from the great old state-haters of his youth -- Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Chodorow, John T. Flynn -- and going off on benders like writing a book in favor of national service.

Finally it became obvious that he wasn't going to change. He's old and set in his ways, and his mind isn't going to come up with anything new. His preoccupation seems to be protecting his celebrity. That was what I'd threatened: he was afraid that charges of anti-Semitism against me, no matter how unfair, would hurt him, and it was his duty to avoid being accused. In his mind, the accusation itself constituted guilt.

Early in 1993 I heard that he'd spoken on anti-Semitism to a Jewish group and had mentioned me. The next time I saw him I told him to leave my name out of these affairs. "You started it," he said. I can only guess that he meant I "started it" by getting myself accused of anti-Semitism. I'd certainly given him nothing but loyalty for twenty years. Now he thought he owned the right to abuse my name. He was telling me he had no intention of stopping.

At about the same time, he sent me another note about my column. I'd twitted George Will, one of his pals, and Bill wrote that I shouldn't do this because Will was on "our side." I had to stop and reflect on how Bill defines "our side." His "our side" seems to include a Podhoretz but not a Buchanan. Like most of Bill's communications, this had a wry interest as self-revelation. He still thought, in spite of everything, that he was my respected mentor.

This summer he wrote an especially contemptible essay on Muslims, arguing crudely that terrorism is encouraged by the Koran itself. I knew where he got that stuff. It was right out of the Zionist agitprop manual. I was reading the same sort of thing in the New York Post, The New Republic, and suchlike rags. I wondered who'd clipped the Koran for him; I doubt he's ever opened it in his life. Citing the injunction that wives obey their husbands, and apparently unaware that St. Paul says the same thing, Bill suggested that this explains the miserable plight of women in the Islamic world; adding humorously, "To all appearances, the only time men and women get together in Islamic society is when they copulate."

The clear purpose of that column was to suck up to his buddies. Nothing else. Bill doesn't even hate Muslims enough to wish to offend them. He was doing it only to curry favor with the neocon crowd, with a touch of gutter humor showing how far he was willing to go. An abject performance. So much for his pose as the Right's scrupulous foe of bigotry. He was telling Norman Podhoretz, in effect, "Whom thou smearest, him also will I smear."

"Israel," he wrote defensively later, "didn't cross my mind when I wrote that column." Then why did the column mention Israel? It dragged in the assertion that Anwar Sadat had been murdered by Muslim fanatics for his "civilized attitude toward Israel." That kind of pandering reference has become so routine in Bill's writing that I can well believe he didn't remember having thought about Israel afterward; the gesture has become almost automatic.

That column enraged me. It showed how insincere Bill had been all along. I should have seen it long before, but I'd assumed there had been some conviction, however misguided, behind all the trouble he'd caused me, as well as other conservatives. Now it really sank in: he'd never meant a word of it. Everything was for public and social effect. If the positions of Jews and Muslims were reversed, he would have written the same column about the Jews.

Bill is always on stage: always acting, posing, making empty gestures. He isn't concerned about their truth or coherence. That's why he can talk facilely about prayer while he's writing for Playboy and Penthouse. And that's why it's frustrating to read most of what he has written over the past decade or so.

I wrote a column slamming him for his ugly cracks about Muslims. Then I decided the time had come to tell my side of the story about his sycophancy to the Zionist apparat.

When he fired me, Bill replied publicly to my account by ascribing it to "an incapacitation moral and perhaps medical." That was the typical Buckley touch. He has broken with many people over the years, and his standard response is to insinuate that they have become a little, you know, unbalanced. He himself, of course, represents the golden mean.

But another way to interpret this recurrent situation, with its attendant rhetoric, is that the people Bill has broken with have consistently been more principled than he is -- Randians, Birchers, Murray Rothbard, Willmoore Kendall, Brent Bozell, Garry Wills, and others of less renown. His only recourse is to imply that they are fanatical, extreme, obsessive -- from causes that are "perhaps medical." Bill is an overrated debater, but he's peerless at making others look bad.

I thought I'd miss National Review as an institution, but I don't. After two decades there I had dear friends, but the place itself was a facade. When I signed on at the age of 26, I thought everyone there would be philosophizing and discussing first principles. There was some of that, but basically it was just a business. Nice, decent, ordinary, though intelligent people. A million laughs, and some terrifically funny guys, from Jeff Hart to Ed Capano to Jim McFadden. Bill could be very funny too, of course, but even he didn't stand out in that company. What I really miss, as anyone who knows her will understand, is Dorothy McCartney.

But how strangely different it all became from what I'd expected. In the Sixties, when most of the world was going madly leftward, in the insane pursuit of "progress," Bill Buckley's conservatism seemed to many of us to be a politics appropriate to the tradition of Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Dr. Johnson. That tradition seemed implicit in Bill himself, in his refusal to join the flow of what he mockingly called the Zeitgeist. You could see in him the reflection of your own yearnings: for Christianity, for constitutional government, for the free market, for the Old South, for almost every other fugitive "reactionary" principle; and also for the courage to stand in opposition.

Now all that seems only distantly related to Bill's actual life, like the boyhood memory of a pious old aunt when you are a middle-aged man. Not that his life is discreditable, apart from the things I've mentioned; but somehow he belongs more to the world of Phil Donahue than to the world of Dr. Johnson. His conservatism is a conservatism of image, show business, public relations, stock mannerisms; big words, anfractuous grammar, repetitious Latinisms, implying a depth that isn't there.

What happened to him? Conservatives everywhere speculate on this. I don't fully know the answer, because it's partly the mystery of a soul. All I can say is that New York, a Babylon of dizzying distractions, has absorbed him, as it is likely to absorb anyone who stays there too long, and Bill, bored with his early role, forgot what he started out to do. Gravitas was finally swallowed up in celebritas. And by now it may be necessary to stand athwart National Review yelling "Stop!"
 
Old February 29th, 2008 #4
Alex Linder
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[From interview with Buckley biographer, jew Sam Tanenhaus]


Q: Did he ever recant his opposition to the civil rights movement? —Chris

A: Yes, he did. He said it was a mistake for National Review not to have supported the civil rights legislation of 1964-65, and later supported a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he grew to admire a good deal, above all for combining spiritual and political values.

[...]

Q: Did Buckley ever change his 1950’s pro-Segregation stance? —Bill

A: See above. He did, strenuously. He debated George Wallace quite strenuously in the late 1960s. It may seem odd, but Buckley, whose parents were both Southerners, actually inherited views on race that were fairly progressive for his time and place.

[...]

Q: How would you characterize in general Mr. Buckley’s relationship with the Jewish American community? What about his relationship with leading American Jews (e.g. the Kristols) commonly identified as neocons? —Michael Presant

A: In the 1950s, when American conservatism still bore the taint of anti-Semitism, Bill Buckley moved forcefully to erase it. One important step was banning anti-Semitic writers from National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Many of his allies included Jews — from Marvin Liebman, the publicist who helped organize conservative rallies and events, through his great friend Richard M. Clurman (of Time magazine) and also, as you point out, neoconservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Buckley was also a champion of Henry Kissinger, who remained one of his dearest friends.

[...]

Q: Who were the primary influences on William Buckley while he attended Yale? —Greg Akiki

A: The most formative influence was a brilliant and eccentric political scientist, Willmoore Kendall, who later became a mentor to the young Garry Wills, when he wrote for National Review in the late 1950s to early 60s. For interesting portraits of Kendall, read Wills’s memoir “Confessions of a Conservative,” and also Saul Bellow’s short story, “Mosby’s Memoirs,” whose protagonist was closely modeled on Kendall.

[...]

Q: I understand that in the 1960s Mr Buckley publicly backed Southern segregationists even though he crusaded against anti-Semitism. How did he reconcile this difference in his own mind? Did he ever formally renounce or apologize for his backing of the segrationists? —John Fuller

A: In the 1950s Buckley did indeed support segregationists in the South but later changed his views. He wept when he learned of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black children. Later he became an admirer of Martin Luther King.

[...]

Q: How did the Brown v. Board of Education case fit into Buckley’s decision to begin National Review? —Patience

A: Not at all. The magazine was founded to promote anti-Communism and the free market and also to defend congressional Red-hunting inquiries of the kind led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The magazine did take a pro-segregationist stand but this did not figure importantly in its core ideology.

[...]

Q: What was William F. Buckley’s post-Yale role with the C.I.A.? —Dave C.

A: His period in the C.I.A. was short-lived. In the summer and fall of 1950 he worked undercover in Mexico City, under the guidance of E. Howard Hunt (later of Watergate fame). Buckley was involved in two projects — overseeing the distribution of a book, “The Yenan Way,” by Eudocio Ravines, a Chilean ex-Communist, and giving cash to university students allied with the “non-Communist left.” As soon as Buckley’s first book, “God and Man at Yale,” was published in 1951, to great controversy, Buckley terminated his C.I.A. connection. He and his wife Pat left Mexico City for New York.

[...]

Q: Which ideological opponents of his do you feel he had the highest respect for? —Paul

A: Another great question. He treasured good writing: Galbraith’s literary style, Murray Kempton’s lyrical strophes, Mailer’s gift for metaphor. He once said, “Mailer is a genius. I am not.”

[...]

Q: What was Buckley’s relationship to and view of Allan Bloom, Harry Jaffa and other students of Leo Strauss? —John Ray

A: I don’t know if he was acquainted with Bloom. He was quite close to Jaffa — who like him was a Goldwater supporter. Buckley’s first intellectual mentor, Willmoore Kendall, was very close to Strauss and passed Straussian ideas along to Buckley.

[...]

Q: Which secret society did William F. Buckley belong to at Yale, and did he ever master the harpsichord?

A: He was “the last man tapped” for Skull and Bones his year — the most prestigious honor for any incoming Bonesman. Master the harpsichord? Well, no. But he was a good amateur and took lessons for most of his life, even past the age of 80.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2...iam-f-buckley/
 
Old March 10th, 2008 #5
Mike Parker
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SO LONG BILL BUCKLEY

So-called ‘conservative’ passes away,
but legacy of ugly deeds survives

An examination of the life of the late William F. Buckley is an education on how “conservatives” evolved into today’s “neocons” and became internationalists who thirst for wars of imperialism. While we regret his death, the truth must prevail. Popular author Michael Collins Piper, who witnessed firsthand some of Bill Buckley’s shenanigans, delivers a review of Buckley which you will find is at odds with many of the mainstream obituaries you may have already seen.

Bill Buckley's Strange
History Revealed

By Michael Collins Piper

William F. Buckley Jr. is dead. The demise of the ex-CIA man-turned-pundit sparked a shameless wave of over-the-top media encomiums for the longtime publisher of National Review, a so-called “conservative” journal many suspected had been (from the beginning) no more than a stylish—if boring—CIA “front.”

The nature of the lavish media praise for Buckley was best reflected by the liberal NewYork Times which went so far as to claim—in all seriousness—that “people of many political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form” because—among other things—Buckley rode motorcycles.

However, despite the hagiography of Buckley in the press, the full story of his intrigue has yet to be told. Although accounts of his record were much on target—in one respect—what was not said about Buckley is more revealing.

The fact is—as The New York Times asserted— Buckley did weave “the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism” during the 1950s. Using National Review as his forum, Buckley did, as the Times said, help “define the conservative movement.” Claiming Buckley’s “greatest achievement was making conservatism . . . respectable in liberal post-World War II America,” the Times cited a Buckley crony as declaring that, without Buckley, “there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”

What all of this means is that in the early 1950s, Buckley and a clique of associates appointed themselves the new conservative leaders—pompously calling themselves “responsible conservatives”— and loudly announced (with enthusiastic media support) that all who dared to advocate old-fashioned America First nationalism or to oppose U.S. meddling in endless wars abroad were no longer even to be considered “conservative” at all.

The “Buckleyites” pronounced themselves boldly internationalist, intent on “winning” the Cold War, even at the expense of a hot war. They had no desire to bring American troops home to protect America. Instead, they were venturing out on a global imperium, and old-style conservative concerns about big government. That socialism (big government) must be the inevitable consequence of military adventurism was pushed aside.
Buckley acknowledged on Jan. 25, 1952 when he wrote in Commonweal, a liberal journal, that he was willing to support what he called “Big Government” for “the duration [of the Cold War]” because—he said—only “a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” could ensure total victory over the communist menace.

The new conservatism was not new at all. In fact, Buckley’s “contribution” to conservatism was introduction of a host of longtime Trotskyite (Marxist) communists as voices for “modern conservative thought.”

Foremost among them, James Burnham, only 20 years earlier, had been Jewish Bolshevik Leon Trotsky’s “chief spokesman” in American “intellectual” circles. Then, during World War II, Burnham worked for the Zionist- and Trotskyite-infested Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, which later recruited Buckley while he was at Yale. After the war, when Soviet strongman (and Trotsky foe) Josef Stalin began moving against the Zionists and the Trotskyites (who were, in most respects, one and the same) Burnham became a so-called “anti-communist liberal.”

The term “anti-communist liberal”—in the Cold War—was effectively a euphemism for describing Trotskyites in America. But, led by Burnham and Buckley, the Trotskyites began transmogrifying, through the venue of National Review, into what ultimately are the now-infamous “neo-conservatives” of today.

While traditional American anti-communists wanted to contain Stalinist Russia, the Trotskyites wanted all-out war, so much so that one of Burnham’s leading critics was American historian Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes, who described Burnham’s shrill calls for war as being “most dangerous and un-American.” In fact, Burnham—this Trotskyite—was the chief theoretician for National Review for more than 20 years.

Another Buckley collaborator was Marvin Liebman— yet another “ex-communist”—who had smuggled arms for the Irgun terrorist gang that killed Christians, Muslims and even Jews in the drive to establish a Zionist state in Palestine. While Buckley ran the “idea” end of the carefully orchestrated seizure of the conservative movement, Leibman ran the business end, assembling massive lists of conservative Americans, most of whom had no idea their movement was being manipulated by forces that were hardly “conservative” at all.

That Buckley should traffic with a figure in the Zionist underground may have involved ulterior motives: Buckley’s father—a rich oil man—was later revealed to have lucrative petroleum interests in Israel, among other places. In addition, the late conservative Chicago Tribune columnist Walter Trojan, a highly respected name in journalism, told intimates that although Buckley was widely touted as a devout “Irish Catholic,” Buckley’s mother was from a German-Jewish family in New Orleans named Steiner that converted to Roman Catholicism, something common for many New Orleans Jewish families in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Whatever his heritage, young Buckley—enthusiastically encouraged by friendly promoters in the major media—authoritatively began to declare what was permissible for American conservatives to discuss: Anyone who raised questions about such issues as Zionism or the role of big international money in dictating the course of world affairs was a “conspiracy theorist” who was “beyond the pale” and delving into “fever swamps” from which Buckley vowed it was his singular mission to exterminate such pestilence, in particular that of “anti-Semitism.”

Considering all of this, Buckley watchers were not surprised that “WFB” was invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations, the New York affiliate of the London-based Royal Institute of International Affairs, the foreign policy-making arm of the Rothschild banking empire. Many conservatives tried to explain Buckley’s CFR membership by saying Buckley would be a good counterpoint to the predominantly “liberal” point of view perceived to reign at CFR headquarters.

But when Buckley popped up in Cesme, Turkey in 1975 at the conclave of the even more powerful international Bilderberg group, established under the auspices of the Rothschild empire and its junior partners, the Rockefeller family, more people began to get the big picture. And, when Buckley advocated legalizing marijuana and giving away the American canal in Panama, a lot of conservatives were apoplectic.

However, there were traditional conservatives who were able to withstand the Trotskyite-Zionist onslaught of the Buckley organism poisoning the conservative movement. That’s why a particular Buckley target was the expanding populist movement surrounding Liberty Lobby, founded by Willis Carto in 1955. Buckley was incensed that Liberty Lobby was growing exponentially with grass-roots support, whereas his publication received a substantial base of its subscriptions from purchases made by U.S. government propaganda agencies such as the Voice of America and U.S. propaganda libraries around the world.

When Buckley published a 1971 smear of Carto, sworn testimony later revealed that a primary source for the smear was syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Along with his mentor, the late Drew Pearson, Anderson had bragged that much of the garbage they peddled came from theAnti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a known conduit for Israel’s spy agency, the Mossad. Pearson’s own ex-mother-in-law, newspaper publisher Cissy Patterson, once called Pearson “both undercover agent and mouthpiece for the ADL.”

After Liberty Lobby launched an extended investigation of Buckley and his affairs, some details (but not all of them) were published in The Spotlight, Buckley then filed a libel suit against Liberty Lobby in 1980.

And—not coincidentally—this came not long after Buckley’s longtime friend and former colleague in the CIA station in Mexico City, E. Howard Hunt, one of the former Watergate burglars, had filed his own lawsuit against Liberty Lobby.

Not only was the CIA providing Hunt with money and attorneys, but Buckley was helping fund Hunt’s lawsuit, even as Buckley was waging his own legal assault on the populist institution.

In the end, in 1985—under the skilful defense of attorney Mark Lane—Hunt’s lawsuit was dealt a devastating defeat, as later described in Lane’s best-selling book, Plausible Denial as well as this writer’s Final Judgment. The jury concluded—just as The Spotlight had said—that there had been CIA involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that Hunt had somehow been involved. Although Hunt denied under oath that he had any knowledge of any conspiracy to kill Kennedy, he later admitted, in a deathbed confession publicized by his own sons, that he did have foreknowledge of the impending assassination.

And, for the record, it should be noted that there were published allegations that Buckley himself may have had some role in the JFK conspiracy.
In any event, not long after Hunt’s lawsuit was scuttled, Buckley’s case against Liberty Lobby came to trial. Although Buckley sued for millions of dollars, the jury awarded Buckley only a dollar (plus $1,000 in punitive damages). When the verdict was announced, a Buckley supporter in the courtroom burst into tears.

Buckley and his cronies may have had the last laugh, however. A CIA intriguer with ties to operations of Israel’s Mossad later orchestrated another legal case against Liberty Lobby that led to its destruction in 2001 at the hands of a federal judge (himself tied to Mossad intrigue). One of the individuals helping fund that lawsuit was longtime Buckley associate, ex-priest and best-selling author Malachi Martin, who—when not penning articles for Buckley—was writing for the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine.

Prior to that Martin had acted as a destructive Zionist agent inside the Second Vatican Council during the early 1960s, a role exposed by such diverse writers as the late Revilo P. Oliver, Michael A. Hoffman II, and Lawrence Patterson of Criminal Politics magazine. [See Michael Collins Piper’s The Judas Goats for the entire story.—Ed.]

Buckley is gone, but his ugly legacy remains.

http://www.mikepiperreport.com/Artic..._Revealed.html

Last edited by Mike Parker; March 10th, 2008 at 08:19 AM.
 
Old March 14th, 2008 #6
Alex Linder
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MARCH 12, 2008

William F. Buckley and the damage done
A Tale of Two Rights


BY JACK HUNTER

The recent death of conservative commentator William F. Buckley reminded me of when I lived in Boston in the mid-1990s, when, for lack of a better term, I became a "born-again" conservative.

Although I already considered myself a conservative, one day I came across The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I thought it might be worth a look. It changed my life.

Kirk outlined a conservative tradition steeped in the philosophy of everyone from English statesman Edmund Burke to poet T.S. Eliot; he even devoted an entire chapter to Southern conservatism with an emphasis on John C. Calhoun. Kirk emphasized caution and prudence over systematic ideology, tradition and custom over radical change, and the particularity of family and community over abstract concepts like "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat."

The conservatism of which Kirk wrote is now called the "Old Right." Its followers stressed the root notion of conservatism — conservation.

The Old Right believed that big government would have a corrosive effect on constitutional liberties and would hurt communities by erasing local custom and culture through federal dictates. The followers of this political philosophy also believed that big business would displace local economies and that collaborations between big business and big government would lead to the militarization of society and a war industry more concerned with profit than the national interest. The Old Right also stressed environmental stewardship and "agrarian" values, believing that the bottom line should never take precedent over the most conservative of material goods — the land itself.

Today, many of these concerns would place the Old Right on the contemporary left. The modern mainstream right no longer poses any serious challenge to big government — in fact, it often aids the expansion of big government. It also considers the advancement of corporate capitalism to be more important than protecting the community or the environment and sees war and never-ending military expansion as the greatest of American ideals.

President Woodrow Wilson's mission to make the world safe for democracy through foreign intervention was considered by the Old Right to be a utopian fantasy, which betrayed the Founding Fathers' intentions and radically altered American life forever. Today, the descendants of the Old Right, the paleoconservatives, continue to fight against the Democrat Wilson's grand scheme of "global democracy" as it's carried on by President George W. Bush and the GOP.

The Old Right also viewed Franklin Roosevelt as a villain. But now right-wingers like William Bennett and Newt Gingrich openly praise FDR and the New Deal and denounce those who dare to question the conservative credentials of America's biggest big government president.

The prominence of the Old Right continued until about the mid-1950s with the founding of National Review by William F. Buckley. While Old Right thinkers like Kirk, Richard Weaver, Ludwig Von Mises, and others dominated the fast-rising conservative journal, with success came corruption. In 1956, Buckley declared in a famous commentary that conservatives should accept big government, military expansion, and the modern state inherited from Roosevelt and others in order to defeat the Soviet Empire. Once that objective was accomplished, conservatives could return to the business of dismantling government, promoting and preserving American culture, and fidelity to the Constitution.

This was not a hard sell to make to the Beltway and Manhattan-based conservatives hungry for respectability, and many were quick to follow Buckley's lead as they happily embraced what Old Right libertarian Murray Rothbard called the "welfare-warfare" state.

Today, prominent paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul often seem like odd men out on the right, simply because they have kept the faith and insist on pursuing conservatism's original mission. Buckley, a man with Old Right roots who should have known better, allowed the movement that he changed more than anyone to change him. Today, the old liberalism of Wilson and FDR masquerades as conservatism, while full-blown socialism is allowed to flourish under the more marketable banner of liberalism. The "new" Old Right, paleoconservatism, is alive and well in journals like Buchanan's The American Conservative, Chronicles magazine, and popular websites like LewRockwell.com, but you would never know of their existence by reading magazines like National Review or neoconservative journals like The Weekly Standard, or by watching their media cohorts on FOX News.

Despite any positive contributions, this is the true legacy of William F. Buckley. By moving the conservative movement to the left, Buckley moved the whole of American politics to the left. He did not elevate conservatism. He repackaged liberalism and sold it as conservatism. And far from making conservatism respectable, Buckley did his best to make it invisible.

Catch Southern Avenger commentaries every Tuesday and Friday at 7:50 a.m. on the "Morning Buzz with Richard Todd" on 1250 AM WTMA.

http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/g...id=oid%3A42026
 
Old March 23rd, 2008 #7
Mike Parker
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March 20, 2008

Buckleyism: The Harmless Persuasion

By Tom Piatak

[See also William F. Buckley, Jr., RIP—Sort Of, by Peter Brimelow, and OK, William F. Buckley Helped Create The Modern Conservative Movement—But What Did It Conserve? By Marcus Epstein]

In a seminal essay in his book Beautiful Losers, Sam Francis dubbed neoconservatism "the harmless persuasion". Francis argued that, far from being a staunch opponent of liberalism, neoconservatism was merely "the right wing of the New Class". Francis maintained that the neoconservatives were unable to make a definitive break with the New Class because they were the "products, socially and intellectually, of the northeastern urban academic establishment" and that "[i]f there is a future for the American Right, it lies in the heartland of Middle America".

I was reminded of Francis’ essay as I read the many glowing tributes given William F. Buckley by the left. To be sure, some of these tributes may best be seen as reflections of Buckley’s undoubted charm, wit, and eloquence, but something else was at work, too. Almost all of them praised Buckley for ridding conservatism of its undesirables, and for making it "respectable", a synonym for harmless in this context.

Then there was the dog that didn’t bark: One of the tributes to Buckley came from Christopher Hitchens, who normally reacts to the death of anyone who had opposed his own brand of leftism with vicious calumny, as shown by his posthumous attacks on John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan, and even Bob Hope. But instead of this customary rancor, Hitchens praised Buckley for having

"picked an open fight with the John Birch Society, taken on the fringe anti-Semites and weirdo isolationists of the Old Right, and helped to condition the Republican comeback of 1980. Was he really, as he had once claimed, yelling ‘stop’ at the locomotive of history, or was he a closet ‘progressive?’" [A Man of Incessant Labor, Weekly Standard, March 10, 2008]

(My emphasis).

One cannot imagine Hitchens asking such a question about Sam Francis, or Peter Brimelow, or Steve Sailer, or Pat Buchanan, or any other conservative who continued "Standing athwart history, yelling Stop" after National Review’s policy changed to "Standing athwart history, crying ‘Uncle’".

Despite its real and significant contributions during the Cold War, Buckleyism has been flawed, from the start, by its need to be seen as "respectable". Given the ascendancy of liberalism in American politics, the price of respectability for conservatives is an acceptance of the premises of liberalism—especially the premises of egalitarianism and democratism—and a willingness to wage war against those further to the right. Although Buckleyism did not fully accept the premises of liberalism until the movement was finally co-opted by the neocons, he was always willing to wage war against those further to the right.

Of course, some of those from whom Buckley sought to distance himself and his magazine were genuinely distasteful. But many merely had a different vision of conservatism than Buckley—such as the "weirdo isolationists" mentioned by Hitchens.

And there is a difference between refusing to associate with someone of whom you disapprove, and seeking to destroy that person politically and even professionally. All too often, Buckley sought to destroy those of whom he disapproved on the right. Indeed, one of the last things he wrote was a piece for Commentary in which he boasted of having administered a "fatal" wound to the John Birch Society, a group that is neither racist nor anti-Semitic but that did disagree with Buckley over Vietnam. [Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me, March 2008, and see Buckley's "5,000-word excoriation of Welch:" The Question of Robert Welch, February 13, 1962 (PDF)]

Even when the views Buckley opposed were repulsive, he employed tactics against those further to his right he never used against the left. Thus he decreed that no one who continued to write for the American Mercury could write for National Review, even if the writer did not at all share the attitudes to Jews of other writers at the Mercury and even if what he wrote was in fact blameless. Significantly, no such restrictions were in place for the New York Times, Washington Post, or New Republic—publications that have caused far more damage to America than the John Birch Society or a fringe publication, no matter how repulsive, ever could.

To take just one example important to me as a Catholic—the faith that Buckley himself professed—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic helped lay the groundwork for legalizing abortion in this country. They have remained unstinting advocates of a "right" that Buckley believed, correctly in my opinion, has cost millions of American lives. Yet, since those journals are the very font of respectability, no NR contributor was looked at askance for writing for them, much less prohibited for writing for NR on account of such associations. Indeed, NR has always been open to writers who favor abortion, and arguments favoring abortion have even appeared in its pages.

Buckleyism has always been far more comfortable with "respectable" liberals than with disreputable rightists. Is it any wonder that American society has moved inexorably leftward during the time when Buckleyism has been the authorized voice of the conservative opposition?

The Buckleyite purges had another unfortunate effect as well. By doing such things as holding writers accountable for things others wrote, Buckleyism has contributed to the erosion of free and unfettered debate in America, the type of debate Americans once thought of as a birthright and is now all too rare across the political spectrum. Any movement that celebrates itself for its purges is bound to move in that direction. Once someone was deemed unfit for the readers of National Review, such as the eminent Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, his disappearance from its pages was only slightly less total than the persons airbrushed out of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, no matter how valuable his contributions were after the excommunication.

As a result of Buckley’s influence, "movement conservatism" has become progressively obsessed with orthodoxy. Epithets took the place of analysis and people and ideas were far too often judged on the basis of their associations and not their merits. Conservatives rightly complain of the stultifying strictures of political correctness. But the tools employed by the PC enforcers to silence their opponents on the right are not all that different from the tools Buckley used to silence his opponents on the right. One example involving VDARE.COM: the extraordinary continuing refusal of Free Republic honcho Jim Robinson to allow postings of VDARE.COM articles because he viewed Steve Sailer’s discussion of the GOP’s need to mobilize the white vote as “racist”—even though this is in fact how Karl Rove won the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections for George Bush.

Buckleyism’s unquenchable thirst for respectability no doubt stemmed, in part, from the same northeastern roots that Francis ascribed to the neoconservatives. But this was compounded by the movement’s attempt to model itself after Edmund Burke. To be sure, Burke was a great man, and he tells us much about the things we wish to conserve and why we should wish to conserve them. But Burkeanism offers little guidance on how to conserve such "permanent things" in contemporary America.

As Sam Francis argued: "The basic flaw of the Burkean model is that we no longer live in the 18th Century, when a relatively conservative aristocracy prevailed". In our day, by contrast, "the people and forces now in power in this country—in government, the culture, and Big Business—are the enemies of the real America and the real civilization of the West". Deference to contemporary elites can only lead to a continued leftward drift in politics and culture. The task for conservatives today is to devise strategies to supplant those elites—instead of worrying about appearing "respectable" to them.

Buckley’s greatest political failing, of course, was his relationship to the neoconservatives. Buckley began by inviting them into his magazine, and ended by virtually ceding that magazine to them, and eventually allowing them to expel from National Review all conservatives of whom they disapproved.

I first became aware of the baleful influence of the neocons as a result of attacks on one of the finest writers ever associated with the magazine, Joe Sobran, and on the most promising conservative candidate for president since Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan.

Despite all the ink spilled over Buckley’s opposition to anti-Semitism, my own sense was that something other than moral rigor was at work when Buckley joined these neocon attacks. Not only was Buckley’s analyis of Sobran and Buchanan unpersuasive, but when Buckley first acted to clip Joe Sobran’s wings in 1986, he commented, bizarrely, on the relative retaliatory prowess of blacks, Jews, and American Indians. [This was repeated in In search of anti-semitism, National Review, December 30, 1991(PDF)] If what a writer produces is offensive to another group, what difference should that group’s political power make—if the concern is really over the content deemed offensive rather than the political power?

The effect of Buckley’s failure was calamitous. Pat Buchanan has been right about almost every major issue facing America since the end of the Cold War, from the necessity of controlling immigration, to the dangers posed by multiculturalism and political correctness, to the wisdom of staying out of the quagmire of Mideast politics, to the need to defend American sovereignty, American jobs, and the American middle class. If Buckley had decided to embrace Buchanan rather than attack him, these ideas, rather than neoconservatism, might today characterize the American right. It is possible that Buchanan might even have gained the presidency.

Instead, Buckley’s neocon friends congratulated him on yet another purge. And the attack on Buchanan helped pave the way for a conservative movement now defined in large measure by the disastrous George W. Bush, the neoconservative president par excellence, and soon to be effectively defined by the media’s favorite "conservative", John McCain. Indeed, Buckley contributed to McCain’s presidential campaign. And his son Christopher recently defended McCain in the New York Times, [The Manchurian Conservative, February 19, 2008], scorning conservatives opposed to McCain’s embrace of amnesty and writing that "It would be interesting…to hear from Mr. Limbaugh, Ms. Coulter, and Mr. Hannity whether they’ve ever availed themselves of the services of illegal immigrants"—apparently believing that no one could go through life without the "services of illegal immigrants."

Actually, there are tens of millions of us outside of the younger Buckley’s elitist cocoon who make it through the day just fine without "the services of illegal immigrants". We’re called Americans.

An op-ed in the New York Times attacking conservatives for refusing to agree with liberals—what a fitting tribute to what Buckleyism has unfortunately become!

There were curious fragmentary signs at the end of his long life that Buckley might be regretting the course he had taken. Buckley wrote of his opposition to the Iraq War, and declared that George W. Bush was not a conservative. For his heresy on Iraq, Buckley was even upbraided by Norman Podhoretz on a National Review cruise.

On reading of Podhoretz’s graceless attack on Buckley, I felt sorry for him.

But, sadly, he had no one but himself to blame.

Tom Piatak (email him) writes from Cleveland, Ohio.

http://www.vdare.com/piatak/080320_buckleyism.htm
 
Old March 23rd, 2008 #8
Mike Parker
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In search of anti-semitism: what Christians provoke what Jews? Why? By doing what? - And vice versa - Cover Story

William F. Buckley, Jr.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...11810753/print
 
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