Conservatives Off the Beam

Patrick Buchanan, editor emeritus of the American Conservative, has been, I think, a fine writer. At one time he looked like a strong and sensible voice in the right/mainstream of US conservatism. However, he is now going further and further off the beam, at the cost of not only his own credibility but that of conservatism in a wider sense.

The American Conservative now has many positions indistinguishable from those of the far Left. In the issue of May 7, 2007, rapturously reviewing the book Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy,by Andrew Cockburn, Martin Sieff wrote:

“Andrew Cockburn, for more than 20 years one of the most magnificently politically incorrect mavericks of English-language journalism, has now rectified the incompetence, laziness, and plain servility of the mainstream American media with this invaluable new book.”

There are some extraordinary linkages here: Andrew Cockburn is one son of the Stalinist Claude Cockburn. With his brothers he was largely responsible for Counterpunch, a magazine which publishes work by such good ol’ boys as Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill (who called the victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns”) and by no means least that dear old patriarch and embodiment of all the values true American conservatives cherish, Fidel Castro. In June 4, 2007, Buchanan wrote in the American Conservative, not in praise of, but as part of an attack on, George Bush:

“Estonia has just enraged Moscow by removing a World War II statue of a Red Army soldier and the remains of 14 soldiers from the heart of Tallinn to a suburban cemetery. The perceived insult has ignited anti-Estonian demonstrations in Russia. Bush’s response? He has invited the Estonian president to the White House.”

This is an alleged American conservative siding with Putin’s Russia as a victim of bullying Estonian provocation! And castigating the American President for offering Estonia a possible gesture of moral support! Has Buchanan no idea why the Estonians might not want reminders of the terrors and atrocities of Red Army occupation polluting their city? This article concludes:

“A first order of business of the next president should be to repair the damage this crowd has done to Russian relations. And the way to begin is by getting NATO out of Russia’s front yard. Respect Russia’s turf, as we would like her to respect ours.”

The suggestion here is that there is no qualitative or moral difference between the USA and Russia. Buchanan’s view of world history appears strange to say the least. Writing in Human Events, May 19, 2008, Buchanan claimed:

“Addressing the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth, Bush said those who say we should negotiate with Iran or Hamas are like the fools who said we should negotiate with Adolf Hitler. ‘As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared, “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement …’
“Again, Bush has made a hash of history. Appeasement is the name given to what Neville Chamberlain did at Munich in September 1938. Rather than fight Germany in another great war—to keep 3.5 million Germans under a Czech rule they despised—he agreed to their peaceful transfer to German rule. With these Germans went the lands their ancestors had lived upon for centuries, German Bohemia, or the Sudetenland. Chamberlain’s negotiated deal with Hitler averted a European war … German tanks, however, did not roll into Poland until a year later, Sept. 1, 1939. Why did the tanks roll? Because Poland refused to negotiate over Danzig, a Baltic port of 350,000 that was 95 percent German and had been taken from Germany at the Paris peace conference of 1919, in violation of Wilson’s 14 Points and his principle of self-determination. Hitler had not wanted war with Poland. He had wanted an alliance with Poland in his anti-Comintern pact against Joseph Stalin.
“But the Poles refused to negotiate. Why? Because they were a proud, defiant, heroic people and because Neville Chamberlain had insanely given an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland. If Hitler invaded, Chamberlain told the Poles, Britain would declare war on Germany.
“From March to August 1939, Hitler tried to negotiate Danzig. But the Poles, confident in their British war guarantee, refused. So, Hitler cut his deal with Stalin, and the two invaded and divided Poland.”

Here loathing of Bush (and Britain) turns into a sort of defence of Hitler’s attack on Poland—as if the patient statesman was thwarted in his legitimate desires by irrational Polish pig-headedness and “pride”—the Poles should have given Hitler what he wanted, after which, presumably, all would have been well.

That is, the Poles refused to give up their only port and naval base to a dictator who had already let it be known that he saw them as sub-human, and who had already destroyed civil liberties in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Hitler’s plans were always that Poland would be crushed and its population reduced to serfdom or exterminated. The British guarantee to Poland, far from being “insane”, actually sealed Hitler’s doom: though Britain could not help Poland directly, it meant Hitler could not move east without a war in the west as well—which ultimately destroyed him. And does any sane student of history think that if the Poles had given Hitler Danzig he would have been satisfied? (Except for the purpose of destroying the Poles, Hitler didn’t even need Danzig. And he showed little concern for that allegedly 95 per cent German population when he began bombing and shelling it.) Is it believable that any “negotiation” other than complete surrender would have satisfied him? Or that simply allowing Hitler to peacefully digest Poland, settle Reichsdeutschers in this newly-acquired Lebensraum and generally build-up defences in depth, including munitions factories beyond the range of Western bombers, would have helped even America in the long run? Also the question of the fate of Poland’s Jewish population is not entirely irrelevant. Even setting aside these details it is not, I submit, possible for a normal person who knows anything of what happened to Poland in the Second World War to read this passage without being simply revolted by it.

On March 17, 1939, following Hitler’s seizure of the post-Munich remnant of Czechoslovakia, and a fortnight before the guarantee to Poland, Chamberlain had said: “One thing I would not sacrifice for peace, and that is liberty.” Churchill, probably as close as he was capable of coming to despair before he heard Chamberlain’s words, recorded how surprised and heartened he was by this. It seems strange that one apparently claiming to be the heir of the American founding fathers and the guardian of American traditions could not find one word of approval for such a sentiment.

Note, too, the omission of any mention of the fact that appeasement at Munich, which Buchanan makes sound rather wise and just, gave Hitler the Skoda armaments works, the biggest in Europe after Krupp, which supplied up to 40 per cent of the Wehrmacht’s tanks in the attack on the West in 1940. There was some realpolitik case for Chamberlain’s actions at Munich—domestic pacifist and leftist pressures had left Britain unprepared for war and he used the year gained to rectify this as far as possible—though Hitler, who was also unprepared at the time of Munich, did the same and more—but this is not it. Whether a war in 1938 would have been better, or if Hitler had backed down if defied, or been overthrown after the humiliation of a backdown, is something we will never know.

Buchanan’s recent Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World describes Kristallnacht as “an historic blunder”—evidently nothing morally worse—and makes the claim with actual pride that: “Though derided as isolationists, the America First patriots kept the United States out of the war until six months after Hitler had invaded Russia.” America First was isolationist with anti-Semitic overtones. It was not a Nazi movement but was objectively an ally of Hitler, and it was not its fault Christian civilisation survived. (Also, last time I looked, the West hadn’t actually lost the world.)

What an achievement to praise the “patriots” of America First for! So much more time for Hitler to murder the Jews and Catholic Poland, so much more time to digest the industrial assets of France and other conquered countries, so much more time for sinking British ships and bombing British cities, for producing U-boats, for Britain to become bankrupt and exhausted, to bring war and terror to Greece and the Balkans, so much more time, if he had used it, for Hitler to develop nuclear weapons and rockets capable of reaching America. Before America came into the war, Hitler was going to win, to the ultimate disaster of America as well as the rest of the world. There is the strong temptation to say that anyone who did not see that Nazism was an abomination to be removed from the earth at any cost simply failed as a human being. Reviewing Buchanan’s book in the New York Sun of June 11, 2008, Adam Kirsch said, in part:

“It is a delicious irony that … Patrick J. Buchanan’s new contribution to the flourishing genre of World War II revisionism, should appear in the same season as Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. Never has there been such a clear demonstration of the way ideological extremes tend to converge … Both men have written books arguing that World War II, far from being ‘the good war’ of myth, was an unnecessary folly that Britain and America should never have engaged in. And both have zeroed in on Winston Churchill as the war’s true villain—an immoral, hypocritical, bloodthirsty braggart whose fame is a hoax on posterity … it is ludicrous to suggest that Britain would have been better off allowing Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe. [The point might also be made that if a free hand in Eastern Europe was all that Hitler wanted, why was he diverting hundreds of thousands of tons of steel-production which might otherwise have gone into tanks to build battleships and submarines?] When Hitler did invade the Soviet Union, in June 1941, he came within a hairsbreadth of immediate victory … Had Britain not been in the war at that point, had Hitler been fighting Stalin alone, there is good reason to think that the Wehrmacht would have been in Moscow by the end of the year. At that point, of course, it would have been truly suicidal for Britain to declare war on Germany, and Hitler would have been free to concentrate on invading the British Isles or starving them into submission. Only by getting into the war when it did, even at a very unpropitious moment, did Britain have a chance of ultimate survival … Left to his own devices, Hitler would have completed the genocide of the Jews, made Poland and Ukraine German slave colonies, depopulated Russia, and committed even more horrors against the ‘Christian peoples’ …”

There were other possibilities if America had not entered the Second World War against Hitler and there had, consequently, not been powerful Anglo-American armies in Western Europe in 1944: had Hitler and Stalin proved approximately equally matched, the war between them might have died out in mutual exhaustion when they had no more of other people’s blood to spend, and Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals was utterly devastated and starving, as at the end of the Thirty Years’ War. Or, possibly, Stalin would have triumphed and the war ended with the Red Army reaching the Atlantic. Of these scenarios—Hitler triumphant, Europe destroyed, or Stalin triumphant—which would Mr Buchanan have preferred?

The July 14, 2008, issue of the American Conservative opens with a symposium of its writers on Buchanan’s book and the editorial sneer: “For many Americans, World War II remains the Great Crusade. For George W. Bush, John McCain, and legions of Churchill-worshipping neoconservatives, it is that and more.”

Let us move to more contemporary issues and the American Conservative’s treatment of John McCain. Surely anything calling itself the American Conservative that flippantly mocks McCain’s torture when a North Vietnamese prisoner has taken leave of its judgment—or taken leave of something. If anyone thinks it unbelievable that the American Conservative would do this, I quote an article from the issue of May 19, 2008, by Bill Kauffman (who also contributes to Counterpunch and is another fan of America First), titled: “When the Left was Right.” The phrase “military-brat pathologies”, by the way, is presumably a reference to the fact that McCain comes from a family of US naval officers and grew up with his father on various postings:

“Obama’s friendship—acquaintance?—with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn is about to get extended play as the Republicans contrast Obama’s Weatherfriends with their nominee’s stint in the Hanoi Hilton.
“By his own account, John McCain lived in North Vietnamese captivity longer than anywhere else in his itinerant life. This deracination and the resultant military-brat pathologies on display in McCain will go unexploited by the Democrats, whose nominee-in-waiting and maid-of-dishonor are just as placeless as Carpetbag John … It would never occur to an attack-ad maker that there was anything wrong with rootlessness.”

The thrust of this argument seems to be that McCain’s background and upbringing in naval bases should be used against him as certain alleged previous connections with figures in leftist alleged terrorist movements will allegedly be used by the Right against Obama. Perhaps it might be added that sneering at and ridiculing an American officer for having suffered torture at communist hands as a prisoner of war (McCain cannot raise his arms above his shoulders because he was hung up by them after the bones had been broken. Further, he refused to be repatriated before other prisoners, though this was offered to him as an admiral’s son) and for the previous personal sacrifices of domestic life which his father made serving his country has at least the merit of creative novelty for American conservatism. I haven’t seen any jokes there, yet, about the very amusing hands and face that Air Force Sergeant Henry Erwin was left with after he saved a US aircraft in the Second World War by carrying a burning phosphorous bomb out of it through several corridors, but I suppose there’s always time.

Writing in another patriotically-titled journal, the American Cause, of January 25, 2008, Buchanan claimed McCain was “still babbling on about Smoot-Hawley”. It is a good thing that somebody is. The Smoot-Hawley Act is something that every generation needs reminding of. It was probably the most destructive piece of legislation ever passed in the United States, giving the force of law to the economic ratbaggery which poses a constant danger to civilisation. Apparently inspired by the notion that the best way to get rich was to bankrupt your possible customers, by raising protectionist tariffs it devastated world trade, helped turn a cyclical recession into the Great Depression, and played a considerable role in the demoralisation of democratic capitalism and the rise of communism, fascism, German National Socialism, Japanese militarism and the Second World War. Nor, in the present economic climate, is this attack on free trade a harmless lunatic-fringe obsession like the Flat-Earthism it otherwise resembles. An article in the issue of June 16, 2008, “Lieberman’s Revenge”, attacks Joseph Lieberman for, basically, disloyalty to the Democrats. Lieberman, according to this, “has reneged on his promise and endorsed Republican John McCain, renewing his ideological assault on his old party”. This concludes:

“Lieberman’s wish to see two American political parties with ‘strong national security wings’ is a desire to see dissent from anti-interventionism forever discredited … a McCain victory in November, aided by Lieberman, could be used to frighten Democrats into accepting the neoconservative view of history: that doves will always lose, that America is fundamentally an activist nation. It’s up to Democrats to prove him wrong.”

Didn’t anyone pick up anything a little odd about a magazine founded and edited by a former Nixon, Ford and Reagan speechwriter and former Republican candidate for Presidential nominee, which now devotes about 90 per cent of its space to attacking the Republican Party, accusing a Democrat of party disloyalty?

The American Conservative has been unfailingly critical of the so-called Israeli lobby and US support for Israel. An article in the issue of June 30, 2008, attacking the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference in Washington contained such less-than-charming statements as: “AIPAC’s change of heart cannot be ascribed to the good thinking of American Jews. They’re not thinking at all. They have passed on their full powers of judgment to the Israeli government.”

And now we come to a sort of climax. The following article, on Israeli espionage in America, was published in the American Conservative of June 2, 2008:

“And then there are the movers. Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, New Jersey was largely staffed by Israelis, many of whom had recently been discharged from the Israeli Defense Forces [Most adult Israelis have served in the Israeli defence forces. Israel has universal national service.] As has been widely reported, three movers were photographed celebrating in Liberty State Park against the backdrop of the first collapsing World Trade Center tower. The celebration came 16 minutes after the first plane struck, when no one knew that there had been a terrorist attack and the episode was assumed to be a horrible accident. The owner of the moving company, Dominik Suter, was questioned once by the FBI before fleeing to Israel. He has since refused to answer questions.
“Whether the movers and the art students had jointly pieced together enough information to provide a preview of 9/11 remains hidden in intelligence files in Tel Aviv, but the proximity of both groups to 15 of the hijackers in Hollywood, Florida and to five others in northern New Jersey is suggestive. [Suggestive of what, exactly?] “Speculation about 9/11 aside, it is certain that Urban Moving was involved in an intelligence-collection operation against Arabs living in the United States, possibly involving electronic surveillance of phone calls and other communications.”

No, once this mephitic hare has been started, let’s actually not set speculations about 9/11 aside! Let’s see what’s being insinuated here. First, allegations of Jews celebrating in New York as the towers fell are to be found, similarly lacking supporting evidence, on a number of anti-Israeli websites, but this proves nothing about their truth.

Nor do the words “as has been widely reported” prove anything. Were reporters sitting round watching three men celebrating as the planes crashed into the buildings? And if they were photographed, where are the photographs? Further, if an event has really been “widely reported” by reputable media it is unnecessary to say so: the fact speaks for itself. Further, assuming for the sake of argument some individual Jews or Israelis did rejoice that America now seemed further locked in on Israel’s side there is nothing to suggest that this was Israeli policy or the feelings of all Jews unless all Jews are regarded as collectively guilty for the acts of some, a mindset not entirely novel. Anyway, America was already strongly supporting Israel—asthe American Conservative complained on numerous occasions—and did not need a great atrocity to lock it further in.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that those allegedly rejoicing, if they existed, were Jews or Israelis at all. It might make sense if they were confederates of the hijackers. However, the point about this quotation is its inference, just short of outright statement, that Israel had at least some prior knowledge of 9/11 which it failed to pass on to America. The clock has already struck thirteen but this ratbaggery pushes it further.