← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 18955 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-07-02
2005-07-02 14:26 | User Profile
[I]I think that this article pretty well represents Raimondo's real beliefs and is not just a example of him frantically distancing himself from anti-Semites or folding under pressure... I do not detect that grovelling I'm-so-sorry attitude in this piece.[/I]
[url]http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6472[/url]
[FONT=Georgia] [B]June 29, 2005 [/B]
[SIZE=5]Comrade Aaronovitch Strikes Again [/SIZE]
[SIZE=4]'Former' Stalinist is up to his old tricks [/SIZE]
[B]by Justin Raimondo [/B]
[SIZE=3] David Aaronovitch, formerly a Communist Party youth leader and now the freshest shoot in Britain's bumper crop of Blairite neocons, tried to smear me once before, and I dealt with him here. The Stalinist school of falsification never sleeps, however: its practitioners just keep churning out lies, in the hope that sheer repetition will do the job. So Comrade Aaronovitch is up to his old tricks again, writing now in the Times of London, wherein he pens a screed ostensibly directed against the decision of Britain's Socialist Workers Party to invite one Gilad Atzmon to its "Marxism 2005 festival." Atzmon is an Israeli-born IDF veteran who is now an expatriate jazz musician ââ¬â and an outspoken opponent of Zionism. So outspoken that he routinely suggests that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is "irrelevant," because, after all, in his view, "American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. So far they are doing pretty well for themselves at least." Brought up in a right-wing ultra-Zionist family, Atzmon appears so enamored of his own ability to provoke that he has lost sight of either truth or common sense. This often happens to people who rebel against an orthodoxy: they go in the extreme opposite direction and wind up becoming a caricature of themselves.
In his piece for the Times, Aaronovitch points out that one of Atzmon's "heroes" is a writer named Israel Shamir, who "claims to be a Russian Jew from Jaffa," but is apparently a "Swedish anti-Semite" of indeterminate ethnicity. Having set the stage for his smear, with all this elaborate linkage, Comrade Aaronovitch moves in for the kill:
[I]"Shamir both buys the world plot and has some very strange allies. 'For as long,' he wrote, 'as Richard Perle sits in the Pentagon, Elie Wiesel brandishes his Nobel Prize, Mort Zuckerman owns the USA Today, Gusinsky bosses over Russian TV, Soros commands multi-billions of funds, and Dershowitz teaches at Harvard, we need the voices of (David) Duke, (Justin) Raimondo, (Pat) Buchanan, (Horst) Mahler, (Nick) Griffin and of other anti-bourgeois nationalists.' For those who don't know, Mahler is ex-Baader Meinhof turned neo-Nazi, David Duke is a former leader of Ku Klux Klan, and Nick Griffin is our very own Welshpool Duce."[/I]
When I read this nonsense ââ¬â a prime example of the Stalinist smear technique of making an amalgam out of disparate elements ââ¬â I wondered: Who the heck is Israel Shamir? I Googled him, and one of the first items I came up with were articles attackingââ¬Â¦ me! In a piece entitled "Justin Raimondo Does Not Go Far Enough," Shamir writes:
[I]"I read with embarrassment the windy semi-apology of Raimondo who stresses endlessly that he does not argue with this exalted position of Jews, but only with some people who love Israel too much. Face it, Raimondo: if Gore and Lieberman were to win in the last elections, the Iraqi war still would happen without a single neo-con. If Kerry will win, the war will go on unabated, and the US support of Jewish supremacy in Palestine will actually increase if possible."[/I]
This passage demonstrates two things about Shamir: (1) He knows nothing about me or my views, and (2) he knows nothing about the American antiwar movement, which consists of a large number of Jews as well as Catholics and nonbelievers. I never supported Kerry, or thought his election would change U.S. policy for the better in the Middle East, and support for that war within the administration had nothing to do with putting Jews in an "exalted position," but everything to do with putting the nation-state of Israel in such a position. That Shamir doesn't make any distinction between these two very different motives is what makes him an anti-Semite and sets him very far apart not only from my own views but from the broad antiwar movement as well. Shamir goes on to berate me:
[I]"Raimondo, stop please these usual references to Nazis and their Siegheil calls. You do not have to be a Nazi, for neither Marx not Deutscher were, in order to be against Jewish ideological domination. Jews should be treated as equals, not as some Supreme Beings, whether in the US or in Palestine. The US media should be taken out of their hands and given back to people; AIPAC and ADL registered as foreign-interests lobbyist if not banned altogether; the US universities should stop their preferential treatment of Jews. Journalists involved in the dirty campaign against Mel Gibson and Christianity should be prosecuted for instigating hatred. Then, and only then this horrible anomaly of American political thought will abate. Otherwise, we are doomed to read these apologising explanations who actually instigated the next war, with Iran or Syria, and why it is not anti-Semitic to notice that they are Jews."[/I]
What drivel. This is precisely the position taken by the neocons, and, not coincidentally, is completely in opposition to the facts: most American Jews opposed the Iraq war, and they continue to oppose it. Israel is not "the Jews" ââ¬â it is a nation, with interests unique to itself and policies that are all too often directly counterposed to the interests and beliefs of Jews worldwide. Shamir and the neocons agree, however, that to oppose Israel is to oppose "the Jews." Both find this position useful, for reasons of their own: Shamir, to cater to his deranged constituency of Jew-haters, and the neocons because they are eager to smear anyone who exposes the real catalyst for U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as a bigot.
Shamir is enormously useful to Comrade Aaronovitch and his colleagues in the Smear Brigade: he writes a screed on some obscure Web site that proclaims my work is "music" to his ears, albeit flawed because we aren't singing the same tune, and Aaronovitch conjures up a Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy in which I, David Duke, the head of the racialist British National Party, and an obscure German ex-leftist-turned-neo-Nazi are all comrades in arms. Very convenient ââ¬â and a brazen lie.
Pat Buchanan is a friend of mine, whom I admire tremendously, and I make no apologies for that. Pat's book, A Republic, Not an Empire, is a masterpiece of historical analysis and argumentation, and his single-handed effort to revive the Old Right in America is an achievement that future generations of conservatives will recognize, even if the current one is willfully blind to it. No, I don't agree with everything he says and writes, but what two individuals agree all the time? Only in the Communist Party where Comrade Aaronovitch was once a leading light, and, truthfully, not even there.
However, what I have to do with the likes of David Duke, Nick Griffin, and the founder of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, fer chrissakes, is a mystery to me. Because the addled brain of a nutbar like Shamir puts me in a group of alleged "anti-bourgeois nationalists" hardly makes it so. As a libertarian, I loathe all forms of nationalism, which is nothing more than worship of the State. As a libertarian advocate of radical decentralism, I favor the unlimited right of a community to secede from the nation-state ââ¬â this is the polar opposite of nationalism, bourgeois or otherwise. All this is absolutely clear from my writings.
Furthermore, Shamir's idea that the U.S. government should ban Jewish organizations is grotesque, not only by libertarian standards but by any measure of human decency. As for prosecuting Mel Gibson's critics for "instigating hatred," someone should tell Shamir (and Aaronovitch) that we don't have laws like that in America ââ¬â as they do in England, with the support of left-neocons like Aaronovitch ââ¬â because, you see, we have this thing called "freedom" (or, at least, the vestiges of it). If film criticism is sometimes a transgression against great art, the ludicrous idea of making it a criminal act is something that could only come up in Europe ââ¬â or Hollywood.
I would note that Aaronovitch found it necessary to give his readers short descriptions of Shamir and the other wacko characters I'm supposed to be in bed with, because they're so obscure that most reasonably informed people wouldn't have heard of them. Buchanan, of course, is too well-known to require a capsule biography, and I didn't get one either. Not that I'm exactly famous, but certainly the Web site I work for is, and that was the real target of Aaronovitch's smear.
Aaronovitch is a worm whose slime trail would be beneath notice but for the fact that it illustrates a lesson that needs to be learned by all those who oppose the neoconservative vision [.pdf file] of the U.S. as a world hegemon.
The War Party greatly fears unity among the antiwar forces, in Great Britain as well as in the U.S. If they can succeed in demonizing antiwar conservatives such as Buchanan and a libertarian such as myself, and play on the Left's own caricaturized conception of the Right ââ¬â a caricature based on ignorance and loyalty to an outmoded "left-right" paradigm ââ¬â they can split opponents of America's imperial ambitions and even set them against each other. That's why the War Party is in the driver's seat while 60 percent of Americans say we ought to start withdrawing from Iraq.
Divide and rule.
The headline of Aaronovitch's piece ââ¬â "How Did the Far Left Manage to Slip Into Bed With the Jew-Hating Right?" ââ¬â is an outrageous libel. It tells us everything we need to know about the real target of the author's hatred. Buried amid details about the doings of obscure left-wing grouplets and the pronouncements of people nobody ever heard of is the inference that I am somehow connected to individuals I have never cited, never run on Antiwar.com, and never professed sympathy with, ideologically or otherwise.
If Aaronovitch and the Times are saying that I am a member of the "Jew-hating Right," they had better be able to prove it. I hear the libel laws over there are quite strict ââ¬â and I've always wanted to own a newspaper.
Luckily for them, libertarians consider libel laws a violation of the right of free speech: you don't own your reputation, which exists solely in the minds of others. Yet the burden is still on Aaronovitch and the Times ââ¬â in the name of fairness, and in the interests of their own credibility ââ¬â to either prove this allegation or else withdraw it and apologize.
The War Party is getting desperate. Unhinged by the complete collapse of public support, and hounded by those who insist on recalling the rosy scenarios predicted by advocates of "democratizing" Iraq by force ââ¬â they were supposed to shower us with rose petals, it was going to be a "cake walk," remember? ââ¬â they are flailing about, lashing out at their enemies with the weapon of last resort ââ¬â brazen smears, backed up by nothing but arbitrary assertions and Stalinesque rhetoric. You're bound to see an increase in this as the War Party is further discredited and some of them even face a few, uh, legal problems. Their hysteria is a prelude to their final disintegration, and, as such, it is a good sign. Until they are finally and totally defeated, however, we can only be sure of one thing: it's going to get a lot uglier. [/SIZE]
ââ¬â Justin Raimondo [/FONT]
2005-07-03 03:47 | User Profile
Petr,
Very true: [QUOTE]I think that this article pretty well represents Raimondo's real beliefs and is not just a example of him frantically distancing himself from anti-Semites or folding under pressure... I do not detect that grovelling I'm-so-sorry attitude in this piece.[/QUOTE]
More libertarian foolishness [QUOTE]As a libertarian, I loathe all forms of nationalism... Justin Raimondo [/QUOTE]
Do not forget this article.
Neo-Nazis & Neocons [url]http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j120400.html[/url]
2005-07-03 07:32 | User Profile
I can't, in good conscience, join the crowd of Raimondo-bashers. As we were mobilizing to roll into Iraq and damn the hindmost, he was one of the few voices shouting the plainly-evident truth; that most people put their fingers in their ears so they could later credibly deny having ever heard a thing isn't Raimondo's fault.
That there's as much Justin-baiting as there is, here at OD, is dispiriting but not surprising. Even more than "Nazis", paleos burn bridges, turn on allies and the like-minded, and eat their young with abandon. I guess when you don't [I]really [/I] believe your objectives can ever be attained, infighting over tactics and personalities becomes the Main Event.
I would like to see one recent tradition put into mothballs, though - I am sick of the done-to-death adjective 'Stalinist'. No, I'm not suddenly enamored of Uncle Joe (although, frankly, you can't cede ultimate power to a guy with a mustache [I]that[/I] thick and expect anything other than what you got); it's just that the modifier 'Stalinist' really came into vogue with the ascent of the Jewish neocons. Horowitz, Podhoretz, Glazov et al tossed around 'Stalinist' as though it were an ideological bonafide that lent their claims of 'conservatism' instant credibility, while studiously avoiding turning 'Marxist', 'Leninist', 'Trotskyite' or even 'Zinovievian' into similar all-purpose adjectives one uses before words like 'liar', 'murderer' or 'tyrant'. And [I]forget[/I] about Lazar the Khazar, whose name I doubt has ever once been uttered by these two-fisted Sunshine Patriots in all the reams of neocon agitprop they've mass-excreted in recent years.
Which says, to me at least, that Stalin has been chosen as the Official Demon of Communism mainly because he was the one who sussed out [I]either I bring the hammer down now or these people will suck Mother Russia dry and sell the leftover husk as bulk kindling afterwards[/I].
Think about it: Ziocons never tire of pointing out that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the exact same leftist coin (it doesn't matter that the claim is patently ludicrous - that only makes them keep claiming it, in ever-louder voices). When has a neokahn [I]ever [/I] drawn a parallel between 'leftist' Hitler and an outright Jewish Bolshevik? [U]Never[/U] is when.
[I]Enough [/I] with the "Stalinist"s already. Especially since the pejorative 'Trotskyite' is [I]far [/I] more germane to our situation right now.
2005-07-03 08:43 | User Profile
[FONT=Garamond][FONT=Tahoma][COLOR=Purple][I][B] - "Ziocons never tire of pointing out that Hitler and Stalin were two sides of the exact same leftist coin (it doesn't matter that the claim is patently ludicrous - that only makes them keep claiming it, in ever-louder voices)."[/B][/I][/COLOR][/FONT][/FONT]
Actually this is not THAT ludicrous theory, why, you yourself just argued in your post that Stalin acted like a "Social Nationalist" towards Jewish usurpers!
It has been suggested by also some non-neocons that Stalin was perhaps the most successful "National Socialist" of them all. We Finns have special experiences on how Stalin, in essence, sought to restore the fortunes of the old Czarist Russian empire in Baltic states and in our own country.
Even the brutal treatment of Ukrainians was not ONLY due to Jewish influences but also due the imperial goal of keeping Ukraine firmly as a part of the Russian empire, although squashing dissent with thoroughly more merciless means than the Czar did.
Do you think that so many Ukrainians (like the boxer Vitaly Klitschko) genuinely supported the phony "Orange Revolution" just because they had been fooled by Jews? No, many Ukrainians (especially from the Catholic western part of the country) are still bitter towards Russia and saw Yanukovich as a man of Moscow.
Even Lubomyr Prutylak from "Ukrainian Archive" shares this attitude!
[url]http://www.ukar.org/putin/putin33.html[/url]
Plus, there are some quite "Nazi-like" ethnic cleansings in Stalin's resume as well, like the mass deportations of whole Muslim nations like Crimean Tatars and Chechens to Siberia, although I cannot say with a good conscience that I am so sorry about them...
Petr
2005-07-03 08:53 | User Profile
I don't argue or discount any animus white Europeans harbor towards Stalin. Of [I]course [/I] Stalin was a murderous tyrant.
But I [U]have[/U] noted a tendency among "Jewish conservatives" to zero in on [I]only [/I] Stalin in their converso-like Commie-bashing. "Stalinist lie" is so commonly found in their lexicon it's practically one word by now. Yet I've never seen a lie described by a Jew as either [I]Trotskyite [/I] or [I]Leninist[/I], though...have you? I've also never heard a Jew analogize a particularly heinous act or acts as "Kaganovitchian", either. Funny, that.
And let's face it....Jews haven't exactly gone broke turning [I]their [/I] enemies into [I]our [/I] "monsters", eh?
2005-07-03 09:47 | User Profile
I like Raimondo and regularly contribute to Antiwar.com, even though Raimondo is a libertarian sodomite.
I used to be a libertarian. The argument makes eminent sense if you buy the postulate that people exist only as individuals. If memory serves Ayn Rand's protaganist Roark in the "Fountain Head" said to the jury that "there is no collective brain." I used to believe that, but I'm now convinced that this is simply wrong. Human societies are organisms, and when viewed from a 30,000 foot persepective, the mind of hive is obvious, and indeed proved by computer models to my complete satisfaction.
But the belief that we exist only as individuals is a reasonble assumption, and the truth of the profoundly organismic nature of mankind is not intuitively obvious. But it is true.
So, the problem with Raimondo is that he labors under this notion that human society is simply a collection of individuals who contract with each other. Thus his anti-nationalism (blacks are as much individuals and the Fourth Earl of Sandwich), and his sodomy (freely chosen by consenting adults).
But again all of that falls apart once we realize that individuals are cells in a larger social organism. The live and health of the larger organism is magnified - and the importance of the individual is diminished - with the acceptance of this empirical fact of nature. Nationalism emerges as the very life of the all-important social organism itself, and sodomy is rightly condemned as an individual indulgence destructive of that life.
Our extreme (and demonstrably false) individualsim is the root of our problem.
But that said, Raimondo's heart seems to be in the right place, and his intuition led him to take a stand against the world's power elite. He is an eloquent and dogged defender of world peace, and for that I thank him.
And contribute to his blog.
I urge others to do the same.
2005-07-03 10:07 | User Profile
I believe that true Christianity provides us with a "golden middle road" between ultra-collectivism and ultra-individualism, between statism and anarchism.
The Scriptures establish the rights of an individual - just check out how remarkably libertarian is Moses' decree on the military draft:
[COLOR=Blue][B]Deuteronomy
20:1 When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
20:2 And it shall be, when ye are come nigh unto the battle, that the priest shall approach and speak unto the people,
20:3 And shall say unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them;
20:4 For the LORD your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.
[U]20:5 And the officers shall speak unto the people, saying, What man is there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? let him go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man dedicate it.
20:6 And what man is he that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not yet eaten of it? let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man eat of it.
20:7 And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath not taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man take her.
20:8 And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well as his heart. [/U]
20:9 And it shall be, when the officers have made an end of speaking unto the people that they shall make captains of the armies to lead the people. [/B] [/COLOR]
But on the other hand, the Word of God does not tolerate solipsistic selfishness either:
[COLOR=Red][B]1 Corinthians 10:
23 "Everything is permissible"ââ¬â but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible"ââ¬â but not everything is constructive. 24 N[U]obody [/U] [U]should seek his own good, but the good of others[/U]. 25[/B][/COLOR]
Petr
2005-07-03 10:43 | User Profile
il ragno
But it was Raimondo who started the burning of bridges. [QUOTE]I can't, in good conscience, join the crowd of Raimondo-bashers... That there's as much Justin-baiting as there is, here at OD, is dispiriting but not surprising. Even more than "Nazis", paleos burn bridges, turn on allies and the like-minded, and eat their young with abandon.[/QUOTE]
His article ââ¬ÅNEO-NAZIS AND NEOCONSââ¬Â was an unprovoked attack on Paleoconservatism. His attack was as bad as anything one might find in the Weekly Standard. His claim that Davy Horowitz was working to bring ââ¬ÅNeo-Nazisââ¬Â into the Neocon movement was stupid and idiotic to say the least!
2005-07-03 11:26 | User Profile
Yeah, I know. Wasn't that tied to the short-lived alliance between Davey and Jared Taylor? I forget now.
Lookit....I don't read Justin Raimondo for moral guidance. I read him for his relentless hyperlinking of sources, actually. If you clicked every link of his for the past four years, you'd collate enough evidence to try [I]and [/I] convict Bush and Perle in the Hague. But every anti-empire writer like Raimondo who has publicly traced innumerable smoking guns to Israel and the Jews [I]has [/I] to maintain his viability, and therefore [I]has [/I] to play the game at times and throw the anti-racist mob a bone. [U]Has to[/U]. This is how the game is played and you cannot beat the game and win by being refused admittance to the playing field. I read that article and wrote it off as collateral damage....it's just business, and I never took it personally.
Don't expect perfection from humans, even good guys. Joe Sobran is maybe the most important, and [I]certainly [/I] the most moral, columnist in America the past ten years and he earned the scorn and emnity of many of his diehard readers with that infamous 'what's so wrong with Mexicans?' column. People were actually accusing him of selling out for writing it....it's as if they'd temporarily forgotten he had nothing to sell that ZOG wants - that he'd been sold [I]out [/I] a decade before, by his 'friends', and there was no getting back in for him...not under [I]any [/I] circumstances.
The danger that marginalized/demonized/fringe writers face is that their audience, while much smaller, is much fiercer as well....and much more likely to hold a grudge over any deviation from the 'norm' they've come to rely upon you for. The awareness of those expectations is a kind of censorship - a strong compulsion to self-censorship, actually, and just as noxious as the other kind. Do good deeds cancel out sins? Depends...on the good deeds, and the sins. But I like to think I'm grown up enough to disagree strongly with a column here or there without letting my disagreement invalidate the good that Raimondo and Sobran have both accomplished; and to recognize that I can't bang my wooden spoon on the high chair wailing about 'free speech' if I won't stand for its being exercised by the writers I admire.
2005-07-03 13:39 | User Profile
I personally don't care if Justin is a homosexual and a Paleolibertarain. He not only writes well, he writes the truth. He is an ally.