← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Buster
Thread ID: 20625 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-10-12
2005-10-12 17:30 | User Profile
I always enjoy it when Sobran takes the time to trash, i.e., expose his old boss.
[url]http://www.sobran.com/columns/index.shtml[/url]
2005-10-14 22:53 | User Profile
[quote=Buster]I always enjoy it when Sobran takes the time to trash, i.e., expose his old boss.
[URL="http://www.sobran.com/columns/index.shtml"]http://www.sobran.com/columns/index.shtml[/URL]
It's good,but,there's no slamming of Buckley in the article.
2005-10-14 23:02 | User Profile
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!"
2005-10-14 23:04 | User Profile
"For Fear of the Jews" by Joe Sobran
(Expanded from SOBRAN'S, September 2002, pages 3-6, and taken from a speech given at the IHR Conference held in Los Angeles, June 21-23, 2002.)
[[ Text dropped from the print edition or modified solely for reasons of space appears in square double brackets. ]]
The news that I would be addressing the Institute of
Historical Review came to some people as ... well, news. It was mentioned in the Jewish newspaper FORWARD and on the Zionist WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE. The editors of two conservative magazines called and wrote me to express their concern that I might damage my reputation, such as it is, by speaking to "Holocaust deniers."
I'm not sure why this should matter. Even positing
that I was speaking to a disreputable audience, I expect to be judged by what I say, not whom I say it to. I note that my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet they rarely quote me directly.
Why not? If I am so disreputable myself, I must at
least occasionally say disreputable things. Is it possible that what I say is more cogent than they like to admit?
My enemies are always welcome to quote anything I
say, if they dare. I would say the same things to them, and they may consider my remarks to the IHR as addressed to them too. I wasn't just speaking to "Holocaust deniers," but also to Holocaust believers.
Because I've endured smears and ostracism for my
criticism of Israel and its American lobby, some people credit me with courage. I'm flattered, of course, but this compliment, whether or not I deserve it, implies that it's professionally dangerous for a journalist to criticize Israel. That tells you a lot.
But if I'm "courageous," what do you call Mark Weber
and the Institute for Historical Review? They have been smeared far worse than I have; moreover, they have been seriously threatened with death. Their offices have been firebombed. Do they at least get credit for courage? Not at all. They remain almost universally vilified.
When I met Mark, many years ago, I expected to meet
a raving Jew-hating fanatic, such being the generic reputation of "Holocaust deniers." I was immediately and subsequently impressed to find that he was just the opposite: a mild-mannered, good-humored, witty, scholarly man who habitually spoke with restraint and measure, even about enemies who would love to see him dead. The same is true of other members of the Institute. In my many years of acquaintance with them, I have never heard any of them say anything that would strike an unprejudiced listener as unreasonable or bigoted.
It was his enemies who were raving, hate-filled
fanatics, unable to discuss "Holocaust deniers" in measured language, without wild hyperbole, loose accusation, and outright lies. I began to wonder: if they can't tell the truth about "Holocaust deniers," how can they tell the truth about the Holocaust itself?
Even if the Holocaust had really happened, as I
assumed, maybe it should be studied with a critical rationality most of its believers obviously lacked. After all, even Stalin's crimes might be exaggerated, quite understandably, by his victims. As Milton puts it, "Let truth and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" Even those in error might have something to say, some marginal clarification to offer. Why stop our ears against them?
Why on earth is it "anti-Jewish" to conclude from
the evidence that the standard numbers of Jews murdered are inaccurate, or that the Hitler regime, bad as it was in many ways, was not, in fact, intent on racial extermination? Surely these are controversial conclusions; but if so, let the controversy rage. There is no danger in permitting it to proceed. It might be different if denying the Holocaust could somehow affect the course of events, as the denial of Stalin's crimes by the NEW YORK TIMES in the 1930s helped him to continue committing them. Why is the Institute for Historical Review notorious, while the TIMES, despite its active support of Stalin at the height of his power, remains a pillar of respectability?
The Holocaust has never been a consuming interest of
mine. But as I read the JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL REVIEW over the years, I found in it the same calm virtue of critical rationality I'd found in Mark himself. And it was applied to many other subjects besides the question of whether Hitler had tried to exterminate the Jews.
[[ I'm especially indebted to one fascinating
article on another taboo subject: Abraham Lincoln's long pursuit of the policy of sending former Negro slaves outside the United States. This completely reshaped the book on Lincoln I was writing. I realized that you can't understand Lincoln unless you grasp that he waged the Civil War with a dual goal: to prevent the political separation of North and South, while achieving the racial separation of whites and blacks. His dream was a united white America. He was by no means the color-blind humanitarian we have been taught to revere. ]]
The IHR's mission can't be fairly summed up as
"Holocaust denial." Its real mission is criticism of the suffocating progressive ideology that has infected and distorted the telling of history in our time. But of course its specific skepticism of the standard Holocaust story is regarded as blasphemy, and has earned it the dreaded epithet of "anti-Semitism."
Not long ago the only label more lethal to one's
reputation was that of child molester, but, as many men of the cloth are now discovering, there is this difference: a child molester may hope for a second chance.
There is also another difference. We have a pretty
clear idea what child molestation is. Nobody really knows what "anti-Semitism" is. My old boss Bill Buckley wrote an entire book called IN SEARCH OF ANTI-SEMITISM without bothering to define "anti-Semitism."
At the time I thought this was an oversight. I was
wrong. The word would lose its utility if it were defined. As I observed in my own small contribution to the book, an "anti-Semite" used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.
I doubt, in fact I can't imagine, that anyone
associated with the IHR has ever done harm to another human being because he was Jewish. In fact the IHR has never been accused of anything but thought-crimes.
The same is true of me. Nobody has ever accused me
of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew. My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous "ally" to the United States. As of last September 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct.
If I were to hate Jews en masse, without
distinction, I would be guilty of many things. Obviously I'd be guilty of injustice and uncharity to Jews as human beings. I would also be guilty of willful stupidity. More personally, I'd be guilty of ingratitude to my benefactors -- which Dante, in his INFERNO, ranks the worst of all sins -- since many of my benefactors, in large ways and small, have been Jewish.
Moreover, I would be becoming exactly the man my
Zionist enemies would like me to be; a man like them, in whom ethnic hostilities take priority over all other values and considerations. I would justify them in treating me as an enemy. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I would be helping to justify the state of Israel. I consider that if I fight these people on their terms, they have already won.
What, exactly, is "anti-Semitism"? One standard
dictionary definition is "hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious or racial group." How this applies to me has never been explained. My "hostility" toward Israel is a desire not for war, but for neutrality -- out of a sense of betrayal, waste, and shame. Our venal politicians have aligned us with a foreign country that behaves dishonorably. Most alleged "anti-Semites" would wince if Jews anywhere were treated as Israel treats its Arab subjects. Moreover, Israel has repeatedly betrayed its only benefactor, the United States. I have already alluded to the place Dante reserves for those who betray their benefactors.
These are obvious moral facts. Yet it's not only
politicians who are afraid to point them out; so are most journalists -- the people who are supposed to be independent enough to say the things politicians can't afford to say. In my thirty years in journalism, nothing has amazed me more than the prevalent fear in the profession of offending Jews, especially Zionist Jews.
The fear of the label "anti-Semitic" is a fear of
the power that is believed to lie behind it: Jewish power. Yet this is still pretty much unmentionable in journalism. It's rather as if sportswriters covering pro basketball were prohibited from mentioning that the Los Angeles Lakers were in first place.
[[ In my 21 years at NATIONAL REVIEW, I had a front-
row seat. I watched closely as Bill Buckley changed from a jaunty critic of Israel to what I can only call a servile appeaser. In its early days, the magazine published robust editorials blasting politicians who sacrificed American to Israeli interests in order to pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it was con- sidered risque to suggest that there was a "Jewish vote." Today Bill's magazine supports Israel with embarrassing sycophancy, never daring to intimate that Israeli and American interests may occasionally diverge. It has forgotten its own principles; today it would never dare to publish the editorials written by its great geopoliti- cal thinker of those early days, James Burnham. ]]
There has been a qualitative change that is
downright eerie [[ -- not only in Bill Buckley and NATIONAL REVIEW, but ]] in American conservatism generally. The "fear of the Jews," to use the phrase so often repeated in the Gospel according to John, seems to have wrought a reorientation of the tone, the very principles, of today's conservatism. The hardy skepticism, critical intelligence, and healthy irony of men like James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and the young Buckley have given way to the uncritical philo-Semitism of George Will, Cal Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and of course the later Buckley -- men who will go to any lengths, even absurd and dishonorable lengths, to avoid the terrorizing label "anti-Semite."
It was once considered "anti-Semitic" to impute
"dual loyalty" to Jews -- that is, to assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty between the United States and Israel. This is now passe. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they accused of "anti-Semitism" for doing so? Does this assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!
Once again, it's a practical necessity to *know*
what it would be professional suicide to say. No politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act as if this were the case. And they succeed.
You can read Jewish publications like COMMENTARY for
years, and you'll read interminable discussions about what's good for Israel, but you'll never encounter the slightest suggestion that what's good for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between Israel and the United States. So much for the "canard" of dual loyalty.
[[ The very word "anti-Semite" is reminiscent of the
term "anti-Soviet." It serves a similar function of facilitating imputations of ill-defined guilt.
[[ The strength of Western law has always been its
insistence on definition. When we want to minimize an offense, say murder or burglary, we define it as clearly as possible. We want judge and jury to know exactly what the charge means, not only to convict the guilty but, also, just as important, to protect the innocent.
[[ Clear definitions put a burden of proof on the
accuser, and properly so. If you falsely accuse a man of murder or burglary, not only is he apt to be acquitted -- you may pay a heavy penalty yourself. As a result, few of us are afraid of being charged with murders and burglaries we didn't commit.
[[ By contrast, the Soviet legal system left
prosecutors with a wide discretion in identifying "anti- Soviet" activities. Almost anything irritating to the Soviet state could qualify. An impossible burden of proof lay on the accused; guilt was presumed; acquittals were virtually nonexistent. To be indicted was already to be convicted. Since the charge was undefined, it was unfalsifiable; there was no such thing as a false accusation. As a result, the Russian population lived in fear.
[[ The word "anti-Semitic" functions like the word
"anti-Soviet." Being undefined, it's unfalsifiable. Loose charges of "anti-Semitism" are common, but nobody suffers any penalty for making them, since what is unfalsifiable can never be shown to be false. I once read an article in a Jewish magazine that called the first Star Wars movie "anti-Semitic." I was amazed, but I couldn't prove the contrary. Who could? And of course people in public life -- and often in private life -- fear incurring the label, however guiltless they may be.
[[ If you want to distinguish between the innocent
and the guilty, you define crimes precisely. If, however, you merely want to maximize the number of convictions, increase the power of the accusers, and create an atmosphere of dread, you define crimes as loosely as possible. We now have an incentive system that might have been designed to promote loose charges of "anti- Semitism."
[[ Silly as all this is from a rational point of
view, the label of "anti-Semitism" is deeply feared. It does signify one thing: Jewish hatred. When I became a conservative as a college freshman, in 1965, nearly all Jews were liberals and Jewish intellectuals associated conservatism with "anti-Semitism." Bill Buckley was often depicted as a fascist or crypto-Nazi; given the smears he endured, it's understandable that he should go to great lengths to appear pro-Jewish, even if he somewhat overdid it by abetting smears of his fellow conservatives.
[[ The situation changed somewhat when many Jewish
intellectuals, upset by liberal criticism of Israel, became what were called "neoconservatives." This term implied no deep adherence to conservative principles, but only the adoption of a few ad hoc principles useful to Zionism, with no basic departure from New Deal liberalism insofar as it was useful to Zionism. "Neoconservatism" was really a sort of "kosher" conservatism.
[[ A few incidents from my years at National Review
may illustrate the point.
[[ In the mid 1980s, the neoconservative Earth
Mother Midge Decter, wife of Norman Podhoretz, accused Russell Kirk of "anti-Semitism." Kirk's offense? He had made a mild quip that some neoconservatives appeared to believe that the capital of Western civilization was Tel Aviv. Never mind that he had a point. Kirk had been a founding father of modern conservatism and a NATIONAL REVIEW columnist for many years, yet the magazine not only failed to rally to his defense against this smear -- it didn't even report the incident! Decter's attack was the biggest news of the season in the conservative movement, but Buckley was afraid to mention it. So was most of the conservative press.
[[ At about the same time, Israeli troops shot up a
Catholic Church on the West Bank during Mass -- a horrible sacrilege that sent worshipers fleeing for their lives and provoked an angry protest from the Vatican. (The congregation had planned a march after Mass to protest the beating of a Palestinian priest by Israeli soldiers.) I mentioned the incident to Buckley, a fellow Catholic, at an editorial meeting and gave him a news clipping describing the event in detail; as I expected, the magazine ignored this too. Even the violent persecution of Catholics by Jews was unmentionable -- in a "conservative" magazine owned and run by a Catholic.
[[ When the Pollard spy case broke, the magazine
called for the death penalty for Pollard -- but excused Israel for sponsoring him, on grounds that it's normal for friendly nations to spy on each other!
[[ And so it went. I could have understood a
favorable attitude toward Israel, having been pro-Israel for many years myself; but surely even this alliance must have occasional drawbacks. From time to time it's necessary to criticize even friends. If we criticized our own government every week, why not Israel once in a while? But the magazine consistently refused to find the slightest fault with Israel, and since I left in 1993 it has gotten much worse. Today it has become assertively slavish, to a comical degree.
[[ By 1993 I'd had enough. I wrote a column
correcting some of the things Bill had written about me, in which I mentioned his evident fear; I wrote that he was "jumpy about Jews." This was a pretty mild description of his terror, but the column got me fired, just as I expected. Since then it has become a neoconservative legend that I was fired for "anti- Semitism," but the truth is that it was far more personal than that. Bill knew me too well to make such a charge. I was fired for making him look bad. He considered making others look bad his prerogative.
Since then ]] I've noticed how eager and desperate
mainstream conservatives are to avoid Jewish wrath. Again, they don't just speak favorably of Israel; they refuse to acknowledge any cost to American interests in the U.S.-Israel alliance. They treat the two countries' interests as identical; when they scold either government, it's always -- always -- the U.S. Government for failing to support our "reliable ally." They are in headlong flight from reality. They have none of the realism of James Burnham, whose writings and style of thought would be wholly unwelcome in today's conservative movement.
They are frightened. You can sense this in their
bluster, in the vicarious jingoism with which they address Israel. Their fear produces a peculiar intellectual thinness that pervades all their thinking on foreign policy. [[ Gone is the critical intelligence that used to set the tone for such earlier conservative writers as Burnham, Kendall, Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, Thomas Molnar, and the other distinguished names that used to grace the masthead of NATIONAL REVIEW. ]] Individualists have been replaced by apparatchiks. Zionism has infiltrated conservatism in much the same way Communism once infiltrated liberalism.
** [[ I notice that Bill Buckley's latest book is a
novel about the Nuremberg trials. Over the past few years Bill has made a habit of commemorating the Holocaust with remarkable frequency. He has dropped references to Auschwitz into countless of his syndicated columns and interviews, as if compelled to banish the slightest suspicion that he has any doubts about the Holocaust or that he doesn't feel deeply about it. The Holocaust seems to have joined, or supplanted, the Gulag Archipelago in his historical memory.
[[ Since I vividly remember the days when Bill
regarded the Jews and Israel not with hostility, but with a healthy and playful irony -- the same attitude he brought to politics in general -- I find all this solemnity pretty cloying. ]]**
Here I should lay my own cards on the table. I am
not, heaven forbid, a "Holocaust denier." I lack the scholarly competence to be one. I don't read German, so I can't assess the documentary evidence; I don't know chemistry, so I can't discuss Zyklon-B; I don't understand the logistics of exterminating millions of people in small spaces. Besides, "Holocaust denial" is illegal in many countries I may want to visit someday. For me, that's proof enough. One Israeli writer has expressed his amazement at the idea of criminalizing opinions about historical fact, and I find it puzzling too; but the state has spoken.
Of course those who affirm the Holocaust need know
nothing about the German language, chemistry, and other pertinent subjects; they need only repeat what they have been told by the authorities. In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it's safer and more respectable to take. They shy away from taking a position that is likely to get them into trouble. Just as only people on the Axis side were accused of war crimes after World War II, only people critical of Jewish interests are accused of thought-crimes in today's mainstream press.
So, life being as short as it is, I shy away from
this controversy. Of course I'm also incompetent to judge whether the Holocaust did happen; so I've become what might be called a "Holocaust stipulator." Like a lawyer who doesn't want to get bogged down debating a secondary point, I stipulate that the standard account of the Holocaust is true. What is undisputed -- the massive violation of human rights in Hitler's Germany -- is bad enough.
What interests me is the growth of what Norman
Finkelstein has called "the Holocaust Industry." True or not, the Holocaust story has been put to many uses, some of them mischievous. It is currently being used to extort reparations and to blacken reputations, for example. Daniel Goldhagen is soon to publish a book blaming the Holocaust on the central teachings of the Catholic Church. This is only the most ambitious project of a school of thought, largely but not exclusively Jewish, that sees Christianity as the source of all "anti- Semitism."
So if you want to avoid being called "anti-Semitic,"
the safest course is to renounce Christianity. Whether this is a safe course for your immortal soul is a question Goldhagen doesn't address. The important thing is to avoid Jewish censure. Obviously this sort of thinking presupposes Christian fear of the Jews. Jews themselves are not unaware of Jewish power; some of them have rather exaggerated confidence in it.
But the chief use of the Holocaust story is to
undergird the legitimacy of the state of Israel. According to this view, the Holocaust proves that Jewish existence is always in danger, unless the Jews have their own state in their own homeland. The Holocaust stands as the historical objectification of all the world's gentiles' eternal "anti-Semitism." Jewish life is an endless emergency, requiring endless emergency measures and justifying everything does in the name of "defense." Jews and Israel can't be judged by normal standards, at least until Israel is absolutely safe -- if even then. Their circumstances are forever abnormal.
But the daily news reports suggest that Israel may
not really be the safest place for Jews. Theodore Herzl's original dream was of a Jewish state where Jews could at last live the normal lives they were denied in the Diaspora. Yet today it's Diaspora Jews who live relatively normal lives, at least in the West, while they must worry about the very survival of Israel. And far from being the independent state Herzl hoped for, Israel depends heavily on the support not only of Diaspora Jews but of foreign gentiles, especially Americans.
Israel insists that its "right to exist" is nothing
more than the right of every nation on earth to be left in peace. This right is allegedly threatened by fanatical Arabs who want to "drive the Jews into the sea," as witness the recent wave of Palestinian terror. But in truth, Israel's claimed "right to exist" is much more than it seems at first sight. It means a right to rule as Jews, enjoying rights denied to native Palestinians.
We are told incessantly that Israel is a
"democracy," and therefore the natural ally of the United States, whose "democratic values" it shares. This is a very dubious claim. To Americans, democracy means majority rule, but with equal rights for minorities. In Israel and the occupied territories, equal rights for the minority are simply out of the question.
Majority rule itself has taken a peculiar form in
Israel. The original Arab majority was driven out of their homes and their native land, and kept out. Meanwhile, a Jewish "majority" was artificially imported. Not only the first immigrants from Eastern Europe, but every Jew on earth was granted a "right of return" -- that is, "return" to a "homeland" most have never lived in, and in which none of their ancestors has ever lived. A Jew from Brooklyn (whose grandfather came from Poland) can fly to Israel and immediately claim rights denied to an Arab whose people have always lived in Palestine. In recent years Israel has been augmenting its Jewish majority by vigorously encouraging Jewish immigration, especially from Russia. Ariel Sharon has told a group of American senators that Israel needs a million more Jewish immigrants.
[[ In recent negotiations, Israel has flatly
rejected demands for a "right of return" for Palestinians exiled since 1948. It frankly gave as its reason that this would mean "the end of the Jewish state," since an Arab majority would surely vote down Jewish ethnic privileges. If Israel remained democratic, it wouldn't long remain Jewish.
[[ This confirms the contention of hard-line
Revisionist Zionists from Vladimir Jabotinsky to Meir Kahane that in the long run, Israel must be either Jewish or democratic; it can't be both. And in order to remain Jewish, it must reject the equal rights for its minorities that Jews everywhere demand where they are a minority. Israel must be the only "democracy" whose existence depends on inequality.
[[ Put otherwise, Zionism is a denial of the "self-
evident truths" of the Declaration of Independence. To acknowledge those truths, and to put them into practice, would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Again, honest and rigorous Zionists have always seen and said this.
[[ American gentiles, bemused by the propaganda
claim that a beleaguered little democracy is fighting for its very right to exist, are vaguely baffled, unable to comprehend what is before their eyes. They still haven't figured out that Israeli "democracy" is essentially and radically different from -- even repugnant to -- what they understand as democracy. ]]
With the verbal sleight-of-hand at which they are
masters, the Israelis always appeal to the Holocaust. Maybe they have nuclear weapons, but their existence is threatened -- once more! -- by rock-throwing Arab boys. The Arabs are the new Nazis, repeating and perpetuating the eternal peril of the Jews. Israel is determined to prevent another Holocaust and must crush the Arab threat by any means necessary, including harsh measures.
Israel without the Holocaust is hard to imagine. But
let's try to imagine it.
Suppose the Holocaust had never occurred, had never
been alleged, had never been called "the Holocaust." Imagine that no great persecution had provided the Jewish state with a special excuse for oppressive emergency measures. In other words, imagine that Israel were forced to justify itself like any other state.
In that case, Israel's treatment of its Arab
minorities would appear to the world in a very different light. Its denial of equal or even basic rights to those minorities would lack the excuse of a past or prospective "Holocaust." Civilized people would expect it to treat those it ruled with impartial justice [[ -- like civilized states ]]. Special privileges for Jews would appear as outrageous discrimination, no different from insulting legal discrimination against Jews. The sense -- and excuse -- of perpetual crisis would be absent. Israel might be forced or pressured, possibly against its will, to be "normal." If it chose to be democratic, its Jews would have to take their chance of being outnumbered, just like majorities in other democracies. Nobody would suppose that losing elections would mean their annihilation.
In short, the Holocaust has become a device for
exempting Jews from normal human obligations. It has authorized them to bully and blackmail, to extort and oppress. This is all quite irrational, because even if six million Jews were murdered during World War II, [[ it doesn't follow that the survivors are entitled to commit the slightest injustice. ]] If your father was stabbed in the street, that's a pity, but it's not an excuse for picking someone else's pocket.
In a peculiar way, the Holocaust story has promoted
not only pity, but actual fear of the Jews. It has removed them from the universe of normal moral discourse. It has made them victims with nukes. It has made them even more dangerous than their enemies have always charged. It has given the world an Israel ruled by Ariel Sharon.
Benjamin Netanyahu has written that Israel is "an
integral part of the West." I think it would be truer to say that Israel has become a deformed limb of the West.
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2005-10-15 01:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Old School Whitey]It's good,but,there's no slamming of Buckley in the article.[/QUOTE]
OSW:
I botched the link.
[url]http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050927.shtml[/url]