← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 3858 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2002-12-05
2002-12-05 08:06 | User Profile
Perhaps to celebrate the addition of Stephen Schwartz to Team NR, Buckley puts on the kneepads to assure his rabbis at COMMENTARY that, a decade after pressing the trigger on Sobran, he's firmly on the side of whoever's in charge: a bought man who [u]stays[/u] bought must be as close as he gets to "integrity" these days. For sure, there is no link left to the WFB who penned those eye-opening, pulse-quickening NR editorials in the 50s & 60s. Why, this bit of White Minstrelsy was syndicated to the Murdoch papers!
[url=http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley120302.asp]http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buck...ckley120302.asp[/url]
December 3, 2002 2:20 p .m. WILLIAM F BUCKLEY Harvard at Bay: What to do with Tom Paulin?
The back and forth at Harvard is much-noticed news almost everywhere. In Israel, to be sure, as also in the Arab press. But also in Great Britain and France, where anti-Semitism is a way of life, however well-mannered. The issue is a poet, Tom Paulin, an Oxford don who teaches this season at Columbia and was invited to give the Morris Gray lecture at Harvard.
Well, when this happened, some spoilsport publicized a remark the poet had made to an Egyptian weekly, to wit, that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." That stretch of prosody is without discernible poetry, but this of course was not considered in ensuing events. The English department at Harvard, on second thought, rescinded the invitation. President Lawrence Summers applauded this decision. But what then happened was a firestorm of free-speech protest, in which three Harvard Law School luminaries figured, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and Charles Fried. The English department, on third thought, re-invited the poet to speak, and now it was news all over the country and indeed the world. We are asked to consider what are the bounds, if any, on utterances of a particular nature if inconsistent with civil comity in a university. We are asked what hate speech should the colleges hate, and how exactly to give voice to that hate. And, inevitably, whether academic freedom is exercised, or is flouted, by speech of a particular character.
What then to do? The New York Observer, which usually flutters if there is the faintest liberal breeze in the air, is stentorian on the subject. In its editorial, it says, "Columbia should fire Mr. Paulin immediately, on the principle that having an anti-Semite on the payroll does a disservice to Columbia professors, students, and alumni who don't subscribe to the view that calling for the murder of Jews is something an Ivy League professor should be doing in his off hours."
The other view, that of the law professors cited above, is that freedom of speech is absolute, and nowhere more ideally protected than in universities.
Well, what concretely to do about the poet's forthcoming lecture? There will of course be some picketers outside, but doesn't something a little more resourceful come to mind?
In the spring of 1962, Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by a student committee at Hunter College in New York to be the speaker at one of its monthly events.
Rockwell was the "Commander" of the American Nazi Party. He dressed in a Nazi commander's uniform, with swastikas here and there, and preached the faith of Hitler. He had a cadre of a dozen or two subordinate Nazis, and took such opportunities as he could to display the Nazi faith in Washington, where he was based, and elsewhere.
Hunter College's undergraduates were predominantly Jewish, and when news of the scheduled event was brought to Hunter president John Meng, a Roman Catholic, he made a decision which lives in Solomonic heraldry. It took the form of a letter to the faculty.
Today's students (he wrote) know of Nazism and what it did only by cursory reading. You and I know of it from direct experience in a world war. I will not overrule the invitation because I am committed to giving the student association plenary authority in the matter.
But, as a symbol of the gravity of the invitation to Mr. Rockwell, I call on members of the faculty to join me in attending the Passover Assembly at Park Avenue at 7 P.M. That is when the meeting with Commander Rockwell is scheduled. I feel sure that many members of the student body will wish to join us in that memorial meeting.
That was a truly eloquent means of handling an aberrational invitation.
Granted that Mr. Paulin is a poet, and not a Nazi. His problem is that he speaks Nazi language when he addresses the problems of the Mideast. That he is a poet is not, in the circumstances, what anybody is interested in, any more than it would have distracted the Hunter College community if George Lincoln Rockwell was also a rock star. There are salient considerations that have been raised at Harvard, and it is these that President Summers of Harvard needs now to act on.
2002-12-05 10:56 | User Profile
**Today's students (he wrote) know of Nazism and what it did only by cursory reading. You and I know of it from direct experience in a world war. I will not overrule the invitation because I am committed to giving the student association plenary authority in the matter.
But, as a symbol of the gravity of the invitation to Mr. Rockwell, I call on members of the faculty to join me in attending the Passover Assembly at Park Avenue at 7 P.M. That is when the meeting with Commander Rockwell is scheduled. I feel sure that many members of the student body will wish to join us in that memorial meeting.
That was a truly eloquent means of handling an aberrational invitation.
Granted that Mr. Paulin is a poet, and not a Nazi. His problem is that he speaks Nazi language when he addresses the problems of the Mideast. That he is a poet is not, in the circumstances, what anybody is interested in, any more than it would have distracted the Hunter College community if George Lincoln Rockwell was also a rock star. There are salient considerations that have been raised at Harvard, and it is these that President Summers of Harvard needs now to act on.**
This is typically Buckley at his best, disinformative self. He clearly is urging Summers to rescind his invitation again, but he is taking the easy way out to conservatives, by suggesting some hocus-pocus counter ceremony might be found that protests the speaker, while still preserving the pretense that free speech has been nominally respected (Pretenses of course are all that matter to aristocratic snobs like Buckley)
It is these disingenuos style that expains why so many rank and filers still fall for these neocon conservatives and their institutions, such as FR, Nat. Review, and the GOP. He's just wagering the average conservative Tom Dick and Harry won't have the time to get to the bottom of things and fully confront their duplicity, and will just stick with supporting them cause its easier.
2002-12-05 17:35 | User Profile
Wm. F. Buckley 12.4. NYPost "HARVARD & THE HATER"
Addressing the surge of "anti-semitic" sentiment at Harvard over the invitation of Oxford poet Tom Paulin, Wm. F. rides off half-cocked, as usual, with this comparison:
""In the spring of l962, Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by a student committee at Hunter College to be speaker at one of its monthly events. Rockwell was the "Commander" of the American Nazi Party. He dressed in a Nazi commander's uniform, with swastikas here and there, and preached the faith of Hitler. He had a cadre of a dozen or two subordinate Nazis, and took such opportunities as he could to display the Nazi faith in Washington, where he was based, and elsewhere.
"Hunter's undergraduates were predominantly Jewish, and when news of the scheduled event was brought to Hunter president John Meng, a Roman Catholic, he made a decision which lives in Solomonic Heraldry." He wrote a letter to the faculty, which Buckely paraphrases, calling for a counter-demonstration at the same time. "That was a truly eloquent means of handling an aberrational invitation. Granted that Mr. Paulin is a poet and not a Nazi. His problem is that he speaks Nazi language when he addresses the problems of the Mideast."
So, WFB calls upon Harvard's President Summers to show the courage of the Roman Catholic president of Hunter, that day long ago in the '60's, when Rockwell brought Hitler's and the Nazi Party's "faith" to Manhattan.
If the guys with Rockwell that day suspected that time was a solid, I can see them winking at each other. Well, here's another duck lined up behind John Meng: -- Bishop Buckley himself. Or should one call hinm "Red Hat". Allen Dulles wears one. Wonder who they'll name the next Pope. Let me guess. That guy from Lima. Hands across the continents. Holding Spain, Poland, Turkey, Israel up as allies, and American protestant liberals hostage, if not poisoned, already -- certainly so in their mentality ("Liberals For Terror" titles a Podhoretz NYPost article 3.15.02). They'll save those pesky Jews from the evil Arabs (Read: from themselves). And from us. With a little (read: a lot) help from the Kissinger/Bush spiritual vigillantes, they'll have that New World Order sewed up in no time.
It was Harvard English Department and Law Profs -- probably as paradigm liberal as it gets, except for my cromagnon type -- who got Pauliln re-instated. So here's the question for them: though disagreeing with his point of view, will you defend to the death his right to say it? Its easy to mug it up on TV. A hundred or more scholars lined up to say impeachment of scuzz would be wrong -- to no avail. The thing is, now, there is no time left for things that don't avail.
Avail we must, and immediately. I'm speakinfing of a is a systemic language take-back, from those who took it from us. Because the psychological processes causally involved in reproducing communication are ever-current (the flux of "time" spinning), ever-replenishing during each diurnal cycle, it follows that through change in sign-use, in a shift of critical mass that has been brewing underneath the surface breaks forth, and sudenly everyone is speaking a new political dialect, born out of the OD forum. Changing a few psychological variables could bring this about overnight. As it is doing anyway. The model is Supreme Court decisions. They become effective immediately; suddently everyone is living under a new regime. That is happening us, by seizure of our "faith". First the sign, then the soul. But it will have to implode our way, since we are centered precisely over that black hole, blocking their countdown to rebirth. We're stuck in your craw, Mr. Rove.
I say they get a partial birth abortion. Just didn't make it. We have absolutely no obligation to save what hs been conceived in deceit, nutured in secret planning, brought to cursed fruition in 9/11, whoever did it. Kick these dogs out of the manger. And make t forever. amen
Catholics and Jews want to divide our use of "father" and "son" between them. Cathlics get to have/be "the Father"; say anything to one of them in criticism, and you get accused of wanting to kill Papa. Socialists and Communists are always killing Papa. Jews get to have/be "the Son", those on the maternal side that puts up the super-nice messiah-type martyr for our "sins". Say anything critical of their way of beibng, and you are challenging their right to exist, killing the Virgin Mary's Son.
As a Protestant, I don't know, nor want to know, what these religions think they mean by "sin". It seems almost exclusively bound up with sexuality, power; sham, and punishment, all coming to much the same thing, as the distinction between Gravitas and Majisterium disappears in their mentality.
As a psychosemiotician, I understand the feeling if "sinfulness" as applied to a groups "attackers" is the psychotic unconscious fantasy of poisoned blood, due to fetal regression (explained elsewhere): sinners are those who corrupt the shared placental/God blood flow among "we" fetuses. To include oneself emotionally as a member of a group, is to silently agree to share this bond: the unconscious fantasy of being siblings in a common womb-surround, nurished by the the One phantom "GOOD" Placenta -- "God: from Whom all Blessings Flow" -- protected from the phantom Poisonous Placenta (""EVIL" = return of birth - trauma terror threat all once lived through, but "survived") by the FEARLESS HERO, who will keep the fantatized archepoisoner, Saddam Hussein, from again doing to the Jews, what Hitler is alleged to have done at such places as Auschwitz.
I try to stay out of, and see America kept out of all that. How many times do we have to rescue the Jews from the holocaust before its enough? I know this is preaching to the choir, but I want the choir to know how it sounds in religious terms, stated descriptively and, I hope, objectively. The phenomenon is the old-world Father-Son complex working its way out, historically, through each other's psychology, but through us, our systems, and our faith. If Linder and Rockwell want to get into it, I won't be drawn in, because that feeds it. On the other hand, I see theirs as a lawfully necessary psychological counter-reaction to a pair of groups huddled up like siblings in their own womb-surrounds, obsessed with the unconscious fantasy that their blood has been poisoned, or is being poisoned, by the very existence of "infidels" like Palestinians, Protestants and neo-Nazis, so be it. Could be projection of their own death wishes toward themselves, returned.
And if reality is at the center of the time-solid everyone circles, there will be some who are circling on the exact opposite side of anti-Father-Son psychology, administered by them. Those who just say No, in no uncertain terms. I'm not mucking, I'm ducking, if it comes to that.
2002-12-05 23:39 | User Profile
I agree with your comments. Once upon a time I regard Buckley as THE INTELLECTUAL of the right, a man who really stood up for American values. It was cool (and probably childish), to be among liberals and to mention the dreaded Buckley and to express one's admiration for him and to hope that some pasty-faced liberal would take up the challenge. Nowadays it seems to me that Buckley is a "middle" level intellectual-- one whose job is to serve as a transmitter between regular conservatives and our wonderful jews. He serves to rationalize and make good the actions of the jews and transmits this to mainstream conservatives. He is a man who rather quickly abandoned old time conservative values and went to work for the establishment. I look upon him, and the rest of the "conservatives" out howling and blaring with contempt and wish them all the worst.
2002-12-06 05:00 | User Profile
Originally posted by Lane@Dec 5 2002, 23:39 He is a man who rather quickly abandoned old time conservative values and went to work for the establishment. I look upon him, and the rest of the "conservatives" out howling and blaring with contempt and wish them all the worst.
The article we have on this forum by Joseph Sobran How I was Fired by Bill Buckley, is pretty much the definitive statement, or maybe it would be moe appropiately called obituary, on the rise and fall of Buckley and Buckleyism.