← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 3991 | Posts: 13 | Started: 2002-12-13
2002-12-13 06:35 | User Profile
Hilarious - when does the stripper come on? WFB patting himself on the back for saving America in 1955 with a magazine whose 1955 editorials he wouldn't dare print today. "Conservatives" who prefer Coke in opposition to "liberals" choosing Pepsi today serve the same purpose: to make sure any third, or fourth, or fifth brand never gets off the assembly line and loaded onto delivery trucks. And if Buckley's serious about "whatever is needed...to thwart explosions in Bali nightclubs....conservatives must come up with it", he might want to think about following up his musings on "a half-century of defending freedom" by reflecting on a quarter century of cowing before Mr & Mrs Podhoretz with his knees audibly knocking.
Not our Billy - he got put wise. He knows what happens to media celebrities who buck the Amen Corner: they get sentenced to the cultural gulag and become ex-media celebrities real quick.
[url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002757]http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/fe...ml?id=110002757[/url]
To Preserve What We Have Reflections on a half century in defense of freedom.
BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. Thursday, December 12, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
When in 1955 I set out to publish a journal devoted to the interests of U.S. conservatism, I stressed in a preliminary circular pretty much what one would have expected on the subject. It was necessary then, and would be necessary for most of the balance of the millennium, to confront directly the challenge of Soviet-based communism; to explain, and to plead, that whatever the pains and dangers of resisting it, these were worth undergoing. In retrospect, it appears obvious that the effort was worthwhile, but it was less than obvious at crisis points, among them Hungary, Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam. History will document that the high cost of nuclear-stakes resistance dismayed more merely than U.S. Catholic bishops. Resistance ÃÂ outrance engendered flesh and blood perspectives. It came down to: Is it really worth it? What do we end up having in hand, by developing and redeveloping and updating a nuclear inventory and the hardware to deliver nuclear strikes, whether pre-emptively or punitively?
American conservatism needed to say and to think through the philosophical vocabulary for saying: It is worth any cost to preserve what we have.
And what was it that we did have?
Conservatives could list, bit by bit, those things that distinguished American life from life in the Soviet Union. A large inventory springs readily to mind. There were the different levels of self-sovereignty. The individual--conservatives argued-- has certain rights over his own direction in life. These rights are subject to biological constraints: You can't, without consequence, ignore diet and exercise. And there are social restraints: You can't defy American orthodoxy without bumping into civil blockades. You can't marry three people simultaneously or refuse to send your child to school. Then there was sovereignty at the next level, the freedom to choose, politically and economically. There the American, unlike the Soviet citizen, was substantially freer, though here there was a domestic struggle, still going on after 50 years. Acquisitive members of society are always seeking to enhance their jurisdiction. What we had in America, and continue to have, is an inchoate sense of proportion in the matter. The conservative instinctively rejects collectivization. Fifty years ago (and contention goes on today) it was thought by many an improvement in social management to pool those concerns that aren't irrevocably personal (whom shall I marry?), by letting collective authority decide how much steel should be produced or property permitted to an individual or his heir. Grander perspectives were thought to be served by socializing education and health care. In 1954, the U.S. hovered between the New Deal and the Great Society. Conservatives fought on, winning some, losing some. With the increase in regulations and extension of custody, the public throne sprouted more and more emeralds and baubles. The sovereignty of the public sector reached to over 40% of the gross national income.
Even so, the Utopians were slowed down, and that was mostly the doing of American conservatives. To hinder, let alone to check rampant collectivization, conservatives needed to do two things. The first was to take empirical note of the failures of those societies that sought collective answers to every problem. Such failures needed to be publicized, and the correlative consequences of yielding authority to the state thought through. The challenge has been to decoct from empirical history relevant lessons. John Adams taught that the state tends to turn every contingency into an excuse for enhancing itself. That is 200-year-old wisdom, but in 1955, and today, it had become a faintly remembered, quaint aphorism of a founding father learned, but grouchy. The lesson required reiteration in modern times, in hardboiled, contemporaneous philosophical jousting.
American conservatives, in order to enliven the principles they stood by, needed to observe life under communism in the Soviet Union and China, to learn from their failures but simultaneously to reinforce philosophical prejudices, liberal in origin. If human freedom is the fountainhead of American conservative thought, then its preservation becomes its principal concern. That means that the knights-errant of conservatism have to find fresh and communicable ways of burnishing the goals of individual authority and of free choice. Everybody is prepared to stipulate that all men should be free to choose between Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola. It is something else to document the advantages, real and ideal, of private health care over public health care.
Conservatives do not vest in the free market ontological authority. But we believe that the marketplace is the operative mechanism by which individual choice is transcribed. It is true that the free market produces wealth beyond the resources of socialism, but what conservatives are engaged in defending isn't the proposition that Coca-Cola is better than Pepsi. On such matters conservatives are nescient, never knowing which of the two is "better," capable only of knowing which is in greater demand--while discerning, in the course of submitting to the free market, that what is important isn't the relative merit of the goods, but the inherent meaning of the individual's expression of choice. That freedom magnifies to the high level espied by G.K. Chesterton when he said simply that we should be free to be our own potty little selves.
Conservatives (unlike anarchists, or Objectivists) know that sacrifices are necessary, even as diet is necessary for organic health. Exactly what it is necessary to forgo is always debatable. Some good men thought it wrong to go to war to end slavery, or to go to Congress to end Jim Crow. Conservatives correctly assumed, in 1955, that to resist the Soviet aggression meant such things as taxes and even a draft. Today the enemy has another face, and we need to remind ourselves that designs on our freedoms don't disappear; they express themselves variously, in entirely different ballistic design. Al Qaeda is messianic, not Utopian, but the ugly genius of science creates weapons of mass destruction, and the market facilitates their assembly and distribution. Put your mind to it, compel the state's treasury to cooperate, and you have an atom bomb. Can we imagine what is needed to thwart explosions in Bali nightclubs? Conservatives know only that whatever is needed, we must come up with it.
Above all, conservatives tend to intuit that materialist terminology is insufficient to express the depth of American attachments to their ideals. It remains, for some reason, arresting that one speaks of the "sanctity" of life, of our "devotion" to our ideals, of the "holy" causes in which we engage. American conservatives never exclude those who discountenance transcendent perspectives, but we tend to live by them.
Mr. Buckley is editor-at-large of National Review and author, most recently, of "Nuremberg: The Reckoning" (Harcourt, 2002).
2002-12-13 06:47 | User Profile
Even taking WFB at face value here, he displays a remarkable blindness that neatly explains the failure of the "mainstream" conservative movement. Notice the persistent underlying assumption in this piece: Buckley apparently thinks the sole raison d'etre of conservatism is resisting Soviet communism. If only his brand of conservatism were not so obsessive about the Soviets. If only enough well-meaning conservatives out there had realized that conservatism existed before the Cold War, and indeed before the Second World War. Of course, that form of conservatism is the Old Right, the tradition for which paleoconservatives bear the torch today, and that form was derided by the likes of Buckley as "nativist," "anti-Semitic," and all the usual buzzwords. "If only"...one of the saddest phrases known to the English language.
2002-12-13 06:56 | User Profile
Fight the symptom, nod courteously to the disease. As ever.
2002-12-13 19:09 | User Profile
Buckley apparently thinks the sole raison d'etre of conservatism is resisting Soviet communism.
Strange, then, that he genuflects before Soviet communists like the Podhoretzim.
2002-12-13 21:56 | User Profile
the world as most of us become aware of is so complex...it gets of necessity reduced to the "simplicity" of a song... E.g. "who knows where the road will lead Us, only a FOOL would say..." etc. however on some intuitive level...those capable of it, start to (for no better word, intuit)... it... the song... which changes pitch, and sometimes even songs change... so then We all attempt, to sing, as best as We can... "are you warm are you real...or just a cold an lonely, lovely..."
2002-12-14 04:50 | User Profile
Everyone needs to re-read or read this article.
The Decline of National Review [url=http://amren.com/natlreview.htm]http://amren.com/natlreview.htm[/url]
Also see these threads:
So What If Thurmond (Or Goldwater) Had Won? [url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=4868]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...t=ST&f=3&t=4868[/url]
"When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country" Nonsense from G. Gordon Liddy [url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=3866&hl=liddy]http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php...t=3866&hl=liddy[/url]
2002-12-14 16:07 | User Profile
If anyone for any reason has not read "How I got fired by Bill Buckley," aka Bill Buckley's obituary, please do so now.
[url=http://www.southernindependentparty.com/buckley.htm]http://www.southernindependentparty.com/buckley.htm[/url]
Thanks.
2002-12-14 18:42 | User Profile
I have found Mr. William F. Buckley to be the most loathesome man in the United States. He and his friends were all for fighting foreign evils as long as they or their children were not to be placed in danger.> . On a television show Mr. Buchanan had mentioned there were only two groups beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States. "The Jews are trying to drag us into this war. Israeli Jews want war to save Israel's hide. American Jews who talk of military action against Iraq want war because it would suit Israeli interests." For this Mr. Rosenthal assaulted Mr. Buchanan by insisting he surpassed country club anti-Semitism and reached the height of "blood libel". What offended them was that Mr. Buchanan had singled out Charles Krauthammer, A.M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle and Henry Kissinger, all Jewish, as the leading cheerleaders. Then once again the charge by Mr. Buchanan that the fighting would be done kids with names like "McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown" was brought up. Then the purported Godfather of the American conservative movement, William F. Buckley, was quoted approvingly of finding it "impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he said and did amounted to anti-Semitism". This editorial was written on January 13, 1992, virtually one year after the start of the war in the Persian Gulf. That Mr. Buchanan was correct in his assessment never bothered the professional goy baiters of that newspaper. That the wise elders on that newspaper did not know that Jews of American citizenship did not fight and did not die in appropriate numbers could only be believed by those who believe National Public Radio did not have a liberal bias. What should not surprise was the support of Mr. Buckley. The truce between the liberal left and the conservative right of the ruling political class on avoiding military service and facing danger was observed. No national newspaper or television network would investigate, and the sanctimonious deception that all Americans were courageous and ready to fight continued.
This creep has never been shy about urging others to fight:> **One only has to think of William F. Buckley, who prior to the war with Iraq devoted two columns to rebuking a Midwestern professor who worried about his son serving with the Marines. Mr. Buckley in his youth avoided exposure to anything resembling combat, and his son sneaked out of the war in Vietnam. His son, Christopher, after taking the physical examination for the draft, gleefully ran back to the campus of Yale, a sanctuary for the timid from the days of the Civil War. After seeing friends, young Buckley jumped into the air screaming "I flunked". ...
Some two months later in October Mr. Buckley still was displaying anger towards the professor. The professor's explanation that his son and others joined for the money for financial aid to college brought a sneer. Did the professor not know that one reason America spent $300 billion per year on defense was to train young men to fight if called upon? To fight meant to run the risk of dying. It was the considered opinion of Mr. Buckley that a thirty year career in the military entailed no more danger than being a cop or fireman. ...
Years later William F. Buckley admitted he knew nobody who died in Vietnam, but he knew one graduate of Yale who was wounded. ...
Noted conservative pundit, William F. Buckley, noted "top young people" got out of the way of the fight in Vietnam and proceeded to state the subject had become "dreary". In a newspaper column Mr. Buckley did advocate that top political people who did not help their children should resign. Mr. Buckley has never understood the difference between an aristocracy who honored obligations, most especially when their country was at war, and a plutocracy who felt money entitled citizens to buy themselves out of danger and duty. Mr. Quayle's adventures in school were likened to those of Winston Churchill, who if Mr. Buckley were to be believed, was something of a playboy like Mr. Quayle. **
2002-12-16 02:10 | User Profile
I don't know on what level, I agree with ed gibbon on. He's become a mystery to me, which must be one level higher than 'scholar'. "They"... who advocate war(s), long as theirs don't fight them... feel it's just social control... meaning the folks who go to wars WANT to go...and so better they do it over There... less they get discontent over Here... (presumably closer to where "they", inclusive of Bill B. Jr. still live...) I always felt the war was HERE, wherever one IS, 9 out of 10 times... is why I only favor war so infrequently... (long as mine don't have to go if possible.) Me, ok... I've lived already... two or three times... so, I'll ride down, the BOMB... 'Over there...'
2002-12-16 15:54 | User Profile
Originally posted by Buster@Dec 14 2002, 16:07 **If anyone for any reason has not read "How I got fired by Bill Buckley," aka Bill Buckley's obituary, please do so now.
[url=http://www.southernindependentparty.com/buckley.htm]http://www.southernindependentparty.com/buckley.htm[/url]
Thanks.**
We posted this over here also.
[url=http://forum.originaldissent.com/index.php?act=ST&f=8&t=1205&hl]OD Thread - How I Was Fired By Bill Buckley[/url]
2002-12-16 23:24 | User Profile
Originally posted by George@Dec 15 2002, 20:10 I don't know on what level, I agree with ed gibbon on. He's become a mystery to me, which must be one level higher than 'scholar'. "They"... who advocate war(s), long as theirs don't fight them... feel it's just social control... meaning the folks who go to wars WANT to go...
Maybe he's a mystery to you, but there's no mystery in his statements at all. Cold hard facts gleaned from observations, yes. Mystery? No.
2002-12-17 00:00 | User Profile
Roger Bannister wrote:> **Maybe he's a mystery to you, but there's no mystery in his statements at all. Cold hard facts gleaned from observations, yes. Mystery? No. **
All statements are referenced in the book I wrote. The observations that I have noted were published in newspaper columns or books. I have not hallucinated nor made anything up.
2002-12-17 17:46 | User Profile
George just probably meant, we can either cry (complain about how things are), or sing... or as per dogma of george, both... Point is ed gibbon or rich E. as a yute, no doubt WANTED for example to go to a War... (wherever). You guys don't realize it yet, but like all of us, you can cry...complain or as georgie might say "bit-thch"... but you have no real Song yet... no demonstrably real, song... that's the, again as george would say 'actual' problem...but we're nearing it, aren't we perhaps a better song, since you are, together... -?- Oh wait, here comes Bannister with the two minute mile? Ok, we've got to harness him, since we're only interested, (just about) in things like the 2 minute egg, or perhaps a couple hundred year old wine...if we can still ingest it. :huh: