One of the most fascinating conundrums in American politics today is why the Conservative movement – so dominated as it is by Jewish intellectuals and thought – is so routinely rejected by the Jewish population as a whole.

After all, the Conservative movement has been long been driven by Jewish intellectuals. Who is more respected in Conservatism than Charles Krauthammer or Mark Levin, for example? It can be argued that Jews – either in government or in punditry – are the intelligentsia of Conservatism, as the success of William Kristol, Johan Goldberg, Richard Perle, David Horowitz, and others on the editorial staffs of the Weekly Standard, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, can attest to.

However, the preponderance of Jewish thought in Conservatism has not translated into Jewish support in the electorate. Jews gave Barack Obama – who was associated with such obvious anti-Semites /anti-Zionists as Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Khalid Al Mansour – 78% of the vote, against a Republican who had a record of strong support for Israel, and antipathy towards Iran. One would think Mr. Bush and his policies would resonate well with Jewish Americans, as well as his close alliance with Senator Liebermann.

It is a puzzle that Norman Podhoretz, one of the most prominent Jewish conservatives, attempts to explain in his book, Why Are Jews Liberals? Podhoretz does so by examining the history of the Jewish people, and anti-Semitism from the dawn of the New Testament to today, generally painting a picture that it was common Jewish perception, rightly or wrongly, that those on the Left were more tolerant of the Jews, than those on the Right.

Podhoretz illustrates this meme by creating a timeline from the ‘enlightened despots’ from early European history to the American presidencies of the last century. Podhoretz focuses strongly on FDR and the Great Depression, in which many of Roosevelt’s initiatives were dismissed by the Right in anti-Semitic terms:

What else were Jews to conclude from all this than that their most rabid enemies were still, and as always, to be found among Christians-Protestant and Catholic alike-and that the religious anti-Semites were, moreover, still in at least a de facto alliance with the anti-Semites on the secular political Right? Conversely, how could Jews fail to conclude that casting their lot with Roosevelt was in their best interests, when the “Jew Deal” had become the prime target of anti-Semitic agitation?

The popularity of FDR because of his New Deal initiatives during a time of great economic hardship for Jews, as well as for his role in the defeat of Hitler, carries over to today (in much the same way that LBJ’s work towards civil rights is a great factor in explaining why African-Americans today are nearly unanimously Democratic voters.)

Podhoretz goes on to argue, however, that there was a “reversal of roles between Left and Right on issues of Jewish interest,” especially in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War.  From that point forward, the Left’s anti-Semitism became increasingly evident, usually disguised as criticism of Israel. Adding to this, of course, was the even more blatant anti-Semitism of the so-called Black Power Movement of the same period, which was born during the same era, due, in large degree, to “the canard [circulated by the Left] that the legitimate demands of oppressed Blacks were being blocked by a gang of racist Jews”.

Podhoretz concludes by arguing that Liberalism was replacing Judaism among Jews. He writes “that what [the Jews] were doing was converting to a new religion in which Marx’s Capital became an ‘a new kind of Torah’. To this new ‘Torah’ they grew as stubbornly attached-both out of conviction and as a matter of honor-as their fathers and grandfathers has been to the Torah of Judaism itself”

Most puzzling to me, as a non-Jew, is the premise that the Right – despite its clear history of anti-Semitism – was ever perceived as any more anti-Semitic than the Left, which I would argue had an equally clear history of anti-Semitism long before 1967. After all, was there anyone on the Right as clearly anti-Semitic as Hitler (whom Podhoretz argues was of the Right – an assertion I soundly reject) or Karl Marx, who attacked his foes with phrases like “dirty Jews” or “niggerlike Jews?” And was not the KKK – who tortured Jews as well as Blacks – Democrats? In fact, I believe that because the Left is by its nature anti-capitalistic, and because Jews have long been burdened with the stereotype of being the “money-lenders,” or the personification of the demonizations the Left puts upon capitalism and capitalists, that anti-Semitism has always been endemic to the Left.

I do not feel that Podhoretz fully addresses the problems of pre-1967 anti-Semitism on the Left. However, neither does the American Jewish population, as a whole; just as they do not address the problems of post-1967 anti-Semitism.  There does seem to be a disconnect between Jewish perception of the Right and reality. And judging by President Obama’s approval rating among Jews, which currently stands at 64%, this disconnect and its corresponding allegiance to the Left, shows no sign of abating.

–DK

“A successful intervention in Iraq would revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East…and all to the benefit of American interests.”

Success!

If you’re looking for stock tips or advice on where to place your money in the sixth race down at the track, Robert Kagan is obviously the man to see. He penned the words above back in 1998, and don’t you feel we have benefitted so much? Of course, Kagan doesn’t say what “successful” means; was it just the overthrow of Saddam? If so, then “mission accomplished.” We just might have to wait a bit longer for all the dividends.

I came across the Kagan quote in Andrew J. Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, a not-so-recent book (previously mentioned here) that I finally read, in preparation for writing a bio on the president who helped revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East. It struck me, as Bacevich traced the role of the neocons (especially Kagan and some select others) in providing the ideological rationale for much of the Bush-era foreign policy, how wrong these guys have been. Over and over again. As a group, the neocons disdain foreign policy realists. But when your world view is driven by an ideology — an arrogant one at that, built on the shaky base of American exceptionalism — you tend to lose sight of some things. Facts, say. Oppposing views that might have some credence. Any grasp of human (or at least American) failures and frailties.

Here’s another of the wonderful predictions from Neocon World, cited by Bacevich:

“A friendly, free, and oil-producing Iraq would leave Iran isolated and Syria cowed.” William Kristol  offered this in February 2002, as he began the drumbeat for war in Iraq. Iran isolated? I guess, if you mean, does anyone want to take it to the dance. Yet it still manages to stir up a bit of concern here, hmm, and maybe has some lingering influence in the region?And  Syria cowed? Maybe. I haven’t read much about Syria lately. But the US military in Iraq (a sure sign that the country is friendly, since they’ve let us stay so long) says Syria still allows insurgents to operate there. Doesn’t sound real cowed to me. Of course, maybe the problem is Iraq is not free, elections to the contrary. Or not oil-produc — no, wait, there’s about 2 million barrels a day flowing now, with more to come. Not what it could be, but still oil producing. So, again, why not more isolation and cowering in the region?

Is it this road, Bill?

Kristol and Kagan tag-teamed for this one: “The road that leads to real security and peace [was] the road that runs through Baghdad.” I hear Kabul has a road like that. Maybe Islamabad too. And one day, can you see it, wending its way through Tehran…

The neocon penchant for dazzling predictions has deep roots, back to one of the movement’s first lights, Norman Podhoretz. Of course, in his day communism and the Cold War consumed the neocons, leading Podhoretz to say in 1980: “Surrender or war are the only remaining choices.” Of course. And six years later, as Gorbachev and Reagan were already becoming buddies, and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union was becoming clear, if not foreordained: “‘The present danger’ of 1980 is still present today.”

The bum insight and advice we’ve gotten from the neocons wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant blowing this month’s rent on the ponies. But were talking hundreds of billions here, and still counting. Death tolls in the thousands (not including the locals), and still rising. And the lingering notion that we have a duty, a God-given right, to wage war so we can remake the world in our image.

I know, I know, it’s easy to cherry pick predictions and arguments from the past and show how wrong they were. But the consistency of the neocons’ mental meltdowns is what’s striking. Especially as I did some more Bush research and came across a February 2000 article in Harper’s by Kevin Phillips. The one-time Republican operative who popularized the notion of the party’s “Southern strategy,” now a prolific documenter of what is wrong with American politics (primarily, too much influence by the rich). He’s been called a “populist crank,” and sometimes I wonder about his depth of historical knowledge. But Phillips seems to have good insights on politics. And g0od predictions.

They don't make 'em like they used to; dynasties, that is

In the Harper’s article, he foreshadowed his 2004 book on the House of Bush, American Dynasty. His point/prediction in 2000 was, Dubya represented the restoration of a failed ruling line, and in the past, the sons of deposed leaders did not do so well. Phillips said Bush II, like past dynastic restorers, would likely “ride into office on an arrogant, memory-driven [He tried to kill my daddy] dynamic that quickly leads to mistakes and failure.” More specifically, Bush fils “would find himself bound to replay some version of his father’s endless pleading for capital gains tax reductions.” And Phillips suggested the possibility of a “Bush restoration implod[ing] on its own whir of cocky inadequacy,” leading to disaster for both the family dynasty and the Republican Party.

We don’t know if Bush’s presidency has assured dynastic destruction and Republican irrelevance. But I’d be more likely to take Phillips’s tip down at the track than the neocons. Give me clear vision over rosy glasses any day.

By Gil Troy, Jerusalem Post, 11-3-09

In her recent Jerusalem Post Magazine column, in which she gave Israel a ”Democracy Check” fourteen years after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Naomi Chazan ominously failed her own test.

In analyzing Israel’s “ongoing democratic malfunctioning,” Professor Chazan offered such one-sided and exaggerated examples that her article was actually detrimental to democracy. Faced with, alas, far too many examples of violence, intolerance, hysteria, or insensitivity from across the Israeli political spectrum, she only saw the Right’s abuses. I am always amazed at partisans’ inability, both Left and Right, to engage in self-criticism - even to build credibility. But preaching about democracy in such a myopic manner deforms democracy, reducing this delicately balanced mechanism to just another bludgeon for bashing your enemies.

Most outrageously, in lamenting the “persistent inability to distinguish between freedom of speech and incitement,” Professor Chazan failed to distinguish between violent crimes and honest disagreements regarding strategy or policy. “Peace movements and activists have been a favorite target” of unhealthy incitement, she observed, correctly. But then she added: “The bombing of Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell’s home, Moshe Ya’alon’s depiction of Peace Now as a virus and Ambassador Michael Oren’s innuendo that J Street is promoting positions that are not in Israel’s interest are just three recent examples.”

Say what? I read that obscene absurdity three times to make sure I wasn’t misreading it. Equating, in any way, Ambassador Oren’s decision not to address a lobbying group - but to send an observer - with the evil violence perpetrated against Professor Sternhell is unconscionable. And using a term like “innuendo,” reeking as it does of McCarthyism, is itself a McCarthyite technique. It suggests that Professor Chazan failed to understand the argument she advanced so eloquently; that democracy requires what she called “self-restraint” that accepts “diversity” along with civil “disagreement” - acceptance of the idea that fair-minded, intelligent people may arrive at different conclusions. And such failure, under the guise of honoring Yitzhak Rabin’s memory, profanes that tragedy’s profound lessons with partisan bile.

In an overlooked lesson from his thought-provoking new book, one of America’s towering intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz, explains the myopia Chazan - and so many partisans both Left and Right - display. Podhoretz asks Why are Jews Liberals – a query that from an Israeli perspective should read, “Why are American Jews Liberals?”

I hate Podhoretz’s answer - because he may be right.

American Jewish liberals’ self-justifying myth preaches that American Jews are liberals because Judaism IS liberalism - if you have any doubts, study Isaiah, or learn about Tikun Olam. Podhoretz, who of course is no longer a liberal, rejects that argument, especially because the most pious Jews tend to be less liberal, and today’s less committed Jews frequently place their liberalism ahead of their people’s self-interest.

Podhoretz explains that over the last two centuries, as American Jews passed from the Old Country’s oppressions and deprivations to the New World’s freedom and prosperity, liberals were the good guys - and conservatives were the bad guys. In his book’s first part, “How the Jews Became Liberals,” Podhoretz’s lightening-quick guided tour illuminates the intertwined histories of anti-Semitism and enlightenment, delighting the reader with his skill despite the depressing picture he paints. For decades, anti-Semitism festered on the Right more than the Left, culminating with Hitler. As a result, Podhoretz argues, in Part II, “Why the Jews Are Still Liberals,” American Jews remain wired to love liberalism, even as today’s ugly anti-Semitism finds too welcoming a home with too much of the Left.

Seeing American Jewish political behavior through the historic prism of anti-Semitism explains why for decades the American Jewish Committee survey has found Americans Jews far more worried about American anti-Semitism than necessary. Applying the argument globally, one could say that in Israel, the Left is so insanely Left, and the Right so insanely Right, because each draws strength from its own reading of the Jewish encounter with Jew hatred.

I hate the argument. As a post-Auschwitz Jew, born a decade and a half after the Holocaust, I want to believe that the world - and my people - have moved beyond anti-Semitism. I wish the ADL was anachronistic. Alas, recent events have proved that the new, post-Auschwitz strain of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is invigorated by the dangerous toxin of left-wing self-righteousness.

The profound - and mostly overlooked – part of Podhoretz’s argument gets to the essence of what political identity is - and why partisans like Professor Chazan can view the world in such warped ways. With his atavistic, essentialist explanation for liberalism, Podhoretz suggests our political stands are not transactional positions we arrive at rationally and adjust casually. The depth and dimensionality of our political identities explains the visceral disgust too many partisans feel for those who dare disagree with them.

In a recent New York Times column, “The Young and the Neuro,” the always thoughtful David Brooks introduced readers to the burgeoning field of “social cognitive neuroscience,” meaning how “biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior” and “how social behavior changes biology.” Brooks implicitly pushed Podhoretz’s historical explanation into the realms of psychology and biology. Lo and behold, Brooks noted, Reem Yahya and a team from the University of Haifa discovered that “Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.”

As an historian, I recoil from monocausal or deterministic explanations. I draw on the first book of Podhoretz’s I ever read, Making It, to explain American Jewish liberalism further. Beyond whatever scars we may carry from centuries of anti-Semitism, American Jews are also driven to “make it.” The sociological corner in America wherein we have most thrived is the Ivy-covered, bicoastal liberal cosmopolitan post-modern “shtetl.” No wonder most of us embrace the identity of our new best friends who have allowed us not just to become one with them but define them.

Podhoretz - and Brooks - help explain how Chazan and so many partisans are frequently so unreasonable even when preaching about being reasonable. Still, no matter how far “social cognitive neuroscience” advances, no matter how resonant we find the insights of Podhoretz or others, we should never get so bound to our atavistic or scientific models we forget humans’ near divine ability to transcend.

Democracy trumps biology and history. Civility can calm the collective soul and send the individual soaring. We must strive harder to achieve such transcendent leaps of faith, for all our sakes, in Israel and America, on the day we commemorate Yitzhak Rabin - and every other day, too.

Holocaust:

(n.) The Judeo-Masonic destruction of former Christendom. Present situation: perverts and godless racial supremacists write and enforce the laws, and brainwash the enslaved population through their ‘educational’ and infotainment franchises; elders are euthanized and babies are slaughtered; temporary survivors are enslaved, numbered, tracked like criminals, and farmed for profit.

~ For L.A. & G.Q. ~

Malachi Martin “Michael Serafian” “The Pilgrim” of Zion

Malachi Martin was an allegedly Christian Irish priest who worked for decades in the Vatican and claimed that Satanic Masses had been performed in the Vatican, in which Christian children had been sacrificed to Satan. His claims actually had  ring of truth to them, even though he never identified the Satanists. Obviously this Crypt-Jew — who claimed to be descended from “a banker” who fled to Ireland in 1492 — didn’t want to incriminate himself. Martin also wrote a book for the American Jewish Committee entitled “The Pilgrim”, under the pseudonym “Michael Serafian”.

“Father” Martin attended Belvedere College in Dublin, became a Jesuit novice in 1939, and received a bachelor’s degree in Semitic languages, and Oriental History at the National University of Ireland while carrying out concurrent study in Assyriology at Trinity College. At the Roman Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, he completed degrees in Philosophy, Theology, Semitic Languages, Archeology and Oriental History. In 1954, he was ordained a Jesuit Priest. He then studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Oxford University, specializing in intertestamentary studies and knowledge of Jesus Christ from Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts. He undertook additional study in rational psychology, experimental psychology, physics and anthropology. He took part in the research of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and published twenty four articles on Semitic paleography in various journals. He was summoned to Rome to work within the Holy See and act as the private secretary for Augustin Cardinal Bea S.J.. While in Rome, he became a professor within the Pontifical Biblical Institute of the Vatican, where he taught Aramaic, paleography, Hebrew and Sacred Scripture. According to his book Hostage to the Devil, he assisted in several exorcisms. Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, developed a friendship with Martin and was influenced by the latter in the development of his theories of evil and exorcism. After a brief stay in Paris, Martin relocated to New York City in 1965, and was active as a Masonic propagandist for the rest of his life. He received a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to write his first bestseller, Hostage to the Devil. Martin a member of the Vatican advisory council.

Malachi Martin’s Double Agent Status Documented

By John Grasmeier, Angelqueen.org, June, 2007

Angelqueen.org has obtained numerous incriminating documents proving not only that Malachi Martin was indeed the infamous Vatican II “double agent,” but also that his duplicitous activities during the Council ran far deeper than had been previously thought.

Background

During the Second Vatican Council, Martin acted as an assistant and translator to Cardinal Augustin Bea, head of the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity (SPCU). At the time, a major focus of the SPCU was the Jewish declaration portion of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II document that addressed the Church’s relations with other religions. Cardinal Bea would later be referred to by Archbishop Lefebvre as an “instrument of betrayal.”

In January of 1966, Look Magazine ran an article entitled “How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking,” a lengthy, in-depth look at the influence various Jewish lobbying groups had over the final draft of Nostra Aetate. In the article, Senior Editor Joseph Roddy tells of an unnamed Jesuit priest who held a key position in Rome during the time the Second Vatican Council was in session. The priest, described as a “double agent who “could never turn down work” and a “savior in the diaspora,” would use his position to gather and disseminate inside information to the secular press and the Jewish lobbying groups, who would in turn use that information in their efforts to influence the Council fathers – particularly the progressive American bishops. Although the priest’s actual name is withheld, several pseudonyms he used for his various activities are revealed.

As “Michael Serafian,” he wrote “The Pilgrim” (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964), a tell-all book on the politics, key figures and inner dealings of the council. As “F.E. Cartus,” he penned two timely articles, one for Harper’s Magazine and one for the American Jewish Committee’s influential intellectual periodical Commentary. As “Pushkin,” he would feed “inside tips and tactical leaks,” often in the form of notes slipped under doors, to journalists of major media organizations.

This all took place many years before Malachi Martin became a cult figure and public author who wrote books under his own name. Although word began to get around in certain circles that Martin and the pen-names were one in the same, it wasn’t until 5 years after he left Rome, when he wrote “The Encounter” (Ferrar, Straus & Giroux), that the first solid nexus was made between Martin and the double-agent priest. On the back cover of The Encounter, it states clearly that Malachi Martin did indeed write “The Pilgrim” under the pseudonym Michael Serafian.

Despite the indisputable self-admission that Michael Serafian was Martin’s pen name, many of his devoted fans would claim that there was no evidence that he was the mole priest identified in the Look article who wrote for the American Jewish Committee and used his position in Rome to pass sensitive information to the press. What follows, will indisputably show not only that Martin was the double-agent priest in the Look article, but that the “warm friendship with the AJC” described by Joe Roddy was far warmer than anyone, including Roddy, had suspected.

The documents referenced below were made available to AQ by the Manuscripts Department of the New York Public Library. They are part of the Ferrar, Straus & Giroux collection, which contains correspondence and documentation on the publishing company’s dealings with many of its authors. They are available to any and all. None have been altered in any way shape or form.

THE DOCUMENTS

Exhibit A: Setting up the Swiss bank account

This memo, dated March 19, 1964 was written by FSG treasurer Robert Wohlforth (RW) and sent to Robert Straus (RWS). Roger Straus is the president of Ferrar, Straus and Giroux and the sole heir to the Guggenheim fortune. The memo describes a discussion the two had regarding “The Pilgrim contract” and what steps needed to be taken to set up a Swiss bank account.

Exhibit B: Zachariah Shuster receives royalty payments from Martin’s book, “The Pilgrim”

This extraordinarily fascinating sheet of paper must be colloquially described as the proverbial “doozey.” It’s a Ferrar, Straus and Giroux royalty statement listing payouts and deductions for The Pilgrim. Only instead of the payee being the author of the book, Malachi Martin (aka Michael Serafian), the payee just happens to be Zachariah Shuster of the American Jewish Committee.

Exhibit C: Zachariah Shuster wonders where the check is

Zachariah Shuster of the American Jewish Committee writes a letter to FS&G treasurer wondering why a check that was destined for a Swiss bank account hasn’t yet arrived. He follows up with a confirmation then receives a response from Ferrar, Straus and Giroux treasurer Robert Wohlforth.

Exhibit D: Martin’s services are requested by the AJC

Here we have Marc Tanenbaum, Director of Interreligious Affairs for the AJC, accepting a gracious offer from Roger Straus to use Malachi Martin as he sees fit. Tanenbaum thinks the idea is a good one, stating that “Serafian (Martin) could provide a genuine service if he were to deal with the crucial issue of the deicide problem…” Although the hoped for late summer deadline would not be met, in the January 1965 issue of the AJC publication, Commentary, Martin, as F.E. Cartus, writes an article entitled “Vatican II and the Jews,” At the beginning of the third paragraph, it reads in part as follows:

“Roman Catholic believers drew a whole range of practical conclusions from these premises. The Jews as a people-not only the Jews of Christ’s time but Jews of all time-were guilty of having killed Christ, the God-man: theologically speaking, they were deicides.”

Not only does Martin dutifully write the article (containing a vast amount of insider information) as requested, but he exceeds all expectations when he fabricates a statement on the Jews that he attributes to Pope John XXIII, claiming it was written shortly before his death and was to be read on a set date in all Catholic Churches worldwide. That story HERE.

Exhibit E: Robert Straus receives Martin’s assignment from the AJC

Robert Straus acknowledges receiving Tanenbaum’s letter and notes that he simultaneously had received the assignment for “The Pilgrim” to write the article for the AJC publication.

Exhibit F: Roger Straus wants to discuss Martin with Podhorez

Roger Straus wishes to discuss a letter from Michael Serafian (Malachi Martin) with Norman Podhorez, the editor of Commentary, where the article was to appear. It’s unclear what is meant when Straus states they should discuss the matter as a “possible post mortem.” Perhaps he was referring to the fact that the hoped for timeframe of late summer couldn’t be met.

Exhibit G: Straus makes undeniable connection between Martin and F.E. Cartus

Roger Straus writes to a British publisher telling him to look for an article by pseudonym Michael Serafian (Martin) that will appear in the September 1965 issue of Harper’s Magazine. As promised, an article by F.E. Cartus entitled “The Vatican Council Ends – Reform on borrowed time?” by F.E. Cartus appears in the September edition of Harpers.

Exhibit H: An ledger with interesting transactions

A ledger that was created to show “actual payments to or in (sic) behalf of Michael Serafian,” offers some interesting insights. On line 1, it shows the check sent to Zachariah Shuster on June 25, 1964 (see Exhibit C). On line 3, it shows the net royalty payment that is shown on line 29 of the document at Exhibit B. On line 2, it shows another payment to Zachariah Shuster that does not have any corresponding documentation in the FS&G collection. On line 5, it shows a payment of $500 to Abe Karlikow. Abe Karlikow was the director of the American Jewish Committee’s European office, based in Paris, France. On line 9, it shows Martin’s last payment as being on June 7, 1965. Just a few weeks later, on June 24, 1965, Martin would receive a $7,350 (around $48,000 in 2007 dollars) fellowship grant from the Harry F. Guggenheim foundation. The founder of that foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim, just so happens to be Roger Straus’ uncle on his mother’s side.

In conclusion

There is no doubt whatsoever that the double agent described in the Look article by Joseph Roddy was in fact Malachi Martin. The document at exhibit G undeniably ties Michael Serafian – who is undeniably Malachi Martin – to the F.E Cartus pseudonym.

Joe Roddy was somewhat remiss, in that the relationship between Martin and the American Jewish Committee was far more than “warm friendship.” The relationship was outright collusive. Zachariah Shuster and Abe Kalikow were receiving payments on Martin’s behalf that were laundered through a Swiss bank account set up specifically for that purpose. Marc Tanenbaum requested custom propaganda for the AJC periodical Commentary, which Martin happily provided. Shuster and Kalikow were attached to the European office of the AJC in Paris, France, which just so happens to be where Martin fled to after he left Rome.

Martin was paid well for his services. According to the Straus ledger (exhibit H), during the latter half of 1964, he received a total of $3,651.03. According to the Federal Reserve consumer price index calculator, that would equal $24,202.80 today. In the first half of 1965, he received $4,282.85, which works out to $27,940.50 in 2007 dollars. Immediately after receiving his last payment from Straus in June of ’65, Martin receives a grant from Straus’ uncle’s foundation for $7,350 or $47,950 adjusted to 2007. In fairness to Martin, it must be noted that he took that grant in monthly payments over 15 months following the time it was awarded to him. The fact remains however, in the year’s time that spanned from June of ’64 and June of ’65, Martin was paid, granted, or received on his behalf at least $100,000 adjusted for inflation. This sum only includes what has been documented by AQ as being paid from Guggenheim and FS&G from in that one year span. It does not include other payments, if any, from Guggenheim and FS&G that AQ doesn’t have a record of. It does not include any payments Martin would have received for writing the articles for Commentary and Harpers. It does not include any other possible income sources. In the summer of 1963, Robert Kaiser claims that Martin “always had a wallet was stuffed with hundred dollar bills,” that he believed was provided by the AJC. In any case, he most certainly didn’t do the AJC’s bidding for free. It’s more than safe to assume that Martin had income aside from that which AQ has been able to document 40 years after the fact.

While Malachi Martin was supposed to be working on behalf of Holy Mother Church, the Holy See and his brother and sister Catholics, he was working for secular publishers, secular media organization and Jewish interest groups.

Related:

• John Grasmeier: Malachi Martin wasn’t a 60s liberal, he was far worse”
• John Grasmeier:  ”Malachi Martin’s actions against the Church during the 1960’s, Clever pseudonyms, paid intelligence work and fabricated Papal Prayers”

How the Jews Changed Catholic Thinking

LOOK Magazine, Volume 30 No. 2
by Joseph Roddy
January 25, 1966

[I have taken the liberty of crossing out the self-pitying and mendacious Anti-Christ Jewish propaganda, and have added  a few helpful comments.]

For the simple tenets of their faith, most Roman Catholics rely on the catechism’s hard questions and imprimatured answers. Children in Church schools memorize its passages, which they rarely forget the rest of their lives. In the catechism, they learn that Catholic dogma does not change and, far more vividly, that Jews killed Jesus Christ. [In fact, this is a Jewish teaching; in The Talmud, the Jews boast about having murdered the Son of God, and celebrate their belief that He is boiling for eternity in a vat of boiling shit and/or sperm.] Because of that Christian [Jewish] concept, for the past 20 centuries anti-Semitism spread as a kind of social disease on the body of mankind. [No. Jews have had a few set-backs over the years because their host populations resent being manipulated and lorded over by Jewish racial supremacists who are at war with humanity.] Its incidence rose and fell, but anti-Semites were never quite out of style. The ill-minded who argued all other matters could still join in contempt for Jews. It was a gentlemen’s agreement that carried into Auschwitz.

Few Catholics were ever directly taught to hate Jews. Yet Catholic teaching could not get around the New Testament account that Jews provoked the Crucifixion. The gas chambers were only the latest proof that they had not yet been pardoned. The best hope that the Church of Rome will not again seem an accomplice to genocide is the fourth chapter of its Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non- Christian Religions, which Pope Paul VI declared Church law near the end of Vatican Council II. At no place in his address from the Chair of Peter did the Pope talk of Jules Isaac. But perhaps the archbishop of Aix, Charles de Provenchères, had made Isaac’s role perfectly clear some few years earlier. “It is a sign of the times,” the Archbishop said, ” that a layman, and a Jewish layman at that, has become the originator of a Council decree.”

Jules Isaac was a history scholar, a Legion of Honor member, and the inspector of schools in France. In 1943, he was 66, a despairing man living near Vichy, when the Germans picked up his daughter and wife. From then on, Isaac could think of little but the apathy of the Christian world before the fate of incinerated Jews. His book Jesus and Israel was published in 1948, and after reading it, Father Paul Démann in Paris searched schoolbooks and verified Isaac’s sad claim that inadvertently, if not by intent, Catholics taught contempt for Jews. Gregory Baum, an Augustinian priest born an Orthodox Jews, called it “a moving account of the love which Jesus had for his people, the Jews, and of the contempt which the Christians, later, harbored for them.”

Isaac’s book was noticed. In 1949, Pope Pius XII received its author briefly. But 11 years went by before Isaac saw real hope. In Rome, in mid-June, 1960, the French Embassy pressed Isaac on to the Holy See. Isaac wanted to see John XXIII. He was passed from the old Cardinal Eugene Tisserant to the archconservative Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani. Ottaviani sent him on to the 83-year-old Cardinal Andrea Jullien, who stared without seeing and stayed motionless as stone while Isaac told how Catholic teaching led to anti- Semitism. When he had finished, he waited for a reaction, but Jullien stayed in stone. Isaac, who was hard of hearing, stared intently at the prelate’s lips. Time passed, neither spoke. Isaac thought of just leaving, then decided to intrude. “But whom should I see about this terrible thing?” he asked, finally, and after another long pause, the old Cardinal said,” Tisserant.” The silence settled in again. The next word was, “Ottaviani.” Isaac shook that off too. When it was time for another, the word was, “Bea.” With that, Jules Isaac went to Augustin Bea, the one German Jesuit in the College of Cardinals. “In him, I found powerful support,” Isaac said.

The next day, the support was even stronger. John XXIII, standing in the doorway of the fourth-floor papal apartment, reached for Jules Isaac’s hand, then sat beside him. “I introduced myself as a non- Christian, the [non-]promoter of l’Amitiés Judéo-Chrétiennes, and a very deaf old man,” Isaac said. John talked for a while of his [Judaic] devotion to the Old Testament, told of his days as a Vatican diplomat in France, then asked where his caller was born. Here, Isaac felt a rambling chat with the Supreme Pontiff coming on and started worrying about how he would ever bring the conversation around to his subject. He told John that his actions had kindled great hopes in the people of the Old Testament, and added: “Is not the Pope himself, in his great kindness, responsible for it if we now expect more?” John laughed, and Isaac had a listener. The non-Christian beside the Pope said the Vatican should study anti-Semitism [sic]. John said he had been thinking about that from the beginning of their talk. “I asked if I might take away some sparks of hope,” Isaac recalled. John said he had a right to more than hope and then went on about the limits of sovereignty. “I am the head, but I must consult others too….This is not monarchie absolue!” To much of the world, it seemed to be monarchy benevolent. Because of John, a lot was happening fast in Catholicism and Jewry.

A few months before Isaac spelled out his case against the Gentiles [sic], a Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity was set up by Pope John under Cardinal Bea. It was to press toward reunion with the churches Rome lost at the Reformation. After Isaac left, John made it clear to the administrators in the Vatican’s Curia that a firm condemnation of Catholic anti-Semitism [sic] was to come from the council he had called. To John, the German Cardinal seemed the right legislative whip for the job, even if his Christian Unity secretariat seemed a vexing address to work from.

By then, there was a fair amount of talk passing between the Vatican Council offices and Jewish groups, and both the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith were heard loud and clear in Rome. Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel of New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, who first knew of Bea in Berlin 30 years ago, met with the Cardinal in Rome. Bea had already read the American Jewish Committee’s The Image of the Jews in Catholic Teaching. It was followed by another AJC paper, the 23-page study, Anti-Jewish Elements in Catholic Liturgy. Speaking for the AJC, Heschel said he hoped the Vatican Council would purge Catholic teaching of all suggestions that the Jews were a cursed race. And in doing that, Heschel felt, the Council should in no way exhort Jews to become Christians. About the same time, Israel’s Dr. Nahum Goldmann, head of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations, whose members ranged in creed from the most orthodox to liberal, pressed its aspirations on the Pope. B’nai B’rith wanted the Catholics to delete all language from the Church services that could even seem anti-Semitic [sic]. Not then, nor in any time to come, would that be a simple thing to do. The Catholic liturgy, where it was drawn from writings of the early Church Fathers, could easily be edited. But not the Gospels. Even if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were better at evangelism than history, their writings were divinely inspired, according to Catholic dogma, and about as easy to alter as the center of the sun. That difficulty put both Catholics with the very best intentions and Jews with the deepest understanding of Catholicism in a theological fix. It also brought out the conservative opposition in the Church and, to some extent, Arab anxieties in the Mideast. The conservative charge against the Jews was that they were deicides, guilty of killing God in the human-divine person of Christ. And to say now that they were not deicides was to say by indirection that Christ was not God, for the fact of the execution on Calvary stood unquestioned in Catholic theology. Yet the execution and the religion of those demanding it were the reasons Jews were “God-killers” and “Christ-killers” in the taunts of anti-Semites [sic]. Clearly, then, Catholic Scripture [i.e. Christian Scriptire, i.e. The New Testament, which supersedes The Old Testament] would be at issue if the council spoke about deicides and Jews. Wise and long-mitred heads around the Curia warned that the bishops in council should not touch this issue with ten-foot staffs. But still there was John XXIII, who said they must.

If the inviolability of Holy Writ was most of the problem in Rome, the rest was the Arab-Israeli war. Ben-Gurion’s Israel, in the Arab League’s view, like Mao’s China in the world out of Taiwan, really does not exist. Or, it only exists as a bone in the throat of Nasser. If the Council were to speak out for the Jews, then the spiritual order would seem political to Arab bishops. Next, there would be envoys passing in the night between the Vatican and Tel Aviv. This was a crisis the Arab League thought it might handle by diplomacy. Unlike Israel, its states already had some ambassadors to the papal court. They would bear the politest of reminders to the Holy See that some 2,756,000 Roman Catholics lived in Arab lands and mention the 420,000 [Arab] Orthodox Catholics separated from Rome, whom the Papacy hoped to reclaim. Bishops of both cuts [huh?] of Catholicism could be counted on to convey their interests to the Holy See. It was too soon for the threats. [No. There was only the ubiquitous Jewish threat.] Instead, the Arabs importuned Rome to see that they were neither anti-Semitic [sic] nor anti-Jewish. Arabs, too, are Semites, they said ["they said"? "they said?" it's a fact!], and among them lived thousands of Jewish refugees. Patriotic Arabs were just anti-Zionist because to them, Zionism was a plot to set a Judaic state in the center of Islam. ["to them..."? "to them..."? it's a fact!]

In Rome, the word from the Mideast and the conservatives was that a Jewish declaration would be inopportune. From the West, where 225,500 more Jews live in New York than in Israel, the word was that dropping the declaration would be a calamity. And into this impasse came the ingenuous bulk of John XXIII — not to settle the dispute but to enlarge it. Quite on his own, the Pope was toying with an idea, which the Roman Curia found grotesque, that non-Catholic faiths should send observers to the Council. The prospect of being invited caused no crisis among Protestants, but it plainly nonplussed the Jews. To attend suggested to some Jews that Christian theology concerned them. [And yet, today Jews make rulings on who is entitled to Christian communion, and issue their demands to their slave, or colleague, the Bishop of Rome.] But to stay away when invited might suggest that the Jews did not really care whether Catholics came to grips with anti-Semitism [sic]. When it was learned that Bea’s declaration, set for voting at the first Council session, carried a clear refutation of the decide charge, the World Jewish Congress let it be known around Rome that Dr. Haim Y. Vardi, an Israeli, would be an unofficial observer at the Council. The two reports may not have been related, but still they seemed to be. Because of them, other reports — louder ones — were heard. The Arabs complained to the Holy See. The Holy See said no Israeli had been invited. The Israelis denied then that an observer had been named. The Jews in New York thought an American should observe. In Rome, it all ended up with a jiggering of the agenda to make sure that the declaration would not come to the Council floor that session. Still, for the bishops, there was quite a bit of supplementary reading on Jews. Some agency close enough to the Vatican to have the addresses in Rome of the Council’s 2,200 visiting cardinals and bishops, supplied each with a 900-page book, Il Complotto contro la Chiesa (The Plot Against the Church) In it, among reams of scurrility, was a kind of fetching shred of truth. Its claim [of the fact] that the Church was being infiltrated by Jews would intrigue anti-Semites [sic]. For, in fact, ordained Jews around Rome working on the Jewish declaration included Father Baum, as well as Msgr. John Oesterreicher, on Bea’s staff at the Secretariat. Bea, himself, according to the Cairo daily, Al Gomhuria, was a Jew named Behar. Neither Baum nor Oesterreicher was with Bea in the late afternoon on March 31, 1963, when a limousine was waiting for him outside the Hotel Plaza in New York. The ride ended about six blocks away, outside the offices of the American Jewish Committee. There, a latter-day Sanhedrin was waiting to greet the head of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. The gathering was kept secret from the press. Bea wanted neither the Holy See nor the Arab League to know he was there to take questions the Jews wanted to hear answered. “I am not authorized to speak officially,” he told them. “I can, therefore, speak only of what, in my opinion, could be effected, indeed, should be effected, by the Council.” Then, he spelled out the problem. “In round terms” he said, “the Jews are accused of being guilty of deicide, and on them is supposed to lie a curse.” [And they boast of their Deicide in The Talmud.] He countered both charges. Because even in the accounts of the Evangelists, only the leaders of the Jews then in Jerusalem and a very small group of followers shouted for the death sentence on Jesus, all those absent and the generations of Jews unborn were not implicated in deicide in any way, Bea said. [Which is why "Christ-Killers" is a proud Jewish boast, and not exactly Christian teaching. Christian teaching is that Judaism is of course evil, but humankind killed Christ.] As to the curse, it could not condemn the crucifiers anyway, the Cardinal reasoned, because Christ’s dying words were a prayer for their pardon.

The Rabbis in the room wanted to know then if the declaration would specify deicide, the curse and the rejection of the Jewish people by God as errors in Christian teaching. [From Chapter 8 of the Gospel of St John, a true Israelite, and the Most Beloved Disciple: "They answered, 'Our father is Abraham.' … 'God is our Father; he is the only Father we have.' Jesus said to them, 'If God were really your Father, you would love me, because I came from God and now I am here. I did not come by my own authority; God sent me. You don’t understand what I say, because you cannot accept my teaching. You belong to your father the devil, and you want to do what he wants. He was a murderer from the beginning and was against the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he shows what he is really like, because he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I speak the truth, you don’t believe me.'… 'you don’t accept what God says, because you don’t belong to God.'"] Implicit in their question was the most touchy problem of the New Testament. Bea’s answer was oblique. He cautioned his listeners that an unwieldy assemblage of bishops could not possibly get down to details, could only set guidelines, and hope not to make the complex seem simple. “Actually,” he went on, “it is wrong to seek the chief cause of anti- Semitism [sic] in purely religious sources — in the Gospel accounts, for example. These religious causes, in so far as they are adduced (often they are not), are often merely an excuse and a veil to cover over other more operative reasons for enmity.” [Mr Bea did not mention Jewish contempt for non-Jewish humanity, or "goyim", and Jewish hatred of Christ and His Church.] Cardinal and rabbis joined in a toast with sherry after the talk, and one asked the prelate about Monsignor Oesterreicher, whom many Jews regard as too missionary with them. “You know, Eminence,” a Jewish reporter once told Bea, “Jews do not regard Jewish converts [i.e Jewish apostates who have converted to God] as their best friends.” Bea answered gravely, “Not our Jews.”

Not long after that, the Rolf Hochhuth [slanderous, mendacious] play The Deputy opened [and not by coincidence], to depict Pius XII as the Vicar of Christ who fell silent [a lie] while Hitler went to The Final Solution [i.e, the expulsion of Jews from the Gerrman Reich]. From the pages of the Jesuit magazine America, Oesterreicher talked straight at the AJC and B’nai B’rith. “Jewish human-relations agencies,” he wrote, “will have to speak out against The Deputy in unmistakable terms. Otherwise they will defeat their own purpose.” In the Table of London, Giovanni Battista Montini, the archbishop of Milan, wrote an attack on the play as a defense of the Pope, whose secretary he had been. A few months later, Pope John XXIII was dead, and Montini became Pope Paul VI.

At the second session of the Council, in the fall of 1963, the Jewish declaration came to the bishops as Chapter 4 of the larger declaration On Ecumenism. The Chapter 5 behind it was the equally troublesome declaration on religious liberty. Like riders to bills in congress, each of the disputed chapters was a wayward caboose hooked to the new ecumenical train. Near the end of the session, when On Ecumenism came up for a vote, the Council moderators decided the voting should cover only the first three chapters. That switched the cabooses to a siding and averted a lot of clatter in a council trying hard to be ecumenical. Voting on the Jews and religious liberty would follow soon, the bishops were promised. And while waiting around, they could read The Jews and the Council in the Light of Scripture and Tradition which was shorter, but more scurrilous than Il Complotto. But the second session ended without the vote on the Jews or religious liberty, and on a distinctly sour note, despite the Pope’s announced visit to the Holy Land. That pilgrimage would take up a lot of newsprint, but still leave room for questions about votes that vanished. “Something had happened behind the scenes,” ["and God said, "Let their be light."] the voice of the National Catholic Welfare Conference wrote.” [It is] one of the mysteries of the second session.”

Two very concerned Jewish gentlemen who had to reflect hard on such mysteries were 59-year-old Joseph Lichten of [Masonic] B’nai B’rith’s [gangster] Anti- Defamation League in New York, and Zachariah Shuster, 63, of the American Jewish Committee. Lichten, who lost his parents, wife and daughter in Buchenwald, and Shuster, who also lost come of his closest relatives, had been talking with bishops and their staff men in Rome. The two lobbyists were not, however, seeing a lot of one another over vin rosso around St. Peter’s. The strongest possible Jewish declaration was their common cause, but each wanted his home office to have credit for it. [Is this an "antishemitic" jibe, making fun of the common perception that Jews will even cheat each other every chance they get?] That is, of course, if the declaration was really strong. But until then, each would offer himself to the American hierarchs as the best barometer in Rome of Jewish sentiment back home.

To find out how the Council was going, many U.S. bishops in Rome depended on what they read in the New York Times. And so did the AJC and B’nai B’rith. That paper was the place to make points. Lichten thought Shuster was a genius at getting space in it, but less than deeply instructed in theology. Which is just about the way Shuster saw Lichten. Neither had much time for Frith Becker. Becker was in Rome for the World Jewish Congress, as its spokesman who sought no publicity and got little. The WJC, according to Becker, was interested in the Council, but not in trying to shape it. “We don’t have the American outlook,” he said, “on the importance of getting into print.” [And who owns the presses?]

Getting into print was even beginning to look good to the Vatican. Yet an expert at the public relations craft would say the Holy See showed inexperience in the Holy Land. When Paul prayed with the bearded Orthodox Patriarch Athenagora in the Jordanian sector, the visit looked very good. Yet when he crossed over to Israel, he had cutting words about the author of The Deputy and a conversionest sermon for the Jews. His stay was so short that he never publicly uttered the name of the young country he was visiting in. [Rightly so, since The Church (wherever and whatever The Church is) is in fact Israel.] Vaticanlogists studying his moves thought they saw lessened hope for the declaration on the Jews.

Things looked better ["better"?] at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. There, at a Beth Israel Hospital anniversary, guests learned that, years earlier, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver had told Cardinal Francis Spellman of Israel’s efforts to get a seat in the United Nations. To help, Spellman said he would call on South American governments and share with them his fond wish that Israel be admitted. About the same time, il Papa americana told an AJC meeting it was “absurd to maintain that there is some kind of continuing guilt.” In Pittsburgh, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum of the AJC spoke to the Catholic Press Association about the deicide charge, and the editorial response was abundant. In Rome, six AJC members had an audience with the Pope, and one of them, Mrs. Leonard M. Sperry, had just endowed [i.e. Jewish $$$, to corrupt] the Sperry Center for Intergroup Cooperation at Pro Deo University in the Holy City. The Pope told his callers he agreed with all Cardinal Spellman had said about Jewish guilt. Vaticanologists could not help but reverse their reading and see a roseate future for the declaration.

Then came the New York Times. On June 12, 1964, it reported that the denial of deicide had been cut from the latest draft of the declaration. At the Secretariat for Christian Unity, a spokesman said only that the text had been made stronger. But that is not the way most Jews read it, nor a great many Catholics. Before the Council met and while the text was still sub secreto, whole sections of it turned up one morning in the New York Herald Tribune. No mention of the deicide charge was to be found. Instead, there was a clear call for the ecumenical spirit to extend itself because “the union of the Jewish people with the Church is a part of the Christian hope.” Among the few Jews who did not mind reading that were Lichten and Shuster. They could look at it professionally. It read, say, much better over coffee in a morning paper than it would if the Pope were promulgating it as Catholic teaching. On other Jews, its effect was galvanic. Their disappointment set off indignation among some American bishops, and Lichten and Shuster appreciated their concern. Chances that a deicideless declaration, with a built-in conversion clause, would ever get by the American bishops and cardinals at the Council were what a couple of good lobbyists might call slim.

About two weeks before that, Msgr. George Higgins of the National Catholic Welfare Conference in Washington, D.C., helped arrange a papal audience for UN Ambassador Arthur J. Goldberg, who was a Supreme Court Justice at the time. Rabbi Heschel briefed Goldberg before the Justice and the Pope discussed the declaration. Cardinal Richard Cushing, in Boston, wanted to help too. Through his aide in Rome, the Cardinal set up an audience with the Pope for Heschel, whose apprehensions had reason to exceed Cushing’s. With the AJC’s Shuster beside him, Heschel talked hard about deicide and guilt, and asked the Pontiff to press for a declaration in which Catholics would be forbidden to proselytize Jews. Paul, somewhat affronted, would in no way agree. Shuster, somewhat chagrined, disassociated himself gingerly from Heschel by switching to French, which the Pope speaks but the Rabbi does not. All agree that the audience did not end as cordially as it began. Only Heschel and a few others think it did good. He invited notice in an Israeli paper that the declaration’s next text had emerged free of conversionary tone. To the AJC, that interview was one more irritant. The Rabbi’s audience with Paul in the Vatican, like Bea’s meeting with the AJC in New York, was granted on the condition that it would be kept secret. It was undercover summit conferences of that sort that led conservatives [i.e. Christians] to claim that American Jews were the new powers behind the Church. But on the floor of the Council, things looked even worse to the conservatives. There, it seemed to them as if Catholic bishops were working for the Jews. At issue was the weakened text. The cardinals from St. Louis and Chicago, Joseph Ritter and the late Albert Meyer, demanded a return to the strong one. Cushing said the deicide denial would have to be put back. Bishop Steven Leven of San Antonio called for clearing the text of conversionary pleas and , unknowingly, uttered a prophetic view about deicide. “We must tear this word out of the Christian vocabulary,” he said, “so that it may never again be used against the Jews.”

All that talk brought out the Arab bishops. They argued that a declaration favoring Jews would expose Catholics to persecution as long as Arabs fought Israelis. Deicide, inherited guilt and conversionary locutions seemed like so many debating points to most Arabs. They wanted no declaration at all, they kept saying, because it would be put to political use against them. Their allies in this holy war were conservative Italians, Spaniards and South Americans. They saw the structure of the faith being shaken by theological liberals who thought Church teaching could change. To the conservatives, this was near-heresy, and to the liberals, it was pure faith. Beyond faith, the liberals had the votes, and sent the declaration back to its Secretariat for more strength. While it was out for redrafting again, the conservatives wanted it flattened into one paragraph in the Constitution of the Church. But when the declaration reappeared at the third session’s end, it was in a wholly new document called The Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions. In that setting, the bishops approved it with a 1,770 to 185 vote. There was considerable joy among Jews in the United States because their declaration had finally come out. In fact, it had not. The vote had been an endorsement only for the general substance of the text. But because votes with qualifications were accepted (placet iuxta modum is the Latin term for “yes, but with this modification”), the time between the third session and the fourth — just finished — would be spent fitting in the modifying modi, or those most of the 31 voting members of the Secretariat thought acceptable. By Council rules, modi could qualify or nuance the language, but they could not change the substance of the text. But then, what substance is or is not had always kept philosophers on edge. And theologians have had trouble with it too.

But first there were less recondite troubles to face. In Segni, near Rome, Bishop Luigi Carli wrote in the February, 1965 issue of his diocesan magazine that the Jews of Christ’s time and their descendants down to the present were collectively guilty of Christ’s death. A few weeks later, on Passion Sunday, at an outdoor Mass in Rome, Pope Paul talked of the Crucifixion and the Jews’ heavy part in it. Rome’s chief rabbi, Elio Toaff [whose son recently wrote a book -- banned by the ADL -- about Jewish torture and cannibalism of Christian youth], said in saddened reply that in “even the most qualified Catholic personalities, the imminence of Easter causes prejudices to reemerge.”

On April 25, 1965, the New York Times correspondent in Rome, Robert C. Doty, upset just about everybody. The Jewish declaration was in trouble was the gist of his story reporting that the Pope had turned it over to four consultants to clear it of its contradictions to Scripture and make it less objectionable to Arabs. It was about as refuted as a Times story ever gets. When Cardinal Bea arrived in New York three days later, he had his priest-secretary deny Doty’s story by saying that his Secretariat for Christian Unity still had full control of the Jewish declaration. Then came an apologia for Paul’s sermon. “Keep in mind that the Pope was speaking to ordinary and simple faithful people — not before a learned body,” the priest said. As to the anti-Semitic [sic] Bishop of Segni, the Cardinal’s man said that Carli’s views were definitely not those of the Secretariat. Morris B. Abram of the AJC was at the airport to greet Bea and found his secretary’s views on that reassuring.

In Rome a few days later, some fraction of the Secretariat met to vote on the bishops’ suggested modi. Among them were a few borne down from the fourth floor of the Vatican over the signature of the Bishop of Rome. It is not known for certain whether that special bishop urged that the “guilty of deicide” denial be cut. But the alternate possibility that the phrase would have been cut, if he had wanted it kept, is not pondered on much any more. Accounts of the Secretariat’s struggles over deicide agree that it was a very close vote after a long day’s debate. After deicide went out, there remained the Bishop of Rome’s suggestion that the clause beginning “deplores, indeed condemns, hatred and persecution of Jews” might read better with “indeed condemns” left out. That would leave hatred and persecution of Jews still “deplored.” The suggestion stirred no debate and was quickly accepted by vote. It was late, and nobody cared to fuss any more about little things.

That meeting was from May 9 to 15, and during that week, the New York Times had a story every other day from the Vatican. On May 8, the Secretariat denied again that outsiders were taking a hand in the Jewish declaration. [A lie.] On the 11th, President Charles Helou of Lebanon, an Arab Maronite Catholic, had an audience with the Pope. On the 12th, the Vatican Press Office announced that the Jewish declaration remained unchanged. If that was to reassure Jews, it came across as a Press Office protesting too much. On the 15th, the Secretariat closed its meeting, and the bishops went their separate ways, some sad, some satisfied, all with lips sealed. A few may have wondered if something out of order had happened and if, despite Council rules, a Council document had been substantially changed between sessions. The Times persisted in making trouble. On June 20, under Doty’s by-line, was the report that the declaration was “under study” and might be dropped altogether. On June 22, Doty filed a story amounting to a self-directed punch in the nose. Commenting to Doty on his own earlier report, a source close to Bea said it was “so deprived of any basis that it doesn’t even deserve a denial.” For those who have raised refutations to a fine art, that was a denial to be proud of, because it was precisely true while completely misleading. Doty had written that the declaration was under study when in fact, the study was finished, the damage was done, and there existed what many regard as a substantially new declaration on the Jews.

In Geneva, Dr. Willem Visser ‘tHooft, head of the [Judeo-Masonic] World Council of Churches, told two American priests that, if the reports were true, the ecumenical movement would be slowed. His sentiments were not kept secret from the U.S. hierarchy. Nor was the AJC saddened into inactivity. Rabbi Tanenbaum plied Monsignor Higgins with press clippings from appalled Jewish editors. Higgins conveyed his fears to Cardinal Cushing, and the Boston prelate made polite inquiry to the Bishop of Rome. In Germany, a group for Jewish-Christian amity sent a letter to the bishops claiming, “There is now prevailing a crisis of confidence vis-à-vis the Catholic Church.” At the Times, there had never been a crisis of confidence vis-à-vis its reporting from Rome, but if there had been one, it would have passed on September 10. In his story under the headline VATICAN DRAFT EXONERATING JEWS REVISED TO OMIT WORD “DEICIDE,” Doty allowed no Times reader to think he had pried into Vatican secrets. He was pleased to credit as his source, “an authorized leak by the Vatican.”

Similar stories in the Times foretold Council failings before they happened. Most of these were substantiated in magazine pieces and books published later, though some had traces of special pleading. The American Jewish Committee’s intellectual monthly, Commentary, had offered a most bleak report on the Council and the Jews by the pseudonymous F. E. Cartus [i.e. Malachi Martin]. In a footnote, the author referred the reader to a confirming account in The Pilgrim, a 281-page book by the pseudonymous Michael Serafian [i.e. Malachi Martin]. Later, in Harper’s magazine, Cartus [i.e. Malachi Martin], even more dour, added to the doubts on the Jewish text. To buttress his case, he recast Pilgrim passages and cited Council accounts in Time, whose Rome correspondent had surfaced for by-line status as author of a notably good book on the Council. At the time, both Time and the New York Times were glad to have an inside tipster. Just for the journalistic fun of it, the inside man’s revelations were signed “Pushkin,” [i.e. Malachi Martin] when slipped under some correspondents’ doors. But readers were served no rewritten Pushkin on the Council’s last sessions. The cassock had come off the double agent who could never turn down work. Pushkin [i.e. Malachi Martin], it turned out, was Michael Serafian [i.e. Malachi Martin] in book length, F.E. Cartus [i.e. Malachi Martin] for the magazines, and a translator in the Secretariat for Christian Unity, while keeping up a warm friendship with the AJC. At the time, Pushkin-Serafian- Cartus [i.e. Malachi Martin]was living in the Biblical Institute, where he had been known well since his ordination in 1954, though he will be known here as Timothy Fitzharris O’Boyle, S.J. [i.e. Malachi Martin] For the journalists, the young priest’s inside tips and tactical leaks checked out so well that he could not resist gilding them every now and then with a flourish of creative writing. And an imprecision or two could even be charged off to exhaustion in his case. He was known to be working on a book at a young married couple’s flat. The book finally got finished, but so did half of the friendship. Father Fitzharris-O’Boyle knew it was time for a forced march before his religious superior could inquire too closely into the reasons for that crisis in camaraderie. He left Rome then, sure that he could be of no more use [use to whom?] locally.

Apart from his taste for pseudonyms, fair ladies, reports on the nonexistent and perhaps a real jester’s genius for footnotes, Fitzharris- O’Boyle [i.e. Malachi Martin] was good at his job in the Secretariat, valuable to the AJC and is still thought of by many around Rome as a kind of genuine savior in the diaspora. Without him, the Jewish declaration might well have gone under early, for it was Fitzharris-O’Boyle [i.e. Malachi Martin] who best helped the press harass the Romans wanting to scuttle it. The man has a lot of priests’ prayers.

Other years, Fitzharris-O’Boyle [i.e. Malachi Martin] was around Rome when the declaration needed help. At Vatican II’s fourth and last session, there was no help in sight. And things were happening very fast. The text came out weakened, as the Times said it would. Then, the Pope took off for the UN, where his jamais plus la guerre speech was a triumph. After that, he greeted the president of the AJC in an East Side church. That looked good for the cause. Then, at the Yankee Stadium Mass, the Pope’s lector intoned a text beginning “for fear of the Jews.” [ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ 20:19: "Οὔσης οὖν ὀψίας τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ τῇ μιᾷ σαββάτων, καὶ τῶν θυρῶν κεκλεισμένων ὅπου ἦσαν οἱ μαθηταὶ συνηγμένοι διὰ τὸν φόβον τῶν Ἰουδαίων, ἦλθεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς καὶ ἔστη εἰς τὸ μέσον, καὶ λέγει αὐτοῖς· Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν." (ויהי לעת ערב ביום ההוא והוא אחד בשבת כאשר נסגרו דלתות הבית אשר נקבצו שם התלמידים מיראת היהודים ויבא ישוע ויעמד ביניהם ויאמר אליהם שלום לכם׃)] And on TV that sounded quite astonishing. Everywhere, there were speeches on the rises and falls of the Jewish declaration, many of them preparing for a final letdown. Lichten’s executive vice-president, Rabbi Jay Kaufman, had told audiences of his own puzzlement “as the fate of the section on Jews is shuttled between momentary declaration and certain confutation, like a sparrow caught in a clerical badminton game.” Shuster could hear about the same from the AJC. He could also hear the opposition. Not content with a weakened declaration, it again wanted the total victory of no declaration at all. For that, the Arabs’ last words were “respectfully submitted“ in a 28-page memorandum [correctly] calling on the bishops to save the faith from “communism and atheism and the Jewish-Communist alliance.” In Rome, the bishops’ vote was set for October 14, and to Lichten and Shuster, the prospects of anything better looked almost hopeless. Priests had slipped each a copy of the Secretariat’s secret replies to the modifications the bishops wanted. The modi made disconsolate reading. In the old text, the Jewish origin of Catholicism [a semantic lie; Judaism is a reaction to Christianity] was noted in a paragraph, beginning, “In truth, with a grateful heart, the Church of Christ acknowledges…” In the modi sent to the Secretariat, two bishops suggested that “with a grateful heart” be deleted. It could, they feared, be understood to mean that Catholics were required to give thanks to the Jews of today [i.e. those who follow the ones whom Christ Jesus condemned as being of their father the devil, and on a mission to drag others to Hell with them]. “The suggestion is accepted,” the Secretariat decided. The replies went that way for most of 16 pages. Through all of them, few reasons were advanced for taking the warmth out of the old text and making the new one more legal than humane.

When Shuster and Lichten had finished reading, there were telephone calls to be made to the AJC and B’nai B’rith in New York. But these were not much help at either end. It was Higgins who first tried convincing two disheartened lobbyists to settle for what they would get. Yet for a day or two, Bishop Leven of San Antonio gave them hope. He thought the new statement was so weakened that the American bishops should vote en bloc against it. If followed, the tactic would have added a few hundred negative votes to the Arab-conservative side and marked the Council as so split that the Pope might not promulgate anything. The protest-vote tactic was soon abandoned. Lichten’s remorse lasted longer. He sent telegrams to about 25 bishops he thought could still help retrieve the strong text. But again, it was Higgins who quietly told him to give up. “Look, Joe,” the priest with the labor-lawyer manner told Lichten, “I understand your disappointment. I’m disappointed too.” Then, he went off to console Shuster.

In his own room, where Higgins thinks he had Lichten and Shuster together for their first joint appearance in Rome, the priest could sound as if he were putting it straight to company men looking for a square shake from the union. “If you two give New York the impression you can get a better text, you are crazy,” he told them. “Lay all your cards on the table. It’s just insane to think by some pressures here or newspaper articles back in New York, you can work a miracle in the Council. You are not going to work it, and they will think you fell down on the job.”

Lichten remembers more. “Higgins said, ‘Think how much harm can be done, Joe, if we allow these changes to erect barriers in the path we have taken for such a long time. And this may happen if your people, and mine, don’t respond to the positive aspects.’ That was the psychological turning point for me,” Lichten said. Shuster was still unreconciled, and he can remember the day well. “I had to break my head and heart,” he said, “to think what should be done. I went through a crisis, but I was convinced by Higgins. The loss of deicide, frankly, I did not consider a catastrophe. But ‘deplore’ for ‘condemn’ is another thing. When I step on your toes, you deplore what I do. But massacre? Do you deplore massacre?” [Was he referring to the Jewish massacres of Slavic Orthodox Christians and others, or the Jewish massacres of Arabs?] A differing view was taken by Abbé René Laurentin, a Council staff man who wrote to all the bishops with a last-minute appeal to conscience. Of itself, the loss of the deicide denial would not have mattered to Laurentin either, if there would never be anti-Semitism in the world again. But since history invites pessimism in this, Laurentin asked the bishops to suppose that genocide might recur. “Then, the Council and the Church will be accused,” [But why should Christians be blamed for Jewish genocides of Arabs, Iranians, Armenians, etc? Does this make any sense at all? I suppose it makes sense if the Church of Rome is a pawn of the Jews.] he contended, “of having left dormant the emotional root of anti-Semitism [sic] which is the theme of deicide.” Bishop Leven had wanted the word deicide torn out of the Christian vocabulary when he argued a year earlier for the stronger text. Now, the Secretariat had even torn it out of the declaration, and proscribed it from the Christian vocabulary so abruptly that even the proscription itself was suppressed. “With difficulty, one escapes the impression,’ Laurentin wrote, “that these arguments owe something to artifice.” Before the vote in St. Peter’s, Cardinal Bea spoke to the assembled bishops. He said his Secretariat had received their modi “with grateful heart” — and the words just happened to be the very first ones deleted by his Secretariat’s vote from the new version. A year earlier, Bea had argued for getting the deicide denial into the text, and now he was defending its removal. He spoke without zeal, as if he, too, knew he was asking the bishops for less than Jules Isaac and John XXIII might have wanted. Exactly 250 bishops voted against the declaration, while 1,763 supported it. Through much of the U.S. and Europe, the press minutes later made the complex simple with headlines reading VATICAN PARDONS JEWS, JEWS NOT GUILTY or JEWS EXONERATED IN ROME.

Glowing statements came from spokesmen of the AJC and B’nai B’rith, but each had a note of disappointment that the strong declaration had been diluted. Bea’s friend Heschel was the harshest and called the Council’s failure to deal with deicide “an act of paying homage to Satan.” [But why would a Babylonian rabbi complain about any alleged homages to Satan?] Later on, when calm, he was just saddened. “my old friend, the Jesuit priest Gus Weigel, spent one of the last nights of his life in this room,” Heschel said. “I asked him whether he thought it would really be ad majorem Dei gloriam if there were no more synagogues, no more Seder dinners and no more prayers said in Hebrew?” [But this is a nonsensical question. Of course Christian prayers can be recited in Hebrew.] The question was rhetorical, and Weigel has since gone to his grave. Other comments ranged from the elated to the satiric. Dr. William Wexler of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations tried for precision. “The true significance of the Ecumenical Council’s statement will be determined by the practical effects it has on those to whom it is addressed,” he said. Harry Golden of the Carolina Israelite called for a Jewish Ecumenical council in Jerusalem to issue [yet another] a Jewish declaration on Christians.

With his needling retort, the columnist was reflecting a view popular in the U.S. that some kind of forgiveness had been granted the Jews. The notion was both started and sustained by the press, but there was no basis for it in the declaration. What led quite understandably to it, however, was the open wrangling [driven by Jews and Jewish assets] around the Council that had made the Jews seem on trial for four years. If the accused did not quite feel cleared when the verdict was in, it was because the jury was out far too long.

It was out for reasons politicians understand but few thought relevant to religion. The present head of the Holy See, like the top man in the White House, believed deeply in pressing for a consensus when any touchy issue was put to a Council vote. By the principle of collegiality, in which all bishops help govern the whole Church, any real issue divided the college of bishops into progressives and conservatives. Reconciling them was the Pope’s job. For this rub in the collegial process, the papal remedy, whether persuaded or imposed, played some hob with the law of contradiction. When one faction said Scripture alone was the source of Church teaching, the other held for the two sources of Scripture and Tradition. To bridge that break, the declaration was rewritten with Pauline touches to reaffirm the two-source teaching while allowing that the other merited study. When opponents of religious liberty said it would fly against the teaching that Catholicism is the One True Church, a similar solution trickled down from the Vatican’s fourth floor. Religious liberty now starts with the One True Church teaching, which, according to some satisfied conservatives, contradicts the text that follows.

The Jewish issue was an even more troublesome one for a consensus- maker. Those who saw a dichotomy in the declaration could find it in the New Testament, too, where all are agreed it will stay. But to what extent was that issue complicated by the politics of the Arabs? In Israel, there is the feeling since the vote, and in Mideast journals there is considerable evidence for it, that the masses of Arab Christians were more indifferent to dispute then the Scriptural conservatives would like known. By the Newtonian laws of political motion, pressure begets counterpressure more often than lobbyists like to admit. And one of the hypotheses that B’nai B’rith and the AJC must ponder is that much Arab resistance and some theological intransigence were creatures of Jewish lobbying [and Jewish colonialism in Arab land]. There was anxiety all along about that, and Nahum Goldmann cautioned Jews early to “not raise the issue with too much intensity.” Some did not. After the vote, when Fritz Becker, the WJC’s silent man, admitted he once called on Bea at home, he said the declaration was not mentioned. “We just talked, the Cardinal and I,” Becker said, “about the advantages of not talking.”

There are Catholics close to what went on in Rome who think that Jewish energy did harm. Higgins, the social-action priest from Washington, D.C., is not one of them. If it had not been for the lobbying, he felt, the declaration would have been tabled. But in his usual gruff way, Cardinal Cushing said that the only people who could beat the Jewish declaration were the Jewish lobbyists. Father Tome Stransky, the touchy, young Paulist who rides a Lambretta to work at the Secretariat, thought that once the press got on to the Council there was no way to stop such pressure groups. If the Council could have deliberated in secret with no strainings from the outside, he thinks the declaration would have been stronger.

As it stands, Stransky fears that some Catholics may gleefully [rightly] pass it off as if it were written to and for Jews. “This, you have got to remember, is addressed to Catholics. This is Catholic Church business. I don’t mind telling you I’d be insulted, too, if I were a Jew and I thought this document was speaking to Jews.” For the Catholics, he thinks it is now written for its best effect. It was Stransky’s superior in the Secretariat, Cardinal Bea, who came around most to the claims of the conservatives. Bea apparently realized fairly late that there were some Catholics, more pious than instructed, whose contempt for Jews was inseparable from their love for Christ. To be told by the Council that Jews were not Christ-killers would be too abrupt a turnabout for their faith. These were Catholicism’s simple dogmatics. But there were many bishops at the Council who, if far less simple, were no less dogmatic. They felt Jewish pressure in Rome and resented it. They thought Bea’s enemies were proved right when Council secrets turned up in American papers. “He wants to turn the Church over to the Jews,” the hatemongers said of the old Cardinal, and some dogmatics in the Council thought the charge about right. “Don’t say the Jews had any part in this,” one priest said, “or the whole fight with the dogmatics will start over.” Another, Father Felix Morlion at the Pro Deo University, who heads the study group working closely with the AJC, thought the promulgated text the best. “The one before had more regard for the sensitiveness of the Jewish people, but it did not produce the necessary clearness in the minds of Christians,” he said. “In this sense, it was less effective even to the very cause of the Jewish people.”

Morlion knew just what the Jews did to get the declaration and why the Catholics had settled its compromise. “We could have beaten the dogmatics,” he insisted. They could, indeed, but the cost would have been a split in the Church.

I don’t know if it’s been there for a while, but I just noticed that Dissent has an archive of really nicely pdfed back issues of Democratiya. Here are some gems:

Archival material:

The Social Democratic Prospect Sidney Hook (3, 2005. This keynote address was given to the National Convention of Social Democrats, USA, held in New York on July 17-18, 1976)

The Left and Korea Susan Green (5, 2006, originally published as ‘Summing up the discussion on the Korean Statement’ in Forum, the internal bulletin of The Independent Socialist League, in 1950. The ISL (called the Workers Party from 1940-49) was a small American democratic socialist organisation. It published the weekly newspaper Labour Action, edited by Hal Draper (and, before him, Irving Howe, the founder of Dissent), and the magazine The New International, edited for much of the 1950s by Julius Jacobson ( Julius Falk), who went on to found and edit New Politics with his wife Phyllis Jacobson.) Also: Debating World War Three Susan Green (orig 1949, 16, 2009)

Democracy as the Guiding Star Max Shachtman (6, 2006, speech given in Chicago in 1958, alongside Norman Thomas)

The Third Force Memos Ernest Bevin (8, 2007, four memos written by Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, and circulated to the Labour Cabinet in January and March 1948.)

Democratiya originals:

Rep. Wexler Retires from Congress | NJDC Blog

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Jews are Among Democrats? Staunchest Supporters | NJDC Blog

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Negative Reviews Abound as Podhoretz asks ?Why are Jews Liberals?? | NJDC Blog

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Dude might be old, but he’s still pretty spry.  And as always, he seems pugnacious when it comes to intellectual arguments.

Podhoretz filmed this interview about his new book “Why Are Jews Liberals?”  The whole thing is well worth the time, but I was especially drawn to the passage around 8:55.  Roger Simon, the interviewer, and Podhoretz discuss how no matter where liberalism goes, Jewish voters always seem to follow along.  They continue to support parties and causes of the left regardless of how radical they become.

Podhoretz calls this the Liberal Torah.  I kinda like that.

Anyhoo, check that shit out ya’all.  It’s good.  I guess I’ll have to get the book sometime to figure out why teh joooooooos love teh libs.

I was thwarted from taking my treasured walk in our nearby public gardens on this breathtakingly beautiful Sunday because, well, it was too incredibly beautiful out today. There were so many cars waiting for parking spaces, I decided to make lemonade out of my forced change of plans by picking up ingredients for a delicious stir-fry my daughter concocted recently that we just cannot get enough of. My exercise would have to be on the treadmill after dinner. No problem. That’s why I got the treadmill, for times like this. No more excuses…

Well, after dinner I am pounding away at 3.8 on the treadmill and channel surfing. The channel lands on CSPAN-2’s Book TV which is airing a taped broadcast from 9/10 featuring conservative author Norman Podhoretz  speaking before a small group of people at The Harvard Club about his latest book, Why are Jews Liberal?

This caught my attention because I admire and respect Mr. Podhoretz for the patriot and scholar I believe he is. In addition, I myself have wondered before why so many Jews are liberal (just like I wonder why so many of my fellow Catholics are liberal). I’ve had my own theories as to why, and after listening to this scholar expand on them so succinctly in an hour’s time, my perspective on the subject was broadened further.

He spoke of how non-Jewish liberals are often non-supportive of Jewish causes to the point of ofttimes being anti-Semetic and anti-Zionist. Ironically, the groups that liberal Jews do not trust – right wing evangelicals, Catholics and conservatives – are the ones who support Jewish causes, including the Jewish state, in overwhelming numbers.

Based on this premise, Mr. Podhoretz presents a confounding statistic of how, other than the black vote in the 2008 election, of which 95% voted for Barack Obama, the next largest voting block, at 75%! (more than Hispanics, Muslims, Catholics, women or other classically ‘liberal’ groups), were Jews.

The answer to the book’s title is complicated and resides in liberal Jews’ misguided interpretation of their history and religious beliefs. Mr. Podhoretz believes that the Jews’ classic distrust of the ‘right’ wing, rooted in historical perspective, is invalid due to the reality of subsequent world events. To make his point that liberal Jews’ thinking is wrongly stuck in time by refusing to see how groups of people can and do profoundly change, he used the analogy of the “Guns of Singapore”. The battle of Singapore was lost when they refused to listen to reliable intelligence and adjust their war strategy accordingly. Instead, based solely on previous battle successes they decided to aim their guns southward, in the same direction as they had in the last war. Their decision resulted in a  disastrous defeat when the Japanese overwhelmed and defeated them from the north.

Mr. Podhoretz explains how many liberal Jews tend to believe that evangelical Christians do not like them because there are passages of the Bible that speak of salvation only through Christ. Mr. Podhoretz would like liberal Jews to also know that, more importantly, in Genesis 9:6 God tells all of us that the Jews are “God’s chosen people…blessed to God above all people…”.  Liberal Jews need to open their eyes and see that it is conservatives, Catholic and evangelicals who are the ones who truly support them.

Mr. Podoretz’s said that it is his hope that over the next few years that Jews who voted for Barack Obama will have ‘buyer’s remorse’, and will see him for the ‘false messiah’ that he so apparently is.

Jews, Marx And Flying Saucers

by

R.E. Prindle

     Seth Lipsky in his review of Norman Podhoretz’ Why Are Jews Liberals in the online Tablet Magazine quotes the Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton as observing:  “When men stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

     Lipsky’s comment is that the Jews didn’t believe in anything they believed in Marx.  Lipsky misses the point- Chesterton included Marxism under the category ‘Anything.’  Marxism by any standard is a stretcher.  If you’re going to believe in Marx you may as well believe in Flying Saucers; in fact, a great many people do believe in Flying Saucers and for the same reason.

     Witness the popular film of the early fifties- The Day The Earth Stood Still- recently remade.  A more impressive film on first viewing than it is on subsequent viewings.  Rather tedious actually.

     The Day The Earth Stood Still is a  virtual metaphor for the Second Coming of Christ.  Klaatu didn’t do any better than the original.  The motivations of the believers in deliverance from outer  space aren’t any different than the believers in deliverance from some stupid ideology.

     Lipsky quotes Podhoretz as asking:  The question then arises of why Jews who joined the radical camp were not put off by the egregious anti-Semitism of Marx.  He then quotes Rosa Luxembourg as gratuitously asking:  Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?

      Well, there you have it.  Jews and Flying Saucer nuts are seeking ‘Close Encounters Of  The Third Kind,’  Redemption, deliverance from their special sorrows, the Second Coming, a trip in that old Gospel ship to a land way beyond the stars.’

     It isn’t necessary to try that hard, Seth; the answers are much more down to earth than one might think on first blush.

Why Are Jews Liberals?

by

R.E. Prindle

     Amongst a rash of articles in Tablet Magazine appearing recently is one titled as above.  Another is The Long Goodbye- Norman Podhoretz Unravels The Mystery Of Jewish Attachment To Liberalism.

     The first is a symposium of Jewish writers while the second is credited to Seth Lipsky.  Neither article comes within a mile of the truth.  Conservatism is usually involved, with Consevatism as a firm idenitification with a national ideal- both of people and country.  As an international people distributed, for our purposes, through Europe and North America, Jews have a Jewish identity, hence little or nothing in common with nationals.  They identify themselves with internationalists or globalists, the discontented or, to use their own term, the oppressed.  They hence work against the interests of the contented or nationalists in an attempt to undermine their authority so as to displace them substituting themselves in their stead.   Jews call this assimilation.  Thus, in every country the Jews align themselves with the ‘revolutionary’ elements.

    The People of Freud and Critical Theory seem unable to grasp this truth about themselves.

     According to Jewish writers the Jews are always innocent victims, the hapless targets of drive by shooters.  Thus they no involvement in the Bolshevik Revolution, the Hungarian and Crimean atrocities or the barbarities performed in Russia.  They project their own evil on the gentiles.  It never occurs to them that they are responsible for the Nazi reaction.   They don’t seem to be aware that they as Communists began the street fighting in German that was met by the Volkist reaction.

     In another Tablet article by Adam Kirsch titled:  Awakenings, Mr. Kirsch seems to be unaware of Jewish involvement in the terrorist campaign that resulted in the overthrow of the legitimate Russian government in 1917.  As he myopically puts it:

     (In 1917) The Czarist empire, devastated by the First World War, abruptly collapsed…

     Yes, well, there is an element of truth in that brief synopsis.  He then summarizes:

     Thus, once again the innocent Jews suffer atrocities. 

     Needless to say as the core of the Bolshevik Revolution the Jews, themselves, were not behindhand in committing atrocities.  Amongst many others was their role in the attempt to make the Crimea a Jewish homeland.   This, of course, involved the complete extermination, that is genocide, of the existing population.  this genocide was well underway when scotched by that devil, Stalin.

     The deeds in the Crimea, as well as Hungary and Russia have of course been well hidden by Jews.  They have been able if not to expunge the historical record at least to well conceal it except to the terminally curious.  Interestingly Whittaker Chambers was hired to translate the record of Hungarian atrocities.

     The reaction of Hitler then was not as irrational as it may seem.  Hitler was well up on history as his comment ‘Who now remembers the Armenians? indicates.

     So, the six million was merely one incident in the long Jewish-European conflict.  The Jews have little or nothing to complain of except of course that the life of a goy is worth less than the fingernail of the fourth finger of a Jewish left hand.  The crime then is that no matter how many people died between 1914 and 1953 six million of them, we are told, were Jews.

     Now, the world has pretty much gotten on with its business since then; not so the Jews.  They have become absessed with the events of WWII, or certain events, such as the extermination camps.  Forget that Crimean genocide, they weren’t Jews; we’re talking Jewish genocide here,

     In the wake of WWII the Jews turned the whole world Nazi or Fascist.  Hitlers were found under every bed.  A great longing for vengeance- on the world- consumed and corrupted the Jewish soul.  The longing found expression from time to time, not least in the scheme of Noel Ignatiev to exterminate the whole White population of the world.

     Now comes Marissa Brostoff with the Tablet article- Retribution Reconsidered.

          The current rage for killing Nazis on screen- as employed by the Ed Zwick feature Defiance, and last month’s Inglourious Basterds - has made its way to the stage with ‘The Retributionists, an off-Broadway play that opened in New York Monday.  This time, the action unfolds after the war is over, when a band of former partisan fighters reunites to plan revenge on a major scale.  “It’s very simple,” says Anika, a leader of this pack.  “We’ll poison the citizens of Germany, and when we have killed as many of them as they did us, we will rest.”

     If I didn’t know Jews have never been guilty of the Blood Libel I would have to say  the Jews themselves are reviving it here.  While the Jews have always claimed that a whole people can’t be held responsible for the actions of a few here they throw that notion overboard and go after German citzens.  Wow!  Can I risk the term hypocrisy without being turned out of society as an anti-Semite?

     Nevermind that because of the Nazis the nation of Germany was bombed flat; nevermind the Rape of Strasburg when the French turned their African savages loose to rape and abuse non-offending German women; nevermind that contrary to self-serving Western reports that Germans in the millions were left to starve or freeze to death; no, no nevermind all that,  the loveable unoffending, innocent Jews are going to poison the wells until a carpet of German bodies covers the nation.  How wrong were those poor deluded anti-Semites who always accused Jews of canard atrocities?  Possibly some rotten goys have infiltrated the synagogue to make Jews look bad by staging the Retributionists?

     Well, a goy didn’t.  The young Canadian playwright Daniel Goldfarb is so credited.  What’s uppermost in Dan’s mind?

     ‘I almost wish we could go back” to wartime, Dinchka, the baby of the group tells Anika. (In one of the play’s overlapping love triangles, Dinchka was once involved with both Anika and Anika’s now-fiance, Dov.)  “When it was natural and normal and right to love you both…I wish we could go back to the ghetto.

     Right!  What’s six million compared to a good fuck?

     How long are we going to put up with this bushwa?

Obviously, the far-right nuts on Fox and Friends did not seem very happy about the overwhelming support Democrats, in general, and Barack Obama, in specific, have been getting from Jews. The graphic header reads, “Why Are Jews Liberal” and the subheadline reads “JEWISH CONSERVATIVE ANSWERS IN NEW BOOK.” So, already the stage is set for three right wingers (Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy and author Norman Podhoretz) to engage in an unbalanced and biased conversation. Doocy then comes in and uses the guest to attack President Obama by talking some garbage about buyer’s remorse. This is nothing  more than trying to eat away at President Obama’s base by trying to smear him in the eyes of Jews. He is using this guest to try and brainwash Jewish people into coming over to the GOP. Then, Kilmeade comes on and predictably tries to rehabilitate George W. Bush and smear President Obama … as you would expect from a far-right extremist masquerading himself on a network that lies about being fair and balanced. There is no counterpoint or anything to balance these three right wingers blasting Jews for supporting Democrats. By the numbers that Fox News flashed earlier in the segment, that would indicate that this man (Podhoretz) is outside the mainstream.

Media Matters:
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200909090006

The quickest test of whether or not Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Ex-Friends might appeal to you is by your level of interest in the controversy that erupted over Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar at last year’s Academy Awards. If you were intrigued by the rancorous political arguments that resurfaced after 50 years, then Podhoretz’s memoir will undoubtedly feel like a front-row ticket to the bickering of a half-century ago.

Podhoretz is today a staunch political conservative; he was one of the most visible and outspoken of the Reagan-era “neoconservatives” during the 1980s as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine. Over the years his politics shifted dramatically. From the 1940s to the late-60s, he was a solid member of the Leftist literary establishment centered in New York City. Ex-Friends, at its best, is an eloquent elegy for a bygone era in our cultural history when politics was the passionate concern of writers, artists, and intellectuals. But it is at its “worst” that Ex-Friends is the most fun to read. Podhoretz has written a catty, self-indulgent, back-stabbing portrait of his former friends on the Left: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Mailer is the only individual on this elite list who is still living, but that doesn’t stop Podhoretz from portraying him as a buffoon. Admittedly, Mailer is an easy target in this regard, and the anecdotes in the book are hilarious, but he’s a far more interesting writer and cultural presence that Podhoretz allows. We’re treated to Mailer the loud-mouthed 1960s libertine encouraging Podhoretz to loosen up with pot and amphetamines and sex orgies. The orgy scene in Ex-Friends promises more than it delivers, however, sort of like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut with Podhoretz cast in the Tom Cruise role of the innocent outsider. “I was simply not up for it,” he writes, “and it turned out to be a total and humiliating disaster for me.”

He first met Allen Ginsberg when they were undergraduates at Columbia University in 1946 and both aspiring writers. By 1958, Ginsberg had gained notoriety along with Jack Kerouac as founders of the Beat literary movement, while Podhoretz, who was well-established as a critic by this time, penned a disdainful essay in Partisan Review titled “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Thus began a long-standing feud between Ginsberg and Podhoretz that continued for many years, right up through Ginsberg’s death in 1997. And Podhoretz still hasn’t let up. Ginsberg’s poetry is, in his judgment, “pornographic” and “anti-American.”

The 1960s counterculture was “a new kind of plague” in Podhoretz’s opinion, from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman. “What they all had in common was a fierce hatred of America,” we are told matter-of-factly in Ex-Friends. The book is laughable whenever Podhoretz talks about the 60s. Words fail him and he falls back on mindless generalities about the “America haters” who were seducing young people with drugs and rock music and promiscuous sex.

Fortunately, Podhoretz writes with considerably more insight about the 1940s and 50s. All the factious left-wing debates of the era are detailed here, all the arcane labels deciphered and differentiated: communists, fellow-travelers, Stalinists, Trotskyites, socialists, cold-war liberals. Podhoretz doesn’t just throw these terms around, he gives them context and meaning within the lives of the personalities for whom so much was felt to be at stake.

He is particularly hard on Lillian Hellman for what Podhoretz and others over the years have considered her disingenuous and self-aggrandizing memoirs about the McCarthy era and her appearance before the HUAC hearings. Podhoretz flat out accuses her of “deliberate lies.” There appears to be some accuracy to several of his charges, but he clearly has his own ideological bias, not to mention a disregard for Hellman’s writing style, which he finds cheaply derivative of Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway.

The warmest memories in Ex-Friends are reserved for Lionel Trilling, who was one of Podhoretz’s professors at Columbia and “the most intelligent person I have ever known.” Little read today, Trilling was an influential literary critic and author for many years, and while he was a model liberal and supporter of left-wing causes, he was also the kind of anti-communist that Podhoretz can admire in retrospect. (Even though Trilling’s wife and fellow-writer Diana had “a wacky sense of reality,” in Podhoretz’s estimation.)

Without question, the finest chapter in Ex-Friends involves Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (in which the phrase “the banality of evil” was famously coined), an account of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war-crimes trial in Israel in the early 60s. In tracing the origins of the Nazi atrocities committed against Jews during the Second World War, Arendt arrived at some disturbing conclusions which suggested that Jews were themselves partly complicit in the fate that befell them. Podhoretz was among many intellectuals who took issue with Arendt’s opinions at the time, and his detailed recounting of this debate in Ex-Friends is superb.

August, 1999

By Jackson Lears, History News Network, Aug 3, 2009

Mr. Lears’s latest book is: Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper, June 2009).

One of the peculiarities of modern war is the fascination it holds for intellectuals. Since the 1890s, in the United States as in Europe, the loudest yelps for blood have been heard some distance from the battlefield. Professors, journalists, ministers, and other moralists have all sung the praises of war from the safety of their studies. This is an occupational hazard, the sort of thing that happens to men (nearly always men) who live in their heads, for whom moral crusades and civilizing missions have a more palpable reality than sliced skin or burned flesh. Of course ordinary citizens are susceptible to vicarious thrills, too: as J.A. Hobson observed in his classic Imperialism (1900), “the lust of the spectator” could mobilize an entire population in the service of the modern imperial state. But people who are paid to write and think for a living are more likely to inflate the invigoration of national purpose induced by war into a justification of war itself.

Continues >>

A rough draft:

American religious nationalism is a unique and powerful phenomenon, and therefore quite difficult to define according to the standard models of idolatrous cults or political science.

One could call it “Americanism”, but there has to be a better term, because most people would think Americanism just means excessive patriotism. I mean the American Religion or the Cult of America, but those terms would be mistaken these days as mere criticisms of “The Christian Right” or theocrats. It’s actually more complex than that, which is why it’s so hard to pin down. Perhaps the elevation of The One True Obama will help people to better appreciate the idolatrous effects of the Cult of America.

Towards explaining this confusion:

One group of Americans insists that there is a “Separation of Church and State”, which is a fiction; and asserts that The Founders were secular or even anti-Christian, which is provable.

Another group of Americans insist that The Founders were devout Christians and intended the United States to be a Christian nation. This is easily supported by numerous quotes.

The thing is that both sides are superficially correct, because of the complexity of the Americanist cult.

Basically, the US is a form of theocracy derived from the same sources as the other great theocracy of modern times, the USSR. Both states are products of the “Enlightenment” heresy, which is a form of Christianity without Christ. The real Enlightenment is baptism in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This confusion covers the ground where American conservatives and liberals come together with European supranationalists and also those suprantionalists’ impotent “enemies” such as Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They all subscribe to the Enlightenment heresy.

Communism is derived from Socialism, which is a distinctive product of the decline of a formerly Christian civilization. Socialists gradually tried to create Christianity without Christ, meaning they wanted to just make people “good” without necessarily being all caught up in the “faith in God” thing.

In the West today this movement has resulted in American Anglican bishops claiming that Christ is just a myth; claiming that having their rectum filled with another man’s turgid penis is a sacrament o the order of Christ being penetrated by nails; claiming that Jesus was just a misunderstood philosopher, and the best way to follow his teachings would be to forget about “all this silly dogma” (meaning correct teaching) and just … you know … be nice … don’t smoke … don’t be judgmental … be considerate and hold your girlfriend’s hand in the abortionist’s waiting room … reach out to the poor Muslims….

A more cynical proponent of Christianity without God was Karl Marx, an atheist Lutheran Jew, whose solution to “The Jewish Problem” was to destroy Christianity from within. His products, such as the USSR are the physical expression of Christianity without God.

The Founders of the American Experiment were more practical than Socialists and Communists; the theocratic aspect of their goals was to create Christendom without Christ. Many US states were defined according to cult:

• Virginia was Anglican.
• Maryland was Roman Catholic.
• The New England states were Puritans who had been quit Britain (via the Netherlands) after their bloody attempts at establishing a militant theocracy had created too many enemies for them. Then, in America, expelled Dissenters of course created ever more schismatic states, or so-called “Bible Commonwealths”, as has been their habit since the origin of their heresy. Other Puritan offshoots such as Quakers failed to establish states.
• Pennyslvania was Anabaptist.

And so on, with other non-State religious colonies, including Jewish settlements, and the first multi-kulti experiments like Rhode Island thrown in to the mix.

To compare the American Experiment with other predominantly nominally Christian colonial creations based on British law, while similar settlement patterns also took place in the Australian and Canadian colonies, which also became multi-cultural and multi-confessional, there was never any constitutional doubt about the source of all secular authority: The Crown, sworn to care for its subjects under God.

The American problem was how to overthrow the Crown, establish a stable revolutionary regime, avoid an official theocracy, and maintain the Christian roots of American civilization, while avoiding the establishment of an official theocracy.

I believe that the Deist heretics, supported by Masonic technocrats, developed the core principles and works of the secular theocracy that is today expressed in Americanism.

Deism is a form of Practical Atheism. It stresses moral teachings derived from Christian teachings, while rejecting the divinity of Christ. Prominent Deists include Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, George Washington, James Madison, and James Monroe.

The disorder engendered by the Puritan experiments in state-craft and their endless ex-communications, was resolved by the more “church”-based Deism of anti-Christ Unitarianism. By 1800, all but one Congregationalist church in Boston had Unitarian preachers. Harvard University became a source of Unitarian training. John Adams and his family attended one of the first Unitarian churches in Massachusetts.

I’m sorry I don’t have time right now to deal with this in detail, but here’s an overview of what happened, as all of these strains came together to create the secular and idolatrous Americanist cult:

• The subordination of God to the State.
• The invention of the concept “Judeo-Christian”.
• Secular Saints, Shrines, and Holy Days, often conceived by Freemasons: the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Sanctification of the unbaptized Abraham Lincoln and of Martin Luther King, Lincoln ruling ex cathedra from his perch in Washington for “eternity”, etc.
• Manifest Destiny.
• Appeals to “Providence”; “Yes We Can!”
  
• John F. Kennedy throwing his Church “under the bus” in order to pass his Americanist Cathechism, by insisting that the moral teachings of his Church would have no bearing on his administration of the American Cult.
• The success of the obscene and overtly Americanist Mormon heresy.
• “Conservative” Glenn Beck establishing a traditionalist movement based on principles and values, that places America above God. As a Mormon, Beck can put America above God since for Mormons worshipping America is worshipping the Earthly expression of God, but it’s strange that so many non-Mormons would support Beck’s idolatry.
• Obama joined “Reverend” Wright’s Anti-Christ cult in order to gain political power in Illinois, and initially defended “Reverend” Wright on the grounds that Wright was expressing the essence of Americanist ideology. Wright’s supporters pointed out that Wright had been a US Marine, giving him an Americanist Indulgence. Then Obama finally realized that his association with Wright’s Anti-Christ cult would only conflict with the Americanist creed in Washington, and accordingly, just like Kennedy had done, proceeded to toss TUCC under the bus.
• The allegedly Christian George W. Bush uttering the following obscenities in an attempt to subsume Islam with the Cult of Americanism:
  

These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.

The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself: “In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.

When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race — out of every race.

America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect.

All this helps explain why the Left, after years of complaining about the baleful theocratic effect of the so-called “Christian Right”, are now all lined up to worship their Obamessiah, leaving self-described Conservatives of every stripe disarmed and bewildered.

Neither side can see that their common cult of Heaven on Earth has been manipulated by Godless Jews like Axelrod, Soros, Emanuel, and by Hollywood image-makers, and by New-Age cultists like Oprah Winfrey, and by the kind of messianic atheists typically found in the media and academia, and by Godless Muslims; all coming together to promote the World-Cult of the multi-kulti multi-confessional Man-God Obama; just as the equally godless Jews, Christians, Muslims etc (William Kristol, David Frum, Norman Podhoretz, Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz, Charles Krauthammer, etc.) attempted to manipulate naive Manifest Destinarianist pseudo-Christian “evangelism” to promote their own brand of One World Religion One World Government New World Orderism.

Both sides express the Americanist belief that the United States must be the basis for Heaven on Earth.

I wish I had more free time, but I hope this helps explain the background and goals of this particular heresy.

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N.B. Atheist Jewish Politics

I make particular mention of atheist Jewish agitators not out of any particular animus towards Jews. But because:

(A) They are indisputably disproportionately influential in American public life — in the legal profession, entertainment, media, politics, etc. (This is not in itself something to criticize — fair play to them, I say, but as Spiderman says, “With great power comes great responsibility.)

(B) I believe that most prominent and influential Jews share Marx’s “solution” to antisemitism, without necessarily sharing Marx’s politics.

The term “antisemitism” was invented in the nineteenth century in reference to the problem of reconciling the “emancipated” status of formerly isolated Jews within Christendom, with their non-assimilationary aspirations. This is the origin of “The Jewish Problem”.

Marx’s solution was to eradicate divisions by crushing both the Jewish and Christian faiths. The same attitude inspired/inspires: The widespread elite Jewish enthusiasm for the militantly atheistic USSR; the widespread elite Jewish enthusiasm for the EU, UN, ICC and other supranational bodies; the invention of a “Judeo-Christian” fiction; the invention of “The Abrahamic Faiths”; and the widespread Jewish elite support for either the neoconservative democracy-exporting NWO (effected by the takeover of Americanist Conservative groups by “The Movement” of “former” Trostkyites) or the neo-Marxist (or Taqiyya Communist) Obamessianic humanism-exporting NWO.

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N.B. More reflections on the One New World Order Religion

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N.B. Washingtonian Americanism vs Mormon Americanism

Interestingly, the only time the USA engaged in an overtly religious war was the attempt to subjugate the Mormon Theocracy. This may be partly due to the fact that Mormons have come closest to setting up a theologically Americanist state to rival the Americanist state seated in Washington. Of course there’s a good chance that Bishop Romney will reverse this subjugation with his victory in the next federal election.

Glenn Beck’s “9 Principles & 12 Values”:

Principles: 1. America is good. 2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life. …

Values: Honesty, Reverence, Hope, Thrift, Humility, Charity, Sincerity, Moderation, Hard Work.

Of course Christians must uphold eternal virtues and verities, not temporal and negotiable values. Sincerity, Moderation, Hard Work, Hope, Thrift, and Reverence are virtue-neutral. Muslims sincerely revere The Pedophile Mohammad. Jihadis hope to slit your throat. Hitler greatly valued hard work: Arbeit Macht Frei.

US Military Crushed Mormon Theocracy

September 7-11, 1857

The Mountain Meadow Massacre in Utah resulted in the deaths of roughly 140 people. Paiute Indians and the Mormon Militia, incited by Mormon fanatic John D. Lee, murdered emigrants heading for California. Lee staged the event in direct retaliation for President Buchanan’s order to remove Mormon leader Brigham Young from his position as governor of Utah.

Primary documents:

PRESIDENT JAMES BUCHANAN

State of the Union Address

December 8, 1857

A Territorial government was established for Utah by act of Congress approved the 9th September, 1850, and the Constitution and laws of the United States were thereby extended over it “so far as the same or any provisions thereof may be applicable.” This act provided for the appointment by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, of a governor (who was to be ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs), a secretary, three judges of the supreme court, a marshal, and a district attorney. Subsequent acts provided for the appointment of the officers necessary to extend our land and our Indian system over the Territory. Brigham Young was appointed the first governor on the 20th September, 1850, and has held the office ever since. Whilst Governor Young has been both governor and superintendent of Indian affairs throughout this period, he has been at the same time the head of the church called the Latter-day Saints, and professes to govern its members and dispose of their property by direct inspiration and authority from the Almighty. His power has been, therefore, absolute over both church and state.

The people of Utah almost exclusively belong to this church, and believing with a fanatical spirit that he is governor of the Territory by divine appointment, they obey his commands as if these were direct revelations from Heaven. If, therefore, he chooses that his government shall come into collision with the Government of the United States, the members of the Mormon Church will yield implicit obedience to his will. Unfortunately, existing facts leave but little doubt that such is his determination. Without entering upon a minute history of occurrences, it is sufficient to say that all the officers of the United States, judicial and executive, with the single exception of two Indian agents, have found it necessary for their own personal safety to withdraw from the Territory, and there no longer remains any government in Utah but the despotism of Brigham Young. This being the condition of affairs in the Territory, I could not mistake the path of duty. As Chief Executive Magistrate I was bound to restore the supremacy of the Constitution and laws within its limits. In order to effect this purpose, I appointed a new governor and other Federal officers for Utah and sent with them a military force for their protection and to aid as a posse comitatus in case of need in the execution of the laws.

With the religious opinions of the Mormons, as long as they remained mere opinions, however deplorable in themselves and revolting to the moral and religious sentiments of all Christendom, I had no right to interfere. Actions alone, when in violation of the Constitution and laws of the United States, become the legitimate subjects for the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate. My instructions to Governor Cumming have therefore been framed in strict accordance with these principles. At their date a hope was indulged that no necessity might exist for employing the military in restoring and maintaining the authority of the law, but this hope has now vanished. Governor Young has by proclamation declared his determination to maintain his power by force, and has already committed acts of hostility against the United States. Unless he should retrace his steps the Territory of Utah will be in a state of open rebellion. He has committed these acts of hostility notwithstanding Major Van Vliet, an officer of the Army, sent to Utah by the Commanding General to purchase provisions for the troops, had given him the strongest assurances of the peaceful intentions of the Government, and that the troops would only be employed as a posse comitatus when called on by the civil authority to aid in the execution of the laws.

There is reason to believe that Governor Young has long contemplated this result. He knows that the continuance of his despotic power depends upon the exclusion of all settlers from the Territory except those who will acknowledge his divine mission and implicitly obey his will, and that an enlightened public opinion there would soon prostrate institutions at war with the laws both of God and man. He has therefore for several years, in order to maintain his independence, been industriously employed in collecting and fabricating arms and munitions of war and in disciplining the Mormons for military service. As superintendent of Indian affairs he has had an opportunity of tampering with the Indian tribes and exciting their hostile feelings against the United States. This, according to our information, he has accomplished in regard to some of these tribes, while others have remained true to their allegiance and have communicated his intrigues to our Indian agents. He has laid in a store of provisions for three years, which in case of necessity, as he informed Major Van Vliet, he will conceal, “and then take to the mountains and bid defiance to all the powers of the Government.”

A great part of all this may be idle boasting, but yet no wise government will lightly estimate the efforts which may be inspired by such frenzied fanaticism as exists among the Mormons in Utah. This is the first rebellion which has existed in our Territories, and humanity itself requires that we should put it down in such a manner that it shall be the last. To trifle with it would be to encourage it and to render it formidable. We ought to go there with such an imposing force as to convince these deluded people that resistance would be vain, and thus spare the effusion of blood. We can in this manner best convince them that we are their friends, not their enemies. In order to accomplish this object it will be necessary, according to the estimate of the War Department, to raise four additional regiments; and this I earnestly recommend to Congress. At the present moment of depression in the revenues of the country I am sorry to be obliged to recommend such a measure; but I feel confident of the support of Congress, cost what it may, in suppressing the insurrection and in restoring and maintaining the sovereignty of the Constitution and laws over the Territory of Utah.

PRESIDENT JAMES BUCHANAN

State of the Union Address

December 6, 1858

The present condition of the Territory of Utah, when contrasted with what it was one year ago, is a subject for congratulation. It was then in a state of open rebellion, and, cost what it might, the character of the Government required that this rebellion should be suppressed and the Mormons compelled to yield obedience to the Constitution and the laws. In order to accomplish this object, as I informed you in my last annual message, I appointed a new governor instead of Brigham Young, and other Federal officers to take the place of those who, consulting their personal safety, had found it necessary to withdraw from the Territory.

To protect these civil officers, and to aid them, as a posse comitatus, in the execution of the laws in case of need, I ordered a detachment of the Army to accompany them to Utah. The necessity for adopting these measures is now demonstrated.

On the 15th of September, 1857, Governor Young issued his proclamation, in the style of an independent sovereign, announcing his purpose to resist by force of arms the entry of the United States troops into our own Territory of Utah. By this he required all the forces in the Territory to “hold themselves in readiness to march at a moment’s notice to repel any and all such invasion,” and established martial law from its date throughout the Territory. These proved to be no idle threats. Forts Bridger and Supply were vacated and burnt down by the Mormons to deprive our troops of a shelter after their long and fatiguing march. Orders were issued by Daniel H. Wells, styling himself “Lieutenant General, Nauvoo Legion,” to stampede the animals of the United States troops on their march, to set fire to their trains, to burn the grass and the whole country before them and on their flanks, to keep them from sleeping by night surprises, and to blockade the road by felling trees and destroying the fords of rivers, etc.

These orders were promptly and effectually obeyed. On the 4th of October, 1857, the Mormons captured and burned, on Green River, three of our supply trains, consisting of seventy-five wagons loaded with provisions and tents for the army, and carried away several hundred animals. This diminished the supply of provisions so materially that General Johnston was obliged to reduce the ration, and even with this precaution there was only sufficient left to subsist the troops until the 1st of June.

Our little army behaved admirably in their encampment at Fort Bridger under these trying privations. In the midst of the mountains, in a dreary, unsettled, and inhospitable region, more than a thousand miles from home, they passed the severe and inclement winter without a murmur. They looked forward with confidence for relief from their country in due season, and in this they were not disappointed. The Secretary of War employed all his energies to forward them the necessary supplies and to muster and send such a military force to Utah as would render resistance on the part of the Mormons hopeless, and thus terminate the war without the effusion of blood. In his efforts he was efficiently sustained by Congress. They granted appropriations sufficient to cover the deficiency thus necessarily created, and also provided for raising two regiments of volunteers “for the purpose of quelling disturbances in the Territory of Utah, for the protection of supply and emigrant trains, and the suppression of Indian hostilities on the frontiers.” Happily, there was no occasion to call these regiments into service. If there had been, I should have felt serious embarrassment in selecting them, so great was the number of our brave and patriotic citizens anxious to serve their country in this distant and apparently dangerous expedition. Thus it has ever been, and thus may it ever be.

The wisdom and economy of sending sufficient reenforcements to Utah are established, not only by the event, but in the opinion of those who from their position and opportunities are the most capable of forming a correct judgment. General Johnston, the commander of the forces, in addressing the Secretary of War from Fort Bridger under date of October 18, 1857, expresses the opinion that “unless a large force is sent here, from the nature of the country a protracted war on their [the Mormons's] part is inevitable.” This he considered necessary to terminate the war “speedily and more economically than if attempted by insufficient means.”

In the meantime it was my anxious desire that the Mormons should yield obedience to the Constitution and the laws without rendering it necessary to resort to military force. To aid in accomplishing this object, I deemed it advisable in April last to dispatch two distinguished citizens of the United States, Messrs. Powell and McCulloch, to Utah. They bore with them a proclamation addressed by myself to the inhabitants of Utah, dated on the 6th day of that month, warning them of their true condition and how hopeless it was on their part to persist in rebellion against the United States, and offering all those who should submit to the laws a full pardon for their past seditions and treasons. At the same time I assured those who should persist in rebellion against the United States that they must expect no further lenity, but look to be rigorously dealt with according to their deserts. The instructions to these agents, as well as a copy of the proclamation and their reports, are herewith submitted. It will be seen by their report of the 3d of July last that they have fully confirmed the opinion expressed by General Johnston in the previous October as to the necessity of sending reenforcements to Utah. In this they state that they “are firmly impressed with the belief that the presence of the Army here and the large additional force that had been ordered to this Territory were the chief inducements that caused the Mormons to abandon the idea of resisting the authority of the United States. A less decisive policy would probably have resulted in a long, bloody, and expensive war.”

These gentlemen conducted themselves to my entire satisfaction and rendered useful services in executing the humane intentions of the Government.

It also affords me great satisfaction to state that Governor Cumming has performed his duty in an able and conciliatory manner and with the happiest effect. I can not in this connection refrain from mentioning the valuable services of Colonel Thomas L. Kane, who, from motives of pure benevolence and without any official character or pecuniary compensation, visited Utah during the last inclement winter for the purpose of contributing to the pacification of the Territory.

I am happy to inform you that the governor and other civil officers of Utah are now performing their appropriate functions without resistance. The authority of the Constitution and the laws has been fully restored and peace prevails throughout the Territory.

PRESIDENT JAMES BUCHANAN

State of the Union Address

December 3, 1860

Peace has also been restored within the Territory of Utah, which at the commencement of my Administration was in a state of open rebellion. This was the more dangerous, as the people, animated by a fanatical spirit and intrenched within their distant mountain fastnesses, might have made a long and formidable resistance. Cost what it might, it was necessary to bring them into subjection to the Constitution and the laws.

Sound policy, therefore, as well as humanity, required that this object should if possible be accomplished without the effusion of blood. This could only be effected by sending a military force into the Territory sufficiently strong to convince the people that resistance would be hopeless, and at the same time to offer them a pardon for past offenses on condition of immediate submission to the Government. This policy was pursued with eminent success, and the only cause for regret is the heavy expenditure required to march a large detachment of the Army to that remote region and to furnish it subsistence.

Utah is now comparatively peaceful and quiet, and the military force has been withdrawn, except that portion of it necessary to keep the Indians in check and to protect the emigrant trains on their way to our Pacific possessions.

1) In an blog post about the young writer Sam Munson, the New Yorker Observer describes him thus  “Mr. Munson, the online editor of neoconservative journal Commentary.” A sentence later we’re told, ” Mr. Munson—who is, incidentally, the grandson of former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz.”

2) In the pages pages of the Jerusalem Post, Ruth Blum Liebowitz (daughter of Norman Podhoretz) interview Elliot Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz). To her credit, Ms. Liebowitz frankly owns up to the fact that the man she’s interviewing is married to her sister.

3) This is perhaps a good occasion to point readers to an early Sans Everything post on Nepotism and affirmative action, where we noted, “Does the ideal of meritocracy, an indifference to parental powers, even describe Podhoretz’s own career? As editor of Commentary the elder Podhoretz very much governed as a benevolent paterfamilias, publishing countless essays and even short stories by his wife Midge Decter, his son John Podhoretz, his step-daughter Naomi Munson (nee Decter), his other step-daughter Rachel Abrams (nee Decter), his son-in-law Steven C. Munson, his other son-in-law Elliot Abrams, and his grand-son Sam Munson. (This is a very incomplete list: it would take an army of genealogists to do justice to Podhoretz’s editorship by blood-line…).”

Allan Bloom

Before the rise of modern science, it was common to think of diseases and plagues as scourges sent by God to punish humans for their sins. We now know better, or at least we should. Diseases are biological phenomenon, best treated by medicine and public policy. But some still see sickness as a curse, shameful evidence of cosmic retribution.

Consider the neoconservatives, who are usually described as among the more secular, rational, and modern of right-wingers. Yet when it comes to AIDS, most neo-conservatives are no different than medieval peasants who prayed and flayed themselves in order to be free of the black plague.

In the mid-1980s, Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary and one of the key shapers of  neo-conservatism, wrote that the government should not spend any money on AIDS research, since a vaccine would only “allow [gay men] to resume buggering each other with complete medical impunity.”

The implication of Podhoretz remarkable sentence is that AIDS serves a useful social function since it makes the costs of gay male sex prohibitive.

Reading the anti-gay polemics of Podhoretz and his cohorts (especially his wife Midge Decter), you would think the AIDS is something completely alien to their world, a divine curse that strikes only deviants and misfits, not something that should worry the wholesome family folks who write for Commentary magazine.

What happens to neo-conservatives when AIDS strikes close to home? Then you see a curious pattern of denial and cover-ups, secrecy and whispering of the sort that was common in the 19^th century when someone was diagnosed with cancer.

In 1992, the political philosopher Allan Bloom died after a long bout of mysterious sickness, supposedly of internal bleeding and liver failure. Bloom, an occasional Commentary contributer, had been one of the pillars of modern neo-conservative thought: he was the great popularizer of Leo Strauss, the mentor to Paul Wolfowitz and Francis Fukuyama, an omnipresent liaison between the overlapping worlds of the academy, conservative think tanks, and the Washington bureaucracy. Knowing something of Bloom’s personal life, I remember suspecting at the time that liver failure was some sort of code, designed to hide the true facts of Bloom’s death.

My suspicions were confirmed in 2000 when Saul Bellow published a novel, Ravelstein, based closely on Bloom’s life. This novel made clear the fact that Bloom died of AIDS. Many of Bloom’s friends and political allies excoriated Bellow for what they considered the novelist’s betrayal, forcing Bellow to partially censor his novel.

Bellow was puzzled by the reaction to his novel. As he told the New York Times, ”you know, I’ve discovered that this is a very itchy subject, and the people carry over attitudes more appropriate to the Middle Ages.”

The assumption that Bloom’s friends were acting on is that there is something shameful about gayness and AIDS, as if a sick man should be blamed for the virus that killed him.

In 1998 the neo-conservative journalist Eric M. Breindel, a frequent contributer to Commentary and the New Republic, died at the the quite young age of 42. Again, the public story was that he had died of liver failure. A rather pedestrian writer, Breindel was not the intellectual heavy-weight Bloom was, but the young man had a gift for making friends in high places with powerful figures like Rudy Guiliani and Rupert Murdoch. By all accounts, Breindel was charasmatic and dynamic, an up-and-coming power player himself when he died. 

As Philip Weiss notes, Breindel’s funerial gave evidence of a life among the media and politcal elite:

His funeral at the Park Avenue Synagogue was mobbed by socialites and pols alike. Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Norman Podhoretz, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Martin Peretz eulogized him. Podhoretz called Breindel a “very good Jew,” Kennedy said he was the “smartest person” those who had met him ever knew and he should have been secretary of state, and Peretz said that Breindel was “obsessive and fierce.”

His friends have made a strong effort to keep Breindel’s name alive, creating two well-endowed scholarships in his honour. John Podhoretz edited a collection of Breindnel’s rather lackluster writing.

Since Breindel had a history of drug use, including a 1983 arrest for heroin possession, there have long been rumours that he died of AIDS (likely caused by dirty needles). In his recent biography of Rupert Murdoch, Michael Wolff has confirmed these rumours. (I found out about Wolff’s report via Philip Weiss, whose entire posting on Breindel is well worth reading).

Breindel’s story is particularly poignant since he aligned himself closely with the law-and-order wing of American politics, and was close friends with many people who adamantly oppose drug legalization and needle exchange programs.

What is sad about these stories, aside from the untimely deaths, is the retrograde moral attitudes on display. Diseases are caused by nature. Sickness and death are not punishments for immoral behavior. The best way to deal with a disease like AIDS is with science and rational public policy: to spend money on research, to educate the public on condom use, to have need exchange programs and free addiction treatment clinics.

The “friends” of Bloom and Breindel were not able to think in a rational matter. As against science, they prefer the primitive language of transgression and punishment. They acted as if Bloom and Breindel had done shameful things, things that are not to be spoken of except behind closed doors in whispers.

Using the cloak of shame to hide the facts of human sexuality and drug use is, as Saul Bellow noted, “appropriate to the Middle Ages” but it should have no place in the modern world. It leads to an enormous amount of human suffering.

The best weapon in the fight against AIDS is education. By acting as if AIDS were something private, a scarlet letter burned on the flesh that needs to be kept hidden, the neo-conservatives make the fight against this disease even more difficult than it already is.

Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East surveys the actions of eight presidencies — from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush — and finds an almost unbroken line of ineptitude, mendacity, bad faith and hubris, from the Suez Crisis to Bush’s lie-driven campaign in Iraq. Tyler draws on newly available archival material and offers some jaw-dropping anecdotes from the history of America’s role in keeping the Middle East ablaze. The sainted Henry Kissinger, who still enjoys a baffling reputation as a master politician and diplomat, comes off particularly badly:

. . . Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it. Nixon’s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”. The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”. So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position. With these acts of disobedience – acts which were also, as Tyler says, arguably unconstitutional – Kissinger closed off the possibility that the 1973 war could have been ended on terms which would have left Israel in a less powerful position, making it more amenable to an ensuing push for a settlement by the Americans and the Russians.

Tyler also demonstrates  the problems caused by the ”special relationship” between America and Israel:

Tyler does not go quite as far as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, for whom the Israel lobby lies at the heart of American foreign policy; but he is nevertheless a keen critic of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking is the constant American appeasement in the face of Israeli aggression. “Don’t lie to me! I’m sitting here watching it on CNN!” Reagan yelled down the telephone to Menachem Begin in 1982, after the Israeli leader had reneged on a promise not to bombard Beirut. But in typical fashion, Reagan did nothing about it – a pattern that has been repeated, by and large, ever since.

Meanwhile, Tyler writes that Bill Clinton fumbleda one-in-a-lifetime chance to capitalize on  ”a great convergence: the end of the cold war, the advent of Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership and the PLO’s decision to recognise the Jewish state.” By letting himself be manipulated by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Clinton tried to force a settlement and had the whole thing blow up in his face. He then blamed Yassir Arafat and everyone except himself for the collapse.

The manifold failures and disasters of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama with one hell of a mess to clear up, but one can only hope he might find time to read Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble. He might not be able to improve the situation, but as Tyler makes clear, simply not making things worse will put him miles ahead of his predecessors.

* * * * *

How did so many public fixtures come to be named after Ronald Reagan? How did so many people come to believe that this dozing fantasist, whose administration was a carnival of corruption and who presided over embarrassing military failures ,  single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, reduced the size of governmentand revived the American economy through tax cuts and positive thinking?

Why, the  way just about everything else beloved of conservatives, from crackpot economic theories to fake bestsellers, comes into being: a small group of dedicated crusaders with access to wingbucks lobbied for them round-the-clock, then created the illusion they had come about through overwhelming public demand. Will Bunch, in his new book  Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, chronicles the rise of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, and argues that its rewriting of history (a creation of a fantasy version of a president whose legacy is, at best, highly debatable) is a hindrance to the present and fitire of America

* * * * *

The memoirs of a renowned editor give us a glimpse of a vanishing era in American publishing — and an amusing look at how a neocon blowhard got wild-man lessons from Norman Mailer. A cultural history of Americans and their automobiles.

I’ve blogged about my long-distance fondness for Theodore Solotaroff, the editor whose New American Review series ushered me through the gates of Quality Lit. If you read that post, you’ll know why I’ve been relishing these excerpts from Solotaroff’s unfinished memoir of his publishing days, run in two parts by The Nation. The passages offer  glimpses into a long-gone era when ambitious magazines held a place at the center of American culture, along with some amusing, gossipy stuff about silver-maned literary lions — and the lesser specimens who wanted to play like them:

I began working at Commentary in September 1960, some nine months after Norman Podhoretz had taken over, invigorating the magazine and steering it in a less Jewish and more leftward direction. By leading off his first three issues with long excerpts from Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, the surprise witness whose testimony would soon change the terms of the debate about American society from conformist to deformed, Norman made it clear that the magazine would hold its own as the suddenly prominent new voice of a new decade . . .

He [Pohoretz] was no longer the spokesman of our sober, mature look, whose wistful suggestion for acting up was a midnight plunge in the Plaza Hotel fountain. No, that Norman was history. In the past year or two he had teamed up with Norman Mailer, the lead rebel, iconoclast and sensualist of the New York scene. The result was a hard-drinking, sexually liberated Norman who didn’t seem to spend many evenings at home. Our editorial meetings were often punctuated by phone calls from Mailer, who appeared to have open access to Norman. We always knew it was “the other Norman”–as Sherry referred to him, with her droll roll of the eyes–because the butch side of Norman would emerge as he responded to Mailer’s latest brainstorm or piece of gossip or plan for the night’s revels.

It’s been a long, long time since words like “invigorating,” “fresh” and especially “leftward” were used in connection with Commentary, but it’s even more surprising — and hilarious — to picture the younger N-Pod getting wild man lessons from Norman Mailer in his brawling prime.  

It’s not hard to believe that some of those evenings spent following Mailer along the razor’s edge fueled N-Pod’s overweening self-image as the twilight warrior against communism — and later on, a cartoon idea of terrorism. If there is an afterlife, I expect Mailer is off somewhere reading those words and thinking, I created a monster.

The Beatles – Revolution

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

~Thomas Jefferson et al,

The Declaration of Independence

Many movement conservatives deeply resent being called neoconservatives or neocons.

I consider myself to be a movement conservative that is comfortable in both the traditionalist and libertarian wings of the conservative movement represented by the works of the late Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friederick Hayek.

While I agree with neoconservatives on many occasions and issues, I part company when they advocate preemptive attacks on nations that have not attacked the United States, democracy nation-building, open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens, where I agree with Pat Buchanan. I part company with Mr. Buchanan’s views on free trade. I am a free trader.

Neoconservatives are first and foremost big government conservatives, which I regard as the problem, not the solution. I agree with the late President Ronald Reagan:

President Reagan – Government is the problem

Should Senator McCain be elected President, which I think he will, and should Senator McCain propose neoconservative policies and programs, I for one will advocate and support the formation of another political party.

I will follow the sage advice of Dick Armey and leave.

Dick Armey discusses big government conservatism

I am tired of being betrayed by Republicans who say one thing to get elected and turn around and do the exact opposite–Presidents George H. Bush and George W. Bush to name two, who I voted for with great expectations and now have very deep regrets for doing so.

Both Presidents increased taxes– the first directly and the second indirectly by massive deficit spending and open borders resulting in dramatic increases in local and state taxes to provide for education, services, medical care, welfare, jails, and prisons for illegal aliens. Not a single Federal department was eliminated such as Education, Agriculture, Energy, Labor, and Commerce for starters. Few spending bills were vetoed, a sheer mockery of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets.

Bush Has Doubled National Debt with Deficits

You can say I am a conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal, but please not a neoconservative, and if things are not changed or reformed in Washington, I will not be voting Republican much longer.

Background Articles and Videos

Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon’s new map for war and peace

The Pentagons New Map – Thomas Barnett lecture

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4689061169761152025

Neoconservatism

“Neoconservatism is a right-wing political philosophy that emerged in the United States from the rejection of the social liberalism, moral relativism, and New Left counterculture of the 1960s. It influenced the presidential administrations of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, representing a realignment in American politics, and the transition of some liberals to the right of the political spectrum; hence the term, which refers to being ‘new’ conservatives.^[1][2]

The term neoconservative was originally used as a criticism against liberals who had “moved to the right”.^[3][4] Michael Harrington, a democratic socialist, coined the usage of neoconservative in a 1973 Dissent magazine article concerning welfare policy.^[5] According to E. J. Dionne, the nascent neoconservatives were driven by “the notion that liberalism” had failed and “no longer knew what it was talking about.”^[1]

The first major neoconservative to embrace the term and considered its founder is Irving Kristol, an American Jew from an orthodox Jewish family^[6], and father of William Kristol who became the founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Irving Kristol had been an active supporter of Trotskyism, but wrote of his neoconservative views in the 1979 article “Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed ‘Neoconservative.’”^[3] Kristol’s ideas had been influential since the 1950s, when he co-founded and edited Encounter magazine.^[7]. Another source was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. By 1982 Podhoretz was calling himself a neoconservative, in a New York Times Magazine article titled “The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan’s Foreign Policy”.^[8][9] The Reagan Doctrine was considered anti-Communist and in opposition to Soviet Union global influence and considered central to American foreign policy until the end of the Cold War, shortly before Bill Clinton became president of the United States. Neoconservative influence on American foreign policy later became central with the Bush Doctrine.

Prominent neoconservative periodicals are Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Neoconservatives are associated with foreign policy initiatives of think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), The Heritage Foundation, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism

Neocons aiding ‘08 Republicans

“Most Americans disapprove of the Iraq war and of exporting democracy by force, yet neoconservative proponents of those policies advise the leading Republican presidential hopefuls.

“There is an overwhelming presence of neoconservatives and absence of traditional conservatives that I don’t know what to make of,” said Richard V. Allen, former Reagan White House national security adviser.

Advisers to Sen. John McCain of Arizona include Robert Kagan, co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), while former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s policy team includes Norman Podhoretz, a founder of the neoconservative movement, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney gets advice from Dan Senor, who counseled L. Paul Bremer III, the Coalition Provisional Authority administrator in Iraq.

Critics say neoconservatism casts American foreign policy as a new and benevolent form of imperialism, and conflicts with the traditional conservative, who prefers U.S. military power be reserved for defending against direct threats to America’s vital interests. …” 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2007/aug/06/neocons-aiding-08-republicans/

The Neocons’ Palin Project

by Patrick J. Buchanan

“…In fairness to Palin, on issues like NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, her answers reflect the views of the man who chose her. She has no option at present but to follow the line laid down by Scheunemann.

But make no mistake. Sarah Palin is no neocon. She did not come by her beliefs by studying Leo Strauss. She is a traditionalist whose values are those of family, faith, community and country, not some utopian ideology.

Wasilla, Alaska, is not a natural habitat of neoconservatives.

And her unrehearsed answers to Gibson’s questions reveal her natural conservatism. Asked if she agrees with the Bush Doctrine, Palin asked for clarification. “In what respect, Charlie?”

Gibson: “Do we have the right of an anticipatory self-defense?”

Yes, said Palin, “if there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against (the) American people, we have every right to defend our country. In fact, the president has the obligation, the duty to defend.”

Exactly. The intelligence must be legit and the threat “imminent.” …”

http://townhall.com/Columnists/PatrickJBuchanan/2008/09/16/the_neocons_palin_project?page=2

American Enterprise Institute

“The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is a conservative think tank, founded in 1943. According to the institute its mission is “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism — limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate.”^[1] AEI is an independent, non-profit organization. It is supported primarily by grants and contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. It is located in Washington, D.C.

AEI has emerged as one of the leading architects of the second Bush administration’s public policy.^[2] More than twenty AEI alumni and current visiting scholars and fellows have served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government’s many panels and commissions.^[3] Former United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is a visiting scholar, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a senior fellow.^[4]

AEI is often cited as a right-leaning counterpart to the left-leaning Brookings Institution.^[5][6] In 1998, AEI and Brookings established the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies.^[7] In 2006, the two organizations jointly launched the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project.^[8]

AEI has connections with the neoconservative movement in American politics.^[9] Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the movement’s founder, is a Senior Fellow at AEI. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

Project for the New American Century

“The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was an American neoconservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., co-founded in early 1997 as “a non-profit educational organization” by William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC’s stated goal is “to promote American global leadership.”^[1] Fundamental to the PNAC are the views that “American leadership is both good for America and good for the world” and support for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.”^[2] It has exerted strong influence on high-level U.S. government officials in the administration of U.S President George W. Bush and strongly affected the George Bush administration’s development of military and foreign policies, especially involving national security and the Iraq War.^{[3][4] ….”}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Flight of the Neocons
From liberal hawks to “National Greatness” conservatives
Michael C. Moynihan | May 2008 Print Edition

“…To Heilbrunn, the legacy of neoconservatism is one of long-term disaster for the Republican Party, an ideological digression that “quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.” This sounds right. The surge has undeniably mitigated the violence in Iraq, but it seems likely that—barring a continued military presence in Iraq for “100 years,” as John McCain posited—the neocons’ nation-building project will be a millstone around the movement’s neck. The Iraq fiasco will also obscure the fact that many of their Cold War–era arguments with the left were prescient. They were right about the ineffectiveness of Great Society welfare programs and about the colossal evil of the communist bloc.

But the failures of the neoconservative approach to both foreign and domestic policy are recognized even by consummate neocon David Frum, partial author of the infamous “axis of evil” State of the Union speech. In his recently released book Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, Frum concedes Heilbrunn’s point that a conservative regeneration is needed after the Bush administration’s big spending and disastrous foreign policy. While Frum is upbeat about conservatism’s prospects, Heilbrunn ends They Knew They Were Right on an ominous note: “These reckless minds…aren’t going away. Quite the contrary.”

Perhaps. But unless Iraq becomes an Arab version of Switzerland in the next decade, I wouldn’t bet on it. …”

http://www.reason.com/news/show/125472.html

John McCain, Neoconservative

“…The neoconservatives, who believe, or pretend to believe, that supposed foes abroad always represent new Hitlers and that wimpy liberals are about to recapitulate the appeasement that English liberals espoused in the 1930s, are constantly searching for a new Churchill. They see Churchill as the last great representative of the Victorian era in contrast to the weaklings that surrounded him. (George W. Bush himself keeps a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office.) For the neocons, McCain, a military hero who has written a number of books and become a politician, eerily resembles Churchill himself. McCain himself has made his admiration for Churchill abundantly apparent in his most recent book, Hard Call, in which he hails the great man’s prescience in warning of Germany’s aggressive intentions in the run-up to both World War I and World War II. But more to the point, McCain represents for the neocons the ultimate synthesis of war hero and politician. And McCain, in turn, has been increasingly drawn to the neocons’ militaristic vision of the U.S. as an empire that can set wrong aright around the globe.The neocons became close to McCain in the 1990s, when they supported American intervention in the Balkans. According to the New Republic’s John Judis, the first sign of neocon influence on McCain came in 1999. McCain delivered a speech at Kansas State University in which he touted “national greatness conservatism,” arguing: “The United States is the indispensable nation because we have proven to be the greatest force for good in human history.” He went on to state that the U.S. should have “every intention of continuing to use our primacy in world affairs for humanity’s benefit.” 

http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/john-mccain-neoconservative.html

“If I could choose to have my readers learn one and only one thing from what I write, it would be that America’s problems are not the result of blind, much less inevitable, forces, but are the consequences of deliberate political action by motivated individuals and groups. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of our ongoing immigration crisis. Let’s trace the lines of influence in the open-borders conspiracy, a word I use despite its connotations of grassy knollology because in this case it is factually appropriate. Given who has been pushing mass immigration in America and how open they have been about why they are doing it, it boggles my mind that anyone who considers himself conservative can still support this policy. …”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/850953/posts

Shamnesty John McCain is back in full force: No, he never “got the message”
By Michelle Malkin

“…And, now, straight from the campaign trail with Arnold “Move Left” Schwarzenegger, McCain has shed every last pretense that he “got the message” from grass-roots immigration enforcement proponents and is back to his full, open-borders shamnesty push. No surprise to any of you. But his complete regression back to the “comprehensive immigration reform” euphemism is a notable milestone.

Also, you don’t need to guess anymore how he would have voted on the Feinstein/Craig illegal alien farmworker amnesty: …”

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/22/shamnesty-john-mccain-is-back-in-full-force-no-he-never-got-the-message/

Translation: McCain’s suck up to La Raza

By Michelle Malkin

“

The other half of the La Raza twins is set to speak today at 12:45 Pacific time. While John McCain’s lips move this afternoon during his speech to the Race’s open-borders lovefest, let me serve as your interpreter:

MCCAIN: My friends, you are right. Those people who killed my shamnesty bill have ill intentions. They are bigots, just like my friend Lindsay Graham told you they were when he spoke before you two years ago. …”

My friends, I don’t want to talk about securing the border any more than you do. But trust me, when the “border” is “secure” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), then we’ll do what we all want to do: Formalize our Sanctuary Nation. Rejoice that illegal aliens are serving in the military. And sanctimoniously demonize and marginalize all those pesky bigots who keep obsessing about immigration enforcement and national security. I’m as committed to peddling sob-story platitudes and whitewashing your ethnic nationalism as you are! (What was that about the 15 things about The Race you should know? Shhhhhhhhhhh!)

Just work with me here, ok? Brother Obama may have marched with you at the Chicago May Day illegal alien parade. But I have a lifetime commitment to Hispandering! And you have showered with me with honors for my open-borders work.

Remember?

They don’t call me La Raza’s voice in Washington for nothing.

Just ask my friend, Juan Hernandez.

My friends.

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/07/14/translation-mccains-suck-up-to-la-raza/

Mexico–United States border

“The international border between Mexico and the United States runs from San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Baja California, in the west to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and Brownsville, Texas, in the east. It traverses a variety of terrains, ranging from major urban areas to inhospitable deserts. From the Gulf of Mexico it follows the course of the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte) to the border crossing at El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua; westward from that binational conurbation it crosses vast tracts of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Desert, the Colorado River Delta, westward to the binational conurbation of San Diego and Tijuana before reaching the Pacific Ocean.

The border’s total length is 3,169 km (1,969 miles), according to figures given by the International Boundary and Water Commission.^[1] It is the most frequently crossed international border in the world, with about 250 million legal crossings every year.^[2]

The nearly 2000 mile (3,138 km or 1,950 miles) international border follows the middle of the Rio Grande — according to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the two nations, “along the deepest channel” — from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico a distance of 2,019 km (1,254 miles) to a point just upstream of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. It then follows an alignment westward overland and marked by monuments a distance of 858 km (533 miles) to the Colorado River, during which it reaches its highest elevation at the intersection with the Continental Divide. Thence it follows the middle of that river northward a distance of 38 km (24 miles), and then it again follows an alignment westward overland and marked by monuments a distance of 226 km (141 miles) to the Pacific Ocean.

The region along the boundary is characterised by deserts, rugged mountains, abundant sunshine and by two major rivers — the Colorado and the Rio Grande (Río Bravo del Norte) — which provide life-giving waters to the largely arid but fertile lands along the rivers in both countries.

The U.S. states along the border, from west to east, are:

California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

The Mexican states are:

Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas.

In the United States, Texas has the longest stretch of the border of any State, while California has the shortest. In Mexico, Chihuahua has the longest border, while Nuevo León has the shortest. …” 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_border

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us-mexico-border.jpg

Re: John McCain Defends Amnesty & Open Borders Juan Hernandez

Who Is Juan Hernandez?

John McCain Defends Amnesty & Open Borders Juan Hernandez

Lou Dobbs – These Candidates Would Say ANYTHING

The Dangers of the “North American Union” by Jerome Corsi

Why Bill Kristol thinks Ron Paul is a “Crackpot”

Charlie Rose – WOLFOWITZ / HOLMES

Paul Wolfowitz speaks at Hudson Institute

Countdown – No Iranian Nukes and Wolfowitz is Back

Paul Wolfowitz speech June 6 2001

 Iraq War Mastermind Speaks Out

Charlie Rose – Sen. Dick Durbin / Douglas Feith / Sen. Ron Wyden

Book TV: Douglas Feith, author of “War and Decision”

Riz Khan – Richard Perle – 18 Mar 08

Charlie Rose – PERL & FRUM

Who is Randy Scheunemann?

Bill Kristol Anthology

Neo-cons War Lobbying To Bomb Iran

NeoConservative Charles Krauthammer discusses U.S. options against Russia

Dr. Charles Krauthammer part 1

Dr. Charles Krauthammer part 2

Krauthammer: What will Obama give to Iran?

Next President 1

Next President 2

Why I love Charles Krauthammer

Bolton and Krauthammer on Russian Expansion past Georgia

 
Fred Kagan on Jim Lehrer

Fred Kagan Debates Nir Rosen on Iraq Surge (Part 1)

Iraq, the Neocons and the Israel Lobby – John Mearsheimer

Conversations With History: John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt

the Washington Report, Ep.1 with Michael Ledeen (Part 2)

 the Washington Report, Ep.1 with Michael Ledeen (Part 2)

John Bolton – Does Iran Need a “Regime Change?”

Neocon John Bolton Pushes War Against Iran

Norman Podhoretz on Iran

Norman Podhoretz on His New Book

Riz Khan- The Neocons and Iran- 10 Dec 07

Beyond Iraq: The Challenges Confronting US (1 of 2), 2008

Beyond Iraq: The Challenges Confronting US (2 of 2), 2008

Charlie Rose: March 4, 2003 with Ron Brownstein and Robert Kagan

Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain

“…These critics point especially to the McCain campaign’s top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann’s record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives’ disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, “the military has won,” says one former senior CIA officer. “We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won’t have any real civilian intelligence capability.”

“McCain would be an absolute disaster,” says a second recently retired senior US intelligence operations officer. “He is prejudiced against the CIA. The day after the 2004 election when Bush won, McCain came on TV and gave an interview in which he said something to the effect of, ‘The CIA tried to sabotage this election. They’ve made their bed and now they have to lay in it.’ I used to like McCain, but he is inconsistent.” Columnist Robert Novak quoted McCain in November 2004 as saying, “With CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization.”

McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials “who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency,” the former senior intelligence officer said. “They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don’t want to hear.” …”

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/08/why-cia-veterans-are-scared-of-mccain.html
 

McCain’s ACU Ratings
By Randall Hoven

“…What this means is that McCain’s ACU ratings since 1998 put him on the liberal side among Republicans. The few Republicans consistently more liberal than McCain would be Chafee (formerly R-RI), Collins (R-ME), Snowe (R-ME) and Specter (R-PA). One could expect senators from northeastern states to be more liberal since their constituencies demand it, but McCain represents the fairly conservative state of Arizona. (Arizona’s other senator, Kyl, has a lifetime rating of 96.9, and half the representatives from there have ratings of 94.7 or higher.)

How much more liberal would McCain vote if his constituency put even the slightest pressure on him in that direction?

On the other hand, Senator Clinton (D-NY) has a lifetime ACU rating of 9 (83rd place) and Senator Obama (D-IL) has a rating of 8 (86th place).

Not much the cheer about here.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/mccains_acu_ratings.html

Whose War?      PDF

A neoconservative clique seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interest.

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Buchanan accuses ‘McCain’s neocon warmonger’ of treason Stephen C. Webster
“…According to conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, Sen. John McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann is a ‘dual loyalist,’ ‘neocon warmonger’ involved in activities that ‘none dare call treason.’

Scheunemann’s former employer, Orion Strategies, is a lobbying firm with strong ties to Mikheil Saakashvili’s administration in Georgia.

Since Georgia attempted to retake South Ossetia by force, triggering a sharp, violent rebuke by Russian forces, Sen. McCain has been by far the most strident advocate of US support for the former Soviet state. And his top adviser, says Buchanan, may well be the next Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

“He is a dual loyalist, a foreign agent whose assignment is to get America committed to spilling the blood of her sons for client regimes who have made this moral mercenary a rich man,” he wrote. …”

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Buchanan_accuses_McCains_neocon_warmonger_of_0822.html

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/mar/24/00007/

Among the Neocons      PDF

A foot soldier in the ideological wars relates

By Scott McConnell

“…Two new issues broke apart the 1980s Reaganite conservative consensus. The first was immigration. By the late 1980s, the impact of the 1965 immigration law had begun greatly to accelerate the pace of immigration. Younger readers may not recall the vital role National Review began to play in analyzing that law and the social, environmental, and political consequences it brought about. The battle was joined when John O’Sullivan (NR’s editor since 1988) published in 1992 Peter Brimelow’s explosive “Time to Rethink Immigration,” which quickly became the most debated conservative magazine article of the year. The piece forced the immigration debate into the open within the conservative movement, where it fused with the populist revolt breaking out in California over Proposition 187, an anti-illegal-alien measure. For the next five years, the magazine put what it called “The National Question” in the spotlight, publishing cover stories by Brimelow, Fred Iklé, O’Sullivan, and eventually (as I was won over to the magazine’s position) one by me.

The neoconservatives, to my complete surprise, were not pleased.

In the summer of 1995, Neal Kozodoy gave me a copy of a letter. Written by Irwin Steltzer to the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, it was making its way around the upper echelons of the neocon magazines and think tanks. Steltzer is a Bronx-born economist and Weekly Standard editor who lives part-time in London. While a gifted economic essayist, his most important function is surely as the ideological gendarme for Rupert Murdoch’s American media properties.

Steltzer wrote to Kristol (and the wider world) that he was canceling his subscription to National Review because of its “increasingly offensive positions on such topics as immigration.” He went on then to complain about a piece by Richard Neuhaus on anti-Semitism, which, Steltzer charged, was itself anti-Semitic. He added, apropos of a quote of Kristol’s that appeared in Neuhaus’s article, that he was “always suspicious” of Father Neuhaus’s excerpting, “particularly in an article which contains cunningly placed little adjectives and descriptions.” He concluded with a more general comment about John O’Sullivan’s National Review: “Add to this NR’s applause for the immigration statutes of the 1920’s, designed to keep eastern European Jews out, and you have a not-very-subtle form of anti-Semitism, dressed up as an attack on liberalism.”

Bill Buckley stood by his editor initially, but not for long. Within two years, O’Sullivan was eased out, replaced by the youthful Rich Lowry, who immediately upon assuming his new post fired Peter Brimelow.

In the very early years of the neocon-paleocon skirmish, Russell Kirk, the somewhat fogeyish father of postwar American intellectual conservatism, gave a speech about the neocons at the Heritage Foundation. He generally praised them but added some words of caution. Quoting from a friend’s letter, Kirk said, “It is significant that when the Neo-Cons wish to damn any conservative who has appealed for a grant from a conservative foundation, they tell the officers of the foundation the conservative is a fascist.” I, of course, had heard of neocon campaigns against other conservatives, but the targets were not men I knew or agreed with. But I did know O’Sullivan and Neuhaus, and the Russell Kirk remark that had once seemed overheated became a good deal less so. …”

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/apr/21/00007/

Idealism and Its Discontents
Thinking on the neoconservative slur.

Victor Davis Hanson

“…Third, Iraq is not the sole touchstone of neoconservative thought. Many traditional conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, who favor balanced budgets, an end to illegal immigration, and more sober judgment on entitlements, came to the conclusion after September 11 that the many lives of Saddam Hussein had run out. Indeed, one of the ironies of this war is the spectacle of many who called for the removal of Saddam Hussein in the late 1990s now turning on the war, while many who would have never supported such preemption before 9/11 insist on giving the administration full support in the midst of the present fighting.

Fourth, traditional conservatives especially distrust neoconservatives because, well, they are not entirely conservative and confuse the public about the virtues of the hallowed native reluctance to spend blood and treasure abroad for dubiously idealistic purposes. In contrast, progressives dislike them because their promotion of democracy can complicate liberalism, as if it were a fine and noble thing to insist on elections in the former Third World, even if need be through force. And every ideology saves its greatest venom for the perceived apostate: Thus Zell Miller infuriates liberals in the way John McCain or Chuck Hagel does conservatives.

Fifth, the battlefield adjudicates perceptions. Before the Iraqi invasion, neoconservatives took a beating in the acrimonious lead-up to the war about which scenarios were proffered about millions of refugees and thousands of American dead. Yet after the three-week victory, even television hosts were boasting, “We are all neoconservatives now.” Then the messy post-bellum Iraqi reconstruction brought back disdain, while successful elections and a consensual government could well win admiration. For most, ideology or belief matters not nearly as much as impressions of being judged as smart, successful, and “cutting-edge” — a constantly changing and amorphous image that in Washington is predicated on the 24-hour news cycle.

Finally, radical foreign-policy changes always upset the status quo and beg for conspiratorial exegesis. After 1948, the Cold Warriors were felt to have appropriated the Democratic party from the Henry Wallace wing, and they suffered abuse both from the naïve Left who saw them as veritable McCarthyites, and from the isolationist Right who did not want to continue the sacrifices of internationalism endlessly on into the postwar peace. …”

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200501210758.asp

The Neoconservative Cabal

Joshua Muravchik

“…Who makes up this potent faction? Within the administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is usually identified as the key actor, together with Richard Perle, a member and until recently the chairman of the Defense Advisory Board. A handful of other high-level Bush appointees are often named as adherents of the neocon faith, including Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, National Security Council staff member Elliott Abrams, and Vice Presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI, where I work), the Weekly Standard magazine, and William Kristol’s Project for a New American Century–all three rent offices in the same building–are often described as constituting the movement’s Washington command center. And then, of course, there is this magazine, crucible of so much neoconservative thought. 

The history of neoconservatism is less sensational than its current usage implies. The term came into currency in the mid-1970’s as an anathema–pronounced, by upholders of leftist orthodoxy, against a group of intellectuals, centered mostly in Commentary and the quarterly Public Interest, who then still thought of themselves as liberals but were at odds with the dominant thinking of the Left. One part of this group consisted of writers about domestic policy–Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, Nathan Glazer–who had developed misgivings about the programs of the New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The other main contingent focused on foreign policy, and especially on the decline of America’s position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in the wake of the Vietnam war. The names here included, among others, Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Eugene V. Rostow. Although, at first, most of these people resisted the label neoconservative, eventually almost all of them acquiesced in it. …”

“…On September 11, we learned in the most dreadful way that terrorists would not be appeased by our diffidence; quite the contrary. We saw–they themselves told us–that they intended to go on murdering us in ever larger numbers as long as they could. A sharp change of course was required, and the neoconservatives, who had been warning for years that terror must not be appeased, stood vindicated–much as, more grandly, Churchill was vindicated by Hitler’s depredations after Munich.

Not only did the neocons have an analysis of what had gone wrong in American policy, they also stood ready with proposals for what to do now: to wage war on the terror groups and to seek to end or transform governments that supported them, especially those possessing the means to furnish terrorists with the wherewithal to kill even more Americans than on September 11. Neocons also offered a long-term strategy for making the Middle East less of a hotbed of terrorism: implanting democracy in the region and thereby helping to foment a less violent approach to politics.

No neoconservative was elevated in office after September 11, as Churchill had been to prime minister after the collapse of the Munich agreement, but policies espoused by neoconservatives were embraced by the Bush administration. Was this because Bush learned them from the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle? Or did he and his top advisers–none of them known as a neocon–reach similar conclusions on their own? We may have to await the President’s memoirs to learn the answer to that narrow question, but every American has reason to be grateful for the result.

If these policies should fail, for whatever reason–including a recurrence of national faint-heartedness–then neoconservative ideas will no doubt be discredited. But this matters hardly at all compared with what we will have lost. For, if they fail, either we will then be at the mercy of ever more murderous terrorism or we will have to seek alternative methods of coping with it–methods that are likely to involve a much more painful and frightening course of action than the admittedly daunting one that still lies before us.

If, however, the policies succeed, then the world will have been delivered from an awful scourge, and there will be credit enough to go around–some of it, one trusts, even for the lately much demonized neoconservatives. …”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/991206/posts

Notice: U.S. WMD Retaliation Doctrine Has Changed

By Michelle Malkin

“…There’s a very important catch in the Weekly Standard by spy-dude Elbridge Colby, who notes a crucial change in our plans to respond to terrorist use of WMD’s. We’ve long held that states which assist in WMD terror would be held accountable. But February 8, we expanded our potential retribution schedule:

Instead of merely threatening that states that support terror attacks will be held responsible–already a staple of U.S. policy–Hadley goes further, threatening non-state actors who “enabl[e]” terrorists to strike with WMD. This careful choice of words would seem to expand our retaliatory standard to encompass complicity and perhaps even negligence. Not only states, but groups and individuals as well, should now be on notice that they will be held accountable for participation in, support for, complicity in, or even negligence in the face of WMD strikes against the United States or its allies. This strategy makes a great deal of sense; catastrophic terrorism is a threat that both justifies and requires a more exacting standard of behavior.

Individuals? Whoever could they mean?

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/10/notice-us-wmd-retaliation-doctrine-has-changed/ 

 
Charlie Rose – Georgia/Russia Conflict

Power Play

The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise, argues Robert Kagan.

By ROBERT KAGAN

“…Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor — a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing “interest defined as power,” to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the “objective law” of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau’s disciples to remind us that Russia’s latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?

Today’s “realists,” who we’re told are locked in some titanic struggle with “neoconservatives” on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus. …”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122005366593885103.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Neoconservative Persuasion

Irving Kristol

“…Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the “have-nots” and the “haves” engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability. The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy–because it seems to be in the nature of human nature–that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

But it is only to a degree that neocons are comfortable in modern America. The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives–though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.

AND THEN, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing. …”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1141481/posts

The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species

by Kirk, Russell

“…Selfish and Uninstructed. I offer you two specimens of the rejection of the Neoconservatives that I encounter nowadays in many quarters. My first extract is from a letter recently received from a very distinguished historian in Pennsylvania. “I have burned my bridges with most (not all) of the Konservatives, and especially with the neo- conservatives, who are selfish and uninstructed radicals and progressives, wishing to pour cement all over the country and make the world safe for democracy, well beyond the dreams of Wilson,” he writes to me. “A feeling for the land, for its conservation, and for the strong modesty of a traditional patriotism (as distinct from nationalism) none of them has.”

My second instance of the spreading distaste for Neoconservatives comes from a well-known literary scholar. “I would not be at all surprised to see the Neo-Cons jump ship if Dukakis is elected; they would be perfectly capable of making an accommodation with the socialist wing of the Democratic Party,” he tells me …… It is significant that when the Neo-Cons wish to damn any conservative who has appealed for a grant to a conservative foundation, they tell the officers of the foundation that the conservative is a fascist…. I believe that the chief enemy of American conservatism has not been the Marxists, nor even the socialist liberals in the Democratic Party, but the Neo-Conservatives, who have sabotaged the movement from within and exploited it for their own selfish purposes.”

Simple Old Label. Now the strictures of the gentlemen I have quoted cannot well apply to some of the better known people called Neoconservatives; for there are among that group high-minded men and women of principle. Our difficulty here is very like that I encountered when I lectured, a few months ago, on the Libertarians: the appellation Neoconservative, like the appellation Libertarian, is so widely employed, and so variously, as to seem to include people of radically opposed views. What is a Neoconservative, really? Is he, as Harrington and Steinfels saw him, a liberal who opportunistically has turned his coat? Is he primarily a seeker after power and the main chance? Or is he a man who has new ideas about the defense of the Permanent Things? For my part, I wish that certain so-called Neoconservatives whose views and lives I approve, like certain libertarians for whom I have a fellow feeling, would content themselves, as do I, with the simple old label Conservative.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/PoliticalPhilosophy/HL178.cfm 

A Concord of Visions

How the neoconservative right adopted the worst errors of the left

Julian Sanchez

“…A final symptom of the unconstrained vision—and the focus of Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed—is the tendency (in Sowell’s account invariably the tendency of liberals) to focus on the intentions of policies rather than their effects, so that a “poverty relief program” is so called whether or not it actually manages to relieve poverty, and a “Terrorist Surveillance Program” can retain the title even if the vast majority of the people whose conversations are swept up by it have nothing to do with terrorism. “Compassionate conservatism”—in addition to suggesting by implication that conservatism simpliciter lacked compassion—makes a sentiment or an attitude, rather than the specific policy mechanisms it seeks to employ, definitive of the philosophy. As a corollary to this focus on intention, opposition to the particular means employed by elites is viewed as opposition to their ends: Where once progressives tarred Great Society skeptics as callous brutes unconcerned with the plight of the poor, conservative pundits now routinely cast opposition to the Iraq war and other components of the War on Terror as prosecuted by the president as a sign of sympathy for tyrants or terrorists.

None of this is to say that all good flows from the politics of the constrained vision and all ills from the unconstrained view. For my taste—and that of most libertarians, I suspect—Sowell’s constrained vision in its purer forms is probably a shade too constrained, too ready to assume that old customs continue to serve their traditional functions under changed circumstances. But it is the worst features of the unconstrained vision—its hubris, its pretense to omnicompetence—that have taken hold of the right. And if there is wisdom in each of the two perspectives, it should be worrying that, for all the other differences between the major parties, between progressives and conservatives, in this one fundamental way the political landscape increasingly offers only half the picture—different refractions of the same unconstrained vision. With the waning of the constrained perspective’s tempering influence, we’re left with a political vision that’s dangerously double.”

http://www.reason.com/news/show/117049.html 

No moderate, no realist, McCain the neocon

Ron Paul revolution against empire and draft

Pat Buchanan vs Neo-Cons

Pat Buchanan on John McCain’s warmongering nature

Pat Buchanan:”McCain will make Cheney look like Gandhi”

 
Anne Norton Defines Neocons

Israel, Iran and the New Neocons

Newshour: “Neo-Cons Pushing for War with Iran” – Pt 1 of 2

Newshour: “Neo-Cons Pushing for War with Iran” – Pt 2 of 2

1. The Neocons – Ideology and Fantasy (Part 1 of 14)

2. The Neocons – Rumsfeld’s Imaginary War (2/14)

3. The Neocons – Birth of Islamic Extremists

4. The Neocons – Recruiting Christians / Concept of Terror

5. The Neocons – CIA’s $1Billion Backs Future Terrorists

6. The Neocons – Ignored Warning of Terrorists

7. Then Neocons – Destruction of the Republican Party

8. The Neocons – Clinton’s Blowjob / Extremist Rampage

9. The Neocons – “There’s No Al-Qaeda Organization”

10. The Neocons – “We’re Gonna Find Those Evil Doers”

11. The Neocons – Hunt for Osama / The Disney Terrorists

12. The Neocons – Godzilla was a Terrorist Mentor

13. The Neocons – Dirty Bomb / Precautionary Principle

14. The Neocons – Fear is the Only Agenda

Leo Strauss

“Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-born Jewish-American political philosopher who specialized in the study of classical political philosophy. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books. Since his death, he has come to be regarded as one of the intellectual fathers of neoconservatism in the United States. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol

“Irving Kristol (born January 22, 1920, Brooklyn, New York City, New York) is considered the founder of American neoconservatism. He is married to conservative author and emerita professor Gertrude Himmelfarb and is the father of William Kristol.

Kristol was born into an orthodox Jewish family. However, he maintains that belief had nothing to do with his family’s observance.^[1] He earned his B.A. in History from the City College of New York in 1940, where he was an active Trotskyist. Before graduating, he met Gertrude Himmelfarb at a Trotskyist meeting, and they married on January 18, 1942.^[2] He wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940.^[3] From 1941 to 1944, he served as staff sergeant in the armored infantry in Europe in World War II. After the war, he was stationed in Marseilles for a year.^[4]

He was the managing editor of Commentary magazine from 1947 to 1952, co-founder of the British-based Encounter and its editor from 1953 to 1958 when he handed over the reins to his friend and City College classmate Melvin J. Lasky^[5], editor of the Reporter from 1959 to 1960, executive vice-president of Basic Books from 1961 to 1969, and professor of social thought at the New York University Graduate School of Business from 1969 to 1988. Since 1988, he has been John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has used these positions and publications to animate the neo-conservative movement, arguing for low taxes, a well-funded and internationally active military, conservative social policy, and a minimalist interpretation of First Amendment rights. For example, he once stated that “I don’t think the advocacy of homosexuality really falls under the First Amendment any more than the advocacy or publication of pornography does.”^[6]

Kristol is the founder of the politics and culture journal The Public Interest and the foreign affairs journal The National Interest. He was co-editor of The Public Interest (first with Daniel Bell, then with Nathan Glazer) from its founding in 1965 until 2002 and publisher of The National Interest from its founding in 1985 until 2001.

He is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute since 1988, a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 1972, a member of the Wall Street Journal Board of Contributors since 1972, and president of National Affairs, Inc.

Kristol suggests of himself, “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative; in religion a neo-orthodox even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I’m going to end up a neo-that’s all, neo dash nothing.”^[7]

In July 2002, President George W. Bush awarded Kristol the Presidential Medal of Freedom. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol

Russell Kirk

“Russell Kirk (19 October 1918 – 29 April 1994) was an American political theorist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. …”

“…The Conservative Mind

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana^[3], the published version of Kirk’s doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival. It also drew attention to:

• Conservative statesmen such as John Adams, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, Joseph de Maistre, Benjamin Disraeli, and Arthur Balfour;
• The conservative implications of writings by well-known authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, George Gissing, George Santayana, and T. S. Eliot;
• British and American authors such as Fisher Ames, John Randolph of Roanoke, Orestes Brownson, John Henry Newman, Walter Bagehot, Henry James Sumner Maine, William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, William Hurrell Mallock, Leslie Stephen, Albert Venn Dicey, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt.

The Portable Conservative Reader (1982), which Kirk edited, contains sample writings by most of the above.

Not everyone agreed with Kirk’s reading of the conservative heritage and tradition. For example, Harry Jaffa (a student of Leo Strauss) wrote: “Kirk was a poor Burke scholar. Burke’s attack on metaphysical reasoning related only to modern philosophy’s attempt to eliminate skeptical doubt from its premises and hence from its conclusions.”^[4]

Russello (2004) argues that Kirk adapted what 19th century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson called “territorial democracy” to articulate a version of federalism that was based on premises that differ in part from those of the Founders and other conservatives. Kirk further believed that territorial democracy could reconcile the tension between treating the states as mere provinces of the central government, and as autonomous political units independent of Washington. Finally, territorial democracy allowed Kirk to set out a theory of individual rights grounded in the particular historical circumstances of the United States, while rejecting a universal conception of such rights.

Principles

Kirk developed six “canons” of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
2. An affection for the “variety and mystery” of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize “natural” distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are “unimaginable apart from one another.” [5] and that “all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief.” [6] …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Kirk 

Milton Friedman

“…Milton Friedman (born July 31, 1912 – died November 16, 2006) was an American Nobel Laureate economist and public intellectual. He is best known among scholars for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.^[1] A global public followed his restatement of a libertarian political philosophy that insisted on minimizing the role of government in favor of the private sector. As a leader of the Chicago School of economics, based at the University of Chicago, he had a widespread influence in shaping the research agenda of the entire profession. Friedman’s many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos and lectures cover a broad range of topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. The Economist hailed him as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it”.^[2]

Originally a Keynesian supporter of the New Deal and advocate of high taxes, in the 1950s his reinterpretation of the Keynesian consumption function challenged the basic keynesian model. In the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy called monetarism. He theorized there existed a “natural rate of unemployment” and he argued the central government could not micromanage the economy because people would realize what the government was doing and shift their behavior to neutralize the impact of policies. He rejected the Phillips Curve and predicted that Keynesian policies would cause “stagflation” (high unemployment and low growth). He argued that a steady expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy, and warned against efforts by the treasury or central bank to do otherwise.

Influenced by his close friend George Stigler, Friedman opposed government regulation of all sorts, as well as public schooling. Friedman’s political philosophy, which he considered classically liberal and libertarian, stressed the advantages of the marketplace and the disadvantages of government intervention and regulation, strongly influencing the outlook of American conservatives and libertarians. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom. His books and essays were widely read and even circulated underground behind the Iron Curtain.^[3][4]

Friedman’s methodological innovations were widely accepted by economists, but his policy prescriptions were highly controversial. Most economists in the 1960s rejected them, but since then they had a growing international influence (especially in the U.S. and Britain), and in the 21st century have gained wide acceptance among many economists. He thus lived to see some of his laissez-faire ideas embraced by the mainstream,^[5] especially during the 1980s. His views of monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation informed the policy of governments around the globe, especially the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the U.S., Brian Mulroney in Canada, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and (after 1989) in Eastern Europe. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

Ludwig von Mises

“Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (pronounced [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]) (September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) was an Austrian Economist, philosopher, and a major influence on the modern libertarian movement.

Because of his Jewish origin and his opinions, he had to emigrate to Switzerland and then settled in the USA.

The Ludwig von Mises Institute is named after him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises

Ludwig von Mises Institute

http://mises.org/

Friedrich Hayek

Friedrich Hayek

“Friedrich August von Hayek, CH (May 8, 1899 – March 23, 1992) was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher known for his defence of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism against socialist and collectivist thought in the mid-20th century. He is considered to be one of the most important economists and political philosophers of the twentieth century.[1] One of the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics, he also made significant contributions in the fields of jurisprudence and cognitive science. He shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with ideological rival Gunnar Myrdal “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.”[2] He also received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.[3] He is considered to be one of the major forces of change from the dominant interventionist and Keynesian policies of the first part of the 20th century back to towards classical liberalism after the 1980s. …” 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 1 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 2 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 3 of 4)

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism (Part 4 of 4)

Charlie Rose – Economist Milton Friedman
 

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman Debates Naomi Klein

The Power of Choice – Milton Friedman

INFLATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT

Nobel Memorial Lecture, December 13, 1976

by MILTON FRIEDMAN

The University of Chicago, Illinois, USA

“…One of my great teachers, Wesley C. Mitchell, impressed on me the basic

reason why scholars have every incentive to pursue a value-free science, whatever

their values and however strongly they may wish to spread and promote

them. In order to recommend a course of action to achieve an objective, we

must first know whether that course of action will in fact promote the objective.

Positive scientific knowledge that enables us to predict the consequences of a

possible course of action is clearly a prerequisite for the normative judgment

whether that course of action is desirable. The Road to Hell is paved with

good intentions, precisely because of the neglect of this rather obvious point.

     This point is particularly important in economics. Many countries around

the world are today experiencing socially destructive inflation, abnormally

high unemployment, misuse of economic resources, and, in some cases, the

suppression of human freedom not because evil men deliberately sought to

achieve these results, nor because of differences in values among their citizens,

but because of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government

measures: errors that at least in principle are capable of being corrected by

the progress of positive economic science. …”

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1976/friedman-lecture.pdf

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(Michelle Malkin)

It should be obvious by now that d-baggery is an American version of an authoritarian nationalist political ideology. D-baggery rails against cultural decline and decadence, and it seeks to achieve a national rebirth by exalting our great nation (and race!). D-baggery advocates unity, strength and purity both in the spirit and in the flesh. It is the unshakable belief in a strong masculine authority — a father, a leader, a Dark Lord — who must remain beyond the reproach of his children, beyond restraint, able to do whatever is necessary at any time and employ His awesome power in whatever way He sees fit, to destroy the enemy and ensure that our traditional life is renewed. He is, of course, a blond beast, one whose fair complexion shows his natural, physical superiority over the degenerate races who were rightfully conquered by our d-bag forbears and put to work making the bricks that compose our national monuments.

D-baggery is much more than just a political ideology though! It is also a lifestyle. It is a worldview. It even comes with its own science. When it looked like d-baggery was on the run in Europe after the end of the Second World War, and when it looked like Soviet era d-baggery was through with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American d-bags rose to the challenge to resurrect d-baggery using the cast-off scraps from decolonized third world countries like the Philippines, Iraq, Ireland, and Canada. At the end of the Twentieth Century, d-baggery achieved what it had been incapable of achieving in Italy, Germany, Spain or Japan in the 1930s: a coalition of genocidal, racist, sexist, homophobic — heterophobic! — revolutionaries who are the very thing they despise! Isn’t it wonderful?

Part of the d-bag lifestyle is the mantra, “I deserve it.” Of course, the unspoken correlative to the mantra is, “and I’m going to take it from you.” Because that’s where being a d-bag becomes fun! D-bags understand law, right, and justice to be concepts affected by gravity: the bigger the social object is (e.g. Rush Limbaugh or Scooter Libby) the more the law protects their rights like a force field and the less power justice has to punish. For example, when the poor and powerless shoot heroin they are criminal scum who deserve nothing short of life imprisonment or execution, but when Rush scams fifteen doctors to get his fix of OxyContin — hillbilly heroin — he can have the case dismissed and his reputation vouched for by all his upstanding d-bag friends. Government does not have the right to tell you what kind of car you can drive, but it is obligated to provide you with cheap gas — even if that means prosecuting an unprovoked war. Scooter Libby, following in the venerable footsteps of Oliver North, not only is allowed to break the law, but is obligated to break the law as proof of his patriotism. This is what it means to be a d-bag: the privilege of doing what you accuse as criminal in others.

Though they would never admit it in polite company, d-bags love irony. And the fact that some of the biggest defenders of white, male supremacy should be neither white nor male is an irony that warms the fires of hate in a d-bag’s heart — even during the cold winter of peace and prosperity.

Bang, bang you're dead!

So when a strong woman calls another woman a slut, a bitch or a whore; when a black man calls another black man a nigger, and a cotton-headed coon then berates him for laziness; when an Asian woman calls herself a slant-eyed, slope, zipper-head and a gook, d-bags around the world raise a cheer. These are off-white d-bags. The irony is they are the beneficiaries of the liberal, uplift, social justice ideology they hate. Most off-white d-bags received special privileges unavailable to other people with whom they might be expected to identify. Clarence Thomas got into Yale through affirmative action; Ann Coulter can vote; and the Neo-Cons, denied entrance to the Ivy League were accepted to City College CUNY — a truly liberal liberal arts institution. But now that they got theirs, they are more than happy to deny the privilege to the new generation of the needy.

Can Filipinos be d-bags? Sure! Can Jews be d-bags? Absolutely. Anyone who thinks God gave them the right to dispossess another human being of his property, liberty, and life without the due process of law or ethical feelings (do to others as you would be done to) is a fundamental d-bag. But because d-baggery is a belief that might makes right, combined with the perverse satisfaction of using fraud and guile to pretend to might without actually having to work for it, off-white d-bags are paradoxically the paragons of d-baggery. They are ideological cover for the continued degradation of ethics, honesty, justice, and morality by the purveyors of hatred, fear, intolerance and perfidy.

Does this come as a shock? Is it surprising that human beings of all backgrounds might want to obliterate any history of oppression and inferiority that clings to their people or themselves? Not at all. Is it a surprise that men and women want to be able to determine their futures and chose their own fates? No. Is it hypocrisy beyond wickedness that a former revolutionary who wants to ameliorate the condition of his people would, when the battle is won, become a more intolerable tyrant the the one he deposed? Yes. But to be a quintessential d-bag, he must also publish the old lie that some citizens are more equal than others, and that war is peace.

 And here we see the terrible utility of off-white d-bags to the cause of authoritarianism: Off-white d-bags prove that tolerance and forgiveness can be shamefully manipulated by the unscrupulous who make a valid claim on our conscience for reciprocity that they have no intention of honoring.