Posted on 03/26/2003 11:54:02 AM PST by Maedhros
The War At Home
The number of emails I’ve received about my article on antiwar conservatives has just crossed the 350 mark. Of those, fewer than 10 have been negative. The sheer number of the messages prevents me from answering each one, but I’ve read them all and I’m grateful for each and every one of them. With the writers’ permission, I’ll quote a couple more to continue to give readers a sense of the reaction of their fellow-conservatives.
“I read your piece on the "paleocons" and I can only imagine the vitriol you are going to take primarily because you are Jewish. I hope you read this before you are simply deleting all of your messages because of the vile stuff that will becoming your way right now. I voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1992 primary because I thought Bush I was too squishy and remembered the old Reaganite Buchanan, but now he puts me in mind of Westbrook Pegler at the end. I loved "Right from the Beginning" and his defense of Reagan but what has happened to him just baffles and appalls me.
“A problem with the current paleos is that their policies would lead us to be like France, immoral and no more likely to help democracies than dictatorships. The view that America tilts towards the "Jews" rather than the "Arabs" makes no distinctions between the nature of the governments of Israel and the Arab nations. The vast majority of Israelis have no intent to kill all of the Arabs, whereas that can not be said of their opponents. If the Jews ran Israel as the Saudis, for instance, run their country, and vice versa, you would see a very quick switch in the views of American conservatives towards the Jews and the Arabs.
“There is one more point you might have made in your excellent piece (whichwill be a standard on this subject wherever conservatives meet) conservatism is supposed to deal with men and facts as they are. The isolationism of agrarian, rural and small town America was the product of the history and experience of the time. To ignore the technology and reality of your time is not conservative, but utopian. As you point out, Robert Taft and Vandenberg and the rest changed their views because of the world wide threat of the Soviet Union and the atomic bomb. I would like the revival of the British Empire to keep the peace, while we sit back here in the New World safe and quiet. This is nostalgia and foolishness, not policy. Paleoconservatism seems unable to imagine what a world in which the U.S. implemented their policy preferences would look like. It would soon be unrecognizable and far more hostile to this nation than it is now.
“Finally, paleoconservatism has no electoral victories. The white heartland it (by this I mean the mostly Caucasian interior of the country not that whites are the "heart" of the country) the paleos say they speak for is more open handed than the paleos and is also more bellicose abroad African Americans and Hispanics are generally far more ambivalent about the war on Iraq than the white heartland. They are far more protectionist as well. Where does a racialist, isolationist, anti-free trade, anti-war on terror ideology think it will get votes? The Confederate sympathizers of my acquaintance express their patriotism through fervid backing of America's wars and are generally pro-Israel, no votes there either. If your domestic policies alienate all the racial minorities, your foreign policy alienates the Southern and rural conservatives and your economic views alienate economic conservatives, exactly what is left? Oh yeah, say hello to Lenora Fulani et. al.”
And another:
“David,
“I just wanted to chime in on the paleos. First, thank you. It's time
they went the way of Objectivism and the John Birch Society. I used to
be a paleo myself. I worked for Buchanan's campaigns in '92 and '96,
subscribed to "Chronicles," "Sobran's" and the "Rothbard Rockwell
Report," and openly cheered the various little secessionist movements
that those types seemed to think were so important in the early
nineties.
“I once even introduced Lew Rockwell at a YAF convention in Orange County with the phrase, ‘If you want to see what principled conservatism look like, unlike those squishes at the National Review, listen to this man's
words, and learn.’ He then gave a frankly nasty speech on immigration.
At the end, I asked him how he reconciled his call for closed borders
with his opposition to tariffs, and his answer was (to me, surprisingly)
evasive: ‘in my ideal libertarian society, all property would be in
private hands, so immigration would simply be trespassing.’ This left a
nagging suspicion in me that ending immigration was more important to
this economist than, say, a return to the gold standard.
“I joined the Army shortly thereafter and discovered that there was still
a lot to be said about this country, and more specifically, a lot to be
said for a cosmopolitan foreign policy. The naïve isolationism of the
intellectual descendants of Father Coughlin and John Flynn does not hold
up under the scrutiny of military intelligence training. I now believed
them to be childish, but not necessarily malicious, when it came to
foreign policy.
“I do not throw terms like ‘racist’ and ‘anti-semitic’ around lightly;
they are serious charges, and should be reserved for serious,
unambiguous cases. I believed the conservative movement to be almost
completely free of the more virulent strains of racism that had plagued
it in its younger stages, but I cannot do so any longer. Public figures
can be legitimately judged not only by their words and deeds, but by
what they choose to speak and act upon. A genuine anti-semite can keep
from being discovered by simply not bringing up the subject. The paleo
crowd has made itself conspicuous by its determination to identify
itself as explicitly anti-Zionist, which is not necessarily the same
thing as anti-semitic, but one would expect that if their motivations
were truly isolationist and devoted to the principle of home rule, they
would cry foul as frequently at the cases of Tibet, the Kurds, the
Basques, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Chiapas, the Ivory Coast, etc. Of
course, they don't, and there's no indication that they ever will, so
what is presented as anti-internationalism and federalism begins to look
more and more like judenhass.
“Suffice it to say that I run with a different crowd now. My hope lies in
the thought that there are more like me, who want to think the best, but
become disillusioned with them not because of others' arguments against
them, but because of their own arguments, coupled with our own policing
of our movement. Again, thank you for shedding some light on this
subject.”
Oh, and a funny one:
“If the war isn't part of a neocon conspiracy, how do you explain the participation of the aircraft carrier ABRAHAM LINCOLN? Aha! What do you say to that?”
A reader from Rockford, Illinois, wrote in with a just reproach:
“In your recent article "Unpatriotic Conservatives" you mention Chronicles as being located in the ‘...rusting industrial city of Rockford, Illinois...’ While I wholeheartedly agree with your takedown of the loathsome racist Tom Fleming, I am hurt by your description of my hometown, Rockford. Disparaging the city Chronicles is located in as a method of demonstrating scorn for the publication and the individual seen as itsface, Tom Fleming, by extension disparages not only one of your biggest admirers (me), but also reflects poorly on my deceased parents and my twelve brothers and sisters (of whom many are Frum fans) and all the citizens of Rockford. I realize a writer of your considerable talents uses many tools. I hope the next time you use a place where Red Americans live in this fashion, you take a minute to realize you're unintentionally insulting a tens of thousands of people, many of whom admire your talents, and even some who because of your Daily Diary, consider you a friend.”
What can I say to that? Only: He is right, I was wrong – and I apologize.
Not every letter was positive though. The following is one of the more coherent of the negatives. It’s not very nice, but I print it at full length. Was it Aristotle who said that we reveal our characters by our choice of friends? Well, take a look at who is praising the antiwar conservatives as “good, intelligent, and deeply patriotic men.”
“Mr. Frum,
“I have on my desk at work a copy of the very first issue of The National Review. The National Review that you write for today has as much in common with that original edition as a horse has with a horsefly.
“You are not a ‘conservative’ nor are you an ‘American’ as you describe yourself.
“You are a jew. First, last always.
“You have been identified and people are no longer afraid to name the jew and to point out the irrefutable pattern of obfuscation, denial, silence and attacks used in the past to keep Americans from identifying jews as the problem with America. The ability to contain that absolute truth of nature- not rhetoric- has slipped past you while you pontificated about what America is. You wouldn't know, because it was a creation of White men, not jews. A stranger can tell me nothing about my own child and so the jew has nothing to offer me in describing my own nation.
“Jew.
“Enemy of the White Western Man that created our culture and our
civilization. The polio vaccine is not enough to undo the damage caused by the Jew and as a far brighter man than you once observed about you and yours-‘Quickly he turns the attacker's charges back on him, and the attacker becomes the liar, the troublemaker, the terrorist. Same exact enemy. How to respond? Nothing could be more mistaken than to defend oneself. That is just what the Jew wants. He can invent a new lie every day for the enemy to respond to, and the result is that the enemy spends so much time defending himself that he has no time to do what the Jew really fears: to attack.’
“It is time to step up to the plate and men, good men, intelligent and deeply patriotic men are doing just that.
“I served my country in combat and so did my father and his father before him, for our people, not for yours- I don't fear conflict like the Fleishers, Perles, Wolfowitzes, Kissingers, Feiths, Abrams and Frums- I relish it.What unit did you serve in, chickenhawk?
“No one cares about the labels anymore, no one cares about the smears.We want our nation back, and we will have it.It doesn't belong to you and it never has. So call me what you like, for I know what you are- Jew.”
Original thread: Unpatriotic Conservatives
Freeper: "The mongoloid looking freak that wrote the article ought to be shot in the head."
Absolutely vile. And also contradictory: if "no one" cares about labels anymore" why was it necessary to call Frum "Jew?"
Then again, who said anti-semites were rational, logical or even coherent.
Personally, I think the whole Neo - Paleo this is a false dilema.
I don't want to re-build the Roman Empire, I have no interest in that at all. Globalism bores me. So, I'm not a Neo.
I support our allies the Jews, as long as they are in the right. In this case, I believe they are so the Paleo's wouldn't have me either.
I am a Social Conservative, a Christian Conservative to be specific and find myself at odds with both of these groups frequently.
Thank you very much.
Hey, I always wondered.. There were more guy's than guns aimed in that warehouse.
Did you fire the extra shot and make off with the diamonds?
Could the lack of negative responses be due to the fact that REAL conservatives no longer read National Review or care what its writers have to say?
That it is, and intentionally so. Why else do you think Frum decided to include it in his defense?
The entire basis of Frum's argument in the original article was a label of anti-semitism. To establish that label, he carefully selected a small list of blatantly anti-semitic assertions by a fringer nut or two from the "American Rennaissance" crowd. He then identified a well known mainstream conservative writer, Robert Novak, plus some lesser known ones and proceded to paint them all with the label of anti-semitism by drawing an association between them and the fringers under the name of the "paleos."
His entire argument was an exercise in guilt-by-association fraud. As Novak noted in his response to Frum, he neither knows nor associates with those exact same fringers who Frum quoted in order to establish his label of "anti-semitism." In short, Frum fabricated it to facilitate his discrediting.
Perhaps most telling of this whole charade is an examination of several people Frum targetted with his label campaign. Novak is ethnically Jewish. Paul Gottfried, who Frum also targets, is a Jew. And most of LRC, a website that Frum paints with his wide brush of anti-semitism, practically worship the political philosophy of two Jewish economists - Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
Returning to that email, Frum's purpose in posting it is clear. It effectively allows him to claim "see, I told you so" in defense of his argument, but such a claim is itself fraudulent. That email could have come from, and likely did come from, your average run-of-the-mill nutcase anti-semite kook out there. Those types of people do exist and they like to email conspiracy rants with all sorts of nutty ideas to any given email address they come upon while travelling the web. To pretend that the reciept of an email from some nutcase out there is vindication for the smear article from NR is just another an exercise in fraud by Frum.
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