One small point about the West Bank and Gaza seems forgotten by Paul Craig Roberts and others like him. Throughout human history, when one country attacks another and its attack is defeated, it tends to lose some territory PERMANENTLY. The victorious country tends to keep that territory as a buffer against future attacks. The attitude that the entire rest of the world takes towards the country that lost territory is “tough luck; that is what you get for launching an attack.”

In 1967, Arab armies mobilized and massed near the Israeli border. Egypt’s Nasser openly talked about what they were about to do. Israel decided that it would not wait for the first punch to be thrown, so to speak, and launched its defense immediately by attacking the forces massed on its borders. Having defeated them, it seized the lands on which those forces had been massed, up to the next natural water and mountain boundaries.

All of this is entirely unremarkable in human history. In fact, what generally follows is deportation of a certain number of the people of the same ethnicity/language/religion of the attackers from the newly seized territories, in order to tilt the balance in favor of the victorious country in that region. Witness the deportation of Germans from newly acquired Polish and Czech territory after World War I, for example.

Furthermore, when those who were deported whine about how that is their “homeland” and they don’t want to live anywhere else on earth, the rest of the world says, “Too bad.”

Why the endless hullabaloo over the “occupied territories” of the West Bank and Gaza? These belonged to attackers who were defeated. The majority of those who live “under Israeli occupation” today supported the attacks. If Israel had simply deported them in 1967, the world would have whined about it for a while, then turned its attention to other matters over time. The endless series of terrorist jihads over the last 36 years would never have happened.

Can someone explain why all other such episodes in military history are judged by one set of standards, and 1967-2003 in the West Bank and Gaza by another?

“Can someone explain why all other such episodes in military history are judged by one set of standards, and 1967-2003 in the West Bank and Gaza by another?”

I can. It’s because never before in history has there been such a timid, unaggressive bunch running a country under chronic threat as the Jews running Israel.

When the world is put before the fait accompli, like the Prussian Empire’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, it accepts it and shuts up, soon losing interest because it sees there’s nothing to do and because, fundamentally, it doesn’t care — it just cares about yakking when yakking can make it feel moral or intellectual, neither of which it is. The people who love to yak-yak-yak stop yak-yak-yakking when placed before the fait accompli because they see they have to go elsewhere to get their fix of holier-than-thou feeling.

When on the other hand there never is any fait accompli but just endless negotiation and jockeying for position, all the people who want to feel moral or intellectual keep yakking. That’s how they get high. That’s what we’re seeing.

In a sense, Israel and the U.S. are committing grave immorality in having Israel remain small and vulnerable, the equivalent of a battlefield salient, with indefensible borders and aggression-inviting tiny size. They are inviting disaster and death by doing it. It’s like the French at Verdun — they just kept pouring men into the fire of the German big guns until a generation was wiped out. The French saw themselves as without a choice. Washington and Israel do have a choice but willingly stain their hands in innocent blood in order that lots of people in the chattering classes can get their fix of feeling high from posing as holier-than-thou and feeling intellectual when in actuality they have absolutely nothing to say.

These chatterers only chatter because strong people don’t do anything. The minute strong people act they shut up.

Clark Coleman and others are quite right in their attacks on Paul Craig Roberts and the other hysterics in the anti-war right. I am a little surprised however, at Mr. Coleman’s assertion that it is historically “normal” to expell the losing population in wars from their homes. This was not true, at least in wars between civilized Western countries. He seems to be reasoning from the very unusual expulsion of the Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after WWII (not WWI). This was an extraordinary event, widely considered an atrocity by both conservatives and moderate leftists at the time, and was possible only because of the greater atrocities of the Nazis. The British and American governments went along with it only reluctantly, and under Soviet pressure. It is not and should not be considered a model or normal occurence, even if circumstances force the Israelis into following similar policies….The true outrage of the treatment of Arab refugees, it should be said, is the fact that the UN and too many Western countries, by subsidizing permanent “refugee” camps, have made it possible for the Arab world to avoid taking care of its own.
Alan J. Levine

Yes, it was after World War I that territory was occupied and Germans were NOT expelled, and after World War II that they WERE expelled, as Mr. Levine correctly noted. The rationale was simple: When Germans remained in the lands after World War I, it served as the excuse for Germany to forcibly reclaim those lands in World War II. The Poles and Czechs did not want to witness a repeat performance.

The analogy to Palestine should be pretty striking in that sense. A continuing presence of Palestinian Arabs west of the Jordan will be a perpetual excuse for the Arab and Muslim lands to foment terrorism and unrest. Their expulsion would signal that they are never coming back, hence it is time to assimilate them elsewhere and quit the refugee camp nonsense. With no more camps in Israel, perhaps the world would notice the camps in Arab lands at long last.

Furthermore, we can imagine what world opinion might have been if ethnic Germans had outnumbered ethnic Czechs and Slovaks in post-WWII Czechoslovakia. No country can be expected to live with that imbalance, and world outcry would have been far less had that been the case (which is the case in Israel).

Mass relocations after wars have been quite common in history, although not always deportations (e.g. relocating Indians to reservations).

In any case, I don’t know which victors in war have been expected to maintain poorly defensible borders forever just to appease their defeated attackers (or “world opinion”). This is insane.

Mr. Auster and other posters here do not care for Craig Roberts’ tone or his arguments about how the United States was brought to the point of invading and occupying Iraq, even after President Bush himself has acknowledged that the heavily implied casus belli that resonated most with Americans was baseless: Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks. More interesting than Roberts’ column is the article he cites that moved him to write it: Claes Ryn’s Orbis article, The Ideology of American Empire (Orbis, Summer 2003 at 383). Whatever VFR participants think of Roberts’ views or his exposition, they should read Ryn’s article, which is the most dispassionate and devastating dissection I have read of the neoconservative approach to foreign policy and the neocon view of what America (and the world) should be. Roberts’ LRC column provides the link.

Ryn calls the neoconservatives new Jacobins and explains why (rather than try to paraphrase him, I would suggest one read him oneself). In addition to noting the perils to America of their hubris-ridden policy prescriptions, Ryn also sheds light on why the perceived super-patriotism of neocons is itself dangerous to America and not patriotic in any traditionally American sense. Here I will quote:

“International adventurism has often served to distract nations from pressing domestic difficulties, but in America today, expansionism is often fueled also by intense moral-ideological passion. Since the principles for which America stands are portrayed as ultimately supranational (for [Allan] Bloom they are actually opposed to traditional national identity), “nationalism” may not be quite the right term for this new missionary zeal. The new Jacobins believe that as America spearheads the cause of universal principles, it should progressively shed its own historical distinctiveness except insofar as that distinctiveness is directly related to those principles. Though countries confronted by this power are likely to see it as little more than a manifestation of nationalistic ambition and arrogance, it is nationalistic only in a special sense. Like Revolutionary France, neo-Jacobin America casts itself as a savior nation. Ideological and national zeal become indistinguishable. “Our nationalism,” write [William] Kristol and [David] Brooks about America’s world mission, “is that of an exceptional nation founded on a universal principle, on what Lincoln called ‘an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.’” This view of America’s role can hardly be called patriotic in the old sense of that word. Neo-Jacobinism is not characterized by devotion to America’s concrete historical identity with its origins in Greek, Roman, Christian, European and English civilization. Neo-Jacobins are attached in the end to ahistorical, supranational principles that they believe should supplant the traditions of particular societies.”

…including, it is evident, those of American society. As noted above, the entire article is well worth reading. Certainly the federal government’s international adventures are a distraction from America’s pressing domestic difficulties today. Ryn’s separation of American moralistic interventionism abroad (his discussion of Woodrow Wilson acknowledges that it did not start with the neo-Jacobins) and traditional American patriotism, that of a distinct country and its people, rings true to me. It also helps explain the thought I usually have when listening to some federal spokesman or media flack talking about how “we’re bringing America/American values to [fill in name of benighted foreign country]” that neither the flack nor the program has anything to do with the actual America or Americans. The new Jacobins are just the latest manifestation of the bellicose liberal, although they are far more disconnected from the rest of America than even Woodrow Wilson was.

I thank Craig Roberts for bringing Claes Ryn’s excellent essay to my attention. HRS

While Claes Ryn’s views of neo-Jacobinism and the neoconservatives are worth reading (his earlier book The New Jacobinism is excellent), I am shocked at Mr. Sutherland’s comment that “President Bush himself has acknowledged that the heavily implied casus belli that resonated most with Americans was baseless: Iraqi involvement in the September 11th attacks.” This is a lie coming from the Anti-War Party, and Mr. Sutherland ought to know that it’s a lie. While the Bush administration, as everyone knows, pointed out possible connections between the hijackers and Iraq, such as Muhammad Atta’s meeting with an Iraq official in Prague, and also discussed other Iraq-Qaeda contacts, it never charged that Iraq was involved with the 9/11 attack per se. Yet the Anti-War Party is now telling the big lie that the Administration did say this, in order to paint Bush’s recent statement denying Iraqi involvement in 9/11 as a reversal of previous supposed Administration war propaganda. It is disheartening that Mr. Sutherland would echo this dishonest attack on the Administration.

George W. Bush, September 17, 2003: “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in September 11th.” That, after two years of heavy hints of Iraqi involvement, almost to point of presuming it, by the president and many other members of his administration as well as pressmen who echo the administration’s positions. The Bush administration tried very hard for a long time to establish such a link, and was never forthcoming until the other day about how little success they were having in doing so.

Saddam Hussein was an evil despot, but the case for our Iraq invasion was not honestly made, here or in Great Britain. Part of the dishonesty was the deliberate fostering of the impression among people who couldn’t or wouldn’t look into it themselves that the Iraqis were either involved in the September 11th attacks or were al-Qaeda’s main supporters - something that makes little sense when one considers what Wahhabi dogmatists think of secular Ba’athists. The dishonesty has continued with the other shifting justifications: from WMDs or the possibility thereof, also unsubstantiated, to Paul Wolfowitz’s unusually frank admission that, even it there were no WMD’s, we did it because of oil. HRS

I agree in general with the article by Claes Ryn, and VFR purposely distinguishes itself from neoconservatism and other forms of liberalism. But war and foreign enemies are not recent inventions of the neocons devised to impose a Jacobin ideology here and abroad. At the beginning of the article Ryn offers a paleo tic which I’ve seen before: Bush campaigned on a policy of foreign policy moderation but bizarrely (to Ryn), after 9/11, he championed a more aggressive posture! Ryn does allow that unsophisticated non-cynics might find some connection between 9/11 and Bush’s changes in foreign policy, but in fact Bush’s original posture argues against the idea that he is dominated by neoconservatives, and pretty much everyone except for the conspiracy-minded left and right understand that the events of 9/11 would logically have a major effect on anyone’s ideas about foreign policy. Later Ryn also makes a passing reference to Bush’s pushing of a “vastly more intrusive role for government in the daily lives of U.S. citizens.” Unless he means the prescription drug benefit, I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Our racial profiling of Arabs at airports? Our internment of Afghan al-Quaeda members at Guatanamo Bay with insufficiently soft prayer mats?

I don’t trust Bush and I don’t like him. I want to know how we got here and how we can get out, and sophistry won’t provide the answers.

One big problem with the neocons is certainly their “proposition nation” nonsense, which has been discussed on this board and elsewhere. But I think an even bigger problem is their political correctness.

As Mr. Auster has pointed out, it is often hard to say what their serious beliefs really are, because so much of their writing and speaking has been devoted to positioning themselves as the “mainstream” and “reasonable” voice within conservatism, with the implicit (and often explicit) implication that the rest of us are unreasonable and doomed to be politically unpopular and unsuccessful pariahs. When you are concerned first with positioning yourself on the political spectrum, just to the right of one group and just to the left of another group, then you will always be subject to intimidation by the forces of political correctness that are rampant in this society.

Thus, common sense would indicate that we tighten our borders, restrict immigration, and engage in law enforcement profiling of Arab/Muslim males at airports and other places in the wake of 9/11. But, political correctness says that would be “racist”. The whole point of the neocons is to take political positions more acceptable to the dominant liberal culture than taken by traditional and paleo conservatives. Thus, they must reject all common sense measures that are not PC.

But, in the wake of 9/11, political leaders have enormous pressure on them to “do something”. If you cannot restrict immigration, tighten borders, etc., then you must do something else. That translates into two things: many foreign wars (my proposal to start just in Afghanistan will not be satisfactory on this score) and strip-searching little old white granny at the airport (after all, you can hardly announce that there shall be no changes in airport security post-9/11, and if profiling in un-PC, then what else is left?) Then the law-and-order wing of conservatism, never having been too concerned with civil liberties anyway (civil liberties having a suspicious association with the likes of the ACLU) can join in with Patriot Acts I and II, etc.

If a government will not do its primary job, it must use its power on something else, and that will often mean abusing its own citizens.

By the way, thanks for the pointer to the Claes Ryn article, which was excellent.

Mr. Sutherland’s charges of deception are false. Here’s the true picture of what happened. There was some evidence of possible Iraqi connection with the hijackers, and that evidence was discussed and explored, as it should have been, but it never reached the stage of any definite statement by the Bush team that Iraq was involved. Bush’s call to war on Iraq was based on the general ties among all Muslim and ARab users of terror, and on possible future cooperation between Iraq and Al Qaeda over WMDs, not on any alleged involvement of Iraq in 9/11.

In fact, it is Mr. Sutherland who engages in the very technique that he falsely accuses Bush of. Mr. Sutherland heavily hints that something is true, while pulling back and acknowledging that it’s not true; he charges the administration with lying, while he admits that the administration did not actually say what he says it said. Thus he writes: “The Bush administration tried very hard for a long time to establish such a link, and was never forthcoming until the other day about how little success they were having in doing so.” Leaving aside the tendentious phrase “was never forthcoming,” isn’t the thing Mr. Sutherland is describing the very thing that you would expect any responsible government to do? That is, they saw a reasonable possibility of such a link, they discussed that possibility and looked for more evidence, and they did not find it, and they were honest about what they were doing and thinking at every stage of this process. Yet Mr. Sutherland twists this into a picture of systematic deception and dishonesty.

Mr. Sutherland then continues:

“Part of the [Bush administration’s] dishonesty was the deliberate fostering of the impression among people who couldn’t or wouldn’t look into it themselves that the Iraqis were either involved in the September 11th attacks or were al-Qaeda’s main supporters - something that makes little sense when one considers what Wahhabi dogmatists think of secular Ba’athists.”

I lived through the war debate, followed it carefully, and was a supporter of the war on Iraq. Yet I NEVER had the impression at any point in the last two years that Bush was saying that “the Iraqis were either involved in the September 11th attacks or were al-Qaeda’s main supporters.” Mr. Sutherland’s charge against Bush is wholly and simply false. He then goes on to repeat the hackneyed and now discredited notion of the anti-war party that the ideological dissimilarity between Wahhabis and Ba’athists precluded any cooperation between them. In fact, we now know that there were significant contacts between them, (though it remains the case that there is no direct evidence of direct Iraqi involvement with 9/11). Does Mr. Sutherland really not know this?

I’m not going to discuss this issue any further, at least for the time being, since there is literally no end to the false statements coming from the anti-war people. I find it especially galling when national leaders who have been behaving honestly and responsibly—as the Bush administration did with regard to their arguments for the Iraq war—are continually and falsely accused of lying.

This is not a defense of anything else the Bush administration has done and said, including their failure seriously to confront Islamism in America, including their failure to think carefully about how to manage Iraq after we had conquered it. I am speaking solely of the narrow issue of the Bush administration’s arguments for war on Iraq.

I think people make that mistake with Bush all the time: that is, they don’t think he means what he says. I think he means exactly what he says. Perhaps many don’t want to face the true horror of that possibility.

HR wrote:
“Part of the [Bush administration’s] dishonesty was the deliberate fostering of the impression among people who couldn’t or wouldn’t look into it themselves that the Iraqis were either involved in the September 11th attacks or were al-Qaeda’s main supporters - something that makes little sense when one considers what Wahhabi dogmatists think of secular Ba’athists.”

Not to be rude, but anyone who believes that Baathist regimes cannot work with Islamist terrorist groups has not paid attention to the middle east since 1983.

Aside from the connections between Ansar Al-Islam, an associate group of Al Qaeda, with the Iraqi regime, we have the Iraqis subsidizing Islamic Jihad and Hamas operations in Israel.
The later two groups also get aid from the Ba’athist Syrian regime, which also props up Hizbullah (Shi’ite Islamist).

CC wrote:
“Thus, common sense would indicate that we tighten our borders, restrict immigration, and engage in law enforcement profiling of Arab/Muslim males at airports and other places in the wake of 9/11. But, political correctness says that would be “racist”. The whole point of the neocons is to take political positions more acceptable to the dominant liberal culture than taken by traditional and paleo conservatives. Thus, they must reject all common sense measures that are not PC.”

I was under the impression that National Review was mainstreme. Their support for border control and profiling belies your claim.

Finally, Mr. Levine, for 4000 years of history it has been the nor for the winning nation to displace at least part of the losing nation.

May Mr. Auster and I agree to disagree about the Bush administration’s positioning before the invasion of Iraq? We agree about most everything else.

I think Agricola is skewing Ryn’s reaction to the shift in Bush foreign policy after the September 11th attacks. Ryn is not surprised that Bush became more interventionist after them - it would have been very difficult not to. Ryn notes, however, that even before the attacks President Bush was already talking a more interventionist line than Governor Bush had when running for president. What strikes Ryn, if I read him accurately, is how thoroughly President Bush has adopted the democratist imperialism that the “new Jacobins” promote. Noting the difference between 2000’s calls for a more humble foreign policy and the unrestricted unilateralism of 2002’s National Security Strategy is not merely a paleo tic.

I think it is very likely that even before September 11, 2001, GW Bush, as was his father before him, was very susceptible to the proposition nation, first universal nation, indispensable nation blather that neoconservatives and some other liberals had been peddling since the Reagan administration. After all, if an American listens to that stuff uncritically, it can make him feel pretty good about himself for being part of this superior super-nation.

For those reasons, I now believe the campaign rhetoric about pursuing a more humble foreign policy was tactical positioning against the vice president of an administration that was hyperactive in its interventionism when American interests were not at stake. I confess I thought Bush meant it at the time - when he spoke about it in debates he seemed perfectly sincere (although having Gore as his foil probably fostered that impression). The “more humble foreign policy” turns out to have been about as meaningful as “compassionate conservatism.”

Mr. Coleman’s points about the essentially PC nature of neocons are on point. Isn’t that really another way of saying that they are just liberals flying false colors? HRS

Isn’t it odd simultaneously to claim that:

1) Bush claimed that Iraq was involved in 9-11
2) Bush engaged in a preemptive war

They can’t both be true.

Ron wrote:
“I was under the impression that National Review was mainstreme. Their support for border control and profiling belies your claim.”

NR is editorially in favor of legal immigration of massive numbers of incompatibles. The claim to be against _illegal_ immigration is a bit specious when, out of the other side of one’s mouth, one advocates legally open borders.

NR doesn’t seem to have any principled position other than “we’ll do our best to sound like conservatives, but we’ll be mainstream (that is, liberal)”.

Do a search of the VFR archives on the phrase “Hegelian Mambo”.

Ron wrote:

“I was under the impression that National Review was mainstreme. Their support for border control and profiling belies your claim.”

Their support for border control goes back several weeks now. If you are unaware of the story of National Review on immigration, search around at vdare.com. They had an ideological cleansing that threw out the traditionalist conservatives, including their leading proponents of immigration restriction, a little over a decade ago, and are just now starting to have second thoughts.

Mr. Coleman brings an exciting news report that I hope turns out to be true. Maybe this is another sign we (as a small unit) are possibly having a miniscule positive effect.

On the immigration changes at National Review: After years of open borders boosterism, and sneering at all those who disagreed, check out two recent columns by Rich Lowry:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry081803.asp

This addresses only illegal immigration in California, but the second one actually takes on mass immigration, legal or not:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry090203.asp

The arguments are almost entirely economic and certainly don’t focus on the loss of Western culture and our political heritage. However, he does take a shot at multiculturalism and political correctness in the second one.

Here is the most recent Rich Lowry column on these issues, addressing the issue of drivers licenses for illegal aliens, matricula consular cards, etc.:

http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry091503.asp

Most of the NR writers are ignoring these issues, but Lowry is suddenly writing about them every fortnight.

It is funny, isn’t it. When Lowry was made editor of NR in 1997, criticism of immigration vanished from the pages of NR. Now it suddenly re-appears, though in this attenuated way.

If Bush does not get reelected (probably unlikely), and if the Democratic candidate is no second Clinton, I imagine that the Republican party will have to scrounge around for principles again. Immigration is one issue that is probably well-posed for take off. I think that NR is getting ready to have another immigration flip-flop rather soon.

Since we were mentioning NR and immigration, this fact should be added to the catalog of William Buckley’s betrayals.

In 1995, Buckley had a two-hour broadcast of Firing Line in which the issue was “Resolved: Immigration to the U.S. should be drastically reduced.” Buckley took the PRO side of this debate. Then, just two years later, Buckley removed O’Sullivan as editor and Brimelow as member of the editorial board, bringing in Lowry as editor. Also, the pro-immigration mediocrity John Miller became an NR honcho. Immigration and the national question henceforth disappeared from the pages of NR. Also, after that 1995 debate, Buckley never discussed immigration again and never referred to his support for a drastic reduction of immigration.

Interestingly, John Miller has been silent on immigration issues since shortly after 9/11/01. He has reportedly said in private that he has lost interest in the issue. Chilton Williamson suggested that this was because his former position became so obviously indefensible.

I think there has been a lot of rethinking since 9/11/01 at National Review. It could be that it took a disaster to turn the tide on this issue.

If what Mr. Coleman says about Miller is correct, then the truth of Washington’s remark, that “people will not see an evil, until they feel it,” is shown once again. It never occurred to Miller that immigration was a problem until the greatest act of terrorism in history occurred in New York City.

People don’t see. They don’t think.

It reminds me of a billy goat we used to have. He was a tough customer, and we had to keep him tied up, but once he got loose, and attacked me when I approached him, and I had to get control of him somehow. The only thing that worked was taking a small log and bashing him over the head with it. That quieted him down enough so that I could tie him up again.

That’s the way it is with immigration. People have to be bashed on the head before they see a problem, or at least, as in Miller’s case, before they stop spouting nonsense about it. Hispanic riots in Washington and New York and L.A. were not enough. Immigrant radicals calling for the takeover of America was not enough. Mexican-American soccer fans in L.A. throwing garbage at the American team was not enough. Multiculturalism and multilingualism were not enough. What was enough? Jetliners piloted by Muslim fiends crashing into World Trade Center. That was enough. That’s what it took to quiet him down.

Matt wrote:
“NR is editorially in favor of legal immigration of massive numbers of incompatibles. The claim to be against _illegal_ immigration is a bit specious when, out of the other side of one’s mouth, one advocates legally open borders.”

I believe that this is the standard neoconservative position on immigration. I do not see any incompatibility between advocating LEGAL immigration and opposing illegal immigration. This does create problems in assimilation and a natural constituency for the left. Some neocons are waking up to this.

After reading _Alien Nation_, I no longer subscribe to this view because culture matters and the national question cannot be ignored.

I believe that September 11, 2001 was a watershed moment. It made immigration policy a matter of national security and existential survival. Outside of libertarians, I have seen a shift towards heavier regulation of immigration, and even actual reduction of numbers.

Please correct me, but as far as I could tell:

The first NR article post 9/11 with the word immigration: “Holy Toledo!”, 10/1/2001: Somewhat straightforward reportage on Mexican immigration, ending with this sentence: “Political ploys come and go. What comes are Mexican immigrants who sustain many businesses in every part of the country. Toledo is not exactly a border town, but it is the home of a growing Mexican community, which is why Fox went there. President Bush’s policy, of breaking down international borders, so long as he can avoid seeming to do so, will keep those Toledos coming.”

The first NR article post 9/11 with an out-and-out call for immigration reduction, in addition to stricter control; and explicitly addressing the point that immigration populations might provide cover for terrorists: “Get Tight”, 3/25/2002: Argues that stricter controls are required for immigration procedures in the United States; efforts to deport aliens who have overstayed visas; problems within the Immigration and Naturalization Service; how immigrant populations often provide a cover for terrorist operatives.

We hopefully are seeing the cracks in the anti-immigration reform party line. We therefore must redouble our efforts at learning here and then taking action.

Speculation might be right: Geroge W has adopted Spanish as his preferred language, Hispanic (especially Mexican) as his race, and Hispanci culture as his. In addition, he is emboldened politically by his invading hordes, so never look to W to change his ideas. He is the enemy to me.

What really is unfortunate about this is that Mr. Roberts has been an effective voice on some very important issues, especially the rights of man under law as shown in:

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/american_prosecutors.htm

And his more recent speech:

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/montpelerin.htm

Some of his articles on how PM Blair is leading his country to loss of sovereignty were also informative.

Mr. Auster has mentioned other cases where on matters of ethnicity, race and nation, there was something to be gained … until we got to the part where the Jews were singularly to blame for everything. Just another example.

The Traditionalist platform articulated here is the last place I’ve found where I can relate and identify on the broadest range of issues, (even if I’m odd-man-out on 1 or 2.) ;-)