Charles Johnson’s politics of personal destruction, redux

I just came across my article, “The Method of Charles Johnson,” written last November during Johnson’s attempt to read Vlaams Belang and the Brussels Journal out of the ranks of decent society, and re-reading it now I am more astonished and appalled than ever at Johnson’s unrestrained lies and smear tactics. I don’t know what the upshot was from this affair, but Johnson should have been thoroughly discredited by it.

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Paul Mulshine writes:

Note my own brilliant yet admittedly self-congratulatory dissection of Johnson.

As for his having a “California surfer-dude” persona, let me note that as someone who still surfs New Jersey winters at the age of 57 and who has hit most of the great surf spots on Earth, what most California surfers lack is the actual ability to surf.

A minor point perhaps, but the best surfers all come from the East Coast these days.

I suspect Johnson was an excellent guitar player, however, which is an excellent credential, though not in the world of political commentary.

LA replies:

Even if we grant Mr. Mulshine’s points, what explains Johnson’s ability to gather such a devoted following which treats him as their guru and Great Leader? He must have some talent. What is it?

Paul Mulshine replies:

Excellent question. I dealt with it in my treatise on Mumia Abu-Jamal, which ran in Heterodoxy back in the good old days. Maureen Faulkner is the widow of Daniel Faulkner, the officer who was shot by Mumia. She later moved to California and once confronted a Mumia supporter at a gas station. The piece describes the California mindset in which Johnson so clearly partakes:

When I covered the wars in Central America in the 1980s, I was amazed at the number of University of California students I’d run into in places like Nicaragua and Guatemala. I’d hear these people making huge, sweeping statements about local politics that had absolutely no basis in fact. I’d offer to show them some writings and documents that might alter their views, but they—like the guy Maureen Faulkner met in the gas station—would decline. Thought to them was not a matter of dry facts and boring theories; it was a question of consciousness. Once one’s consciousness was raised about a given question, that was that.

A footnote: Guess who else graduated from UC Santa Cruz? You got it: Victor Davis Hanson, the Banana Slug chicken hawk.

Is this not a perfect theory of the neocon universe?

LA replies:

Ok, but at VFR I don’t approve of phrases like “chicken hawk” which is a cheap shot unworthy of people engaged in rational discussion. If there was a war that you believed was necessary, then suddenly you would be a “chicken hawk” too. So the phrase “chicken hawk” has no objective meaning and doesn’t tell us anything about the rightness or wrongness of any particular war or about the rightness or wrongness of any individual’s position on any war. It’s simply a way of belittling people who support a war that the speaker disagrees with. And the anti-war right, through the use of such prejudicial and immature language, as well as other low and vicious arguments, deservedly consigned themselves to political impotence and irrelevance.

Even Paul Gottfried is now realizing how the inordinate anger and contentiousness of the paleocons has doomed them as a movement.

Paul Mulshine replies:

I agree on “chicken hawk.” But “banana-slug chicken hawk” takes it to a new level.

You are aware, of course, that the UC Santa Cruz mascot is the banana slug?

It’s the most hippie-dippy campus in America. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. My nephew went there and is in fact a true banana slug, having played for the baseball team with some distinction.

But the idea of an ardent militarist graduating from there is laughable on its face. Every time I hear Hanson comparing the battle for Basra to the Peloponnesian war I crack up laughing. One of these days I will write the definitive Hanson parody, in which Robert E. Lee shows the Union his true moral courage through Pickett’s charge. Never mind that it was a total failure. It’s the thought that counts.

As for what doomed the paleocons, I would say it’s the sad fact there there just aren’t many of them—or us. We live in a world where, as you noted in the case of Johnson, the great mass of people believe conservatism began on Sept. 11, 2001.

As a member of the dreaded MSM, I have to say that the real criticism thereof is the denigration of the term “conservative” by employing it to the idiocies of Johnson et al.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 09, 2008 04:22 PM | Send