Conservatives must separate themselves from Hitler and Islam apologetics

Lydia McGrew writes:

I appreciate very much your taking on the Buchanan thesis. I especially appreciated your comments about how important it is not to speak of Hitler as some sort of rational agent with whom we could have and should have negotiated. But isn’t it very much the modus operandi of the paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians to treat everybody in those terms, including our and Israel’s most implacable enemies? We see it in the contemporary scene. Even Osama bin Laden, according to Ron Paul, needs to be understood. And certainly I think Buchanan’s book is taken to have contemporary resonances with regard to Iran. I say all of this at slightly more length in a post on my personal blog, here.

LA replies:

Lydia McGrew’s post at her blog is a meditation on the “Buchanan’s Double Dementia” entry, and a cri de coeur against paleocon nihilism. Well worth reading.

“… how important it is not to speak of Hitler as some sort of rational agent with whom we could have and should have negotiated.”

It’s supposed to be liberals, not conservatives, who deny the existence of evil and enemies and imagine that all men are rational. But suddenly, when it comes to Muslim jihadists, paleocons imagine that jihadists are rational men with whom we can deal.

And Buchanan, who has never been in favor of left-wing third-world liberationist movements, makes an exception for Muslim terrorists who seek to “liberate” Israel.

Why do Buchananites and paleoconservative act like naive, pie-in-the-sky liberals when it comes to dealing with the mortal enemies of Israel?

The obvious explanation is animus against Jews. Let’s call it a rebuttable presumption. If Buchanan and others want to rebut it, let them do so.

As long as this animus against Jews is harbored and protected by the paleoconservative and Buchananite movement, leading its members to side with our Islamic enemies and say that it would have been better for Hitler to have survived and controlled all of Europe, the good causes that paleocons are associated with, such as immigration restriction, will be discredited and hobbled, and there will be no hope to save America and the West. What is the solution? Conservatives need to say to Buchanan that they condemn his Hitler apologetics, they condemn his apologetics for Islamic jihadists, they condemn his Chamberlainesque position that we must “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims. Only a conservatism that has clearly separated itself from these positions will be able to advance effectively the good conservative causes.

Buchanan’s supporters will undoubtedly say that I am “dividing” the conservative movement by attacking Buchanan. But paleocons typically see things through the lens of relationships and personal loyalites, not through the lens of principle. I’m not saying that conservatives should attack Buchanan personally. I’m saying that they need to separate themselves, clearly and definitively, from his bad positions.

- end of initial entry -

Paul Gottfried writes:

Your dismissal of pro-Palestinian members of the Old Right as Jew-haters is much too simplistic. This group for the most part, including Buchanan, are decent men of the Right, who would agree with you on all important social issues. But they are striking out against something that their enemies on the left, who are disproportionately Jewish, love or pretend to love more than anything else on earth, namely the Jewish state. By beating up on Israel as insufficiently “democratic” and egalitarian, the Old Right is trying to pay back their (and our) enemies by belittling what they presumably adore, for failing to meet the political standards that liberal and neocon Jews set for gentile societies. It’s all a game, like destroying a tree that one’s hostile neighbor happens to like in order to get back at that neighbor for poisoning one’s life. And though I can understand why frustrated and powerless people behave that way, it’s not likely to lead anywhere. Certainly the anti-Israeli Left would have nothing to do with paleo critics of the Zionists, whom they hate as the reincarnations of everything they and the rest of the political establishment have managed to change in American society. And so you may be wasting your anger by venting it on those who’ve already been marginalized—and who have suffered the fate of being isolated for their virtues rather than idiosyncrasies.

LA replies:

So Mr. Gottfried (who is of course Jewish) acknowledges exactly what I’ve been saying for many years: that the paleocons who attack Israel are doing so to get back at the hated neocons, even though Israel herself has done nothing to offend the paleocons and is fighting for her existence against an entire world that is seeking to destroy her.

Paleocons who do this, including Buchanan, are morally despicable; and they are Jew-haters, as they are attacking Israel solely because of its Jewishness.

It is astonishing that in the act of defending the paleocons as “decent men,” Mr. Gottfried admits that these “decent men” are for the lowest of reasons indulging in the demonization of, and giving moral support to the monstrous enemies of, a beseiged country fighting for its life.

Second, this is not about my unleashing my “anger” against paleocons; Mr. Gottfried, in the manner typical not only of paleocons but of most people today, reduces an issue of principle to personal emotion. No. This is about saying to traditionalist conservatives that we must condemn and separate ourselves from this despicable immoral Jew hatred of the paleocons, both because it is right, and because the paleocon sickness discredits the good causes of the right, particulalry immigration restrictionism.

Mencius Moldbug writes:

The irony of the Israeli situation is that anyone who thinks the U.S. is pro-Israel is on crack.

What would happen if the U.S. adopted a Buchananite isolationist position relative to the Arab-Israeli conflict? If it told both the Israelis and the Arabs that it was done with the Middle East, that whatever happens, that it has no dog in the fight? Um, who has the strongest military in the region? Forget the West Bank and Gaza—the IDF would be occupying the Islamic world from Tehran to Timbuktu. And if Nigeria and Indonesia wanted some of that, they could probably get it, too. Their kids would grow up speaking Hebrew. It’d be Alexander the Great, 2.0.

The reason that a few fools with homemade rocket launchers can fight the IDF is that they have the State Department on their side. Remove U.S. diplomacy, and Israel turns the Palestinians into a big grease spot. If Israel’s position with the U.S. in the game is weaker than Israel’s position with the U.S. outside the game, the net effect of U.S. policy is anti-Israel. Case closed.

I really can’t understand why this isn’t obvious. I would not be so hasty as to accuse Buchanan of anti-Semitism. My guess is that the problem is some kind of liberalism, probably akin to what Arthur Pendleton diagnoses in the paleolibertarians. But whatever it is, it reeks.

LA replies:

I agree, and have said many times, that the U.S. embrace of Israel, correction, the U.S. involvement in the peace process, has been terribly harmful. It was only with the peace process that the U.S. began micro-managing Israel’s affairs, which made the U.S. seem much more involved with Isreal than ever before, and made people resent Israel for that relationship, even though that relationship was now actively harming Israel, not helping it. And then, because the peace process so weakened Israel, Israel became ever more dependent on the U.S., and so didn’t dare say no to what the U.S. was telling her to do, even though those were the very things that were weakening her.

I’ve also said many times that it’s ironic in the extreme that the world, including the paleocons and Buchananites, began ganging up on Israel much more AFTER the peace process got started. AFTER Israel spent years accommodating the Palestinians and seeking a deal on a Palestinian state, Buchanan and his allies attacked Israel as though she were a Nazi like oppressor. All this shows how liberal-inspired efforts to “raise up the oppressed victim,” in this case the Palestinians, only increase the liberal guilt of the party doing the raising up. The more you try to help the oppressed, the more oppressive you seem. And the hideous irony is that the anti-Israel paleocons were simply signing onto the liberal thought process of demonizing the supposed oppressor who is not an oppressor at all.

Finally, I would not call the truly neutral stand that Mencius advocates “Buchananite.” Buchanan is NOT neutral and hands-off. He is actively anti-Israel, he invokes hatred of her, he pushes proposals for her destruction.

Paul Gottfried replies:

You wrote:

It is astonishing that in the act of defending the paleocons as “decent men,” Mr. Gottfried admits that these “decent men” are for the lowest of reasons indulging in the demonization of, and giving moral support to the monstrous enemies of, a beseiged country fighting for its life.

I am saying nothing of the kind. Paleos sound like generic non-Jewish liberals on the subject of Israel. They also have no effect on the debate in this country or anywhere else.

Also, paleos do nothing to discredit any discussion about immigration, since predominantly Jewish liberals and neocons have removed them and us from any discussion that is likely to be noticed.

Carol Iannone writes:

You write:

It is astonishing that in the act of defending the paleocons as “decent men,” Mr. Gottfried admits that these “decent men” are for the lowest of reasons indulging in the demonization of, and giving moral support to the monstrous enemies of, a beseiged country fighting for its life.

I agree, and I’m a little astonished that Paul rather ingenuously reveals this, thinking that it somehow exonerates them or lessens their guilt!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 15, 2008 10:50 PM | Send