The Paleostinian Conservative calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel

Marc B. writes:

I know you don’t need me to tell you how crazed The American Conservative can be when they address the issue of Israel [LA replies: I would change “can be” to “is”], but an article in the current number that I happened to take a look at while browsing in Borders was a fine example. It makes the usual comparison of Israel to South Africa—usual in the sense that we have come to expect that from leftist writers—and supports a boycott of Israel just as South Africa was boycotted and notes hopefully that the day will surely not be long off before everyone will see a boycott of Israel as being as necessary and just as the boycott of South Africa. I’m not sure what the writer is picturing—younger versions of Richard Spencer building whatever the equivalent of shanty towns in the middle of university plazas, like we were all treated to in the 1980s?

Now, forgot about whether the comparison is reasonable on the facts, and I am of the opinion that it doesn’t even come close. But since when does a supposedly traditional or paleo or at least non-neo conservative magazine come down in favor of the boycott of South Africa because of how it treated its blacks? I understand that Taki is no longer associated with TAC, but I don’t recall him every shedding a tear about South African blacks; in fact, one of the reasons I used to read him in The Spectator in the 1980s and 1990s was to see if Paul Johnson was ever going to let him use the word “nigger” while discussing crime in London or New York. But for some folks any stick will do to beat Israel.

Even worse, with all that has happened in South Africa in the years since apartheid ended, it is amazing that a conservative magazine would simply assume that apartheid was wholly bad, it was a great thing that it ended, there were no downsides to it, and now we can all just apply the same great strategy that led to such wonderful results in the old South Africa to the new South Africa, Israel, so the Jews and Arabs can all live together in racial harmony. In fact, to my mind, one of the reasons that justifies Israel in doing some of the things that shock those devoted to egalitarianism is so that the Jews won’t end up like the whites in SA.

LA replies:

Thanks for telling me about this. I just found the article at the TAC site. It is “Divestment Diversion,” by Michael C. Desch. He is identified as “a fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.” So he’s a peace leftist. He’s not a conservative. From its beginnings, TAC has published any leftist, no matter how vile, no matter how anti-American, so long as he was an enemy of Israel.

The article is as egregious as you indicate. No, worse. It simply regards Israel as a criminal country that must be brought to heel by the unified force of world pressure.

Of course, as you indicate, it wasn’t just paleos, but mainstream conservatives, who opposed the divestment strategy against South Africa, and I don’t think neocons favored it either. My memory is that President Reagan did not support the divestment strategy, and that conservatives of all stripes, including, of course, paleocons, agreed with him. In the years since the onset of black rule paleocons (though not neocons that I recall) have written about the steady descent of South Africa into a post-civilization condition including rampant anti-white violence. But such is the paleocons’ hatred of the Jewish state that they now adopt as a weapon against Israel that same left-wing policy of divestment which they themselves opposed when it was used against South Africa and which by their own estimation led to the ruin of that country. There are no words to describe adequately the sickness and evil of the anti-Israel paleocons.

—end of initial entry—

Kilroy M. writes:

Hang on just a minute. The boycott of RSA was part of the suicide of the West in the days of the Cold War, just as the betrayal of Rhodesia was too. The political trends in those two states were fundamentally anti-communist. They were natural allies and front line states in the Afro-Marxist struggle, which we subsequently lost and imported to the streets of our capitals in the West (oh yes, and the Oval Office too). The sanctions and boycotts of those two states was wrong, appallingly wrong!

If we are to use the comparison of RSA to Israel, the Jewish State is a front line power against organised Islamic radicalism in the Mid-East. What universe are these paleoconservatives living in? Do they seriously think that if we take a genuinely impartial and neutral attitude to Israel, that it will survive? And when it falls, do they seriously believe that the Mohammedans will stop at the sea, and not go for Rome and the rest of Europe? I mean really, how can anybody treat these idiots seriously. What a bunch of complete morons.

May 17, 1:30 p.m.

James N. writes:

Kilroy M. is entirely right. I’ve traveled extensively in the New South Africa. If apartheid was NOT the right policy for a white nation of five million living among tens of millions of blacks, just what WAS the right policy? OF COURSE apartheid was moral, correct, and necessary for the survival of those whites.

Here’s the point. Leftists who opposed apartheid in South Africa and who opposed the white government in Rhodesia did so because (on their terms) Africa is for the blacks. Just as Asia is for the Asians, and India is for the Indians, just as Pakistan is for the Muslims and Palestine is for the Arabs. These Leftists would oppose, with the last lie out of their mouths, a Western or white influx into, say, Nigeria which displaced the native population and created an ethnostate.

So, OK, we get it that nature put various dark-skinned races in various places, and that it is an abomination and a crime against nature for whites to settle there and to rule. That’s what they are saying.

So, that being the new rule of human association, WHERE ARE THE WHITE LANDS, where blacks, Muslims, and Asians may only go (at best) on sufferance and never rule?

LA replies:

But it is not the new rule of human association that the historically and culturally dominant population of a country has the natural right to remain as such. The new rule of human association is (1) that the historically and culturally dominant population of a country has the natural right to remain as such, if it is nonwhite; and (2) that whites are illegitimate oppressors who must be displaced everywhere, so that there shall be no majority white polity anywhere in the world.

That is the actual rule of the present world order, regardless of how the rule is formally stated. If we want to change that rule, we must, first, identify it as such, second, expose its injustice and anti-white genocidal character, and, third, declare that as historically white countries we have the right to remain so and intend to remain so.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to see how the anti-Israel paleocons will be able to help in this essential endeavor, given their implicit or explicit support for the leftist-Third World destruction of white South Africa, and thier implicit or explicit support for the leftist-Muslim destruction of Israel. Here is a culminating passage from chapter two of The Path to National Suicide, which I’ve quoted before:

Finally, if we want to consider “cultural equity,” there seems to be an extraordinary kind of inequity in the proposition that the United States must lose its identity, must become the “speechless, meaningless country” that Allan Bloom has foreseen, while the countries that the new immigrants are coming from are free to preserve their identities. In a hundred years, the United States will have become in large part an Hispanic nation, while Latin America will still be what it has always been; Mexico has strict immigration laws even against other Latin Americans. China, Korea, the Philippines and India will still have their historic cultures intact after having exported millions of their people to America, while America’s historic culture will have vanished. If the situation were reversed and North Americans were colonizing Latin America and Asia, it would be denounced as racist imperialism. Why, then, does every other country in the world have the right to preserve its identity but the United States has not? The answer, as I’ve tried to show, is that the end of multiculturalism is not some utopian, “equal” society, but simply the end of American civilization.

May 18

James K. writes:

Marc B. is wrong; the article opposes an anti-Israel boycott. (For that matter, the comparison to South Africa seems to be as an example of a boycott widely regarded as having been successful, without much comment on the moral dimension one way or the other.) The article is, to be sure, not pro-Israel, and one could certainly take the position that even considering and debating a boycott is absurd and reprehensible, but the article does not conclude what Marc B. claims.

LA replies:

I skimmed/read the article, and my clear impression was that it did favor a boycott. I’ll have to read it again to double check my initial impression and provide quotes to back it up.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 17, 2010 12:32 AM | Send