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Old September 2nd, 2012 #21
Alex Linder
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So, to recap, as Buckley enters the scene in the 1950-55 period, with his God and Man at Yale, followed by his founding of National Review, we have conservatism almost dead. Everyody is a liberal, as jew Lionel Trilling famously complained around this time. Such conservatism as their was was championed politically by Robert Taft, who was famous as what the jews smear as 'isolationst' when it came to foreign policy. But on the domestic front, he was quirky, and supported various forms of socialism, and he was also very much not a racialist. So the biggest conservative name of the middle decades of the 20th century, their main Congressional leader, was not a racialist - before the jew-led 'civil rights' revolution. Ponder on that. The problems go back farther than we tend to think, and that is a rule you can count on for almost any phenomenon you care to consider.

So, Taft is the big guy politically. And then pre-Buckley, on the intellectual side, we have the above-described Peter Viereck, and then also a man named Clinton Rossiter, a professor at Cornell. Rossiter, who offed himself before 1970, is described by Bogus as "handsome, urbane and brilliant." One of the nation's top political scientists. Author of the much-translated "The American Presidency." Well, he wrote a book on conservatism too, an influential one: Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (1955).


"Paradoxically, considering it was written by a professional academic, Conservatism in America is brisker and even more evocative than Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Kirk's book was his doctoral thesis. He had to write it with an eye toward satisfying his dissertation committee that it was a work of high scholarship. As a result, as well written as it is, The Conservative Mind is quite dense. It covers dozens of conservative thinkers and writers -- arguably too many. ... Rossiter, by contrast...could afford to write a popular book, and that was clearly his intent. Conservatism in America was published by Random House and found a sizable audience.

"Although he did not use the term 'new conservative,' Rossiter described a philosophy, grounded in Edmund Burke, similar to that described by both Peter Viereck and Russell Kirk. 'The Conservative, contrary to popular belief, is not an extreme individualist,' he wrote. 'His distrust of unfettered man, his devotion to groups, his sense of all the complexity of the social process, his recognition of the real services that government can perform -- all of these sentiments make it impossible for him to subscribe whole-heartedly to the dogmas and shibboleths of economic individualism: laissez-faire, the negative state, enlightened self-interest, the law of supply and demand, the profit motive.'

"Rossiter agreed with Kirk that conservatives place a special importance on institutions -- family, church, neighborhoods, occupational or professional groups -- and put the interests of the community before those of the individual. Not when it comes to race, though! At least in his own case. He agreed with Kirk as well that conservatives have a special reversence for history, in whcih they see the hand of God at work, and that religion -- and more specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition (sic - there is no such thing, it is a political invention to fool fools) -- lies at the core not only of conservative thought but also of American democracy. As Rossiter put it, the 'mortar that holds together the mosaic of conservatism is religious feeling.' Rossiter's tone about religion was similar to Kirk's; that is, he suggested that religion fills conservatives with a sense of the grandeur of life, not that it provides answers to political questions. ...

"Rossiter exhorted conservatives to follow their better instincts. 'Principle -- the conscience-stricken recognition that the Negro should not have to beg and fight for the ordinary rights of an American -- will surely make its claims upon the minds of many conservatives,' he wrote. (pp. 126-7)

Just more weakness. How about the principle of considering carefully what tens of millions of liberated niggers are likely to do with their new freedom? That's the question that matters. Yet again, an example of religious morality being not the source of stabilty God perverts customarily praise it for but a source of national destruction. The difference between religion and hallucination has never been established. Religion is a socially acceptable form of delusion, and it opens up society to destruction in the very large sphere in which it trades useful reality for wouldn't-it-be-nice? fantasy. But again, the main point to underline: this is a top-level conservative, before 'civil rights' claiming nigger empowerment as a conservative philosophy and moral duty. Think about it.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 2nd, 2012 at 10:28 AM.
 
Old September 2nd, 2012 #22
Alex Linder
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"[A] belief that the nation needed an aristocracy -- an elite filled with a sense of noblesse oblige that would serve as the nation's ballast -- may be a fundamental tenet of conservatism. But while Rossiter leaned toward a meritocratic aristocracy, Kirk placed faith in family lineages. He believed that people had to be born and bred to the sense of duty, and that it took generations to fashion worthy aristocrats. Moreover, he believed families should be connected to the land. He criticized Rossiter for rejecting what Rossiter called 'country-house Conservatism.' ...

Among those attacking Rossiter was James Burnham, who would become Buckley's second in command at National Review. In a scathing review of Rossiter's book, Burnham attacked not only Rossiter but Burkeanism -- and, by extension, Kirk too. 'Feudalism never existed in America,' Burnham wrote. 'Therefore there is no historical basis for a true Burkean conservatism, which rests on traditional aristocracy.' Burnham was also clearly upset that Rossiter suggested that liberals and conservatives should not be enemies. ... Burnham was not willing to concede that liberalism was a genuine or valuable part of the American tradition. ...

Rossiter's belief in tradition, community, the social fabric, and institutions, as well as the importance of understanding history, made Rossiter a Burkean through and through. But although he saw conservatism and liberalism as a partnership, he viewed conservatism as the junion partner. 'Our commmitment to progress means that liberalism will keep its role as pace-setter in the arena of politics, and that conservative doers will constinue to spend far too much time fighting the reformers and then adjusting to their reforms,' he wrote. Thus, he believed that liberalism provided society with its momentum, and the conservative mission was to moderate and consolidate the progress. (pp. 129-130)

In other words, conservatives aren't just cowards, afraid of all uncontrolled or spontaneous human activity, they are effeminates. Reduced to tugging on their man's sleeve in the vain hope of getting him to slow down a bit. Can it truly be a surprise that so many conservative politicians are closet homosexuals, given that the entire mentality of the breed is is passive-unaggressive? Spirit-queers, they tend to be, and all too many turn that into flesh-queerdom as well.

"Frank Chodorov was also blasting Conservatism in America. In a private letter, Chhodorov sought to persuade a prominent conservative that the new conservatives, including both Russell Kirk and Clinton Rossiter, were in fact liberals. Kirk rejected the key principles of libertarianism or individualism, which he said were limited government and the free economy, Chodorov declared. ... [I]t was not Kirk alone who bothered him; it was the combination of Kirk and Rossiter that upset him. "I would never have become exercised over this matter,' he wrote, 'if it were not for a book called 'Conservatis in America' by Clinton Rossiter. Mr. Rossiter welcomes Kirks brand of conservatism because it fits in very nicely with Mr. Rossiter's 'liberalism.'' (p. 130)

Conservatism is liberalism, then. Just a slower, more dubious kind, but trailing in the same path.

Anyway, this was the environment the 'libertarian' conservative Buckley emerged into or competed with, but in any case soon came to render marginal.


Taft was anti-racialist. Rossiter in a 1962 editorion of his book denied he was or had ever been conservative! 'New conservative' Viereck also added a few dozen pages to his Conservatism Revisited for a new edition in 1962. He attacked Russell Kirk for talking the talk but not walking the walk:

"Kirk evoked the 'true humanistic conservatism' of conservative figures of the past u failed to follow their examples. Where, for example, were Kirk and other conservatives on such worthy humanistic causes such as desegregation? Viereck urged conservatives to reread Burke's speeches against the slave trade and reminded them that John Adams was one of America's first champions for Negro rights. (p. 132)

Conservatives place the community ahead of the individual only where they feel like it. Not where it's objectively necessary. The loosed negro is the surest guarantee of the destruction of the social order, so how can a true conservative support it? Only because he allows his ideology and his religiously-produced morality disorder his mind and disable his senses.

"In a similar vein, Viereck accused Kirk of arguing for the preservation of pseudotraditions that appealed to him and rejecting genuine traditions that didn't -- as he did by romanticizing utopian dreams of an aristocratic society while rejecting New Deal liberalism. Kirk, Viereck said, was guilty of an 'unhistorical appeal to history' and a 'traditionless worship of tradition.' 'In contrast,' he continued, 'a genuinely rooted, historically-minded conservative conserves roots that are really there.'

Excellent points. Conservatives pick and choose. Because they are naturally timid and stupid, they follow authority. Conservatism becomes whatever the athority they're listening to tells them it is. Thus they go from 'isolationists' to warmongers because there's no independent thinking at work to puzzle out the inconsistency.

After their early-sixties revisions, "both Clinton and Rossiter left the battlefield," says Bogus. And so William F. Buckley Jr's definition of conservatism -- economic libertarianism + aggressive foreign policy -- won the day over the Burkeans.

"Why did Buckleyism prevail? ... The answer has little to do with the ideas themselves. The answer has to do with leadership," says Bogus.

"It is ironic that the new conservatives -- notwithstanding their philosophical emphasis on community over individualism -- were loners. Despite the commonalities of their views, Kirk, Viereck, Rossiter and [jewish sociologist Robert] Nisbet never untied to collectively promote the Burkean vision. It is doubly ironic that William F. Buckley Jr. was exactly the opposite; he was philosophically an individualist but built a community at and through National Review. (p. 138)

We see the same thing today. Libertarians, supposedly the ultimate individualists, get along with one another far better than White Nationalists, who are supposedly all about a racial community. Ron Paul has succeeded in building a real community of people who love him and listen to him and work with one another to advance their collective goals, whereas racialists mostly hate one another and try to undermine each other. Explain that if you can. The world, as always, is ironic in construction.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 2nd, 2012 at 11:17 AM.
 
Old September 2nd, 2012 #23
Alex Linder
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Ideas need carriers, they don't enact themselves. Their carriers are individuals with personalities. Personalities attract or repel others. Someone of great skill or personal attractiveness may be able to bring people to ideas they otherwise might reject.

People on the white right with good personalities are few and far between - most are prickly independent types. Many are depressives. Many are paranoid. The late Byron Jost was an example of the type uncommon to WN: a connective type. A type who talked to lots of people and seemed to enjoy human contact. His loss is great. Rare is the man who, like Hitler, can bind and inspire. Ideas alone are usually not enough, they require wrapping and selling.


"Had Buckley not worked hard to acquire interpersonal skills in the army, Kirk might have found him overwhelming and threatening. but Buckley had learned how to take stock of other people, sense what they needed, and provide it. ... None of the new conservatives had anything like the organizational and political skills -- or the single-minded dedication to a cause -- that Buckley possessed. Rossiter, Viereck, and Nisbet were all academics, with all that implies. They were interested in ideas and animated by the classroom. Kirk also was foremost a scholar. ... Viereck and Rossiter wanted the new conservatism to prevail, but neither considered that cause to be his principal ambition. Whent eh going got tough, Viereck retreated into poetry and Rossiter retreated into denial. Buckely, however, considerd the conservative cause to be his life's mission, and he believed that the fate of the nation might depend on his success. The new conservatives were all talented and formidable individuals -- bu they were individuals. They never cohered as a group, and there is no evidence that they ever considered doing so. None saw himself as a general leading an army to war. Buckley saw himself in just that wy. He knew that he was not going to prevail over the new conservatism -- or more importantly liberalism -- alone. He was, moreover, not merely a leader, but an extraordinary leader. (pp. 138-9)

100% commitment is what it takes. Only Buckley had it. Great personality, talent and drive is what it takes. Only Buckley had it. He cherry-picked the Burkeans of their top talent, and had it pissing out of his tent rather than pissing in. There was huge synergy for both him and Kirk. Kirk made money from his association with Buckley's mag; Buckley got perhaps his most popular writer, and someone coming at the same thing from a different direction.

Who can unite white racialists? Who has the personality? Who has the technical ability? Who has the money? Who has the desire? Who has the drive? Who can be the general leading the army?

Enough for today, plenty more for tomorrow...

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 6th, 2012 at 09:25 PM.
 
Old September 2nd, 2012 #24
Rick Ronsavelle
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What we see in this attitude is the very common, and surely genetically based view, that fears uncontrolled, spontaneous individual movement. Lots of bilge about the value of the individual soul, but great distrust of an individual basically doing any kind of business with the world, or, really, moving at all in a way that isn't prescribed for him by the priest or some other authority. Alex Linder

Years ago I read a classic (in the field) book entitle Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (by jew Otto Kernberg). I recall only one idea:

Narcissists cannot stand the autonomy of others

Conservatives seem to be afraid that society is always at the abyss, ready for complete immersion into All Things Bad. A pro-liberty view would mean catering to the devil.

In truth, it is the pro-State view that delights the fancy of Beelzebub. Witness the last delightful century. Old Scratch just loves to play with monopolies. . .

Now- let us continue and define "borderline condition":

"The nosological concept of borderline conditions (or states) arose from what was defined in the English-language literature as "borderline personality organization," a term used to refer to a wide range of patients whose symptoms could not be explained in terms of either neurosis or psychosis.

There are three common misconceptions concerning borderline conditions to be avoided if their dynamics are to be understood, the first two of which arise from the term itself: that they exist at the "borderline" of neurosis or psychosis or constitute a transition between the two, when in fact they are neither pre-psychoses nor severe neuroses; that they are transitory "states" because of the various forms in which they can manifest within one individual. Otto Kernberg (1975) prefers to use the term "borderline organization" because, as Daniel Widlöcher (1979) emphasizes, this is an unstable condition existing within a stable structure; finally, that the wide variety of clinical manifestations eliminates any need to define the fundamental psychodynamics that these conditions have in common.

The borderline condition is more than a pathology that consists more often in manifest behavior than internal suffering and in an attitude of object-dependency that, depending on the level of mentalization, can range from drug addiction to violent passages to the act in the "psychopathic" subject. This disorder can produce a wide range of visible manifestations, including extraordinary lapses of consciousness, an "as-if" mode of existence with loss of feeling, and an indefinable state of inefficacy. This range nevertheless stems from the same narcissistic rationale, the same archaic reaction, and a similar way of establishing the required defenses in the outside world.

The narcissistic component of the borderline condition restricts the experience of conflict to its traumatic impact. The Oedipus complex is overcome without having been resolved (Bergeret); however, the narcissistic disorder is neither a depression nor a form of neurotic or psychotic decompensation experienced as an object loss. This in no way detracts from the archaic nature of the need, the intolerance of frustration, the intensity of the rage, or the violence of the reaction. Accordingly, the pregenital quality of the need becomes a threat to an object that is absolutely necessary but has become frightening through projection—an object both that needs protection and from which protection has to be sought.

In the context of such a risk and this overwhelming atmosphere, the borderline patient actively strives to deal with reality rather than to negotiate the drive. Given the impossibility of dissociating the affect from the representation in a way that would enable repression and displacement to occur, and in the absence of an internal object that would be the guarantor of subtle difference, everything is organized in the external world so as to secure the object. Accordingly, this demonstrates the radical choice that the subject has to make in using the denial of the reality that he is able to perceive but not cathect to avoid any conflict. This subject also deploys splitting and—to avoid any internal conflict between love and aggression—completely separates good from bad in the external world or intensely idealizes the object on which he cannot rely.

The concept of omnipotence provides the key to a better understanding of a wider range of manifestations in borderline conditions, including that which characterizes the deeper disorder beneath the neurotic exterior, which ranges from unstable behavior to antisocial reactions and also extends from childish personalities and depressive tendencies to what is described as narcissistic perversion. Heinz Kohut (1971) classified the megalomania in borderline conditions as one of the "archaic narcissistic configurations" that exist in the Self, which is considered not as an agency of the psychic apparatus but at the very least as a structure in which the representations retain a degree of autonomy in relation to the rest of the life of the drives.

In sum, the borderline condition remains an entirely external striving that results from an incapacity to tolerate internal ambivalence, which produces both the economy of depression at the internal level and the economy of delusion at the external level."


Comment- The autonomy of others means they lose control. Controlling others mean gaining control and losing anxiety.



Last edited by Rick Ronsavelle; September 2nd, 2012 at 04:42 PM.
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #25
Alex Linder
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Rick: that's interesting. I think that would apply to truly unusual types, like Bill White - a narcissism so strong as to amount to solipsism; the very idea of others even existing, let alone imposing their will, can hardly be dealt with by the subject. The type I'm talking about is far more common, and as far as I can tell, it's attitude is based in fear. It does not understand money, so any interest on a loan becomes 'usury' and must be forbidden. This attitudes carries generally, so that anything the person doesn't understand, which is most high-level activity, is dangerous and should be stopped by a dictatorial authority. This is the source of ilttle-man support for nazism. To an extent it's based in reality - that the little guy is getting screwed economically. But he can't make out the specific source of the problem - the people and the specific practices - so he would do away with a whole level of his betters to in his mind solve the problem. This type can be identified by its preference for bleating over arguing. It can't handle debate at the level of actual ideas, it just slaps a label on what it doesn't like and has done with it.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 3rd, 2012 at 09:48 AM.
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #26
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Postscript on Kirk. He bit his tongue about libertarianism through his long employ at NR as an out-of-house regular columnist. The minute he left, in 1981, why, he opened up again.

"Kirk maintained that while the 'libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor,' the conservative believes, in Burke's words, that government is a contrivane of human wisdom to provide for human wants.' The libertarian, said Kirk, believes the 'world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego,' while 'the conservative finds himself a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required.' In the eyes of the conservative, the libertarian is impious. (p. 140)

That's what makes conservatives so easily cowed and buffaloed. Big-eyed appeals to authority, whether God or DoD or 'our troop,' and he instantly rolls over. Conservatism truly is simple animal fear, base cowardice. Measure any state you like by how well it contrives to serve human wants, and surely the only conclusion will be that the state exacerbates human problems while serving itself.
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #27
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Now we get to the racial suff - 'civil rights,' to use the jewish term.

But first:

"The conservative movement was born on November 19, 1955, the publication date of the first issue of National Review. The publisher's statement, signed by William F. Buckley Jr., then still just shy of his thirtieth birthday, set forth what have become the most famous words in the history of modern conservatism. National Review, he declared, 'stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so.'

Notice the shticky similarity to 'alt-Right' today:

"Readers quickly grasped that this was not merely a magazine. What they held in their hands was a cry for a crusade -- a battle for the future. The crusaders were to be iconoclasts, people who found themselves out of place in America. It was, moreover, not to be a crusade by everyone who called himself a 'conservative.' Buckley sought to appropriate that term for a narrowly defined group. Conservatives would no longer include people who sought to conserve and improve upon the then-existing American model -- people, we might imagine, such as the late Robert Taft. ... [Buckley] wrote, 'Conservatives in this country -- at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others -- are non-licensed nonconformists.' ... The crusaders would be attacked -- 'suppressed,' 'mutilated,' 'ignored,' and 'humiliated' were the words Buckley used -- not only by liberals, but also by 'the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.' Thus Buckley and his coeditors threw down two gauntlets: one against liberals, who they conceded controlled the government and the press; the other against conseratives cut from a different cloth. 'Radical conservatives' were the true crusaders, and those on the 'well-fed Right' were not allies but adversaries. (p. 141-2)

Gee, now what does that sound like? My very own strategy. But notice that Buckley's forces ended up not triumphing but reversing on race, supporting big government, and supporting endless wars that even "rollback" anti-communist Buckley would have seen as going too far. Buckley became the establishment right, so in that sense he succeeded. But nothing substantial in American politics changed because of his efforts. In that sense he failed. He did not arrest history or liberalism; it is closer to the truth to say he allowed the liberals, i.e. the jews, to coopt him. But there was nothing wrong with his original idea or strategy: destroy all competitors and redefine the right. While simultaneously taking on and destroying the left. That's what the White right must do: attack and destroy the conservatives, all of them, including the alt-right posers, and stand alone as the champions of our race - all while simultaneously taking on and eventually destroying the jews. Take over the right. Polarize the country between White and jewish forces. Defeat the jews and live happily ever after. That is the correct political strategy for WN to follow. Notice it runs direct opposite to the fellate and pander and promicuously mingle (with the conservatives) strategy recommended by...everybody else.
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #28
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National Review's principles:

"The first principle began: 'It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens' lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress.' This is a classic statement of libertarian doctrine, which holds that government should be limited to three functions: protecting citizens against violence and fraud, providing a justice system to resolve disputes, and protecting the nation against foreign invasion." (p.142)

The second principle was dedication to rolling back communism vs. merely containing it - this is proto-neoconservatism. The third principle was to fight the cultural menace coming from the liberals in education and the arts. In these three principles are the concerns of the three strains of Buckley's conservatism: social conservatism + neoconservatism + libertarianism.

Illiberals know that if they can establish a law by hook or by crook, they can count on easily cowed conservatives to throw in the towel and follow it, so strong is their respect-authority tropism. But National Review loudly opposed Brown vs Board.

[National Review] "called Brown 'one ofthe most brazen acts of judicial usurpation in our history, patently counter to the intent of the Constitution, shoddy and illegal in analysis, and invalid in sociology.' (p. 153)

NR favored the 'Gray Plan,' which would give local school boards in cities federal-court-ordered to desegregate the option of closing all public schools and giving the money in the form of tuition grants to students to use in private schools, which obviously could be segregated. NR also ran an article supporting nullification, which is where the state rejects federal law as unconstitutional. Federal courts, big surprise, have rejected attempts at nullification. The feds want all power centralized, but to make the case for this requires misrepresenting history in the same way Lincoln did to justify the Civil War. That is, they must claim the union precedes the states, rather than the actual case: free and independent states coming together to form the union, and ceding only such powers to it as were ennumerated, while reserving the rest to themselves. Nullification was another potential way around ZOG-ordered desegration, or the forced race-mixing within white public schools in the name of equality, no matter that this forced mixing was rejected by the democratic majority.

The key point here is that while the bogus decisions, bus boycotts, and other 'civil rights' garbage was going on, National Review, and WFB personally, were entirely on the side of the White South.

"In February 1956, Sam M. Jones wrote another article about Southern resistance to school desegregation. 'Southerners ill not accept the edict that the races must mix, in schools or elsewhere,' he declared. 'And it won't be shoved down their throats, even with federal bayonets.' (p. 155)

Later in the fifties:

..."National Review continued to lambaste the Supreme Court for its desegregation decisions. Indeed, not only did it reiterate its criticism of sloppy reasoning and judicial activism but it also remarked 'that is not altogether clear whether a moral issue is at stake.' (p. 157)

The problem is that NR was casting about for the solidest or most effective grounds for opposing the federal infliction of race-mixing and mongrelism on the South. Perhaps the best way to do it would have been to focus on race, specifically the damage that would be done to white children if niggers were mixed among them. And direct this anger at the jews behind this foul policy, specifically making an 'issue' of their genocidal racial hostility toward whites. And then worry about the legal arguments, states rights and such.

...[T]he magazine also praised the Senate for filibustering to death legislation that would have imposed on the South 'extreme measures of racial integration.' Just before the 1956 presidential election, Buckley wrote a signed article setting forth his reflections on the choice before the voters. His central theme was that Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were Tweedledee and Tweedledum. If each were made absolute monarch of a small island, Buckley speculated their kingdoms would look very much alike. They would both have golf tournaments, the young publisher quipped. And they would both have racial intermarriage.

"By raising intermarriage, Buckley was employing a strategy favored by segregationists. Although, especially in the North, Americans were increasingly in favor of equal rights for black citizens, intermarriage still made them nervous. As late as 1963, 90 percent of white Americans said they would object if their teenage daughter wanted to date a black person. National Review kept raising he specter of intermarriage -- or miscegenation as segregationists preferred to call it. In a July 1957 interview of Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the magazine's principal voice on race, Sam M. Jones, asked two questions on the topic: 'Do the people of the South fear political domination by the Negro or miscegenation or both?' 'Do you believe that school integration would be a step toward mass miscegenation in the South?' Russell's answers were, respectively, 'both,' and 'yes, a long insidious step toward it.'

"The following month National Review published what was to become its most infamous piece about race, an editorial titled 'Why the South Must Prevail.' Though the piece was not signed, in accordance with the magazine's policy for editorials expressing the corporate position of the magazine, Buckley had written it (as some readers may have guessed from his distinctive style).

The central question...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes -- the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage . . . National Review believes the South's premises are correct . . . it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

This was WFB's and NR's position in 1957.

"The editorial also declared, 'The great majority of the Negroes in the South ho do not vote do not care to vote, and would no know for what to vote if they could.'

"From the vantage point of more than half a century later, what probably shocks most is the rank racism of portraying blacks to be inferior and incapable of responsible citizenship. But jus as significant is the willingness to throw over fundamental precepts of the nation -- demoracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution -- for desired political and social ends." (p. 157-159)

So says illiberal Bogus. But he ignores that the problem began with Lincoln doing just what he laments when he finds NR doing it. There is no moral or legal duty on the part of Whites in the South to allow niggers to destroy their culture, neighborhoods and children. They'd be insane not to resist that to the point of killing the mongrelizers.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 3rd, 2012 at 12:49 PM.
 
Old September 3rd, 2012 #29
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"There was no philosophical reason for conservatives to oppose civil rights," says Bogus. How about Burke's view that you should pay very close attention to actual facts? Blacks have proven they are incapable of civilization. Letting them vote, gain power, control things, can only lead to a terrible end for civilized Whites. All history shows that. What more philosophy do you need than we shouldn't let our beautiful civilized race and its society be destroyed by jungle animals?


"Even if one were to argue that the libertarian position naturally favored allowing the owners of private businesses such as hotels and restaurants to serve only those they chose, one could not have argued that libertarianism -- or conservatism of any stripe -- justified inferior blacks schools and the rest of Jim Crow." (p. 160)

Except that now, sixty years later, we've had forced school race-mixing for decades and we see that niggers still can't learn. The inferiority, as the Southerners knew, was never in the schools. It was in the negroes. There's nothing can be done about it because it's natural. All you do by force-mixing niggers into human schools is destroy white children's education and do damage to their bodies and psyches. But not a single time in the history of recorded argument over 'civil rights' has a White-hating illiberal like Bogus expressed the slightest concern over the interests of white children or their educational needs. The great untold story of 'civil rights' is the psychological, educational and cultural -- racial -- damage done to white children exposed to niggers. The truth is that 'civil rights' was always, always, from day one, a plot by organized jewry to destroy a racial enemy by forcing mongrelization on it in the name of communist equality.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 6th, 2012 at 09:25 PM.
 
Old September 6th, 2012 #30
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Buckley's own relative, Bozell, didn't agree with him Bozell is an even stronger Catholic than Buckley, and would later leave to start a right-wing religious publication. Bozell opposed Buckley on the Southern racial question because he believed Buckley was not showing proper conservative respect for law and the Constitution. We can observe again, the left can make the shadiest moves possible knowing that the second it can force its twisted interpretation through official authority channels, like a judge, most of the right will immediately stop fighting. This is one of the main reasons the right perpetually loses. Leftists dominate the academy, and dominate law schools too. There is never any shortage of judges when the need to thwart the majority will arises, as we have seen all too clearly since WII. Says Bogus of Buckley in response to his relative Bozell:

"Buckley did not back off. He reemphasized, and if anything, intensified -- National Review's position. He repeated that National Review believed that majority rule must give way to "the right of the few to preserve, against the wishes of the many, a social order superior to that which the many, given their way, might promulgate" and that it was "responsible' for Southerns 'to refuse to enfranchise the marginal Negro,' which he defined as the Negro voter who would tip the scales of an election. that was, in fact, what the South was doing; discrimination against blacks at registrars' offices tended to vary in proportion to the size of the black population. He observed that Southerners regarded the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution to be 'inorganic accretions to the original document, grafted upon it by by victors-at-war by force.' His implication was that National Review considered these amendments less than fully legitimate." (p. 161)

So back then Buckley had fizz in his balls. He would fight. He would defend the civilized White South against the massive monkey minority or majority if it came to that.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 6th, 2012 at 10:21 AM.
 
Old September 6th, 2012 #31
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Today, as we know, the conservatives have been gelded. They will not only not defend their own race, or racial sanity, or racial reality, they will try to airbrush their own history, and scream fretfully and point fingers at whichever ancient Dems (Robert E. Byrd, typically) they can find who used to be in the Klan or had some other pass association with racial clarity.

Observes Bogus:


"Even the best conservative histories tend either to deny National Review's early racism or suggest that it was an aberration -- a momentary lapse in an otherwise decent and principled opposition to the civil rights movement. For example, in the book that many conservatives consider the authoritative history of their movement, George H. Nash writes, 'The conservative leadership strenuously adjured any notions of innate black inferiority. No rantign, vulgar racism besmirched National Review.' In his memoir, longtime senior editor Jeffrey Hart concedes that racism stained the pages of the magazine. He quotes at length from a 1960 National Review editorial, which stated in part that 'in the Deep South the Negroes are, by comparison with the Whites, retarded ('unadvanced,' the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People might put it)...Leadership in the South, then, quite properly, rests in White hands.' But although Hart is repelled by the editorial, he suggests it is an anomaly. 'Everyone has a bad day,' he says.

When it came to race and civil rights, however, National Review repeatedly had bad days. One of the journal's favorite authorities on race was sociologist Ernest van den Haag. In 1964, National Review featured on its cover -- with large block letters reading NEGROES, INTELLIGENCE & PREJUDICE -- a rather strange five-page article presented in Q&A format as though Van den Haag were both interviewer and interviewee. ... The piece begins with the question of whether differing results in intelligence tests among ethnic groups are due to heredity or environment. Van den Haag tells the interviewer that 'we do not know whether the differences that tests find occur because of differences in cultural opportunities or because of differences in native intelligence.' The interviewer presses his subject: 'But what about a practical guess?' 'I'm reluctant,' Van den Haag replies. 'I feel uneasy about guessing.' The interviewer persists. Van den Haag says it is 'very possible but not certain' that much of the difference in average results between white and Negro children is due to innate differences, and that he 'should be inclined to believe' that is the case. The interviewer asks again, 'What then is your conclusion?' That question is an artifice to allow Van den Haag to then pretend to decline to answer a question he has, in fact, just answered.

"This game is repeated several times. Van den Haag suggests that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites while disclaiming that is his conclusion. 'What about the lower cultural performance of Negroes in their native habitat?' the fictitious interviewer asks. Van den Haag replies that in terms of cultural achievements 'such as the invention of a written language, or of the wheel, the creation of a literature, of arts and humanities, of mathematics, the rule of law, or medical progress,' Negroes compare unfavorably with other racial groups. 'It does not follow that a bio-genetic explanation is correct,' he cautions. He then adds, 'But I see no reason -- other than fashion -- to discard the possibility of differential genetic distribution of talents among ethnic groups as a possible partial explanation.'

The pseudointerview also deals with whether black students will do better in segregated or integrated schools. In Brown v. Board of Education, of course, the Supreme Court held, based in part on sociological studies by Kenneth Clark, that segregated schools were inherently unequal because they made black students feel inferior. Van den Haag tells his interviewer that this is poppycock. The evidence on which the Supreme Court relied 'has been clearly shown to be wrong' and if the court were to follow valid evidence it would reverse itself. 'The learning ability of Negro children on the average is not as responsive at present as that of white children to the stimulation given by average white schools,' he explains. 'We don't know whether it will ever be...Therefore, Negroes and whites should be educated separately -- unless there is evidence in specific cases that the learning of neither group suffers from congregation and that neither group objects.' ...

"Van den Haag's views were typical for National Review. Both Buckley and the magazine consistently took the position that black people,l whether in America or elsewhere, were inferior, whether genetically or by virtue of deficient culture and education, and that they were not up to the responsibilities of citizenship. In his 1959 book, Up From Liberalism, Buckley repeated at greater length the view that whites in the South were entitled to 'prevail politically' by denying the franchise to the marginal Negro voter because 'the claims of civilization (and of culture, community, regime) supersede those of universal suffrage.' In a 1961 National Review article about Africa by Peter Duignan and Lewis Henry Gann, one learned that wherever in the 'Dark Continent' European settlements occurred, both economic progress and true liberty expanded for blacks. South Africa had the most mature economy, and thus nowhere were conditions less suitable for a black uprising. The authors did not bother mentioning that the relatively tiny white population ruled the nation through a system of apartheid; apparently they thought blacks in South Africa considered that of little consequence. In an article that same year, J.D. Futch referred to Africa and Asia as 'the black and yellow continents' and 'the savage and heathen worlds,' and their inhabitants as 'barbarians.' By turning nations over to 'bushmen with 'no capacity to govern themselves,' the Western powers were opening the door to Soviet subversion and power, he said. [...] And in his 1963 book, Rumbles Left and Right, Buckley gave what he declared to be the conservaive solution to the race problem in the South: 'There is no present solution to it.' There was no solution because the ends did not justify the means. The means -- 'the drastic proposals that are beign put forward with an end to securign the rights of the Negro' -- included depriving states of the right to establish voting qualifications. The ends were coming without governmental action because 'never in the history of nations has a racial minority advanced so fast as the Negroes have done in America.' No one should be taking Martin Luther King's word for the fact that blacks were unhappy. Dr. King was 'more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average Southern Negro.' (pp. 162-5)

All perfectly defensible, but NR would soon back off it, and eventually Buckley would apologize for it and say he was wrong. The key is that not so long ago, in living memory, the #1 conservative publication took a white nationalist position on race.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 6th, 2012 at 11:05 AM.
 
Old September 6th, 2012 #32
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Bogus then discusses another NR heavyweight, a man who died in the last couple years, but was a longtime popular newspaper columnist on the right.

"Another favorite National Review authority on race, civil rights, and state's rights was archsegregationist James J. Kilpatrick. In the 1950s, Kilpatrick was the opinion page editor for the Richmond News Leader an an ardent advocate of massive resistance. Resurrecting John C. Calhoun's pre-Civil War theory of 'interposition,' Kilpatrick argued that in extraordinary cases the sates had the right -- indeed, the duty -- to interpose themselves between their citizens and unconstitutional federal laws, such as those mandating desegregation. Kilpatrick was far more sophisticated than Ernest van den Haag. His tightly reasoned arguments revolved around theories of constitutional law and political science. Kilpatrick would later become one of the most widely syndicated newspaper columnists in the country and regular on the CBS show 60 Minutes, where, as pugilist for the conservative point of view, he sparred with a liberal counterpart at the end of each week's broadcast. He was skilled at live debate -- so skilled, in fact, that when he debated Martin Luther King on television in the fall of 1960, members of the executive committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) believed that Kilpatrick delivered a drubbing to their hero.

"During the Little Rock crisis, Kilpatrick wrote an article for National Review in which he sided with Governor Orval Faubus over President Eisenhower. 'Manifestly, race-mixing of certain schools now leads to knifings, dynamiting, and other forms of violence,' he wrote. As Kilpatrick saw it, the 'question thus raised so formidably in Little Rock is whether the rights of nine pupils override the rights of 1,900 pupils, whether admission to a desegregated school is a right superior to the right of a community to peace and order.' Once again, a National Review author was suggesting that the ultimate threats to law and order were not violent mobs but the integrationists who provoked them.

"Kilpatrick framed the issue as balancing the rights of nine students against those of nineteen hundred students although, of course, the nine black students represented all black pupils in Little Rock's segregated schools -- and indeed across America. It was as if these other black students were somehow invisible to Kilpatrick -- a point he himself surprisingly suggested in a piece he wrote for National Review four years later. The South, he wrote, was changing. Thousands of Southerners were 'beginning to see the Negro in a way they never saw him before.' It was, Kilpatrick said, like getting new glasses and for the first time seeing clearly shapes that had previously been blurred. The civil rights movement was forcing him to confront issues, such as genuinely unequal schools, he never thought about before. 'A sense of the Negro point of view, totally unrecognized before, stirs uneasily in the conscious mind,' he wrote. It was, he admitted, an unsettling experience. (pp. 165-166)

There's your conservative: going weak in the knees. He has a winning position: that mixing blacks with whites destroys schools and neighborhoods, and that we ought to focus on precisely what happens to white bodies and minds when federal outsiders force jungle savages among them. But as the political winds shift, he grows nervous, looking for a way to hedge his bets.

"[...]Kilpatrick fell back to providing arguments and devising strategies for resisting integration. In 1963, Kilpatrick penned a dense and extensive attack on President Kennedy's then-proposed civil rights bill for National Review. He argued that six of the bill's seven major provisions were unconstitutional. The voting rights provision, for example, would have prohibited literacy tests for voters who successfully completed sixth grade and required that literacy tests for other voters be in writing and available to registrants upon request. Kilpatrick argued that the provision infringed on the right of states to establish their own voting requirements. 'I have no patience with conspiracies or chicanery or acts of intimidation to deny genuinely qualified Negroes the right to vote,' he claimed. Yet he argued that all that was necessary to bring fairness to polling places was to enforce existing laws -- a position patently refuted by history and the practical impediments to litigating individual cases. As Kilpatrick surely knew, despite herculean efforts, the Department of Justice was making little headway in efforts to compel registrars to treat voters alike. Existing law was simply not equal to the task. Under the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the department had to provide the court with evidence of individual blacks who had been denied registration, individual whites of equal or lesser competence who had been registered, and enough instances in each category to prove not merely discrepancies but a pattern of discrimination. Even a single case was difficult to bring because blacks were terrified of Ku Klux Klan reprisals if they appeared as witnesses in such lawsuits. Moreover, cases could only be brought on a county-by-county basis, and there were 1,157 counties in the eleven states of the former Confederacy.

"Six months before Kilpatrick's attack on Kennedy's civil rights bill, readers of National Review encountered Brent Bozell's review of Kilpatrick's book, The Southern Case for School Segregation. 'Kilpatrick acknowledges without blinking that the root cause of the war [over civil rights] is the South's belief that the Negro race is innately inferior to the white race,' wrote Bozell. The presumption of black inferiority was, in Kilpatrick's view, supported by the Negro's 'bleak historical record as a civilization-builder' and his 'crime and illegitimacy rates that do not seem to change with improved environment.' Black demands for equal treatment were ungrateful and counterproductive. Somewhat curiously, in light of his other articles, Bozell seemed to endorse Kilpatrick's thinking. 'The Negro can force his way into the white man's house by breaking down its walls,' wrote Bozell in the conclusion of his review, 'but he will have destroyed thereby the white man's capacity for hospitality, and thus his own dream of rue integration.'

In 1965, Kilparick wrote another article attacking he voting rights bill then before Congress. 'For the better part of a century,' he conceded, 'much of the South has engaged in systematic, deliberate, ingenious and effective devices to deny the colored citizen his constitutional right to register and to vote.' But there were extenuating circumstances. Most Southern blacks were 'genuinely unqualified for the franchise.' Kilpatrick acknowledged that blacks would not have been illiterate if they had been provided decent schools, but said that 'rightly or wrongly, some realistic account must be taken of life as it is and not of life as perhaps it ought to be.' Kilpatrick was appalled that the voting rights bill would only affect states that had previously employed literacy tests or qualification devices and in which less than half of eligible adults were registered to vote or voted in the 1964 presidential election, a set of criteria that he believed had been devised to capture most of the South while excluding Lyndon Johnson's Texas. Kilpatrick argued that the bill was overly broad and unnecessarily infringed on the rights of the states to determine voting requirements. Besides, federal interference was entirely unnecessary. Things were taking care of themselves. As 'the Negro's education and his income improve,' Kilpatrick explained, 'new doors open to him, the South's urban places beckon, and here he votes as other men do.'

Kilpatrick's views reflected those of the National Review generally. A series of editorial praised Orval Faubus for his actions during the Little Rock crisis. The editorials also denounced Dwight Eisenhower for being a 'prisoner of the nation's most dangerous and extreme Liberal ideologues' and 'power-hungry enough' to trample upon the division of authority between the federal and state governments, and they implied that the black students who sought to attend Little Rock Central High School were in cahoots with communists. An article by Brent Bozell took a different tack. Bozell thought Faubus's claim that he originally called out the National Guard because he feared violence seemed phony from the start. Why, if that were the case, did Faubus order the National Guard to remove the students from the campus rather than ordering them to escort them into the school and protect them? But Bozell criticized Faubus for collapsing on the central issue -- asserting Calhoun's right of interposition and refusing, come hell or high water, to knuckle under to federal pressure, even if that meant refusing to comply with orders of the federal courts. Bozell argued that the most important principles at stake were preserving 'the states' constitutional powers against federal encroachment' and 'contesting the proposition that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution means.' Because Faubus lacked the stomach for a real fight, he let the South down.

National Review argued that the states' rights were intertwined with freedom. 'We believe that if there is such a thing as a mechanical safeguard to freedom, it is political decentralization,' it explained in an early editorial. But while that may be a fine statement of abstract political philosophy, it sounded less than fine in the context of the civil rights struggle, where the Southern states were denying genuine freedom to their black citizens.

National Review's positions on desegregation and states' rights had long-term ramifications. The magazine -- and with it conservatism as a whole -- drifted to the view that the states were wiser and 'closer to the people' than the federal government, and that state authority was primary while that of the federal government was merely derivative. What were the consequences of Buckley and National Review's positions about race, civil rights, and states' rights? In one respect, National Review's opposition to civil rights was good for National Review. Just as Playboy thrived by packaging photographs of naked women together with serious articles by respected authors, National Review thrived by wrapping racism with ostensibly highbrow arguments about constitutional law and political theory, thereby appealing not only to self-confessed racists but to those who disliked the civil rights movement but believed themselves to be untainted by racist impulses. The latter was a large group in the 1950s and 1960s -- not because those in it were mean-spirited but simply because they had been raised in racist times. This was hardly the only reason for National Review's success, but it was almost certainly a factor. By no means does this mean that Buckley crafted that editorial position for tactical reasons. As we shall soon see, Buckley was willing to take editorial stands that he believed were right on the merits even when that position ran against National Review's financial benefit." (p. 166-169)

"At the twilight of his life, Time magazine would ask Buckley over a career spanning half a century and involving all the great debates in American politics if he had taken any positions he had come to regret. 'Yes,' Buckley answered. 'I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong: federal intervention was necessary.' He also observed elsewhere that 'indifference to the rights of minorities can mutate, and during the century has done so, to genocide.' (p. 173)

The foregoing passages are posted to demonstrate the history of professional, mainstream conservatism. We see that what the communist/jew smears as racism was a natural and normal position, and backed by the #1 man and #1 magazine in the conservative movement well into the mid-sixties at the least. Even the illiberal biographer concedes that the position probably helped the magazine. There was no reason to back off.

Backing off a winning position out of sheer cowardice is the most characteristic conservative behavior, and it is the reason that, no matter how much one loves the fine intelligence founds in their writers' top minds, one can, in the end, neither support nor respect the thing, at least in its party manifestations.

That's enough for today... We have one more series of notes to go. In that we will cover Buckley's history of excommunicating people and positions, in order to define and lead the conservative movement he wanted. We will consider this in relation to WN in 2012, and the way it's wisest to head.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 6th, 2012 at 09:26 PM.
 
Old September 6th, 2012 #33
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Quote:
The foregoing passages are posted to demonstrate the history of professional, mainstream conservatism. We see that what the communist/jew smears as racism was a natural and normal position, and backed by the #1 man and #1 magazine in the conservative movement well into the mid-sixties at the least. Even the illiberal biographer concedes that the position probably helped the magazine. There was no reason to back off.

Backing off a winning position out of sheer cowardice is the most characteristic conservative behavior, and it is the reason that, no matter how much one loves the fine intelligence founds in their writers' top minds, one can, in the end, neither support nor respect the thing, at least in its party manifestations.
B-But - you're not taking into account the constant gefilte farts brrraapp-ing from all the judenpresse assholes, and the tut-tutting of pinko Thurston Howells at Manhattan cocktail parties! My god, it's a wonder the poor man lasted as long as he did!

When the most highly-educated, sophisticated leaders of the White cause surrender like whipped dogs and later pule about regretting taking up the fight for their people in the first place, it can be no great surprise when working & middle class Whites throw up their hands and grumblingly accept having Hymie foist Niggy on them and their children.

"Standing athwart history and yelling STOP!" my nekkid ass.....
 
Old September 7th, 2012 #34
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In the next and final section, we'll see how Buckley guarded his movement by casting out devils. The devils he cast out were the Birchers, the Objectivists (followers of Ayn Rand), and the 'racists' and 'antisemites.'

Fun fact: Robert Welch, the candy guy who founded the John Birch Society, was introduced to WFB by Henry Regnery, who published books by both of them. Welch was actually one of NR's original financial contributors, although not a huge one. Welch started his own magazine, American Opinion, and also his own front group, CASE. There was a considerable degree of overlap in whom both Buckley and Welch were appealing to, so they were to some extent competitive. Welch acted and appeared to be paranoid, in that he famously accused even the president, Eisenhower, of being a communist. Which sparked the famous response: Eisenhower isn't a communist, he's a golfer.

What we know about Welch, which Bogus never mentions, is that Revilo Oliver, who was on the original board of the JBS, eventually came to learn that the JBS was a front for the jews. That is why the society focused, very much like an early-day AmRen, on blaming communists, but never blaming jews for communism. Both George Lincoln Rockwell and William Pierce came up through the JBS, and both were kicked out of it by asking questions about jewish involvement in communism. JBS was a front designed by somebody to divert anti-communist sentiment from focusing on the jewish source. Although JBS is today a joke, and has been for decades, back then it was a large and significant force.

Buckley, who was just getting going in the late fifties, had to play things carefully. JBS was a powerful force; he needed to be sure he was either in its good graces, enjoying some synergy from it, or at least carefully critical. From where I sit, it's easy to see Welch as a paranoid candyman, since he lumps idiots and communist party men into the same pile. It was in about 1963, if I recall, that Revilo Oliver learned the truth about the money men behind JBS and Welch, and resigned from its board of directors. I don't know if the jews found a useful paranoid in Welch once he got going, or if they were funding his lunacy from the start. In any case, what matters to WN, is seeing Welch as an example of the tactic of overaccusing as a way to deflect attention from a real problem, even to render the existence of a problem questionable by means of making it a joke. If Eisenhower is a communist, then is there really anything to worry about?

Overall in the US there was serious underaccusation when it came to communism. McCarthy made his charges, which were basically correct. The controlled media responded with fear and loathing, as their friends were in the dock. The mass media were communist deniers. This was the one serious effort to examine how far the international conspiracy had wormed its way into the American hierarchy. Soon enough it was destroyed. So most of the jewish effort to undermine McCarthy was through their usual personal smearing and siding with the guilty (Alger Hiss) over their innocent accusers (Whittaker Chambers). Along with hiding the problem in the mass media, by pretending that communist subversion was either non-existent or vastly overrated, the jews worked the other angle by funding this wacky group that claimed almost everyone of note was a communist.

There has never been any way to separate jews from communism, although jews like to portray themselves the victims of communism, as they portray themselves as the victims of, well, everything. But the fact that the mass media have always hidden the connection, and still do (see any neocon book touching on the subject, i.e. Ann Coulter's), and the fact that Welch's John Birch Society did to, show that functionally they were on the same side: preventing the solid anti-communists from getting to the truth and doing something about it.

Bogus never uses the term paranoid, but anyone managing a WN forum can immediately see it for what it is. Seeing everything as a ruse, and everything as connected to everything else - these are the usual indicators of this problem. Along with not responding rationally when these things are pointed out. Buckley recognized at some point that Welch was a wacko. Bogus does bring up Oliver, but never mentions that by the early 60s he had concluded JBS was a front. Buckley separated from JBS years before Oliver did. Says Bogus, "Buckley though it wise to inoculate himself against Welch." He first did this by publishing a piece mocking Welch for claiming that Doctor Zhivago was a pro-communist play masquerading as anti-communist.

Welch ran ads in 100 papers for an ad hoc group he called the Committee Against Summit Entanglements (CASE), with the goal of stopping Eisenhower from having a summit meeting with Khrushchev. Welch had a lot of prominent names on his CASE committee, enough to worry Buckley that he'd better be involved himself or miss the boat. Says Bogus: "Buckley was not a member of the CASE board; he had never been invited. But when Buckley read the names of CASE's national board...he was shaken. Its masthead included financial backers of National Review, as well as prominent people within the political right whom Buckley was courting, including economist Ludwig von Mises, Dean Clarence Manion of Notre Dame Law School, and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona." (p. 182) At least five people on Buckley's masthead eventually belonged to JBS, including a couple insiders. A good number of NR's financial backers were supporting JBS too, including her largest backer, textile king Roger Miliken. Even though Buckley already believed Welch was a paranoid nut, he was still concerned that while JBS guys were all over NR, NR guys were being kept off the masthead of CASE - by design. Buckley was worried. He reached out to perhaps the one man who was on both mastheads, and that was the racialist and anti-jew we all know and love, Revilo P. Oliver. Here's how Bogus treats RPO:


"The man to whom Buckley was appealing was, in many ways, unusual. His name, Revilo P. Oliver, was a palindrome. It had been given to him by a father who loved linguistics. Oliver was a professor of classics at the University of Illinois. His home study had twelve typewriters, each with a typeface for a different language, modern or ancient. Perhaps unbeknownst to Buckley, Oliver was one of the dozen men (including Welch) who founded the John Birch Society in Indianapolis, and he was on its council. Buckley did know, however, that Oliver was the vilest sort of bigot. Oliver disparaged a wide assortment of ethnic groups, especially Jews, and did so in Buckley's presence and in correspondence with Buckley. In April 1956, Oliver became an official associate and contributor to National Review. His specialty was book reviews. Four years later, Buckley expelled Oliver -- not for holding racist or anti-Semitic views -- but for revealing them publicly. In a speech, for example, Oliver said that Cuba was 'largely populated by mongrels.' To preserve its own good name, National Review could not publish pieces by such authors, even if their articles for the magazine were carefully scrubbed. Buckley sought to preserve his friendship with Oliver even after excommunicating him. Oliver went on to write regularly for American Opinion. His articles for that magazine, among other things, praised an anti-Semitic book, denied that the Holocaust occurred, and declared that 'there is in the human species some biological strain of either atavism or degeneracy that manifests itself in a hatred of mankind and a lust for evil for its own sake.' Presumably, Jews and communists shared satanic genes. In 1964, the Warren Commission called Oliver to testify about his theory -- set forth in an article in American Opinion -- that President Kennedy's communist handlers assassinated him beacuse he was going to 'turn American.' Eventually, Oliver decided that Welch himself had sold out to the international communist conspiracy, left the John Birch Society, and affiliated with an organization of Holocaust deniers. He remains, posthumously, a hero to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. (p. 183) Bogus has it wrong - Oliver discovered that Welch was being funded by jews, hence was operating a false front. I don't believe Oliver was sure whether this had been the case from the start, or whether it became the case at some point thereafter.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 7th, 2012 at 05:52 AM.
 
Old September 7th, 2012 #35
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At the point Buckley wrote him to find out if JBS had declared war on NR as a result of the Zhivago article and Buckley's disagreement with Birch calling even the president a commie, Oliver was still a committed JBS, and wrote Buckley back with a "frosty" tone, saying he had the highest esteem for Welch, and was proud to be associated with him in any endeavor.

Eventually, though, it came out that, like all paranoids, Welch was pissed about the Lyons article (on Zhivago), which had been a cover story in NR. It led to his not underwriting NR subscriptions. But he did end up putting WFB on his CASE board. So Buckley showed that while he believed in excommunicating others for ideological reasons, if those he would excommunicate were powerful enough, he would suck back up to them and hope to get included in their efforts, so long as being excluded made himself and his magazine look out of the game. Bogus describes this as Welch winning the first skirmish in a losing war.

To seize the momentum from JBS, Buckley held his own press conference denouncing the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit, completely with people wearing armbands in memory of the victims of communims, and himself threatened to die the Hudson red when the Russian entered New York. Bogus describes Buckley's press conference speech as one of his most famous, on the theme that "the nation had profaned itself by inviting a ruthless communist dictator to its shores." Bogus says: "If there was a moment when Buckley became the leading conservative in the nation, it may have been at Carnegie Hall during the evening of September 17, 1959." (p. 186)


"An uneasy truce between Buckley and Welch ensued. They largely ignored one another. Meanwhile, both of their organizations flourished. By 1961, National Review's circulation was fifty-six thousand. The John Birch Society was even more successful. Welch was a skilled salesman and organizer. Observers estimated that by 1961 the John Birch Society had sixty thousand members, a full-time salaried staff of fifty-eight, and -- through membership dues, books sales, magazine subscriptions, and contributions -- annual revenue of about $1.6 million (the equivalent of about $11 million today). The society was predominantly made up of older middle- and upper-class businessmen and professionals, skilled laborers, and housewives." (p. 186)

By 1960, the major media were attacking JBS, notably Time. JBS became a national issue when a Congressman, Kuchel, gave a speech attacking it. The stuff about Welch calling Eisenhower a communist emerge. NR and politicians such as Goldwater began to hedge their bets. They wanted to distance themselves from Welch and the JBS without alienating the large body of supporters all these right wing men/magazines had in common. Says Bogus:

"Buckley and his team were in the dark about just how grave a wound they might inflict upon the magazine by denouncing Welch and his society. Moreover, Buckley was discovering that not everyone was as repulsed by Welch's conspiracy theories as was he. While Bill Rusher [NR's publisher] conceded that Welch was peddling nonsense, he thought that many Birchers accepted Welch's theories as more figurative than literal -- a poetic cry of distress about the grave state of affairs. Rusher also thought that Buckley was jealous that Welch, rather than National Review, was leading a successful conservative membership organization, and that, in fact, this was upsetting Buckley more than was Birch doctrine. ... Buckley told his readers that the John Birch Society was being so widely attacked because certain elements of the media were taking advantage of Welch's views to 'anathematize the entire American right wing.' And although he did not say so, this was the principal reason Buckley had decided to act. To avoid being tarred with the same brush, National Review had to draw a clear distinction between itself and the John Birch Society." (pp. 188-189)

Pretty typical grungy right-wing behavior. Suck up to someone doing well; abandon him in the field when he comes under fire. Unprincipled, self-seeking behavior on Buckley's part. It would have been more impressive had he forthrightly described Welch as a paranoid and made it clear from the outset National Review had nothing to do with the John Birch Society. Buckley, being Buckley, hedged his bets every step of the way.

We usually hear that Buckley manfully bounced the JBS kooks out of the conservative bar, but the history Bogus relates shows otherwise. JBS deserved to be destroyed or at least exposed because of the paranoia of its founder, and because at some point, including possibly the start, it became a false front serving the jews it would not allow its customers to name. The media helped discredit the Society, but of course they did it for their own reasons. To the jews, JBS is like the catholic church writ small: it's a discredited organization, but because it is dogmatically (that is, unchangeably) jew-safe, it can still be allowed to exist. Organization, by contrast, that name the jew and actively fight it must be destroyed, if they ever develop within 1/10th of what Welch and JBS achieved in their heyday.

Meanwhile, in the early sixties, as the national spotlight shone on JBS, Goldwater, who had been on the CAST masthead, remember, was shaping up as a potential presidential candidate. NR's Brent Bozell had ghost-written "his" book, Conscience of a Conservative, which was pubilshed by a group of men who wanted Goldwater to run. Buckley, meanwhile, was helping get Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) a college student group, off the ground. Was conservatism heading the JBS way or some other way? All this got hashed out through a meeting convened by Goldwater in early 1962. Goldwater needed to separate from JBS, and Buckley agreed to be his point man. Again, alienating big-money backers was the thing both men feared. "'Every other person in Phoenix is a member of the John Birch Society,'[Goldwater] told [Russell] Kirk."

"Buckley volunteered to take the lead in holding Welch up to ridicule. He would do so in National Review and in other writings and speeches. Moreover, he would criticize the society as a hole unless and until Welch recanted on his 'operative fallacy,' which to Buckley was that subjective intentions could reasonably be deduced from objective consequences." This is a classic problem with paranoids. As Buckley is saying, they believe they can go from the fact to the motive. What happens is, the paranoid decides that X happening is good for communists. Since Y person supported X, that proves he is a communist or working for them. Paranoids will not be talked out of this way of reasoning. Ultimately anyone who does not act, in every minute, precisely as the paranoid describes, is part of the plot, an enemy. A good example of this type of paranoid fool is J-Richards at Majority Rights. Goldwater liked that approach, and it was agreed that was how the group would proceed.

"The next month National Review ran a six-page editorial entitled 'The Question of Robert Welch.' It began by quoting Russell Kirk to the effect that Welch, although a likeable and honest man, had become 'the kiss of death' for the conservative movement, and Barry Goldwater as saying that Robert Welch should resign as head of the John Birch Society, and that if he refused to do so, the society should reorganize under different leadership. The magazine argued that Welch was damaging the anti-communist cause by 'distorting reality.' It quoted Welch's statement in 'The Politician' [a secret book written by Welch and circulated to WFB and a very select group of other top conservative anti-communists] that he firmly believed Eisenhower to be 'a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,' along with Welch's views that the CIA was procommunist and NATO was a hoax. 'Woe to the man who disagrees with Mr. Welch,' said the editorial. 'He is 1) an idiot, or 2) a Comsymp, or 3 an outright Communist.' John Birch Society chapters could do much to advance conservative aims, the editorial concluded, 'but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch's smoking typewriter.' In its next issue, National Review ran six letters to the editor about the article -- the first by Barry Goldwater, who said that he did not believe that Welch's views 'represent the feelings of most members of the John Birch Society' and reiterated that he thought Welch should resign.

"Goldwater, however, was wrong when he said that Robert Welch did not reflect the views of most members of the John Birch Society. There was never a serious effort wtihin th ranks to replace Welch nor was there any mass exodus of members. Moreover, the society continued to grow. Three years further down the road it would have eighty thousand or more members, a paid staff of 220, and annual revenues of $6 million (the equivalent of $39 million today). It would also have its own publishing company (Western Islands) and operate 350 bookstores selling Birch books and literature across the country. American Opinion magazine would boast a paid circulation of forty thousand. So much for the power of Buckley's excommunication, eh?

"In the end -- and to his undoing -- it was Barry Goldwater who accommodated himself to the John Birch Society. Some of his advisers begged him not to do it. Nevertheless, when he accepted his party's nomination for president in July 1964, Goldwater stood before the Republican National Convention and declared, "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Cheers shook the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Goldwater had to wait more than forty seconds before he could deliver the companion line: "And let me remind you that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue!" The audience leaped to its feet. Everyone understood that Goldwater had just said that the John Birch Society was okay by him. Richard Nixon, who had introduced Goldwater, grabbed his wife Pat's arm to keep her from rising with the crowd. Why Goldwater chose to do this after having tried, albeit halfheartedly, to separate himself from the John Birch Society will forever remain something of a mystery. Perhaps he found it too difficul to turn his back on the likes of Clarence Manion and Frank Cullen Brophy. Perhaps it was orneriness: If Rockefeller and other liberal Republcians were going to insist that he unequivocally repudiate thte John Birch Society, then by golly he was going to do just the opposite. Perhaps it was loyalty to the foot soldiers who helped him win the nomination. Whatever it was, Goldwater surely understood the magnitude of his words. The John Birch Society had been a major issue in the struggle for the Republican presidential nomination, and it remained a source of bitter confrontation throughout the convention. ...

"Goldwater went on to suffer one of the worst electoral defeats in modern history. While the John Birch Society itself was one of many issues, it was part and parcel of a larger theme: Was Goldwater reckless or loony? Was Goldwater outside the mainstream of American politics? Was the Republican Party in the hands of extremists? Because of those two lines in Goldwater's acceptance speech, and the positive reaction of Republican delegates, many voters decided the answers were yes.

"Buckley realized that he had failed: The John Birch Society continued to grow and threaten the image of the conservative movement." (pp. 193-195)

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 7th, 2012 at 07:17 AM.
 
Old September 7th, 2012 #36
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In 1965, Buckley would try again to put an end to JBS influence. In August 1965, NR ran a 12-page feature: The John Birch Society and the Conservative Movement. The main point was the JBS were nuts who believe the commies controlled almost literally everything. Their mag estimated the US was 60 to 80 percent under communist control! This time Buckley actually dared take on the JBS membership rather than attacking the founder and claiming the members were at odds with him. Says Bogus: "He and others had always believed that a great gulf existed between Robert Welch and members of the John Birch Society, wrote Buckley, but the letters he received in reaction to [a column he had written that became part of the feature] were troublign. He quoted passages from fifteen mean-spirited, wacky letters and reported that they were typical of six hundred letters he received. The third of Buckley's columns was devoted to one letter -- from Frank Cullen Brophy [a big-money man, supporter of JBS and Goldwater] of Phoenix, Arizona, who was a member of the national council of the John Birch Society. Brophy's letter, said Buckley, 'is a specimen of the utter hopelessness of communication with anyone suffering from advanced Birchitis.' Brophy, for example, complained that Buckley had criticized an American Opinion article about the Supreme Court. 'The pro-Communist activities of the Court in recent years are so obvious that I find it hard to believe that you would find any comment to offer,' wrote Brophy. Buckley observed (once again) that it was a mistake to infer intention from effect. The court may have interpreted the First Amendment in ways that granted license to the Communist Party, but decisions procommunist in effect were not necessarily procommunist by design. Yet the American Opinion article in question had expressly said that the Warren court was 'working for' a foreign dictatorship, thus suggesting 'pure and simple, that the majority of the Court are pro-Communist traitors.' (pp. 196-197) [...]

Anyone in WN will recognize this sort of foolishness. Half of all people are below average in brainpower, and this type is particularly fond of explanations that are overly simple. It can see things in black and white, and many things are black and white, but many things are not. The simpleton, the paranoid, treat them all the same. There is a conspicuous lack of interest in and ability to sift evidence to draw tentative or probable conclusions. Just leap backward from what X should be doing, or believing, to what he actually does or believes, and you have all the evidence you need.

"Prior National Review attacks on Robert Welch were pulled punches. This was not. It landed with full force, not only on Robert Welch, but also on the society as a whole. No longer was a distinction drawn between Welch and his followers; no longer was it suggested that while Welch was harebrained, members of the society were reasonable people. Membership in the John Birch Society was indefensible. It was an act of lunacy, and it was irresponsible because it harmed the conservative movement." (p. 197)

Barry Goldwater had abandoned and denounced the society too. "The society went into steep decline. Recruiting new members was extremely difficult, and members who had never made their membership public drifted quietly away. Even highly visible members quit. Wichita industrialist Fred Koch -- one of the eleven men Robert Welch invited to Indianapolis, and an original member of the JBS council -- quit in 1967, saying that he considered Robert Welch too extreme. Welch continued to head the John Birch Society until his death in 1985, but it was a depleted group, bereft of allies. William F. Buckley Jr. had successfully excised it from the movement. (pp. 197-8)

It's not clear that claim is justified. More likely is the inherent wrongness and kookiness of the JBS operator's unfounded claims guaranteed it a limited shelf life. And who's to say, if Oliver is correct in his claim that JBS was a front for the jews, that it didn't serve its real purpose - discrediting anti-communism at the very time it was making its greatest inroads. Birchism gives anti-communism a bad name, and that just might have been precisely what it was intended to do. Or perhaps it was begun earnestly, and the jews shrewdly realized that Welch, while honest, was paranoid, and his society worth funding as a way to divert angry white men who hated communism away from the real truth about what Churchill called the "driving power" behind it.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 7th, 2012 at 07:46 AM.
 
Old September 7th, 2012 #37
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The next supposed crank Buckley supposedly kicked out of the conservative movement was the jewess Alisa Rosenbaum (various spellings), or Ayn Rand, the founder of 'Objectivism.' This jew was an escapee from the Soviet Russia her kind had built. She lived in Chicago with relatives, and watched movies continually to learn English. Bored, she moved to Hollywood to get into movies. "[S]he went to DeMille Studios to apply for a job as a screenwriter. She pitched herself to a secretary, who politely showed her the door. Then, as Rand was leaving, she serendipitously bumped into Cecil B. DeMille himself. In a story line fit for a movie, DeMille invited the awestruck young woman to take a ride in his roadster -- and Rand successfully parlayed this chance encounter into a position as a junior screenwriter." Good example of fortune favoring the bold. Also a good example of jews taking the initiative, not waiting passively for things to happen. This is one reason they rule us and we rue them.

Bogus describes her philosophy:

Rand understood that at bottom political philosophy is about values, morality, and human nature. Given human nature, as she saw it, the capitalistic system allowed individuals not only to thrive economically, but also to achieve their highest potential. In short, capitalism encourages people to become the best people they can become while socialism and communism force them into becoming parasites and scoundrels. Rand's main point is that socialism and communism are not merely economically inefficient; they are evil. Rand takes this to the exreme by arguing that selfishness is virtuous and altruism is wicked. Moreover -- and this point becomes important both to Whittaker Chambers's review and to the hisory of the conservative movement -- Rand defends taking things to the extreme. Moderation is evil and extremism is virtuous. 'There are two sides to every issue; one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.' John Galt declares... (p. 208-9)

"Galt's [one of her fictional heroes] followers live by the following oath: 'I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for hte sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.' The oath was a practical application of Rand's three basic premises, which she later set forth in a work of political philosophy. Her first premise is that a person exists, and that the only thing sacrosanct for the individual is his or her own life. Second, individuals should value whatever perpetuates or enhances their existence. Third, individuals must rely exclusively on logic to determine what is in their self-interest.

"Galt preaches the libertarian view that government should be limited to protecting citizens from criminals and foreign invaders and to maintaining a judicial system to protect property, enforce contracts, and settle disputes. Anything else -- public schools or services of any sort -- is a form of theft. 'You regard as 'in the public interest' any project serving those who do no pay,' says Galt. 'Public welfare is the welfare of those who do not earn it,' he continues. standard libertarianism holds that it is appropriate for government to provide police, courts, and national defense because those services benefit everyone, but in her nonfiction works of political philosophy Rand argued that in a 'fully free society' taxation to support even those limited government functions would be voluntary. She offers a government-run lottery as an example of voluntary taxation. (p. 211)

"The Fountainhead's philosophy is similarly sophomoric. Ideas are clear-cut: Individualism and selfishness are good; living for oneself alone is virtuous; altruism is a sinister plot by parasites and collectivists. Complexity of any kind -- human or philosophical -- does not exist in The Fountainhead. But the novel resonated powerfuly with some readers. Perhaps simplicity was also a strength: The sharply delineated ideas are crystal clear." (p. 203) Similar to the black and white views found in John Birch Society.

The Fountainhead was released in 1943. It sold 50,000 copies by the end of the year, on projected sales of 10k max. Says Bogus, "Then something even more unexpected happened. For most books, popularity diminishes after a year or two. The Fountainhead, however, just kept doing better and better. Two years after its release, it was selling a hundred thousand copies a year. By its sixtieth anniversary, it had sold more than six million copies. Even today that number keeps rising." (p. 204)

Buckley first met Rand in 1954. He liked her, and they shared beliefs: anti-communism, pro-market. But they disagreed over religion. She was atheist; he was catholic. "I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on a different level," he had famously written in God and Man at Yale. Rand's view was that religion was superstition. Superstition leads men astray. "Morality flowed from autonomous individuals freely entering into transactions for mutual benefit." (p. 205)

Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. Intended as a massive and definitive statement of Objectivist ideals, it was five times as long as a typical novel. It broke all the rules, and even with the great success of her earlier work, the publisher wanted to cut it. "Would you cut the Bible? was Rand's response. Random House didn't cut the book, but did cut her royalties to make up for the higher printing costs.

Buckley had Whittaker Chambers review Atlas Shrugged as his first assignment since Buckley persuaded him to come on board. His review turned out to be what Bogus calls "the most famous or infamous book review in the history of the conservative movement." Chambers finds the book a piece of sustained materialist arrogance from the kind of mentality that sends men to the gas chambers. "Its dogmatism is without appeal...Dissent from a revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked." This from a catholic, of all people, complaining about dogmatism. The review pissed off Rand and resulted in many letters. Buckley later said "Chambers did in fact read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement." (p. 213) Keep in mind that Rand was wildly successful, and in most ways a far bigger deal than National Review or any of its writers. It is not entirely clear what reading out means in light of her comparative success.


In my opinion, Rand does overdraw. But her stylization does point up fundamental differences between the free-man's and the socialist's mentality. If she is popular primarily with the young who feel they are misunderstood or unappreciated geniuses like her characters, that is hardly her fault. No one has better described the businessman-as-artist; the true source of almost everything that makes life comfortable and, even, possible. Besides the work of the businessman, the offerings of the church are pathetic, and in fact negative. It is human stupidity and ingratitude that privilege hallucinations like Jesus over genuine miracles like air-conditioning.

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 8th, 2012 at 06:22 AM.
 
Old September 8th, 2012 #38
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"Chambers' s review succeeded to an extent. The National Review family understood that Rand had been excommunicated from teh movement. In those circles, it would no longer be acceptable to say that one came to conservatism through reading Atlas Shrugged. Chambers's review may even have cost Rand soem readers, but it was like pulling a bucket of water out of the Atlantic Ocean. Atlas Shrugged was on the New York Times besseller list for seven months. Within five years, it sold one million copies. Countless readers have reported being profoundly moved by the novel. In 1991, the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club cosponsored a survey that asked people what books most influenced their lives. Atlas Shrugged came in number two, after the Bible.

"Of course, Buckley's primary interest was not suppressing Rand's total readership; it was suppressing her influence within the conservative movement, especially her views about the illegitimacy of religion, reason trumping authority, and the virtues of pride and selfishness. Despite his boast that Chambers had effectively excommunicated Rand from the movement, Buckley knew that Chambers had only partially succeeded. Rand's works had a profound effect on young people, and she continued to have strong -- and from Buckley's perspective, troubling -- influence on young members of the conservative movement.

[...]

"Clearly Chambers's review hadn't killed Objectivism. In its October 3, 1967, issue, National Review launched a second attack on Rand. The magazine's cover portrayed an Ayn Rand stained-glass window. Rand held a little flag that read "St. Ayn"; a flowing ribbon at the bottom read 'The Movement to Canonize Ayn Rand,' and a dollar sign sun streamed shafts of color throughout the window. Inside was a five-page story, titled 'The Gospel According to Ayn Rand,' written by associate editor M. Stanton Evans. Trying not to repeat Chambers's mistakes, Stanton wrote a less inflammatory piece. He began by generously listing a number of subjects on which, Stanton said, Rand was right, which he listed as her understanding of the 'secular conditions of freedom,' 'her excellent grasp of the way capitalism is supposed to work,' her 'trenchant anti-Communism,' and her political realism. ... He devoted most of the article to expounding on the numerous ways that Rand was 'depressingly wrong.' Here Evans tried a new tack: suggesting that Rand had things in common with liberals. Because Rand had no spiritual support for her belief in freedom, she fell back on atheistic humanism. 'This is, in all its major points, the standard left-liberal fare wtih which we have been regaled for years,' said Evans. Making Rand out as some kind of confused liberal was a clever way of tarnishing her in the eyes of right-wingers.

[...]

"Evans said Rand's fundamental error was rejecting Christianity. The last third of the Evans article is a paean to Christianity, which he said was the only system of belief predicated on something more than mere survival. By attacking 'the Christian culture which has given birth to all our freedoms' Rand stood with the collectivists who would destroy freedom.

"Evans's approach had the advantage of clarity, but there were disadvantages to suggesting that only Christians could be first-class citizens in the conservative movement. Jews, among others, would feel less than fully welcome. Years earlier, Buckley and the other editors might not have thought much about keeping a welcome mat out for the Jews. They were a demographically tiny and predominately liberal group. But two years before Evans's article, three prominent Jewish intellectuals -- Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Bell -- founded a journal named the Public Interest that was espousing a 'neoconservative' philosophy. Not long after that Buckley appointed a Jew, sociologist Will Herberg, to be the first religion editor of National Review. Herberg had been arguing that conservatives recognize a more ecumenical moral foundation. I.e. make NR safe for yids and their anti-white illiberalism. 'Conservatives, true to the classical tradition of our culture, whether Hebrew or Greek, of course affirm the doctrine of higher law as the very cornerstone of their moral, social and political philosophy,' he had written in National Review. Herberg suggested this was more than sufficient to distinguish a religious or spiritually based morality from value systems based on 'some form of legal positivism, cultural relativism, and moral pragmatism,' which were often favored by liberals.

"Herberg was something of a welcome mat to Jewish conservatives. Now Evans was pulling in the opposite direction. Buckley's permitting Evans and Herberg to express such different viewpoints in National Review illustrates one of the reasons why Buckley was the leader of a movement and Rand was the leader of a cult. A movement must transcend any individual. It must allow room for differences of opinion while still maintaining definition. It is a difficult balancing ac but one at which Buckley was skilled. Buckley was willing to exclude people such as Robert Welch and Ayn Rand. But within rather broad parameters, Buckley allowed -- indeed encouraged -- robust discussion and debate, including disagreement with some views he held strongly. Buckley also respected and nurtured others who possessed strong voices and leadership skills of their own. Rand was just the opposite. For her, there was only one acceptable viewpoint: her own." (pp.214-8)

Remember the point Pat Buchanan made in a column the other day: rising movements aren't tolerant, they are intolerant. Who has had a bigger effect, Rand and libertarians, or Buckley and conservatives? Remember that Buckley's own mentor, Willmoore Kendall, in a famous quote that Bogus never uses, was describing National Review as "just another liberal rag" -- and this before 1970. In the end, Big Tent Buckley's conservatism was coopted by jewish neocons and ended up, in all its public positions, indistinguishable from liberalism.

"Buckley never softened on Ayn Rand. When Rand died in 1982, he wrote an uncharitable obituary for National Review. He talked about how Chambers had trashed Atlas Shrugged, how Rand had purportedly cried at a dinner party because Ludwig von Mises had told her she was being foolish, and how Rand's principal disciple claimed he had been cast out because he rejected Rand's sexual advances. He noted that Russell Kirk opined that Rand's novels sold so well because of their sex scenes. But Buckley closed his obituary on a substantial note. After objecting one final time to her declaring that God did not exist, Buckley said that by declaring altruism to be despicable and self-interest noble, Rand risked 'giving capitalism that bad name its enemies have done so well in giving it.'

Ironically, however, Rand has been a powerful recruiter for a movement from which Buckley tried to excommunicate her (and one she claimed to detest). Year after year, decade after decade, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have converted young people into laissez-faire purists. Some of these converts came to consider themselves conservatives; others came to consider themselves libertarians. Through these two books, Rand may be responsible for recruiting more people into the broad conservative movement than anyone else. As her biographer, Professor Jennifer Burns, wrote in 2009, 'For over half a century Rand has been the ultimate gateway drug to life on the Right.' For its part, to this day National Review continues to publish articles denouncing Rand and her work." (pp. 220-1).

Last edited by Alex Linder; September 8th, 2012 at 07:39 AM.
 
Old September 8th, 2012 #39
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Just one final note, re Oliver, from an endnote:

[...] letter from Oliver to WFB, March 12, 1960 (stating, 'We all know that, in addition to the large [but diminishing] number of rabbits who are panic-stricken when they hear 'anti-Semitic,' there is a very large, well organized, extremely powerful and utterly ruthless body of Jews whose only standard of judgment is . . . 'Is it Good for the Jews?'') [...] [C]orrespondence reflects that Buckley terminated Oliver for publicly associating with anti-Semites and crackpots. Letter from Oliver to WFB, Dec. 24, 1960; letter from WFB to Oliver, April 5, 1961. Among other things, Oliver's speeches were beign published by the anti-Semitic periodical Common Sense. Even as he terminated Oliver from National Review, Buckley wrote, 'I know that you know that this action has no bearing whateer on our personal relationship, which will not, I pray, be in the least affected by it. All the editors and members of the board who know you esteem you as I do." Letter from WFB to Oliver, May 16, 1960. All correspondence cited from WFBP, Yale.

So Buckley sided with the jews over their critics. "Just another liberal rag." What are NR's final achievements? It published a ton of great, thoughtful, highly intelligent articles by brilliant men, and inspired generations of youngsters to value erudition. That's its main achievement. That is its main achievement. Politically, it achieved the election of Ronald Reagan and the turning of liberal from a good term to an insult. Even while it itself was converted to illiberalism on the most essential stuff - abandoning solid racialist views for mongrelism. Abandoning jews criticism - no, wait. NR never allowed group criticism of jews. In the end, NR made no difference politically, it must be concluded. Libertarians, who stuck to their principles, eventually may achieve a breakthrough; so too with racialists. Conservatism will remain what it ever has been: a modest drag on liberalism, and a source of many excellent writers and arguments. But conservatives as people, will remain the same collection of passives and cowards and prickly independents they always have been. Buckley's personal charm and outgoing personality were 180 degrees opposite most of his conservative brethren, but ultimately his willingness to give in on basic principles meant that his magazine was there for the taking by any force that could coopt him or threaten him with loss of income/social status. That group was the neocon jews, and they captured NR and Buckley without much of a struggle.
 
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