posted August 02, 2006 11:27 AM              

Backlash on the right: mainstream conservatives reject Frum purge, oppose neo-imperialism

It's true that in a sane world everything that the neo-cons say, do and represent would be considered insane. I love the following quote and that is what I would also say to the neo-cons around GU. "Good work guys, please keep it up" because you are your own worse enemies. You do more to promote the cause of liberalism than any liberal could ever imagine doing. The Neo-Con Republicans are going the same route as Communism. They are imploding from within...recently I noticed from some of his statements that even Bill Kristol has backed away a bit from the nutty neo-cons.

quote:

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That more conservatives have decided to fight has the neocons in a panic. The American Right is on to their game. It is even possible that, one day soon, the conservative movement will be liberated from the Ba'athist-style conformity imposed by its neocon overseers. In moving toward that day, our best ally is the puffed-up Frum and his comrades, whose arrogance and hectoring style have alienated the conservative mainstream. Good work, guys. Please keep it up.

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When David "Axis of Evil" Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, turned his rhetorical guns on antiwar conservatives and libertarians, this writer included, he ended his peroration against "unpatriotic conservatives" with the declaration that all good right-wingers must now "turn their backs" on the heretics. But what has happened is quite the opposite: mainstream conservatives are asking who appointed Frum the Commissar in charge of political correctness on the right – and are coming to the defense of ideological diversity.

David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union (ACU) and a veteran activist, had earlier dissented with a ringing defense of calumniated columnist Robert Novak – smeared by Frum as an "anti-Semite" – and now Donald Devine, his colleague at the ACU, has come out with a stinging memo challenging not only Frum but also neocon orthodoxy on every point – including foreign policy.

The sheer gall of Frum's interdict clearly has Devine's dander up. Frum & friends have so alienated the rest of the Right with their pretentious posturings as moral and ideological guardians of the Faith, that they have achieved in the conservative movement what the U.S. military has accomplished in Iraq: provoked a general rebellion against the occupying forces.

Devine calls for nothing less than "a general discussion on the future on conservatism." He laments that the official conservative movement has become an appendage of the Republican Party, and is reduced to cheerleading for the White House. Worse yet:

"Conservatives are fighting each other on the front pages of their own magazines. National Review writer David Frum made the argument public with a banner denunciation of any conservative with reservations about the invasion of Iraq. Those conservative intellectuals and activists opposed or even those critical of it before the fighting or even those who mentioned that protecting Israel's interests could complicate matters were all labeled paleo-conservatives and pushed off to the nutty fringe. The only good guys remaining on the right were neo-conservatives. Frum named names, some of who differed on principle, but most simply saw the facts differently. He was so obsessed with his own righteousness in anathematizing heretics he was heedless of how the split would further weaken the forces of the right."

The War Party has no loyalty, either partisan or ideological, except to the worship of Ares (not Zeus). The entire program of the neoconservatives has been reduced to a call for World War IV, and the need to create – or, rather, recreate – an overseas empire on which the sun never sets. "The forces of the right"? To a neocon, there ain't no such thing: there is only the War Party, and their opponents, whom neocon wildman David Horowitz routinely describes as "fifth columnists."

Devine notes that "even those who mentioned that protecting Israel's interests could complicate matters" were "pushed off to the nutty fringe." But that is what the neocon Iago's polemic is all about.

When the interests of the U.S. and Israel clash, those who take the side of the former are, by definition, "anti-Semites" – this is the neocon view of "patriotism." To point out that this is Israeli patriotism, and not the American variety, is to stand accused of ethnic and religious "bigotry," and this is the one unifying theme of Frum's polemic. All the individuals mentioned are smeared as "anti-Semites." With the neocons – from the three Bills (Kristol, Bennett, and Safire) to the P.J. O'Rourke clones over at National Review – it's always the same old song: there is no other issue.

Frum represents an organized grouping on the Right that will brook no criticism of a foreign country that is even now challenging their President on his latest Middle East initiative.

The critique of Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, and others on the right who opposed this war was that it did not pass the test of serving uniquely American interests, but only furthered Israeli ambitions in the region. In a sane world, it is the neocons who would be consigned to the "nutty fringe," rather than those who question their alien agenda.

Devine's refreshingly bold call for open debate on foreign policy – as opposed to smearing and back-turning – is accompanied by a discussion of the "invisibility" of mainstream conservatism on this question. The neocons are getting all the publicity, he complains, and have become "the public face of the movement." Everybody now confuses mainstream conservatism with National Review's proposal in favor of a "revival of colonialism under U.S. auspices and the building of an American empire."

Devine fondly recalls the good old days when National Review was pushing Frank S. Meyer's "fusionist" brand of conservatism. But Meyer's ecumenical coalition, which consisted of traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-Communists, always existed in an uneasy alliance. Nor was Meyer all that ecumenical: when libertarians began questioning the Vietnam war, they were promptly and personally excommunicated by Meyer.

It is more accurate to ascribe an air of relative tolerance for doctrinal differences to the conservative-libertarian alliance of the New Deal and postwar eras. This was the Old Right of the America First generation, where conservatives such as businessman William H. Regnery and General Robert E. Wood, and libertarians such as Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, existed side-by-side in a peaceable kingdom.

Next to the neocon-dominated movement of today, however, the conservative movement of the 1960s was a model of ecumenism. Devine notes bitterly that even William F Buckley, Jr., in criticizing his own magazine's endorsement of British-style colonialism, was forced to resort to the pages of Human Events (sorry, it's not online): National Review apparently would not give even so distinguished a dissenter a forum.

In any case, the "fusionism" that tried to reconcile traditionalists with libertarians, and simultaneously accommodate the fervent anti-Communism of the ex-commies within its ranks (such as Meyer, a former Communist Party theoretician), was a product of the cold war. The sudden implosion of the Communist empire relegated "fusionism" to irrelevance, sent the neocons on a quest for new enemies to conquer, and opened up the neo-paleo divide.

Devine rejects the paleoconservative label, but on the defining issue of foreign policy he seems to fit the bill, asking "Empire, or National Interest?" To any authentic conservative – or, indeed, any American worthy of the name – the answer to that one is easy, and Devine is unequivocal:

"Global empire is an important issue for conservatism. If the U.S. government has the ability to bring peace and democracy to the world, big government can obviously also run America's economy and plan its social life – and limited government becomes irrelevant. … Government keeps growing and journalistic conservatism is silent that this growth, especially fueled by dreams of empire."

This is precisely the critique of the paleoconservatives, grouped around The American Conservative and Chronicles – both of which Devine deems insufficiently devoted to the cause of limited government. Yet an identical theme is apparent in the very title of Pat Buchanan's book, A Republic, Not an Empire. It was in Chronicles magazine, under editor Tom Fleming, that the Old Right's opposition to what Murray N. Rothbard called the "Welfare-Warfare State" was first revived, and this same tradition of conservative anti-imperialism is invoked by Antiwar.com on a daily basis. These disparate tendencies – libertarians, American nationalists, and cultural conservatives – are all asking the same question: What good is it if we win an overseas empire, and lose our old republic? The current crisis on the Right is due to the lack of a good answer to this question, and Devine clearly sees this:

"For a movement that began uniquely united in opposition to communism, it is strange that the conservative split would become most profound on foreign policy. From its founding document, The Sharon (Connecticut) Statement, conservatives had agreed that all foreign policy had to be justified on the criterion – was it in "the just interests of the United States"? Communism was the "greatest threat" to those interests, so it had to be opposed. Iraq was not so simple for the question was empirical, not principled – was that war in the U.S. interest or not? Was it necessary to eliminate weapons of mass destruction and control terrorism or was Iraq not a threat unless the U.S. invaded and stirred up Mideast terrorism?"

It is not at all strange that the split on the Right is over foreign policy, the key issue of the post-cold war era. What united conservatives for so long – what allowed them to forget about their devotion to the Constitution and the cause of limited government – was the alleged necessity of fighting a global war against a militant Communist movement that seemed poised, at several points, to overtake and overwhelm the West. That this was largely an illusion – and a self-created one at that – is nothing new to libertarians, who opposed a policy of global intervention and for that reason opted out of "fusionism" sometime in the late 1960s. Ludwig von Mises had confidently predicted the implosion of socialism as early as 1920: it was doomed from the start, due to its economic impossibility. As Rothbard and other libertarians pointed out during the cold war, the main threat to liberty was not in Moscow, but was situated in a capital city closer to home.

When Rothbard's confident prediction that Communism would soon "fall victim to its own inner contradictions" came true, the Sharon Statement no longer represented a conservative consensus on foreign policy. Furthermore, the disappearance of "the greatest threat" meant that the "fusionists" had been wrong about the alleged danger posed by "international Communism" – they always called it that, just to make it sound more grandiose and scary. But how could something so overbearingly ominous and dangerous vanish almost overnight, short of being knocked out of commission by a nuclear first strike?

The fusionists of yesteryear made a pact with the devil of Big Government at the beginning of the cold war. Convinced of the necessity of launching a global crusade against Communism, including fighting a series of futile losing wars on the Asian landmass, the Meyer-Buckley crowd were resigned to accepting the necessity of Big Government "for the duration," as Buckley put it in a 1956 article for Commonweal, "even with Truman at the reins of it all."

Putting aside the question of how and why the Soviets imploded, the indisputable death of communism once again re-opened conservative eyes to the growth of government power as the main danger. Now the Devil makes his reappearance, rising out of the smoke and fire of 9/11, and proposes a pact similar to the one fusionists signed on to in the 1950s: give up the conservative agenda of limited government for the duration of the post-9/11 emergency, i.e., indefinitely. Let John Ashcroft read your email. Let "national greatness" supplant the stern republican modesty of the Founders. Let the Republic give way to the Empire.

Devine's memo is the neo-fusionists' unequivocal no. This time, faced with Lucifer's choice, it looks like many if not most conservatives are saying: get thee behind me, Satan!

Now that we have "won" the Iraq war, and are the proud possessors of 25 million Iraqis, the question of what to do next is isolating the neocons, who want to go on to Iran, Syria, and even Saudi Arabia. Those fusionists who supported the Iraq war, such as ACU director David Keene and Devine, are ready to draw a line in the sand:

"Buckley and many others calculated war was necessary but still opposed empire building. Philosophically, either he was right that building an American world empire was against conservative principles or Bill Kristol, Max Boot and Paul Johnson – with some NR and The Wall Street Journal support – were correct that a new American colonialism was required to bring peace and democracy to the world. Even President Bush had said: 'America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish' – but neo-conservatives were still trying to push him there anyway."

The neocons are not only trying to push Bush down the road to empire – with some success – but they are intent on dragging the "official" conservative movement along with them. Those who refuse their marching orders will be summarily expelled, but not before being tried by Commissar Frum, or Comrade Goldberg, and denounced as "unpatriotic." This distinctly Soviet style of politics has – finally! – driven the conservative mainstream (ably represented by the ACU) to shed its invisibility and come out in open opposition. Devine's has thrown down the gauntlet to the neocons, and one wonders if they will have the courage to pick it up and respond to the challenge with anything other than the usual smears. Somehow, I doubt it.

Devine's dissent from the neocon party-liners is good news indeed. Although he sees the development of an alternative as mid-way between The Weekly Standard and The American Conservative, it is clear that on all the important issues – in style and spirit, as well as substance – the neo-fusionists are much closer to the latter. As both groups unite in their opposition to the methods of the neocons in "policing" (as Comrade Goldberg once put it) the conservative movement, their common opposition to empire-building means that the foreign policy debate on the right is about to heat up.

Devine proposes an online fusionist magazine, and this is a welcome development. The more venues there are challenging neo-imperialism from the right, the merrier. I am all for a new fusionism, albeit one that doesn't require unity around the high "principle" of perpetual war in pursuit of empire.

I note that Frum has popped up again denouncing paleoconservatives, myself included, in the pages of National Review. The occasion is a veritable symposium in which Frum answers the letters of protest received by the magazine when they ran his denunciation of "unpatriotic conservatives." Gee, I wonder why they haven't put it online? Maybe they're too embarrassed by the extent and voltage of the expressed outrage from some prominent conservatives.

Frum's smear of Robert Novak provoked outraged reactions from Jack Kemp, David Keene, and former Federal Trade Commission chairman Daniel Oliver – as well as a sharp response from Novak (ouch!). Keene, while a supporter of the Iraq war, nonetheless rejects Frum's self-appointment as the conscience of the conservative movement: "I am as opposed as the most ardent 'paleo' to the idea of Uncle Sam on a white charger roaming the world in a mindless quest to right every wrong."

Amen, brother!

This section also contains a very abbreviated version of the letter I sent them: two short paragraphs out of six. In his original smear, Frum accused me of writing that the Israelis were responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. All I am allowed to say in response is:

"My belief is that Israeli agents were watching the 9/11 hijackers in this country, knew about the plot, and somehow neglected to tell us in time to prevent it."

The expurgated portion of my brief letter goes on to protest that I was merely citing news reports, from such sources as Fox News and Die Zeit, to that effect. Another good reason why they don't put all this online is because the lack of a link to my original comments would underscore the essential dishonesty of Frum's assertion that I am saying the Israelis were "implicated" in 9/11. (They never provide any but the barest possible links on NRO.). But why expose National Review's readers to the facts? They might begin asking inconvenient questions. Besides, paleo moles in the National Review office are chortling over the number of outraged letters they didn't print, or even acknowledge.

But my favorite parts of this "Frum Forum," as the editors of NR call it, are the hosannas from neocon party-liners. "David Frum's article will serve the important purpose of compelling conservatives to consider more carefully just what their movement stands for and who is entitled to claim membership in it," writes William Rusher, onetime publisher of National Review. "David Frum's essay is a welcome indictment of the unpatriotic tendencies of paleoconservatism," avers Charles R. Kelser, a professor at Claremont McKenna College. "NR remains a beacon," says one Arnold Steinberg, described by the editors he hails as "Political Theoretician for Young Americans for Freedom." Pete Dupont, failed presidential candidate and fake-"libertarian," accuses the "Buchananites" of "supporting Serbian terrorism" and hails Frum's pack of lies as "educational." "David Frum's piece is a bracing contribution to the library of conservative polemic," announces the magisterial Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and the neocons' chief cultural commissar (Department of High Culture).

In their uniformly obsequious style, there is a distinctly Soviet air to all these fervent testimonials to the wisdom of Commissar Frum. It is altogether grotesque to see them printed in an ostensibly conservative magazine. But what is even more bizarre is Frum's response to such servility. He lashes out at Rusher, who made the mistake of appending the mildest criticism to the tail end of what was otherwise a paean to Frum's infinite wisdom. Rusher wrote:

"One minor cavil: I think the adjective 'unpatriotic,' in the title of Frum's article, was unfortunate. These people are not unpatriotic. It is true, as Frum says, that 'They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president.' But they do not hate America. They are simply, desperately, wrong."

Rusher is mostly wrong about that. There is no consensus among paleos – and, now, the fusionists – on the Republican party's role as either the guarantor or the destroyer of liberty, nor is there even any agreement on the question of whether this President is freedom's friend or foe. Unanimity is achieved, however, when it comes to hating the neoconservatives.

The reason for this dislike is apparent in the tone as well as the substance of Frum's rebuke of Rusher's gentle critique. Rusher, says Frum, is being "too generous." The dreaded paleos are traitors who are "excited" by the "inevitable reverses" suffered by the U.S. in its bid to turn Iraq into Arizona. On the other hand, America's "ensuing victories and successes seem to sadden and frustrate them." How dare that impertinent Buchanan ask "are we willing to crush an Iraqi intifada to hold onto the country?"

Whom does Frum think he's fooling? There are any number of Republicans not only in Congress, but throughout the country, who are no doubt asking the same question. They are wondering, too, why not declare victory and go home?

Devine, at the end of his piece, recalls the beginning of the modern conservative movement,

"When there were only a few thousand committed activists and intellectuals in the whole country. Liberal intellectuals proclaimed 'The End of Ideology' because there was no conservative alternative. The GOP was dominated by Nelson Rockefeller and the Eastern liberal Republicans controlled the White House, which threatened conservatives with expulsion if they even complained.

I have news for Mr. Devine: those liberal intellectuals who proclaimed the "end of ideology" back in the 1950s are, in good part, the same neoconservative intellectuals who, today, hail "the end of history" – and the birth of an American Empire. And the GOP still operates in the same manner, with the neocons replacing the Rockefeller Republicans and "national greatness" conservatism taking the place of liberal republicanism as the ideological rationale for Big Government. But Devine isn't ready to give up without a fight:

"We rose up then and moved the world right and we can do it again. If we cannot rise to oppose empire, the movement deserves to fail. All we need to do is get off our butts and speak up for our principles."

The rebellion against the neocons couldn't have come at a more crucial time. Today, the question is posed pointblank: do we want to fight for our old republic, or will we go the way of empire?

That more conservatives have decided to fight has the neocons in a panic. The American Right is on to their game. It is even possible that, one day soon, the conservative movement will be liberated from the Ba'athist-style conformity imposed by its neocon overseers. In moving toward that day, our best ally is the puffed-up Frum and his comrades, whose arrogance and hectoring style have alienated the conservative mainstream. Good work, guys. Please keep it up.

posted August 02, 2006 01:44 PM            

What happened, couldn't find any Chomsky?

Justin Raimondo: An American Neo-Fascist
By Stephen Schwartz
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2005

Dennis “Justin” Raimondo is a minor celebrity in the U.S., thanks to a 10-year career as an amateur demagogue in the libertarian milieu of the San Francisco Bay Area, a political environment where anything goes and nothing matters. He has the familiar personality traits of the type: “sentimental formlessness, absence of disciplined thought, ignorance combined with gaudy erudition.” He poses as a conservative but maintains a website at antiwar.com, that features anti-American cranks like Noam Chomsky and is hugely popular with the left – not surprisingly since it views America as an incipient fascist state.

Raimondo is a confused and confusing person, who seeks to be the master of the confusion he creates. Born plain Dennis, he renamed himself Justin, while attending the Cherry Lawn School, a defunct prep school in Darien, Conn., which he graduated in 1970.

Raimondo unquestionably encompasses many contradictions. Now past 50, he features a photo of himself on his website with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, in a fey (and failed) pose as an homme fatale. He is flamboyantly gay, but promotes himself as a Buchananite conservative and was in fact Buchanan’s San Francisco campaign spokesman during the “culture war” that other gays took personally, many elections ago. The entire package is deceitful, and it is a calculated deceit.

The movement that Raimondo has cobbled out of opponents of the Iraq war, who are drawn into his site, is unabashedly fascist. Justin Raimondo personifies an American “red-brown” alliance, like the one that surfaced briefly in the 1930s when Communists and Nazis combined forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. This alliance was revived after the fall of Russian Communism, when Stalinists and fascists around the world united on an old platform – war against the Jews – of which more will be said further on.

Raimondo’s own understanding of fascism – a word he himself throws carelessly around when defaming political enemies and disarming potential critics -- is utterly superficial. In a preposterous column titled “A Fascist America,” (March 3, 2005), he defines fascism as follows:

1) “The idealization of the State as the embodiment of an all-powerful national will or spirit;

2) “The leader principle, which personifies the national will in the holder of a political office (whether democratically elected or otherwise is largely a matter of style);

3) “The doctrine of militarism, which bases an entire legal and economic system on war and preparations for war.”

Of course. applied to America this is absurd. Outside the neo-Nazi fringe, no Americans, least of all Republicans, idealize the state. The “leader principle” is not only not in evidence, it is almost absent in a political season when the President has been attacked more viciously than any chief executive in memory; and it is pretty difficult to refer to American “militarism” when the country’s security rests on a military that is voluntary and under attack. In the same column, while attempting to draw a parallel between opponents of the anti-war crowd and fascists, Raimondo even lends credibility to Hitler’s fairy tale that the Nazi seizure of power was a response to “the imminent danger of Communist revolution” – a particularly absurd assertion since the Communists actively colluded with the Nazis in their attacks on Weimar’s democracy and passively supported Hitler’s accession to power.

In an attempt to smear America even further (as if that would be possible) Raimondo throws in Augusto Pinochet, the left’s favourite example of an American puppet. But Pinochet never idealized the Chilean state, or promoted a cult of himself as a leader, or prepared for war or waged war against any foreign country, as required by Raimondo’s fascist model. Pinochet even organized a democratic referendum that removed him from power. Indeed, Pinochet was no more than a typical, short-term military dictator of a type seen all over Latin America, bereft of charisma or serious ideology. His rise to power was the consequence of historical accidents, not of ideology or mass mobilization, and he left behind a thriving democracy.

Raimondo himself, on the other hand, has much in common with the true historical type. He once sought notoriety as a leftist, but now poses as a rightist, a pattern first set by Mussolini in 1915. Years ago Raimondo attempted to become a Republican leader in San Francisco but was quickly dumped after boring the small party group in that city with his pretensions and diatribes. He took over a new conservative tabloid in San Francisco and soon put it out of business by turning every front page into a showcase for headlines about himself.

He has always wanted to be considered an author and journalist, no less than a political figure. At about 13 or so, he seems to have imagined himself as a science fictioneer. But he never had the discipline or stamina to apply himself to any profession aside from that of absurdist publicity hound. He has failed as a journalist and political commentator, exactly as Hitler failed as a painter, as Mussolini failed as a socialist leader, and as the most notorious fascist of the left, Fidel Castro, failed as a lawyer.

Like his models, when Raimondo never engages intellectually with opponents, but relies on invective, insults, and innuendo. Notwithstanding his bizarre and vulnerable persona as a gay Buchananite, he glories in violating the privacy of others. He is obsessed with exposing neoconservatives as “Trotskyites,” a largely spurious claim, since the most famous example among the original neoconservatives, Irving Kristol, was a Trotskyist for only a year, nearly seventy years ago, and only a handful of recent ex-leftists – almost entirely ex-Democrats – are leading neo-conservatives today.

The psychological term for Raimondo’s posturing is “projection.” He is obsessed with rooting out alleged political, ideological, and even religious chameleons, with the unconscious intent of advertising his own political transvestism. This pattern is evident in all his activities: he claims that America is becoming a dictatorship, the better to justify his own ambitions for power. He defends the establishment media against criticism by conservative weblog authors, although without the rise of the “blogs” he would be nothing. Until the launch of Buchanan’s unreadable (and soon to be defunct) American Conservative, his only place of publication was the paleo-conservative Chronicles.

Posing as a war-hater, Raimondo defends murderous dictators like Milosevic, who unleashed the only wars in Europe over the past half century. He presents the Ba’athist party-states in Iraq and Syria as victims of the malicious West and openly wished that Japan had won the Second World War, while fiercely alleging his patriotic motivations. When it comes to America’s present wars, he revels in a repellent defeatism. The heinous attacks on America on 9/11 become for him an explanation of American “fascism.”

Taking a leaf from his comic-book canon of political wisdom, Raimondo describes fascism as a product of “the traumatic humbling of a power once considered mighty.” He cites Germany defeated in the First World War, while ignoring that Italy, where fascism originated, was a victor in that war, as was the third Axis power, Japan. Perhaps this omission can be ascribed to the fact that Raimondo idolizes Japan, which was at the height of its power when it attacked Pearl Harbor. As he wrote so eloquently, in an article titled. “Hiroshima Mon Amour: Why Americans Are Barbarians,” posted to his site on August 8, 2001, “the idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled.” By contrast, imperialist Japan, which slaughtered millions in East Asia, is his idea of paradise. He believes “the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.” It is, by the way, extremely doubtful that Raimondo has ever set foot on Japanese soil.

The upshot of Raimondo’s mishmash is his charge that September 11 was “an enormous defeat for the U.S.,” and thus the source of Bush fascism. Many fascist movements have been expansionist and imperialist, but others were historically known for their promotion of disaffection and demoralization, such as those in France and England before the Second World War, and the isolationist legion in America at the same time, which Raimondo seeks to revive. The Rosetta Stone of his philosophy is Buchanan’s idea of the betrayed “American republic” – betrayed by democracy that is – an ahistorical trope which echoes prior fascist movements.

Classic fascism has other characteristics that resonate in Raimondo’s agendas. He is a fanatical rumormonger, asserting that U.S. war plans against Syria and Iran are nearly operational, while Bush administration policies toward these states have been notably circumspect. He was among the most active disseminators of the legend that an innocuous document, titled “A Clean Break,” having to do with Israeli foreign policy, was actually a blueprint for the invasion of Iraq.

If, as Mary McCarthy said, every word written by the Stalinist Lillian Hellman was a lie, including “and” and “the,” Raimondo is a prevaricator down to the placement of commas, periods, and semicolons.(***Note..that sounds like some other lying leftists) One of his favorite tricks is the mendacious use of hyperlinks, giving the impression that his statements are backed by other sources. These are usually his own articles, immodestly declared by him to be “classics,” which in fact have little or nothing to do with his latest ravings, but lead to more lies through more links. This, too, is not original with Raimondo; it is the Chomsky method of meretricious citations.

Raimondo calls Abraham Lincoln “the closest to a dictator that any American president has ever come.” A couple of days later, forgetting or ignoring that statement, he labels President Franklin Roosevelt the “predecessor” of today’s “fascism,” and declares that Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were also “fascist heroes.” At the same time, he tenaciously defends Milosevic – a dictator who freed no slaves – and, equally insistently, denies the occurrence of the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. He also defames the Albanians, and encourages others on his site to do the same, and then denies being an apologist for Serbian war crimes. He has called the Kosovars “the Shi’ites of Western Europe” – meaning, Muslim friends of America, who deserve to be slaughtered. He fervently hopes for a new war between Slavic Macedonians and Albanians, since nothing warms his heart so much as the thought of dead Albanians except, perhaps, the dead “Zionists” buried in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Calumny is Raimondo’s Socratic method. He refers to David Frum and Richard Perle, two intellectuals who have no governmental authority whatever, as “strutting martinets.” When I myself attempted to clarify the status of Islam in Uzbekistan, an American ally, while criticizing obstacles to democracy there, he labeled me a defender of torture. He accused me of “rationalizing the same sort of regime in the U.S.” as in Uzbekistan – based, according to him, on “torturing dissidents, shutting out all political opposition, and arresting thousands on account of their political and religious convictions.”

In his latest ridiculous column, “The Specter of Fascism,” dated March 9, the Raimondian style of revisionist history is in full display. In a single paragraph, he refers to the leftist New York tabloid PM, published in the late 1930s and 1940s, as “Communist Party-controlled,” which will certainly come as a surprise to Arnold Beichman, a long-serving anti-Communist and former leading editor of the paper. PM was famous as a battleground where Stalinists and anti-Stalinists fought for influence, but was never under Communist control. For one thing, unlike the real Communist press, such as the Daily Worker, PM did not promote an “antiwar” alliance, during the Stalin-Hitler pact, with the Nazis, of the kind Raimondo wishes to revive today – which is why PM, a newspaper that went out of business in 1948, still provokes Raimondista rage. Raimondo refers to PM’s identification of pre-1941 isolationists as a “fifth column,” which Dennis shrieks was “scurrilous and untrue.” He’s wrong. Calling the pro-Axis rabble in America then a “fifth column” was accurate reporting, just as it is accurate reporting to describe Dennis Raimondo as a sympathizer of America’s enemies now.

Sometimes Raimondo posts other leftwing fascists to do his slandering for him. He has done this with Kevin Keating, infamous for hoisting a banner during the anti-Iraq demonstrations in San Francisco that read: “We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers.” If a critic of Saudi Arabia’s support for Wahhabism enters his sights, he will accuse them of fomenting war against the Kingdom. He has, in fact, insisted that the neo-conservatives in the government are actually preparing military action against the Saudis. Raimondo’s protective attitudes towards the Saudis derive perhaps from the fact he and the Saudi princes share a commitment to the fable of “Zionist” involvement in 9/11.

For Raimondo, the Great Satan is America, and the Little Satan is Israel. He has written a screed called The Terror Enigma, that is a kind of Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the War on Terror. Raimondo’s tract – it’s only a pamphlet issued by a vanity press – insinuates, with no serious evidence, that the Israeli government had prior knowledge of 9/11 but failed to warn our authorities; that because an Israeli lived in the same neighborhood as a 9/11 conspirator they were naturally complicit; Israelis selling art on the streets of the U.S. were actually big-time spies engaged in undermining our government; that here, there, and everywhere, the omnipotent Israelis control everything, so why not the attack on the Twin Towers as well? The next step from this conspiracy logic is, of course, the claim that Israel was in on 9/11 with the Bush administration.

On October 29, 2004 Raimondo wrote a piece under the headline, “Bush and Kerry put Israel first.” It claimed that, “the Jewish state keeps an entire people captive in the twin concentration camps of Gaza and the West Bank;” and “the Israelis love to torture and berate [Yasir Arafat] far too much to let him die a natural death.” Referring to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he wrote, “one needn’t refer to fiction when the relevant facts are so readily available.” (In other words, the Protocols may be fake, but they tell the truth.) According to Raimondo, “Today, the word ‘fascist’ is the political equivalent of the ‘f’-word, rendered virtually meaningless on account of its degeneration into pure epithet. Yet, Israel in its present trajectory fits the classic definition of fascism.” And: “Israel, far from being our faithful ally, is potentially an enemy.”

Almost as intense as his hatred for the Jewish state is Raimondo’s loathing of democracy. Some may have been taken aback by the volume of his bile when he denounced the “orange revolution” in Ukraine as well as the current democratizing efforts in Lebanon. But not those who have followed Raimondo’s prominent association with the Russian Jew-baiting website, Pravda.ru, and its American contributor, the neo-Nazi Bill White.

Bill White has followed the predictable career of neo-Nazi agitators. He is a Jew-hater and a compulsive liar, frequently inventing “facts” about those he targets. Posing as a “libertarian socialist” with a site at www.overthrow.com, he recently distinguished himself by hailing the murder of the family of the judge in Chicago who had the temerity to order payment of a fine by a neo-Nazi leader. The Roanoke Times reported on March 3, “As authorities investigate the killings of a federal judge’s family in Chicago, a Roanoke white supremacist on Wednesday applauded the murders as justified violence against Jews and the federal government. ‘I don’t feel bad that Judge [Joan Humphrey] Lefkow’s family was murdered,’ William A. White, editor of The Libertarian Socialist News, wrote in an essay Tuesday on his Web site, Overthrow.com. ‘In fact, when I heard the story I laughed. ‘Good for them!’ was my first thought.’”

While sorting out the love affair between antiwar.com and overthrow.com is akin to diving into a sewer, Dennis Raimondo and Bill White were eager contributors to the Pravda.ru site until the “patriotic” admirers of both bridled at their association with a journalistic enterprise associated, in the mind of most Americans, with old-fashioned Communist propaganda. Articles by both Raimondo and White have been widely recirculated by the Saudi-funded Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In the “red-brown” logic, Jew-baiting works equally well for fascists, Communists, and Islamo-fascists.

Raimondo’s website consistently published propaganda generated by Randall (Ismail) Royer, a former CAIR employee now doing a 20-year federal sentence for terrorist activities. Recently, one of Royer’s associates, Ahmad Omar Abu Ali, was charged with plotting to assassinate President Bush in collaboration with al-Qaida. Before his arrest, Royer distinguished himself between with a campaign to harass and intimidate critics of the jihadists – myself, and the Saudi dissident Ali al-Ahmed among them – in the Washington region. Raimondo gleefully recycled Royer’s Jew-baiting rants on his website. CAIR, which employed Royer, joined in the campaign by redistributing the Raimondo screeds. CAIR – which pretends to be an anti-defamation organization – also disseminates the neo-Nazi propaganda of Bill White.

CAIR poses as a civil liberties advocate, Raimondo poses as “antiwar,” White poses as a “libertarian socialist,” and their comrade-in-arms Kevin Keating poses as a “revolutionary.” The technique is familiar to any history student: the Nazi party called itself the socialist party of the German workers, while plotting to suppress the labor movement and enslave wage-earners.

The law recognizes that some conspiracies are real: one such is the common effort of Raimondo, CAIR, Royer, Abu Ali, White, Keating, and others to silence the critics of Islamist extremism and intimidate the supporters of America’s leadership in the global war on terror. Of that leadership, Raimondo has written, “Go F*ck Yourself, Mr. President.” (November 26, 2003).

posted August 03, 2006 11:29 AM              

The first thing that you and any neo-con does when someone writes an article or speaks their mind on anything that is not agreeable with your neo-con fascist agenda is to attack and attempt to smear the person's character.

Frankly it has gone waaaaaay beyond boring to the point of being obnoxious.

Neo-cons are the boil on the butt of humanity and a curse to the world. The world will be a much better place when the neo-con fascists do implode.

The sane people in your own party can't stand you neo-cons much less the rest of us. The only ones who can are equally insane and like lemmings rushing for the cliff you are all rushing for your own demise. The sane world does not wish to go down with you or have our world blown up by a bunch of insane morons who can't think for themselves so need a leader to follow. We don't want America to go the way of Germany under Hitler thank you.

posted August 03, 2006 01:29 PM            

It's entirely laughable for you to attempt to paint those who call you and your lying leftist friends to account for your lies as...neocon fascists.

Your choice of articles to post..in this case, the entirely disgusting anti-America lying twit moron Marxist, Justin Raimondo...is an indication you have your head up Marxist as$es.

You and your radical leftist friends have from the beginning attempted to paint the United States as an imperialistic expansionist power. The truth however is just the opposite. The US seeks no territory where and when we intervene. We seek to overthrow tyrants and despots who abuse their citizens and threaten their neighbors, our allies and the United States.

Let me remind you and the rest of the Marxist leftist twit cadre.

It was the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, North Vietnam, North Korea, Saddam Hussein and now China who sought to enlarge their empires...all those are/or were nations leftists like you swoon over..and every one, a communist/socialist dictatorship.

By contrast, the United States directly controls less land area of the world than we did at the end of World War II. Where and when we intervene, the objective is to right wrongs and restore the governments of nations to their rightful owners, their own people and only then, when those in power threaten their neighbors, our allies, the United States or start a war.

It takes a special kind of venomous liar or brain dead moron to advance the kind of bullsh*t you, Justin Raimondo, Noam Chomsky, et.al put forth. In all your cases, it's Marxist/leftist liars.

Given the death and destruction which follows as closely as night follows day when a communist/marxist/socialist government murders their way to power, one could also advance the notion that a communist/marxist/socialist is by definition a brain dead moron.