Never write 50 words when you can write 500.

I’m an admirer of Pat, and think that the Irving bit in the review simply took it too far. That, more than anything else, deeply put me off about Lukacs.

lol

http://bannedindc.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/stove-top-stuffing/

I have to wonder whether or not it would be possible to keep any magazine like the TAC truly “paleo” at this point. It almost seems as if the zeitgeist itself seeks to deny the expression of certain opinions and that the TAC got away with it, for as long as it did, seems itself truly remarkable. If you go to far to the right - like Chronicles does - you drop off the radar entirely. But TAC seemed to steer a different kind of course and, in the end, it might not prove possible to do. This isn’t to exonerate Lukacs or excuse the editor who ran that review. But you do have to wonder why this enterprise - simply telling the truth consistently, and challenging the mainstream narrative - seems so difficult in this particular day and age.

But you do have to wonder why this enterprise - simply telling the truth consistently, and challenging the mainstream narrative - seems so difficult in this particular day and age.
Posted by Kevin S on Jun 02, 2008.

Do you really have to wonder, or just look at all the ring-kissing going on by the Washington establishment at the AIPAC conference this week?

Mr. Stove,
Thank you. You have expressed my thoughts on the matter with more precision, grace, and courage than I could muster.  We should not put our faith in publications.  It seems inevitable that a certain level of organization succumbs to this sort of treachery or pious conformity to opinion. 
I was not surprised by Ronald Radosh’s review of Stanton Evans book on McCarthy in National Review and certainly not surprised by Lukacs’ review in itself but its appearance in American Conservative is provocative.  You are quite right about the daisy chain effect of demagoguery and criminalization of thought:
If Mr. Buchanan can be likened to Mr. Irving, and thereby in practice thrown to the wolves, then which TAC contributors, past or present, cannot be thrown to the wolves? This strikes me as a valid question.
And a question I’m sure that everyone on this site has asked. Mission accomplished, fear instilled.  My only disagreement with what you wrote is your intolerance of blasphemy.  Christianity has enjoyed a rich and invigorating tradition of blasphemy (Bahktin’s Rabelais and His World).  Your ban on blasphemy could, mutatis mutandis, be cited as an endorsement of Lukacs’ defense of the American civic religion.

Perhaps the answer is for TAC to move away from the Beltway-Boston corridor. I know, I know, a lot of cocktail parties and free booze will be missed - but that is the point, isn’t it? For paleos to remain true, it helps they BE in the heartland.

I don’t habitually submit blog comments (I have a reputation as a non-blogger to keep up) but I’d like to thank Dan for his kind words. As to Rabelais, I’ve got no direct knowledge of him. My limited secondhand knowledge suggests that I would still prefer even Rabelais’ output to be kept away from female, as opposed to male, readers. (At the time Rabelais wrote it, I presume that it had an exclusively male readership.)

What I had in mind by “anti-Christian blasphemy” was mainly PISS CHRIST and similar art-gallery outrages. Many of them funded by the taxpayer.

Lukacs...yet another Marxist philosopher.

Not interested.

I must say the idea that the American Conservative is kowtowing to the liberal establishment or somehow corrupted by non-paleo contributors with malicious, self-serving goals is ridiculous and totally inconsistent with the available facts.

Mr. Stove:
You have, with some eloquence, expressed my thoughts and views on this difficult
topic exactly. Thank you.

I like Chronicles, post there all the time, and have been to the last three John Randolph Clubs, but we do need a paleo magazine that is more overtly political. TAC is certainly overtly political, but it has become, over time, less overtly paleo. And more niche anti-war. And it probably helps if that magazine is located near the Beltway, if not inside it. If for no other reason than to prove to the rest of the Beltway crowd that we do exist and we are real, normal people. (Perhaps this is inherently corrupting. I could be convinced. But if we are entirely out crying in the wilderness, then that is what we are going to seem like, wilderness dwellers.) The problem with niche political magazines these days, as I understand it, is that the economics just don’t work out, thanks in part to the internet and sites like this. You need a big money backer or backers or a Foundation. (Perhaps there is a magazine waiting to spring out of the Ron Paul campaign. Revolution Magazine, anyone? This could work if it avoided clichéd and reductionistic libertarianism and sought to keep traditionalists in the fold.)

I would not abandon TAC. I would just accept that it is what it has become. An anti-war conservative, realist foreign policy magazine.

I think the choice of Lukacs as reviewer was wrong and disrespectful of Buchanan. But it seems to me some of the anger has been displaced and is out of proportion and unhelpfully personal. Why has this not been a discussion about TAC instead of Lukacs? The discussion of Lukacs has been, it seems to me, a bit of a surrogate for some other issues and fault lines - nationalism, anti-anticommunism, Churchill and WWII in general.

Read the last two threads by Thomas Fleming at Chronicles. The attacks on Lukacs are not being accepted well in some quarters. And this whole thing threatens to damage what little of paleoconservatism that you could call a coherent “movement.” (Bad word, I know, but you know what I mean.)

Here is my question re. TAC. TAC had to know what kind of a review they would get from Lukacs. It seems like bad editorial policy to commission a review when you know it will be either good or bad. So was this a conscious attempt to distance themselves from their founder so it would no longer be “Buchanan’s Magazine,” or was it a sort of intrapaleo publicity stunt or something else? (I guess clueless and thoughtless are options.) If it was a publicity stunt, I think it has backfired. If it was the former, it has worked.

“And it probably helps if that magazine is located near the Beltway, if not inside it. If for no other reason than to prove to the rest of the Beltway crowd that we do exist and we are real, normal people. (Perhaps this is inherently corrupting. I could be convinced. But if we are entirely out crying in the wilderness, then that is what we are going to seem like, wilderness dwellers.)”

Red,

I think I’d be more likely to agree with Rick Johnson’s

“move away from the Beltway-Boston corridor. I know, I know, a lot of cocktail parties and free booze will be missed - but that is the point, isn’t it?”

If for no other reason that we should not accept the elites’ definition of what does or does not constitute a “wilderness”.

To my mind, places like Manhattan and D.C. is the wilderness.

A place like Bardstown, Kentucky is where you’d go to find civilization.

Somewhat related to blasphemy and Chronicles:

I cancelled my subscription to Chronicles after reading Fleming’s article “Violent Revolution” (June, 2006 I believe) in which he warned about “the spreading Virus of Islam” and expressed the hope that Mexicans could come to the realization that their real enemies were Muslims who “blaspheme against Our Lord and His Blessed Mother.”
The lie and the demagogic incitement to violence triggered my Solzhenitsyn response from “Live not by Lies” a list of suggestions: among these get up and walk out and cancel subscriptions.  That’s the limit of my approval of censorship.

A while ago a writer on this site invoked the Islamo-viral topos and - unsurprisingly perhaps- also expressed the desire to incite violence. I no longer read that writer and was glad to see his article removed by the editor.
I think magazines are nearly always an invitation to join “the educated rabble.”

I agree with Mr. Stove about “Piss Christ” of course. That is not blasphemy in Bahktin’s sense but rather agitprop and leaden sarcasm actually identical to some of the anti-Christian art produced in the early years of the Soviet Union.  Bahktin by the way did well without magazines in the depths of Soviet terror and oppression when he rediscovered Rabelais and Dostoyevsky, achieved cultural and spiritual liberation, and developed his deeply Christological literary criticism.

Rabelais is anarchic intellectual fun, a goliardic apocalypse, beloved of Albert Jay Nock and Mikhail Bahktin simultaneously across continents and yes, I’m afraid Antonia White rough and tumble schoolgirls.

What else? Anti-anticommunism and Solzhenitsyn?  No, I’ll stop now I heard somewhere that Catholic bogging can be an occasion of sin.

G.S.,

When I was toiling in the GOP for one year last year trying to gain some street cred, so to speak, as a Ron Paul supporter, I went to several Republican events. Our retched Governor’s Fish Fry for one. When I would talk these events up at our Meet-up groups, I was occasionally asked, “what is the point?” My answer was always to normalize us. Show up there proudly wearing your Ron Paul buttons and shirts looking as normal and GOPesq as you can. Put real faces on the Ron Paul supporters.

I am now happily out of that mess and supporting the Constitution Party again, but my thoughts are similar here. Paleoconservatism needs real faces and a real presence inside the Beltway. A presence that distinguishes us from the movement conservatives of the world. The entire Beltway thinks all conservatives are war-loving money grubbers. The key is that those inside the Beltway must be incorruptible, hearty souls.

For your information, those interested in Lukac’s understanding of Churchill’s limitations and failures might wish to read his chapter “His failures, His critics.” in Churchill: Visionary. Statesman.
Historian.  Yale, 2002. It is hardly a work of hagiography but this book overall defends the author’s assertion of Churchill’s greatness. This work, as well as others by Lukacs argue for the essential wisdom of Churchill’s decision to carry on the war in 1940 and address why the at times attractive arguments of Irving, Charmley, and now Buchanan are wrong.

The Lucaks/Buchanan controversy is actually quite simple. The fundamental question of the Second World War is this: Who was the real enemy of World War Two? Hitler or Stalin? Mr.Lucaks wishes to believe, for reasons of ethnic self-interest, that it was Hitler. He also wishes to downplay, again for reasons of ethnic self-interest, who was running communisn in Russia.

There are indeed similarities between Mr. Buchanan’s position and that of English historian David Irving. Both emphasize that Hitler had no aggressive intentions against Britain and her Empire. As to the much debated question of how many Jews actually died in the Second World War and by what methods, it might be more appropriate to remember the much greater number of victims of communism in Russia-and the distinctly un-Russian features of the gulag commissars.

Mr. Buchanan’s book is stirring up extreme controversy because it gets dangerously close to the real issues lurking behind the standard historiography of the Second World War. That is all to the good. Let no one accuse Patrick Buchanan of pro-Nazi attitudes or anti-semitism in disguise. There are many hard truths about the European conflagration which have yet to be revealed or honestly discussed. Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War is a major step in the proper direction for the average reader.

Yeah, Pat Buchanan is obviously a better historian than David Irving (the historian). For all here academic controversy is like a role playing game that never leaves the safety of the parlour. Irving’s flaw (in your eyes) is simply that he has the courage to go to the terminus of where his convictions lead. You guys leap of as soon as you see suburbia begin to fade. Hold on tight to your tenures guys!

Comparisons of Patrick Buchanan with David Irving are appropriate because, in fact, both men are taking substantially similar positions. The message, in both cases, is that Hitler’s territorial ambitions lay in the east, not against Britain and her empire. This effectively demolishes both the need for British and American intervention.David Irving is a professional historian, something which Patrick Buchanan is not. Irving has researched very widely in the archives and has found a wealth of information not discovered by more timid historians.His libel lawsuit against Deborah Lipstadt had an unfortunate result, but it is well to remember that the truth about great historical controversies is not decided in politically motivated courtrooms, anymore than the truths of World War Two were established at Nuremberg.

Buchanan is best read as an introduction to Irving, who has already published two volumes of a projected three volume series on Churchill. There the reader will find Churchill’s lifelong subservience to Zionism which began very early in his career, his indebtedness to various Jewish financiers who saved him from the forced sale of his estate, his drunkenness at his wartime conferences and his almost uninterrupted blundering over the battlefields of two world wars, his passing off of his own paintings as those of European masters to raise sale prices, his infamous “Order of the Bath” in which he habitually greeted high personages in the nude, his shaking his fist in fury at German bombers which he knew were passing over London on their way to bomb Coventry and a host of other less than savory details on the life of the “great man”.

It is obvious that Buchanan has read Irving although his works and name nowhere appear in the bibliography of the “Unnecessary War”. Irving is a pariah and the ommission is understandable. Patrick Buchanan has carried the debate on World War Two follies as far as it can reasonably be carried under present intellectual conditions. His book suffices to demonstrate that Germany had no causus belli with Britain and that Hitler was proceeding against a very real threat. Just how immediately menacing that threat actually was in the summer of 1941 is only now beginning to emerge from the former Soviet archives. For the rest, the interested reader may consult Irving and even more heretical authors, if he so chooses.

Lucaks claims in his review that history does not repeat itself. This is quite true. Not every circumstance in time is exactly identical. However this does not neccesarily hold for mistakes committed by our political leaders. Buchanan’s salient point in his new book is that by giving the Israelis carte blanche unconditional support vis a vis Iran Bush is committing the same error the British did in 1939 with regards to Poland.

Poland at the end was betrayed. The British could not rescue them from either National nor International Socialism. When American power wanes which it eventually will the same fate awaits Israel.

There is a nostalgia in the West for a repeat of the “good war”. It allows us to justify the slaughter of innocents that were holocausted in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

When our politicians are in search of a reason to launch off into another conflict 1938 is invoked and another Hitler is just around the corner. First it was Slobodan of Serbia, then Saddam of Iraq, now it is the President of Iran.

By now this pattern has become tedious even to the most casual observer. If nothing else Pat’s book may be a tiny step to break this vicious cycle.

On Irving, it is worth remembering that the defence in the Lipstadt trial hired professional witness Richard Evans to do an exhaustive search of Irving’s books for the many lies they just “knew” were there.

Evans located six lines that were definitely untrue out of the hundreds of thousands of lines in Irving’s many books.

Other alleged “lies and falsehoods” were and are still arguable and equivocal.

Irving’s two volume biography (of three planned) on Churchill contains material even Churchill’s official biographer Martin Gilbert was shocked to read, and are true.  Gilbert just never thought to interview people like Churchill’s secretary, whereas Irving did.

All Irving really did to bring down the wrath of the professional Semites was to claim that there was no Hitler order to exterminate the Jews.  If there is one, none has been found.

Churchill never once mentioned any “Holocaust against the Jews” in his six-volume history of the Second World War.

Bad history?

I could never understand why Stalin’s murders of millions upon millions of people was never quite as bad as the Nazi’s murders of however many Jews.  Stalin gets a pass.  Hitler is the real bad guy.

Are Jews somehow more valuable human beings than Ukrainian peasants or Ingush intellectuals?

Lukacs is a wonderful historian whom I much respect. I respect Buchanan as red-blooded American. Anyway, I think it was a great idea for American Conservative to invite Lukacs to write a critical review of Buchanan’s book. Debate and dialectics is always good. National Review is a magazine of conservative consensus, which is why it’s gotten so boring. American Conservative, on the other hand, can be full of surprises. It encourages and instigates disagreement and discussion.  Too often, leftwing magazines praise leftwing writers, and rightwing magazines praise rightwing writers. But, Lukacs’s critical review forces us to think and debate. That is good. And, let’s face it. Buchanan purposely wrote a provocative and even incendiary book.  It was supposed to raise eyebrows and get the debate rolling.