Bravo to Paul for warning against the illusion of restoring past “golden ages,” which are more often imagined than real.  Rightists will never restore the 1950s, the 1750s, or 50 A.D.  Romanticist nostalgia about the past may be tasty at times, but it’s a poor diet of survival against the managerial therapeutic state.  Short of Ron Paul’s supporters taking over the GOP (I’m not holding my breath), postpaleos will have to adopt the minimalist and defensive strategy of protecting their individual freedoms from statist incursions.

A fascinating look forward. Unfortunately, all the signs point toward a species of re-communalization rather than toward a more refined intellectualism and more verbal fisticuffs as I perceive is meant by “Pos(t)paleos will have to get their hands dirty by continuing to go after their enemies and by doing so in a way that draws public notice.” and “...I trust the postpaleos will never hold back from flattening those who claim to be on the right but who can’t resist paying homage to leftist heroes.”

A vigorously verbal or written assault would be a great thing, but the re-communalization that is going on links the derogatory impulses at National Review and The New Republic with Richard Spencer, Leon Hadar, and Justin Raimondo, namely the division of the population from which the postpaleos are most likely to spring into the “worthy whites” like themselves, and the “rednecks and hillbillies” who are to be denigrated and despised. With that kind of class warfare that is deeply embedded in TakiMag itself, as they are at the opposing NRO and TNR, postpaleos will have a short half-life on the shelf of history.

If the postpaleos can teach manners to Spencer, Hadar, and Raimondo, it may be that the intellectual reach of postpaleoism can have an important portion of our nation’s intellectual and ideological life. I hope when you make your next list of ideological enemies ("propositional nationhood, antiracism, anti-homophobia, anti-anti-Semitism, and anti-fascism"), it will include “denigration for lower income & less education.” It’s not particularly offensive to me that the writers here often dip a toe in the fever swamps of name-calling, but it reveals some particularly loathsome habits of mind that cast a taint on their other ideas.

Very incisive analysis, unsurprising from Gottfried.

William:
“It’s not particularly offensive to me that the writers here often dip a toe in the fever swamps of name-calling, but it reveals some particularly loathsome habits of mind that cast a taint on their other ideas.”

Yes, I’ve felt the same way recently, especially at Raimondo’s rant against West Virginians who refused to vote for Obama.

I myself have fallen into the trap of seeking alliance with the Left.  I once tried to get Peter Hitchens, who I know, an interview with a radical Marxist professor at my UK University, thinking that her opinions often seemed close to his, eg on the dangers of New Labour deligitimising opposition.  She reacted as if I had asked her to eat dog poo. 

“The correct position for dealing with the dominant class is not the kind of ranting I have heard from the extreme Right against Jews, Masons, Skull and Bones, or whatever.”

Agreed - these people are often indistinguishable from the Islamists; indeed they quite often end up converting to Islam, a more acceptable venue for venting their hatreds.

A very good piece.  I agree with Prof. Gottfried that the left hates us far more than it hates the neocons, and the likelihood of a genuine alliance between traditionalist conservatives and leftists is, essentially, zero.

It is probably the least vicious and the most restrained war launched by the US in the last hundred years, give or take a few minor interventions such as the ones in Grenada.

One of the great evils about war is the way it destroys morality and common sense. Americans are so used to war they become either blind to its attendant evils (Women killed in combat zones)or so inured to evil that it seems mundane.

Worse, having been told about the number of women dying in combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, many mount a defense of such abject evil.

In our current wars, Mothers of children as young as one year old have been killed in combat zones thousands of miles away from home.

One woman died while a prisoner in Iraq. She was prolly tortured to death. Do you think she had thoughts about her young child at home missing her? Who the hell can defend such evil?

When America is sending Mothers, Wives, and Daughters off to foreign lands in an unnecesary war to tote weapons in war zones, who gives a rat’s ass how this war compares to other wars?

It does not get any worse than this. As a nation we have descended into pagan savagery that makes comparison with previous wars moot. Wars always lead nations further down the path to destruction and the wars corrupt and coarsen the citisens (Paul Fussel is right)to the point where we are barely distinguishable from our enemies.

http://www.cmrlink.org/printfriendly.asp?docID=292

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec07/women_07-05.html

“The correct position for dealing with the dominant class is not the kind of ranting I have heard from the extreme Right against Jews, Masons, Skull and Bones, or whatever. An intelligent Right must make well-reasoned and thoroughly documented attacks on political correctness, global democracy, and other tools of expanding public traditional social institutions.”

This is true enough as far as it goes, but I think it doesn’t go quite far enough.  An intelligent Right must make as its business a systematic attack on advanced liberalism, that is, the ideological liberalism which dominates the whole of Western society.  It must recognize that the West as it exists today is wholly estranged from its past, and that liberalism is such is an attack on the fundamentals of society.  We have to move beyond attacking symptoms, in other words, which neocons already do a fine job of (believe it or not).

“the postpaleos will have to pursue, and all the more vigorously as resources become available, the tasks of discrediting the neoconservatives and presenting themselves as the true Right. Pospaleos will have to get their hands dirty by continuing to go after their enemies and by doing so in a way that draws public notice.”

I believe the best way to destroy the Neconservative/Left-liberal alliance/status quo is to clarify in the public’s mind how and why it is the enemy of Western civilization.

This means articulating the Neocon/Leftist connection to Bolshevism and its murder of millions of Christians; this means articulating why the Neocon/Leftists hate traditional Europeaon Christendom and Western culture and customs; this means fleshing out how the Neocons and Left-liberals are trying to supplant Western civilization with their own formulation of multicultural neo-American civilization, which, like Communism, also purports to be based on universal humanist principles such as the innate human yearning for freedom and democracy, but in actuality, like Communism’s universalistic rhetoric, merely serves as cover for their authoritarian power grab.

Neoconservatism is clearly an alien amalgamation of materialism, authoritarian Statism, Zionism, martialism, and a push for social-engineering, and identity politics. Add to that list atheism/secular humanism, and you get mainstream left-liberalism.

Indeed, we are in an internal West-vs.-the-rest situation—and the Neocons/left-liberals are clearly the enemies of the West and its traditions. If that central truth can be hammered home, the Paleocon/libertarian alliance stands a sliver of a chance.

The “dirty hands” work is going after the two politically correct positions that Neocons and the left-liberal establishment share most strongly in common: rabid Zionism and the desire for open borders/mass immigration—both of which, not coincidentally, are part and parcel of their hatred for Western civilization.

Paul Gottfried makes some excellent points, as does William; I think the correct approach
would involve the recommendations and advice of both. My experience is that what we term
“paleosconservatives” (and I specifically do not include “paleo-libertarians” in this category)
include a motley crew of “old right” anti-imperialists, anti-"big government” types, conservative
states’ rights Southerners, traditionalist Catholics, Kirkian traditionalists, and others,
including those who hearts are with the Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs… From this congerie
the one major thing we all have in common is this: we oppose fervently the designs of the
neo-conservatives, and that is because: either we oppose their insane foreign intervention,
or perhaps it is an opposition to the abolition of (what’s left of) the Constitution, or perhaps
because we believe that the secularization of America has brought with it a precipitous
decline, or perhaps because we believe that the destruction of the rights of the states and
or local communities (and their rights and customs) has destroyed our regions and our Republic.
Or, perhaps we hold most or all of these beliefs....

While cultivating a strong intellectual discourse (and Paul Gottfried, the late Sam Francis,
and others writing on Takimag, in Chronicles, and in a few other journals have done that),
we cannot forget that practical success, at least in the United States, must come, so it seems to me,
with popular support. A few well-schooled intellectuals talking among themselves, however
much delight that might give, will get us nowhere. That is why individuals such as Pat
Buchanan have been and are so important to us (and indeed we saw what the two major political
parties and the dominant media did to him in 1992, ‘96, and 2000), and why such newer practical
political leaders, like perhaps Congressman Walter Jones, need to be “connected” to what
goes on here at Takimag and in the other sparse “paleo” (or “post-paleo") sites.

One last point: I don’t think nostalgia is a real danger. Yes, traditionalists, by their very
nature, tend to look to the past, to the days of kings, crusades, or of the great statesmen
who once led or fought for this decrepid republic, Washington, or a Robert E. Lee, for instance. There is nothing wrong with venerating our heroes and holding them up as models for our lives and present crusades, nor it there anything wrong with suggesting the the Habsburg monarchy of Franz Joseph I was a much nicer
place in which to live, and suggesting that a restoration of the ideas and institutions (and families) that helped create such countries is a good thing...as long as we are realists about it. Indeed, drawing
inspiration from Wilhelm Riehl’s ideas on guilds and federalism or von Radowitz (during post-Napoleonic
Prussia)on distributive justice and tradition, why, these are good things. I certainly realize
when I view the famous “Sisi” movies, made in the late ‘50s, that those days of Habsburg
glory are gone....but to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, there is never really any “lost” cause
because there is never really any “gained” one.  If viewing the Sisi movies (which glorify
the Habsburg monarchy) can inspire us hic et nunc, then good for them, and good for historical
memory, and even for a smidgen of nostalgia.

My son was a student at Randolph-Macon College. He made friends with a young black woman from a poor rural No. Carolina family who was the first person in her family ever to go to College.

After Freshman year she had to drop-out to earn some money and become eligible for the GI Bill.

She became a Chaplin in a company which had never ever been sent overseas and the recruiter for the Army promised her she’d never be sent overseas.

Of course she had been lied to.

She was sent overseas and what she saw she was unprepared for and she suffered a serious psychotic break.

This bright young woman (she visited with us during Christmas Vacation while a Freshman) has never been the same since.

That is what we are fighting for in Iraq. For the will to war whenever we damn well please and when we grind-up the lives of innocent young women in doing what-we-want-when-we-want that is just too damn bad, ain’t it?

Who gives a rat’s ass about what damn label some worthless toothless political organisation will get?

When a Nation sends gun-toting Mothers into combat zones thousands of miles away from home in any war (say nothing about unnecessary ones) that nation is dead.

DEAD

Since when is an invasion a “war crime?”

We could level Baghdad, Fallujah, and Ramadi if we choose.  We risk many American lives to save Iraqi ones.  The war may be unwise, and it may be unwarranted, but it’s being conducted in a meticulous manner.  Abu Ghraib and Haditha were exceptions and thankfully have been prosecuted.

Our enemies in both Iraq and Afghanistan, by contrast, seek to maximize the civilian body count on purpose.  They are the real war criminals, not we.

Mr. Gottfried,

Something the EXTREME right understands is that awakening the silent conservative majority will take much more than well-reasoned thoroughly documented attacks. The great difficulty we face as a political movement is trying to reach an audience suffering from apathy, laziness and various forms of attention deficit disorder. The apathy problem is compounded by that fact that we are living in a technological world where television, internet, cell phones, Wi-Fi, iPods and a million other gadgets pleasurably distract Americans from the creeping threats we face as a nation. Is it an exaggeration to claim that more Americans know what Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears did last night than they do what is going on in Iraq? Probably not. Americans do not want to be informed or even inspired. They want to be entertained. The post-paleoconservative movement must recognize this reality and find a way to capitalize on it. The liberals have Hollywood and extreme members of the right have their conspiracy theories and racial websites. Paleo-conservatives must find another way to educate the public in an entertaining way. Well-reasoned and thoroughly documented attacks are great when you are dealing with an audience that enjoys reading about politics, but our reach is limited when it comes to reaching Average Joe. And until we find a way to reach him, our movement is doomed to failure.

Mr. Roach asks “Since when is an invasion a `war crime?’”

Well, that was one of the “crimes” with which the Nuremberg defendants were charged - “conspiracy to wage aggressive war.” I say that not to suggest that Bush and company should likewise face such charges for the Iraq war - I think people like Paul Craig Roberts are just hyperbolic in their rhetoric in making statements like that - but to argue that it’s simply impossible to decide, from a supposedly legal perspective, what makes a war one of “aggression,” and thus a “war crime.”

Do conservatives now believe in the Hague?  What’s next--conservatives for world government?

Jupiter, you may dislike the same war as some of my confederates here, but you have a leftist outlook on the world, as best I can tell.

The Bush administration lied America into the Iraq war, which, if we were living in a Constitutional Republic under a Congress interested in in enforcing the Constitution, would have resulted in impeachment by now. But we are not.

Isn’t restoring the Constitution and forcing government accountability and subordination to it one of the points of this web site?

Roach seems to be torn between fidelity to the Constitution and fidelity to the policies that are a manifestation of illegal, unconstitutional actions—a real Leftist quandary.

Law is distinct from your opinion of right and wrong, Jupiter.  What law says what you say?

I should add as a matter of common sense that we may be woefully incompetent in Iraq, but it is different Iraqi resistance factions killing their countrymen for the most part, not U.S. forces, who are murdered on a daily basis by young men who endanger civilians by attacking us in civilian clothing in the manner of barbarians.

By the Nuremberg standard Iraq does appear to be an ‘aggressive war’ and thus a war crime.  Being of conservative inclination I don’t agree with the Nuremberg standard, though.  I’m ok with “worse than a crime, a mistake” - but certainly an impeachable mistake.

Jupiter:
“Let the international Court at the Hague decide. “

You put too much faith in international organisations.  Aren’t Americans fit to stand judgement on them?

Turning the Republican neo-con masses to whatever you want to call traditional Republicanism has as much chance as convincing an atheist in the benevolence of a loving God. These people still lie about belief in small government while grabbing largess with both hands. They want government off peoples back except for when they want to enforce their rules on people they don’t like. They are hoping McCain picks another Scalia or Thomas to the Supreme Court so they can throw the Constitution on their 4th of July Bar-B-Ques.

They are self-righteous and deluded and ignorant by choice. They prefer their leaders the same way and white and mouthing off pointy headed talk about post-paleo-neo-traditionalism is a dog that don’t hunt.

Seems to me that with 2 million Iraqis having left Iraq, and another 2 million internal refugees with hundreds of thousands dead or seriously injured, this war can be judged as brutal as most others in recent memory.

Note there is nothing in my comments that would suggest that I approve of the war in
Iraq or that I wish to congratulate W and his neocon buds for unleashing it. What I am
saying is that some good came out of it, namely the overthrow of a sadistic mass
murderer who before his removal had killed thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of
his countrymen. Moreover, the war has been carried on from our side with far, far less
willful destructiveness than the US showed in any earlier war that it waged. I’m also
skeptical about the numbers that are thrown around about “millions” fleeing from Iraq
because of our presence. These figures invariably sound inflated and their users fail to
take into account that most Iraqis would move here or to some other first-world
country in a heart beat if they could.

“Someone who recently distinguished himself by doing this is Marcus Epstein, who pounced on that onetime rightwing publication Human Events,”

He also exposed the geeks at LewRockwell.com for their hypocrisy on race and their desire to be liked by the far-left (good luck with that, Lew).

“Do conservatives now believe in the Hague?  What’s next--conservatives for world government?”

Indeed.  In the happy event that George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and Bill Clinton are ever put on trial for their numerous, vicious crimes, that trial must take place here in the USA, presumably in Washington.  Sending our Consuls off to Europe to be tried by socialist internationalists is not an option for authentic conservatives.

Exactly, in what sense is the war in Iraq “restrained?” From a financial perspective, it is already the second costliest war in history. We should also acknowledge that this war was entirely fraudulent—Iraq did not have any WMD, or connections with al-Qaeda, or any plans to invade the United States. (In Gulf War I—love it or hate it—Iraq really did invade Kuwait.)

So while some anti-war conservatives argue that the war was a strategic blunder, it still doesn’t take away from the fact that it was also a war crime.

Civilized societies practice justice. Therefore, we should all seek to bring Bush, Cheney, et al up on charges of war crimes.

“Two, postpaleos do not intend to “take us back” to the “old movement,” which is the fantasy of a golden age of American conservatism that never existed, or at least not in the stable form that the nostalgia-buffs believe it did”

Agreed. Be as it might, we will not restore Eisenhower’s America, or Coolidge’s America.  Like it or not, this is America.  As worse as it often seems, I wonder if someday we will yearn for ‘Bush’s America’ (yikes!).

GREAT post.  This is what I have been saying again and again, and I’m afraid Paul Gottfried said it better.  What Paul Gottfried and Chris Roach are advocating for “post-paleo” conservatives is the rhetoric of the survival, the tactics of the future.  Paul Craig Roberts and antiwar.com represent the tactics of the past, which worked about as well against the neocons as the outdated Prussian Army against Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt.  We need less Chomsky rhetoric and more “blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard” rhetoric.  I realize that most of our disagreements here are more about rhetoric than policy, but rhetoric is important and this is a matter of survival or death.

Once again, I find myself an old fogey.  The assumption here is that the the Conservative Movement was a matter of magazines, an assumption natural to us writers looking for markets.  But when I was with the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists it was a matter of books, and some of the books are still part of a useful canon — The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Rationalism in Politics, even The Conservative Mind.  And there were some excellent works that didn’t make the canon then because gatekeeper Buckley was a diehard McCarthyite — a neocon.  I think of some of Peter Viereck’s writings, worth reading even today and even when he was wrong.

America is a dying nation that we can’t save even if we should (a dubious proposition). Maybe we should turn our attention to secession. And maybe we should revive the militia movement while we’re at it.

“What I am saying is that some good came out of it, namely the overthrow of a sadistic mass
murderer”

Paul
As someone of your intelligence must realise, you have backed yourself into a corner from which there is no escape. The above comments by Jupiter and Spartacus are spot on. Saddam and his officials may have been a match in evilness for Bush-Cheney and company, but that does not come close to excusing the war. Need I list the endless horrors that the war has unleashed on Iraq and the horrors that have ensued for Americans? The point that you avoid is that there was no reasonable justification for initiating the war. Indeed, the reasons given for invading Iraq have all turned out to be deliberate lies. The truth that has emerged is that the war was really initiated at the behest of Zionists to inflict chaos on Israel’s enemies and to result in their Balkanisation.  And no, it is frequently not possible for conservatives to “make well-reasoned and thoroughly documented attacks” without mentioning the very obvious “elephant in the room”. Either conservatives strive to find the truth about their world or they become like everyone else, easy fodder for manipulators.

On the big picture question of tactics for a revival of conservatism, I’ll paste what I wrote earlier here at Takimag.com:

We have no choice, I believe, but to slowly and steadily chip away at the intellectual core of the dominant leftism, doing battle where our work is easiest (genetics, history, psychometrics), and thus opening up the gates for a more thorough reconsideration of the system by thoughtful and intelligent people.  In spite of our pretensions of being an equal and democratic nation, power is more concentrated in the hands of high IQ elites than ever.  Lead them away from their current path, and our natural allies in the peasantry will follow.

Consider how much more effective the secular left’s campaign has been, focusing on rigid control of universities, publishers, Hollywood, the print and television media, and other agents of culture.  I’d take NBC and Harvard--or their equivalent--over an election victory any time.  We can learn some lessons from our opposition.  Average Americans talked like half-baked sociologists, mouthing platitudes dervied from people they never heard of--Boas, Kallen, Croly, or Dewey. Such zombie-people are easily hitched to the left-liberalism and right-liberalism of our two major parties; they are as pliable today, as they were resistant only 40 or 50 years ago.

Mr. Gottfried, if you’re still reading these comments, I’ve got a couple questions.  Do you distinguish here between those to the left who support the hegemonic ideology and those who oppose it?  I’m thinking specifically of the late Paul Piccone and others at Telos.

Second question.  I agree with you 0 about stale symbols and narratives that now only hide what’s really going on.  I wonder if you’d include all the loose talk of “just war” going on now (even in some of the comments to your post), considering that it was once meaningful as part of a nomos of the earth which disintegrated a century ago, and which has by now disappeared almost entirely?  It’s been said that these relics of the jus publicum Europaeum have now degenerated into “empty normativism”.  Is this 19th-century “just war” discourse also misleading and even harmful?

The left/neocon alliance has made the work of us post-paleos easier. We are the only coherent anti-establishment group around. We don’t have serious competition from Naderites or Kucinich acolytes. We can have fun and actually be the “hippies of the Right” that Ayn Rand accused us of being all those years ago.

I am sick of neocons “taking over” (the take over has not always been hostile) once conservative institutions, publications, etc. Surely there is a struggling neocon or mainstream conservative institution open for takeover back. I think turnabout would be fair play. Any ideas? If so, maybe we shouldn’t announce them publicly.

So 100-150k+ Iarqi casualties, and 4k+ US dead and 25k+ wounded is now lauded at Taki Mag as “not unprecedented” and “the least vicious and the most restrained” of US overseas “interventions?”

Least vicious?  Like a stilleto is less vicious than a howitzer, which is less vicious than, say, napalm?  Well, sure, we’re still in rough numerical range of the El Salvador and Nicaraguan proxy wars of the 80’s.  But I think we’ve exceeded our friend Pinochet’s 3-4 thousand, or the Shah’s couple thousand (roughly?) SAVAK dead.

Tens of thousands dead, and millions of refugees, is a world historic tragedy.  Making relative light of it, “we still haven’t butchered 2 to 3 million like we did in SE Asia” is Orwellian moral idiocy worthy of the “neocons.”

And it’s now a embracing a “liberal” shibboleth to assert oil is at the center of the conflict? 

You guys are on crack.  What ever reason do we - in terms of real politik - have to be in Iraq?  Other than the desire to paste a bunch of Arabs in revenge for 9/11?  It was oil that drove us to “liberate” Kuwait in 1991. 

Other than hatred for Muslims, and sentimental attachment to Israel, we have no other reason to be there. Oil is in effect, the only “real,” overarching national interest we have in the region.

I mean, come on.  Christopher Roach continues to astonish.  Last I checked, Fallujah was pretty well flattened.  With a little more elegance than the Russians took out Grozny, but pretty brutalized & flat nonetheless.  And “Pre- emptive” war is criminal, no matter what he says.  Which means the Bush claque is waging an illicit war, and so guilty of war crimes.

One thing I can agree with, though:  Certain terms have lost their efficacy.  The word “conservative” is pretty well bankrupt.  I quit reading NR and The Weekly Standard six years ago when the prose became too warped too handle.  Too many more articles minimizing the horror of what is happening in Mesopotamia, and making utterly stupid assertions that the 30-40 trillion bucks of oil there is not the single most salient geo-political fact about the place..

Well, I can only handle so much moral and political idiocy.  If keeping those sorts of facts in mind is “liberal,” I guess that’s maybe what I am.

This is longish, but I try to address a few points.  The Contras were the good guys.  So was the Shah.  And the Iraq War, while not in our interest in any real sense of the term, is colored by two things.

One, as you yourself acknowledge, Charles, other wars, including Vietnam, had much more collateral damage.  And, second, as Gottfried pointed out, the moral cost of war upon a people is affected by the status quo ante.  Saddam was brutal and murdered perhaps 100,000 of his own people since the First Gulf War.  When a regime is as brutal as that, the costs of war are lessened, but certainly not diminished to the point of insignificance. This does not give us a moral right to intervene solely for that reason, but it does affect moral criticisms of our actions once war is prosecuted.  We should not be in Iraq because we have no real interest there, the primary casus belli in WMDs was exaggeratted and proved false and that was made plain shortly after Baghdad fell. The material cost of US occuption on Iraqis, however, has been minimal by historical standards and much of that cost has been self-inflicted by various Iraqi fashions and not the actions of US forces. 

As for “preemptive” war always being illegal, who says?  I haven’t heard anyone talk about “illegal wars” since the Left harped on the El Salvador mission in the 80s. We should pursue wars deemed necessary for our national interest.  The international order is something of an anarchy and has been since 1990.  This appreciation is central to any conservative foreign policy, which must emphasize sovereignty, our collective right to survive unmolested by other nations, and the lunacy of submitting to institutions run by hostile forces such as the UN. 

The international order has broken down; for at least a half-century, there are no clearly legal or illegal wars.  All we can hope for is that combatants be restrained in their actions once war is prosecuted; on this, thankfully, there is much consensus. 

Fallujah was flattened primarily by close combat (not artillery, as in Grozny) after weeks of leafleting and after the civilians departed.  It was a source of terrorist resistance to US occupiers after the US soundly defeated the Iraqi Army.  Such un-uniformed and disorganized resistance to occupation is illegal under the law of war.  Whether we belonged in Iraq or not is irrelevant to our duties as occupiers and the duties of un-uniformed combatants and civilians under the law of war.  They are obliged to submit; if they don’t, we have a legal and moral right to kill them, particularly as we did so in Fallujah at the behest of the recently proclaimed sovereign Iraqi government. Sorting out that hornet’s nest with extreme prejudice was the least stupid and most clear-headed thing we’ve done since the mistake of going to Iraq.

The excessive focus on the human rights of Iraqis by conservatives who are supposed to be partisans for our own people and against wars undertaken in the name of human rights is disturbing.  Once you say all people are equal everywhere and deserve the same rights without regard to accident of birth, then why aren’t our duties to protect foreigners oppressed overseas whom we can easily assist equal to our nation’s duties to its own citizens? What was wrong, for example, about the Liberian intervention? This, incidentally, is the logic of neoconservatives.  On the primary and secondary steps of this chain of logic, much of the maudlin anti-war right is in agreement.

Simply as a matter of rhetoric, it is far more effective in appealing to conservative-minded Americans to emphasize that most the people in the Middle East are strange aliens with illiberal values that are undeserving of our forces’ sacrifices on their behalf.  Because, Iraq, as dumb as it is, is in fact pursuing a liberal object based on a universalist view of the human right of everyone to an American-style regime. I don’t think Iraqis or anyone else deserves such a regim; it must instead be earned.  At this point, the best thing the Iraqis can hope for is an enlightened despot, and the US is too stupidly concerned about their human rights to endorse one.

There is something rarefied and useless with the endless post-mortems of the justice of the Iraq War and the events of 9/11.  We must act today based on the circumstances of today.  We should concern ourselves with these post-mortems chiefly because they should guide future conduct.  It would have been preferable, for instance, if the US never allowed chattel slavery, but it did and, having done so, there were other more just choices than destroying states’ rights and half-a-million Americans to be rid of it.  This is to say that even in addressing injustice we must be both just and prudent.

How to preserve US interests today having gotten embroiled in Iraq is the question of the hour, not whether it was wise to do so at first. Clearly it wasn’t.  There are mistakes of action and innaction.  It would have been wise to wipe out al Qaeda before 9/11 and before that not to be so involved in the Middle East.  But we are where we are, and we cannot right every wrong that has come down the pike, nor easily reverse every mistake. We should chart a way forward.  For instance, any withdrawl from Iraq will impact the price of oil, the power of al Qaeda, the liklihood of others states harboring terrorists or developing WMDs, the power of US deterrence, the perception the US is a paper tiger, the instability in the region, and all the rest.  I believe this is a price worth paying, as the costs of staying are higher.  But I acknowledge that cost and think decision-making should be made in that fashion, not through exquisite Kantian-style moral reasoning divorced from the chief objects of our foreign policy:  national independence secured through military power and appropriate deterrence to threats.

It would have been wise to wipe out al Qaeda before 9/11 and before that not to be so involved in the Middle East

Do you mean right after the Cold War or after the “liberation” of Kosovo?

Mr. Roach, you are either dishonest or, in the age of the Internets, very confused about your audience at takimag.

I can see that the Shah was the good guy by the benighted standards of the Middle East.  I’m not sure how the Contras qualify though, other than by being pro-US.

Chris Roach:
“Whether we belonged in Iraq or not is irrelevant to our duties as occupiers and the duties of un-uniformed combatants and civilians under the law of war.  They are obliged to submit; if they don’t, we have a legal and moral right to kill them...”

I guess we have a legal right per Geneva.  I’m not sure if an illegal occupying army has a moral right to kill un-uniformed insurgents though.  By that standard an (eg) Chinese army occupying Australia has a moral right to kill Australian insurgents.  Is that your position?

“The excessive focus on the human rights of Iraqis by conservatives who are supposed to be partisans for our own people and against wars undertaken in the name of human rights is disturbing.”

It is not excessive to demand that the United States military not militarily aggressive against a sovereign country and kill its people. This has nothing to do with “human rights,” or “liberalism,” but with the Christian concept of just war.

You keep forgetting a very elementary fact: the war in Iraq was unjust and therefore our presence, and our every action, is also unjust.

We shouldn’t just look at it from a strategic perspective. Strategically, Genghis Khan’s massacre of Beijing was brilliant and successful, but nevertheless a wicked and inhumane act.

Were you demanding that the Afghan resistance submit to Soviet rule after 1979? Was it wrong for the United States to finance the Mujahideen?

We shouldn’t fall into the simplistic partisan trap that automatically associates certain arguments or catchphrases as “leftist,” or “liberal.” If Leftists make much ado about Iraq being about oil or imperialism or empire conservatives shouldn’t automatically stop making such arguments. Conservatives oppose Leftist ideas not because Leftists are against imperialistic wars, the military industrial complex, and massacring civilian populations, but because they believe in egalitarianism—and all its implications—globalism, socialism, etc.

The Iraq war was a war crime, not just a strategic blunder, and conservatives should be the last people to make excuses for such terrible lawlessness.

Let me respond to just a small sampling of Mr Roach’s wisdom:
“power is more concentrated in the hands of high IQ elites than ever”
eg. Bush, Cheney, McCain? (try substituting “psychopaths” for “high IQ elites")

“There is something rarefied and useless with the endless post-mortems of the justice of the Iraq War and the events of 9/11.”
You couldn’t be more wrong. If you bothered to study recent American history a little more carefully, you might discover that small, interconnected groups of people have had a disproportionate role in much American evil. For example, Prescott Bush and his protege Nixon, Nixon and his proteges Cheney and Rumsfeld, and George Bush I and II. If there had been a full and thorough reckoning (and not pardons from the likes of Ford) of the misdeeds that were associated with people like Nixon and Reagan (eg Watergate, October Surprise, Iran-Contra), then it is highly likely that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, George Bush I and II would have been discredited long ago and would never have been deemed fit candidates for the offices that they subsequently filled. Similarly, if the role of various individuals in tricking Americans into support for the Iraq war is forgiven, then it is highly likely that these individuals will persist in their evil.

Anyone who studies the events of 911 fully and with an open mind will come to the conclusion that there is no doubt that various high-placed individuals in the American government (eg Cheney and Myers) were complicit in the attacks. What inspires 911 truthers to press for a full investigation is not just that these individuals might be exposed and some small measure of justice accorded their victims, but that the manipulators behind the likes of Cheney might also be exposed. 911 is perhaps unique in the extent to which the power elite displayed their hand. Exposing this elite and bringing them to justice would be enormously beneficial (not just for America).

I should have been more clear before about moral rights of occupiers.  Does an occupier in an unjust war have a moral right to authority?  I’m not sure.  The old law of war idea was yes.  Peasants were supposed to be indifferent to which of Europe’s kings were governing them. If they took up arms, it was illegal and also considered wrong because it invited reprisals against civilians.  In Poland, the Home Army ceased most of its operations after massive German reprisals, while the communist resistance partisans continued.  Further, unlike leaderless resistance groups, they were subordinated to the Polish government in exile and wore uniforms and such-like, particularly during the battle of Warsaw.

Perhaps just saying that guerrilla activity was illegal was enough; there are times when breaking the law may be justified, but the punishments are to be expected upon capture.  Take the example of this young Marine, Jermaine Nelson, out in California.  He refuses to testify against a squad-mate who saved his life in a war crimes prosecution.  Is it legal? No.  Is it the right thing? It may be.  So, Simon, I’ll retract that part of my earlier statement, and I agree that there are complex factors related to this issue, and that it was a step too far for me to make the point as broadly as I did before.

On the 911 conspiracy idea, Ian, well, let’s just say that it must be comforting to think that there are super-competent people behind the scenes of life making everything that happens happens. I would more often chalk up to incompetence that which can be explained with super-secret plans and uber-government-competence.  Exhibit A are our various missteps in Iraq, which shows anything but a super-competent government.

“I would more often chalk up to incompetence that which can be explained with super-secret plans and uber-government-competence.  Exhibit A are our various missteps in Iraq, which shows anything but a super-competent government.”

Ah Christopher, the weary old incompetence defence. Under-estimate your enemies at your peril. In fact, there is strong evidence that Mossad did much of the dirty work on 911. You could try doing a Google search on Urban Moving Systems (a Mossad front company run by a Mossad agent called Dominic Suter) and you might discover some interesting facts about their apparent involvement in 911. Would you call Mossad an incompetent organisation? The failure of multiple arms of the US government to respond to the hijackings was not incompetence, it was (as has been well documented by Griffin and others) due to deliberate sabotage and the deliberate creation of confusion. For example, there were multiple emergency drills involving iamginery plane hijackings and the insertion of virtual planes onto radar screens and the like. All this was happening at the same time as the real-life 911 happenings. Only the naive could swallow the government fairy tale for what happened on 911.

Regarding your exhibit A: What makes you think that the people behind the Iraq invasion have stuffed up? It all depends on what your definitions of success are. If the real aim was to initiate a process of Balkanising Israel’s enemies in the Middle East (and if you regularly read Anti-War you would find plenty of evidence to support that view), then it could be argued that the invasion and occupation have been highly successful. If George Bush had asked my opinion before the invasion what the outcome would be, I could have fairly accurately predicted what has happened. I certainly don’t claim any expertise on the Middle East, and there were likewise plenty of experts in America and elsewhere who knew that the invasion would end in disaster. Bush and Cheney are evil, but they are not idiots. They would have been well aware of the likely outcome of the invasion.

I believe Christopher that you suffer from the fatal political disease of insufficient scepticism of government.

I agree that we need to attack the enemy as Dr. Gottfried suggests, but how, in what venue, where, etc. A webzine like Takimag is great. It is a parallel or alternative institution. As is Chronicles. As is Amcon regardless of what you think of their recent direction. As is http://www.conservativetimes.org (shameless plug). So there is a definite place for that.

But, quite frankly, if I was an uninitiated outsider looking in, I would probably think that most paleos are grumpy complainers. Cursing the darkness, but not lighting many candles. I think it is easy to fall into a pattern of complaining about the neocons in forums read by other paleos and think we are striking a blow. I pick up on a lot of preaching to the choir in paleo circles.

So a question would be how to get our message out to the not yet converted. I don’t know the answer. Are there neutral forums we could utilize? As I suggested above, is there a struggling neocon organization we could take over? Can we endow a chair? Fund research? Groom candidates? The bright minds and leading lights need to give this some thought.

9/11 Truthers, whether they’re right or wrong, actually are the quintessential conservative because they recognize that the greatest threat to liberty always comes from one’s own government, and not a foreign scapegoat.

Interesting analysis. However, I think the “postpaleos” described here will be similarly ineffective because of its ideological component.

There is another, more viable subset of paleos - I would have called them “postpaleos” myself if Prof. Gottfried had not beat me to the name - who are more interested in being good, decent, and faithful than they are in being a particular brand of conservative. That’s not to say they don’t identify as conservatives (they usually do), but they are not “movement” conservatives. They are movement traditionalists, movement religious believers, movement agrarians, movement communitarians, movement pro-lifers, and movement proponents of various other worthy ideas and causes. If they are not “postpaleo”, they are at least post-ideological, and because they focus on the trees instead of the forest they are capable of making effective alliances with people who wouldn’t know a paleo-conservative from a paleontologist.

Hey Jupiter

If I am an “insane corrupt bastard” then a clever fellow like you should be able to make mincemeat of me in a debate that sticks to the facts rather than just throws wild aspersions at my character. See how you go responding to any of the 911-related issues that I have raised in recent times.

p.s. If Bush really is “quite happy and laughing at the the 9/11 truthers” then you might try explaining why Bush and Cheney refused to allow any records to be made of their interview with the 911 commission and refused to be questioned separately about their actions relating to 911. Nothing to hide eh?

Let me suggest that the prefix “paleo” be dropped once and for all.  This cannot be emphasized enough: once someone is branded paleo anything, they have be relegated to the past, to the age of dinasours.  The have become irrelevant. To call oneself paleo is to appropriate an essentially derogatory, or at best quaint, label, especially in a forward-looking democratic nation.  To be “paleo” is to invite comparison with neanderthal.

What Ron Paul conservatives most need is proper marketing and some style, a make-over of sorts.  I don’t believe people on this site are serious about assuming power - too damn pure and holy.  Attaining power has always - always! - required getting one’s hands dirty and making shaddy bargains.  If everyone is an enemy, even the folks at The New Criterion!, then enjoy the isolation and get used to heckling from the sidelines.

I suppose Roger Scruton is also “one of them” because he publishes in The New Criterion and is not at war with the neocons?  Is anyone pure enough?

Sebastian, perhaps we should drop paleo. Traditionalist might be better. But conservatism is inherently about the past, unless we are all faithfully dedicated to conserving the current status quo. How can one be a forward looking conservative? Forward looking perhaps with regard to style, presentation, technology, etc. of the message but in the service of preserving, restoring the past.

Look at the Paul campaign. He wanted to restore the Constitution as originally intended. He wanted to abolish the Fed and return to the Gold Standard. He wanted our foreign policy to be more like the foreign policy of the Old Right. How is that forward looking? It is appropriately backwards looking in the hope of creating a better future, one with sound money and constitutionally limited government, for example. Perhaps the better future aspect needs more emphasis, but conservatism can’t not be backwards looking without ceasing to be conservative.

Chris Roach:
“Perhaps just saying that guerrilla activity was illegal was enough; there are times when breaking the law may be justified, but the punishments are to be expected upon capture.  Take the example of this young Marine, Jermaine Nelson, out in California.  He refuses to testify against a squad-mate who saved his life in a war crimes prosecution.  Is it legal? No.  Is it the right thing? It may be.  So, Simon, I’ll retract that part of my earlier statement, and I agree that there are complex factors related to this issue, and that it was a step too far for me to make the point as broadly as I did before.”

Thanks - yes, I think we’re broadly in agreement.  I certainly wouldn’t criticise American and British occupying forces who respond to insurgent attacks with lethal force, but there is also a case that where the occupation is illegal and immoral, un-uniformed insurgents are not acting in an immoral fashion by attacking the occupiers, even when the occupiers are my kinfolk. 
The real immoral actors are, of course, the men in suits back in Washington, New York and London.

@ Red Phillips

Thanks for your comments.  I see conservatism as a set of principles grounded in what has been tried, non-ideological yes, but also more than just nostalgia.  If one were living during the end of communist rule, a conservative would be forward-looking compared to the party functionary who wanted to preserve the status quo.  Perhaps more in terms of a return to reason - I do understand your point.  I suppose I’m a little pessimistic about Americans’ putative conservatism.  I meant to say this country is inherently forward-looking.