We Report; You Decide
The 18th Annual Meeting of the John Randolph Club was perhaps the most successful in its history, with the exception of the bad behavior of one invited speaker, who, not happy that a majority of the audience favored the other side in the debate on Saturday night, has made common cause with the ex-communist David Horowitz to attack his longtime allies.
The debate question was "Resolved: America Should Immediately Withdraw Her Armed Forces From Iraq," and the affirmative team featured Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com, Peter Brimelow of VDare.com, and the well-known leftist author Kirkpatrick Sale, who these days devotes himself to furthering the cause of decentralism through his Middlebury Institute. The negative team featured regular Chronicles contributor R. Cort Kirkwood, Chronicles' foreign-affairs editor Srdja Trifkovic, and William Hawkins of the U.S. Business and Industry Council.
You can find Mr. Hawkins' account of the debate here. Mr. Hawkins raises questions about the people we associate with (and whom he voluntarily associated with by accepting our invitation), but we'll leave it to the reader to decide whether our associations are less desirable than his.
As for the outcome of the debate, you can decide for yourself. Thanks to Antiwar.com, which is providing the bandwidth, you can listen to the entire debate by clicking here.
Entries(RSS)
To Leon Haller:
If you don't like my private life, then don't open your big mouth about it: it's private, anyway, so what the f*ck do you know about it? Nothing!
As for me being a "leftist" -- you are wrong, my friend. Eliminating gun controls, abolishing ‘civil rights’ laws, restoring free enterprise, slashing [abolishing!] the welfare state, abrogating NAFTA and other globalist treaties, etc -- I am for all of those things, as I have written on many occasions.
Thank you for replying. I wish I knew just what to ask you to draw out your wisdom.
That's interesting. I've heard such said of nationalism, and it would of course be preferred for patriots to embrace their nations out of extended love of real, lower levels.
However, modern society is fluid and interwoven - communities don't exist as they once did, and those that do like the remote Faroe Islands don't seem capable of retaining their young people.
The modern world is within a different paradigm as long as cheap fossil fuel abounds. Hawkins's view of geopolitics from a US nationalist vantage would seem politically expedient though exploitation of another nation is unChristian. Hawkins doesn't want to integrate the Iraqis into a larger American state but simply to take control of their oil. At least ostensibly, his desire isn't to build a larger American state to counter a rising China but to empower the US that he loves. He does wish for the world to be unipolar under the US, but this is distinct from the neocon desire of a world under one dominant humanist power (actually Israel might be their preferred dominator putting them in the same class as Hawkins, but for the sake of argument their true goals are ignored)
---
1. As long as his ego isn't bruised, he won't be opposed to returning or at least working with his (ideologically) natural allies once he realises where he belongs. 2. If it's ignored it becomes less of an issue.
If a juvenile says something terrible, he often isn't fully aware of what all he saying. So an adult is usually better off ignoring it, and the comment is soon forgotten.
I see too many petty fights among folks in political groups, and I've enjoyed reading Hawkins in the past. It kills me to see him act so immaturely, and I hate to see him drawn into the neocons. His view of the world will probably change and become perverted the longer he's among them.
@Frank (104):
"I see too many petty fights among folks in political groups, and I’ve enjoyed reading Hawkins in the past. It kills me to see him act so immaturely, and I hate to see him drawn into the neocons. His view of the world will probably change and become perverted the longer he’s among them."
Indeed. Perhaps the fact that he's been writing for FrontPageMag.com since 2002 may have something to do with his recent behavior.
I am once again astounded and embarrassed by the cavalier approach to simple questions of fact displayed on this site. If, for example, I had decided to speak at the debate, I would have spoken against hasty withdrawal, though there was much in the other side's arguments that deserve respect, and they clearly won the room--which had, by the way, few peaceniks or libertarians in it. The nonsense over poor Bill Kauffman is particularly embarrassing. Where do you people pick up such nonsense? Anyone who would insult another man's wife (and a woman he doesn't know!) because she is half-Armenian invites the contempt of any decent person. What sort of barn were these people raised in?
This discussion marks the unwelcome return of the rude, ignorant, and stupid brownshirts. (To distinguish them from the intelligent, polite, and well-informed racists whom I have normaly encountered and with whom I am often happy to engage in discussion.) These people are giving bigotry a bad name. When I used to know the people from the American Renaissance, they never spoke this way. Such language is the mark of the proletarian would-be revolutionary. They used to sit in cafes. Now they don't have to get out of their little rooms.
Note to these people, if that is the correct word, posting on this site. Daily Worker language (such as cockroaches, vermin, etc.) is not permitted. By the way, Iranian peoples (including Scyths and Armenians) belong to the Indo-European language family. Indeed, they belong to the Indo-Aryan group, a name that ought to brighten the day of every little nerd in their Hitler Youth video-game club. They are caught on the horns of their own dilemma. Which is definitive, geography, or religion and ethnicity? If Christian Indo-European Armenians are not "European" by virtue of geography, then, presumably, Turks from Constantinople to Berlin are. Hatred, in depriving them of the manners their mothers must have taught them, has also robbed them of their wits.
Perhaps we made a mistake in setting up this website. I know that I can barely bring myself to look at it, much less contribute to it. Despite the lies these people love to tell, the way meth addicts love to destroy their brains, there is hardly a subject we are unwilling to discuss with rational and informed people, who have some idea of how mature human beings discuss serious questions. Debating ethnic and racial issues with the likes of the Squealers and Hollers is like debating the merits of Botticelli with a high school art teacher sculpting garbage on an NEA grant. If the main effect of the internet is to give the illusion of speech and power to the products of American education, then it is time to turn the field over to David Frum. He belongs here and we don't.