Not Your Father’s National Review
What held National Review together during its heyday was anticommunism. The kiddies who post at NRO either don't know this, or are embarrassed by it. Yesterday, Mario Loyola, commenting on the prospect of the Obama administration potentially prosecuting members of the Bush administration for encouraging torture, ruefully notes that there is historical precdent for this. According to Loyola,
During the 1952 campaign, John Foster Dulles, who was to be Eisenhower's secretary of state, fostered the impression that "secret agreements" had been reached at Yalta selling out large chunks of the civilized world into Communist slavery, and that the State Department was full of people who had intentionally facilitated the Communist takeover of China.
As a result, we had the McCarthy hearings once the GOP came to power, which Loyola, quoting Dean Acheson, describes as "the attack of the primitives." This is the same Mario Loyola who earlier chastised American leftists for not applauding George Bush for "fighting fascism," since American leftists "are the heirs to the European and American leftists who, during the Spanish Civil War, went to Spain to fight the rise of a fascist dictatorship," an action Loyola burbled was "their finest hour."
Loyola is hardly alone at NR. The magazine brought in Ron Radosh to trash Stan Evans' positive book about McCarthy, both Victor Davis Hanson and David Frum have wailed about the evils of Franco, and Richard Brookhiser has bemoaned conservative criticism of Yalta. Even when Communists are criticized at NR these days, it is because they were really Nazis. Jonah Goldberg's column today blames the Soviets for fueling "national-socialist movements around the globe." How long before the magazine devotes an issue to lauding the Abraham Lincoln Brigade's fight against fascism, or perhaps one to prasing the creative contributions of American Communists to Hollywood?
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"This is the same Mario Loyola who earlier chastised American leftists for not applauding George Bush for “fighting fascism,” since American leftists “are the heirs to the European and American leftists who, during the Spanish Civil War, went to Spain to fight the rise of a fascist dictatorship,” an action Loyola burbled was “their finest hour.”"
Disgusting. He must not realize what a kick in the teeth it can be for many Catholics to hear 'Spanish Republicans = good' (me included). The Spanish Republic was one of the low points for Catholics in the 20th century, along with 'revolutionary' Mexico.
MR. Piatak,
I clicked on the link for Mario Loyola's article but after reading a few lines became more interested in the advertisements. Hitler said after attempting to negotiate with Franco permission for
some troop passages through Spain,that he would rather have his teeth pulled than negotiate with that short and squatty Spaniard. This thought about prefering dental work occurred to me when I reviewed their main guest list for the 2009 cruise. Maybe the folks over at Taki Mag and Chronicles should get together and
rent one of those ancient,wind powered sailing vessels off the coast of Peru and sail East,since the Neo_cons will be on a more
luxurious cruise ship sailing West.
Whittaker Chambers, if I recall my "Witness" accurately, had some misgivings about Senator McCarthy early on based on the Senator's personal demons. There is no doubt in my mind given the venomous bile heaped on him that McCarthy was onto something with his Wheeling speech. It's just too bad there wasn't another viable standard bearer with Patrick McCarran being mobbed up and John McLellan easily tarred as a segregationist.
I think the good Lord wrote this country off when he called Robert Taft home.
So you're suggesting that McCarthy was right. I agree. The good senator's "witch hunt" from Wisconsin received scant coverage in publications like Time magazine. It seems the serious demonization from the gutter press took place after the fact, and continues to this day.
The real error of McCarthy and the anticommunists was to suppose that the communist threat could be chalked up to a simple international Bolshevist-spinoff conspiracy. Such an idea is simple and sexy enough to sell in an election, but it ultimately counts for little. Sympathizers with leftist ideals were indeed already deeply entrenched in the government and the academy but were smart enough to shut up; they simply cared about their careers more than their Marxism, which they knew was a futile and worthless pursuit. More attractive in their eyes was the prospect of destroying anything standing in the way of industrial materialism. I wonder, if FDR could have run as a Republican and avoided owing his office to the immigrants and her descendants, might he have allowed the Soviets to occupy Italy?
"The king must die." I've always thought that the imperfect king in this case was Joseph McCarthy of Appleton, Wisconsin,for he came too close to the truth about the role and influence of Communists and their sympathizers in the FDR and Truman administrations, all of which was verified by the Venona tapes. Why is it, I pondered, that the likes of that blackguard, LBJ, and even RMN could be resurrected, but the senator from Wisconsin was beyond the Pale? That question to the Deputy Editor of a well-known neo-con journal received a frosty response. In the same way that Whittaker Chambers is still persona non grata amongst the intellectoids, Joseph R. McCarthy remains an "untouchable" amongst the elites in governmenta and media.
Yet, in the days when it was a conservative and adult magazine, National Review backed and supported the senator's efforts; today, I suspect, its juvenile staff would find him "extreme."
For those interested in the true importance of McCarthy and the way he has been treated since his death, I suggest Arthur Herman's bio of the senator, but, much more so, I urge you to read M. Stanton Evan's, "Blacklisted by History. The king at least deserves a decent burial.
Equating communism with fascism,is,I'm afraid,just as prevalent among paleos.Goldberg is at least furthering his tribe's intersts.What the heck are paleos doing?
Why wasn't there a Robert E. Lee Brigade fighting alongside Franco?What were Catholic Americanos doing?Complaining about "pagan corporativism?"
American conservatives are the proverbial liberals who've been mugged.After turning to "conservatism" -old fangled liberalism- they get mugged again!
He who lives by liberalism,dies by liberalism.
Neo-conservatives seem to want to justify their move to the right by painting certain elements of the Old Right as fascistic or, in a few cases, in bed with the communists. Franco was of the Right and, yes, was a fascist, but he defended the Church and traditional Spanish culture, and was the enemy of the Spanish Left, which was supported by those Trotskyites who became the original neo-conservatives. In this deliberately confused world of the neo-conservatives, someone like ex-communist David Horowitz can get away with labeling those on the Right he detests as either fascist or communist-- whatever he can get away with. With the modern right being nearly as ignorant of history as the left, the neo-conservatives can get away with a lot.
When Jonah Goldberg explains fascism as communist inspired, is he lying or is he really that stupid? Fascism and Nazism were organic political responses to the tumultuous upheavals that Italy, Germany and Spain experienced after World War One. Lenin and Stalin were not backers of Fascism or Nazism.
How much lying and stupidity can the what passes for the American Right get away with? Apparently a lot. About a week ago, talk blabbermouth Mark Levin, probably the most intelligent of the syndicated talkers, explained that Germany never elected Adolf Hitler. Rush Limbaugh has made the same claim. Yet any educated person knows that Hitler, within the paramaters of multi-party German democracy, was as honestly elected as was George W. Bush or Al Franken in recent American history and maybe more so. The German Nazi Party, whether Limbaugh or Levin cares to acknowledge it or not, was by far the largest party in Germany after 1930. Levin and Limbaugh or either both very ignorant about modern German history or they are liars.
A movement based on dishonesty can not last forever. If Goldberg, Limbaugh and Levin pass for important conservative thought today then conservatism has crashed harder than the world economy. But most of you who post at this site know that.
Sorry for my typos. Should have proofed my post.
@Semipronius: The historic standard-bearers of Anglo-American "conservatism" are Edmund Burke and Margaret Thatcher. Both understood where the left-wing menace would end up, logically. Neither, regrettably, could understand just how deeply entrenched they themselves were in the menace. Thatcher, for her part, could not even understand that she was a Whig draped in blue.
"Fascism and Nazism were organic political responses to the tumultuous upheavals that Italy, Germany and Spain experienced after World War One."
Just a remark: Nazism was not "organic," nor particularly "fascistic." It was as modern and revolutionary as Communism, only more practical.
@11 NGPM
I'll agree with the Edmund Burke, but I'll have to nix Thatcher. The Iron Lady got lucky when disaffected urban youth voted Tory as a protest against Jim Callahan's 20% unemployment rate and 40 year mortgages. Fans of the Sex Pistols put her in office and so she quickly ran to Ted "The Grocer" Heath for advice. She was wise to implement his vision, but although she ditched government control of the telephones, she never could get rid of the National Health System.
Tom,
Thanks for reading National Review so I don't have to.
I grew up reading the mag at the school library, beginning around 1967, when I was 12. I soon saved some lawn-mowing money to buy a subscription and eagerly awaited each blue-bordered issue. I now realize the many flaws of NR and Buckley in those days, detailed in Paul Gottfried's "Conservatism in America." But it certainly had its merits.
I stopped reading it around 1997 when Buckley gave control of NR to a group of adolescents. Joe Sobran aptly called them "callow young men." Now they're callow middle-aged men. Sobran also said they were "the sort of men who survive purges." Exactly. As Gottfried showed, Buckley's cardinal sin was continuous purges of the "movement" until it was run by the likes of Jonah Goldberg (so snide he's impossible to read) and Rich Lowry (cursed with terminal dullness). Although these men are warmongering neocons, few have served in the military.
Lowry and Goldberg (both age 40) actually are under the 42 maximum age for joining the U.S. Army. So they could still volunteer and be sent, within a few months, to the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead they cower behind their desks and paunches.
The only decent regular writer they still have is John Derbyshire, an atheist. They do occasionally print somebody worthwhile, such as Roger Scruton.
But compare today's regular hacks with just some names from NR's lineup in the glory days: Sobran, Pat Buchanan, Russell Kirk, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Frank Meyer, Gerhardt Niemeyer, James Burnham, Will Herberg, Whittaker Chambers, Brent Bozell, Willmore Kendall, and Ralph de Toledano.
Herb Meyer, scribbler for NRO, took out advertising space on today's Limbaugh Show to flog his new book or DVD or something about western civilization. It sounded intriguing until I did some research online. He's apparently good friends with the Feith traitor. Limbaugh ought to be more careful who he accepts payment from -- or not.
To John Seiler, I had subscribed to National Review for 20 years. I read your post and wept. The difference between NR then and now is the difference between Joe Sobran and Jonah Goldberg.