A
WORLD THEY NEVER MADE
American
conservatives were completely bollixed by the end of the
cold war: without an enemy of Satanic proportions, they
felt . . . alone, and afraid, in a world they never made.
The Evil Empire was gone, and, in its wake, so was much
of the rationale for having a conservative movement to
begin with. After all, when William F. Buckley, Jr., declared
that the goal of his magazine, National Review,
was to "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!'", the advance
of the Marxist juggernaut was thought to be all but inevitable.
Conservatives, as well as lefties, considered the Soviet
Union and its allies around the world to be the wave of
the future, and they, in the West, were at best fighting
a rearguard action that many, such as the darkly pessimistic
Whittaker Chambers, thought to be too little too late.
The sudden implosion of the Soviet Union and its satellites
took much of the wind out of their sails: suddenly, their
members and contributors started drifting away, and, most
important of all, the money flow slowed to a mere trickle.
Something had to be done. . .
THE
CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP
Back
in 1952, it was young Buckley, the enfant terrible
of the nascent conservative movement, who declared that
"we have to accept big government for the duration [of
the cold war] – for neither an offensive nor a defensive
war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of
a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Forget
about opposition to confiscatory taxation, said Buckley:
conservatives must become apologists for "the extensive
and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous
anti-Communist foreign policy." The Right had opposed
warmongering during FDR's day – Buckley's father
was a staunch supporter of the America First Committee,
and when Bill Buckley was 16, he won the yacht club's
Community Service trophy by chalking up 13 wins for the
season in a boat called Sweet Isolation. But by
1956, when National Review was founded, Buckley
had matured – if that is the word – into a full-blown
unapologetic warmonger: he and his rotten magazine soon
transformed the formerly pro-peace conservative movement
into an adjunct of the War Party. Opposition to big government
was largely dropped, except on ceremonial occasions, in
favor of a fanatical anti-Communism that saw only one
solution to the alleged threat posed by the Kremlin: a
military confrontation. Not only was the end of the cold
war a cause of increasing poverty on the Right, but also
the source of political and spiritual demoralization,
what American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrell
Jr. called "the
conservative crack-up."
GOING,
GOING, GONE
Faced
with the political, financial, and spiritual meltdown
of the institutions they had carefully built up from nothing
– not to mention their own personal prestige and
income – the cadres of what by this time had come
to be called neo-conservatism looked high and low for
a new enemy to demonize. Of course, the Russians were
still around, but they seemed to be not yet done with
the implosion process. Sure, the Russkis have nuclear
weapons, but if their population keeps exponentially decreasing
all on its own, it won't be necessary for the US to launch
a first strike. In the time it takes to re-demonize them,
they may very well disappear.
IN
SEARCH OF ENEMIES
Saddam
Hussein is a small fry, and Osama bin Laden is a freelancer:
what was needed was a big country, like the Soviet Union,
only with a booming population, one which at least formally
retained its allegiance to Marxism-Leninism: China was
the only possible candidate for the villain's role in
a new cold war drama. One added feature was that, while
the Russians are considered white folks, albeit somewhat
Orientalized, the racial factor was a plus: the threat
of the Yellow Peril could be the subtext of their propaganda.
But there are certain disadvantages to this new line,
the chief one being that the Chinese military is a vast,
bloated welfare program for otherwise unemployable peasants,
who would be dangerous roaming the streets of China's
teeming cities, looking for work. Militarily,
the Chinese are decades behind the US, in spite of
the hyperbolic alarmism of our professional China-haters,
who like to imagine that the People's Liberation Army
is about to nuke Los Angeles. As to why they would want
to nuke their own best market – 40 percent of Chinese
are entirely dependent on export-driven industry –
is a mystery known only to these alleged advocates of
free enterprise. In any case, as John Schulz, a former
Voice of America correspondent and professor at
the National War College, put it in 1998:
"Nuclear-armed
China will not even be a regional conventional threat
for decades to come. The PLA's long list of systemic problems,
coupled with those facing China as a whole, constrain
military modernization efforts in ways that may ultimately
be insurmountable. 'Strategic planners" – whose views
are 'long term' – should thus be aware that China
will not be able to project and sustain offshore military
operations for at least thirty years. 'Strategists' who
think instead in global or regional (geographic) terms
can also rest easy; the PLA will be restricted to limited
"quick skirmish" capability over limited ranges offshore
during that time, and is already being outstripped by
other regional military modernization programs."
WHEN
CIVILIZATIONS COLLIDE
But
the warmongering faction of the American Right is not
too interested in facts: instead, they are big on emotion,
such as that displayed by our old friend John Derbyshire,
National Review's Sinophobe-in-chief. As I pointed
out in
my last column on this subject, Derbyshire's approach
to the problem of how to convert Chinese weakness and
dependence on the West into an overwhelming threat is
to project the struggle as a culture clash, instead of
a dispute between nations, in which two antithetical civilizations,
and not just aircraft, were in collision. We ought, he
wrote, to have bombed the captured plane, "without any
regard whatsoever to Chinese sensitivities, or indeed
lives and property." Not surprisingly, Derbyshire was
not too pleased with the way Bush and his advisors wisely
handled it: his piece in National Review was entitled
"America
Grovels," coupled with the obligatory subhead: "A
full kowtow." At the news that the words "sorry" had been
used, not once, but twice, Derbyshire was practically
frothing at the mouth:
"This
is folly. It is, in fact, very little short of madness.
The greatest danger to the peace of the world at the present
time is the rabid, psychopathological nationalism of the
Chinese, which is being carefully tended and nurtured
by the Communist dictatorship for its own purposes. That
monster has just been fed a big, nourishing meal by the
U.S. administration."
DEMONIC
POSSESSION
Here
is the language of demonization: "rabid." "psychopathological,"
mad dog, dog-eating
(according to NRO editor Jonah Goldberg) "monsters."
Mow 'em down! This is the emotion that the writer
seeks to evoke, and the rationale is that these are clearly
subhuman monsters. We are in a battle in which no quarter
can be given: Derbyshire cites Bill Gertz of the Daily
Moonie, er, uh, I mean the Washington Times:
""These are not nice people. They do not wish us well."
"They are tigers," adds Derbyshire, "who live only to
kill and eat."
DOIN'
THE MONSTER MASH
We
are back to the monster motif. But if anyone is truly
monstrous, it is him, for he clearly believes that
to even express sympathy to the family of the downed Chinese
pilot, was, in Derbyshire's bleak moral universe, a betrayal
of enormous proportions. It was, in his view, a concession
made to monsters. For you see, the Chinese are not quite
like us. It is difficult for anyone who has grown up in
the "Anglo-Saxon tradition" to understand the true perfidy
of China and its leaders. Yet Derbyshire seems to be confused
about just what it is he is describing. While initially
denouncing the Chinese government as "Leninist," and invoking
the specter of militant Maoism, he then goes on to describe
China as a "fascist dictatorship," and winds up conjuring
the ghost of none other than – yes, you guessed it
– Hitler.
HITLER
RETURNS
That's
right folks, we have another Hitler on our hands in Jiang
Zemin. Derbyshire avers that not only is China undemocratic,
but its state ideology is "centered on racial superiority."
Is it, really? Then where oh where are these proclamations
of Chinese racial superiority? How come we hear nothing
about this doctrine of "racial superiority" in the Peoples
Daily, or in any of the other state organs? To make
such a charge without offering any evidence, not
even a sliver of a quote, is an affront not only to reason
but to Derbyshire's readers: he expects them to swallow
this without question, and won't even do them the courtesy
of a citation. According to Derbyshire, China is
"In
short, a fascist dictatorship. This is the beginning of
wisdom about China. China's leaders are not pushing any
universalist creed. Fascism is never universalist. It
is introvert and parochial, a doctrine of autodidacts
and narrow, clouded minds. Hitler never started out with
any intention to Nazify Africa, or the Americas, or Indonesia.
He could not have cared less about those places, though
I dare say they turned up in his table talk from time
to time. His goal was to assert German control over what
he believed to be Germany's rightful sphere of influence:
Europe and European Russia. . . . Early 20th-century Japan
was not bent on world conquest, only a Greater East Asia
Co-prosperity Sphere – precisely what China wishes
to construct in Central Asia and the West Pacific."
CHINESE
ISOLATIONISM
In
other words, China is evil precisely because it is not
expansionist, not pushing a universalist ideology
on the rest of the world, and seeks only to develop in
peace. Derbyshire is correct insofar as he perceives that
we – or, rather, the US government – are the
universalists here, pushing our system on reluctant peoples
from the Balkans to Eastasia, and often imposing it at
gunpoint. The Chinese are indeed indifferent to
the fate of Colombia, and can't get too excited about
the niceties of Macedonia's internal politics; they don't
have spy planes buzzing our coast, and Fidel Castro has
yet to grant them a base in Cuba. If they stole our nuclear
secrets, or bought them from corrupt politicians, then
they probably haven't stolen as much as the Israelis.
And is the corruption of our politicians really their
fault? Perhaps it only confirms the contempt in which
Derbyshire claims they hold us.
FASCIST
AUTODIDACTS?
Oh,
those awful Chinese autodidacts, cut off from the wisdom
of "Anglo-Saxon" civilization, how could they be
so "narrow" as to prefer their own sovereign status to
the good old days of colonial subjugation? How could
their minds be so "clouded" with "narrow" nationalism
and "fascism – the two being equivalent, in Derbyshire's
view – as to resist absorption into the universalist
dominion of the West? Those Hitlerites! How dare
they hold on to their independence, in this, the age of
globalization? Why, everyone knows that the idea
of national sovereignty is an archaic relic, besides being
a symptom of incipient "fascism" – don't they?
THE
DRAGON, CHAINED
That
he presents no evidence for the alleged Nazi-fication
of the Chinese Communist Party is topped off by the utter
hypocrisy of Derbyshire's stance: In my previously cited
column, I discussed how he describes blacks as "emotional"
and mentally "feminine," while Asians are portrayed as
physically "feminine" but psychologically "masculine"
(i.e. rational). Considering his own racialist views,
for Derbyshire to accuse anyone of upholding a doctrine
of "racial superiority" is a bit much. What is shocking,
however, is the hyperbolic language employed to describe
not only the Chinese leadership, but the Chinese people
in general. After all, Hitler was elected by the Germans,
and if the Chinese leaders are the new Hitlers, then they,
too, must have at least the passive support of their own
people, even if they don't get to vote. What is interesting
is that Derbyshire also throws the Japanese in the same
pot, denouncing their "co-prosperity sphere" of the 1930s
and comparing it to the scope of China's ambition. Clearly,
Derbyshire believes that no Asian power can ever
have a predominant role in Eastasia – and that we
must go to war in order to prevent it. Here is the Derbyshire
Doctrine in a nutshell: Eastasia must become a permanent
colony of the US and its allies, a protectorate of the
Anglo-Saxon Empire, a dragon forever chained.
VEERING
NEAR KOW-TOW TERRITORY
Derbyshire's
dark vision of a Yellow Monster on the loose informs the
relatively muted but still
angry statement of National Review's editors,
which condemns the diplomatic solution as little short
of a "kowtow" – an appellation that underscores not
only the editors' opinion, but also their rather limited
vocabulary. Unlike Derbyshire, they think it's okay to
express regret over Wang-Wei's death, but to say sorry
for having violated their airspace when the plane landed
without permission "veers near kowtow territory." No mention
that the pilot requested permission to shoot the plane
down, and that this was not granted by ground control.
It was a military plane that could have contained anything,
and as far as we know the crew, for whatever reason, did
not answer frantic inquiries from Chinese air controllers.
From a strictly military point of view, not shooting
it down was the first big Chinese concession: after that,
it was the Americans' turn, and George W. Bush and his
advisors knew it. But none of this matters to the editors
of National Review, whose concerns are far more
elevated and ennobling than mundane worries over the fate
of mere mortals, such as the 24 crew members held hostage:
"No
doubt the administration considered these concessions
necessary to get the crew back safely and quickly. But
their return, though obviously welcome, should never have
been the principal concern of American policy. Our servicemen
are not more important than the objective they serve:
America's security, which includes our standing in the
world. Our adversaries and allies alike now have further
reason to believe that we are a sentimental superpower,
and thus a vulnerable one."
MACHO-MEN
OF NATIONAL REVIEW
Individuals
and their fate are never the concern of imperial overlords,
modern totalitarians, or power-mongers of any type, left
or right. To them, soldiers are cogs in the machinery
of Empire, and their fate can never be considered, the
justice of their death can never be measured. They refuse
to measure the human costs against the alleged benefits
of "our standing in the world." God help us if we are
suspected of harboring any sort of human sympathy: for
then we shall be forever tagged "the sentimental superpower"
– in other words, a nation of pansies, the kind who
like to get pushed around. I leave it to you, my
readers, to evaluate the psychopathology of this super-"macho"
stance: perhaps if there are any noninterventionist psychologists
out there, they could send in a paper on the "Psychopathology
of Warmongering." In the end, must we really go
to war in order to mollify the neurotic fear of inadequacy
that wracks the editors of National Review?
POOR
LITTLE JONAH!
While
leaving it to others to plumb the depths of that particular
cesspool, I note with unalloyed glee that Jonah Goldberg
is still in trouble over those nasty remarks about "dog-eating"
Chinese. "I will be in favor of apologizing the moment
they apologize for all those menus outside my front door,"
he quipped. Actually, it was mildly funny, but
not nearly as funny as the spontaneous reaction of Chinese-Americans
over at the website AsianAvenue.com,
which is collecting Chinese menus to deliver to Goldberg's
doorstep. Their point: "Hopefully they will notice that
the Chinese menus left at their doorstep are from America,
not China." Send your menus to:
AsianAvenue.com
Community Connect, Inc.
Attn: Chinese Menus
P. O. Box B
New York, NY 10159-000b
Well,
I was going to include in this column an analysis
of China-bashing on the Left, particularly the really
virulent
editorial in the New Republic that screams
"appeasement" and also raises the specter of Communism
unleashed. Am I getting old, or was it not that long ago
when they were praising the Moscow Trials as fully justified?
But I digress, and I've run out of space – and time
– and so the sins of the Left will have to remain
unpunished, at least for a couple of days.
