BLOODTHIRSTY
PEACENIKS
Cheering
as the bombs fell on Belgrade, these former "peaceniks" proved
to be both more bloodthirsty and less forthright about it
than the rightists of the Cold War era: at least General Curtis
"Bombs Away" LeMay did not have any highfalutin' pretensions
or rationalizations for his bloodymindedness. We were at war,
and he wanted to "win" it. But the "humanitarian" imperialists
of the Third Way do not even pretend to be fighting a defensive
war; indeed, they glory in the fact that they have boldly
gone on the offensive, openly proclaiming their globalist
ambition and undertaking a merciless war against the very
concept of national sovereignty. The ruminations of Deputy
secretary of State Strobe Talbott, a former editor of Time,
on the "obsolescence" of the nation-state summarized the internationalist
predilections of the Western power elites: "All
countries are basically social arrangements," he averred,
"accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent
and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they
are all artificial and temporary." Talbott predicted that
by the end of the 21st century "nationhood as we know it will
be obsolete: all states will recognize a single global authority."
This, of course, is in his view a "basically positive phenomenon."
In the world of Strobe Talbott, the only permanence is in
the State, a planetary Authority that will countenance no
rivals – immortal, benevolent, and divine. Borders or
boundaries of any sort are barriers to the power of the new
global hegemons, and therefore politically incorrect:
ONLY
YESTERDAY
As
the Left has moved away from its anti-imperialist heritage
and taken up the cudgels on behalf of a self-righteously aggressive
foreign policy, the Right has gone in the exact opposite direction.
While it seems like only yesterday that conservatives were
reflexively militaristic, and the most consistent champions
of interventionism on a world scale, today they are the first
to confront any new crisis with an equally reflexive "isolationism,"
i.e. a traditionally American desire to stay out of what does
not concern us. The Gulf War of '90-91 saw this trend come
to the fore, with the leading opponent of conflict none other
than Patrick J. Buchanan. The combative conservative columnist
had worked for two Republican presidents, Nixon and Reagan,
who had vigorously prosecuted America's international war
on Communism, and Buchanan was one of the most vehement of
the Cold Warriors. His 1988 autobiography, Right
From the Beginning, is capped by a final chapter entitled
"Containment is Not Enough" that summarized the rightist case
for rolling back the Soviet empire by any means necessary:
"Because the Communist party is, at its core, a war party,"
he wrote, "every 'peace' agreement signed with it is a fraud
on their part, and an act of self-delusion on ours." There
was, according to Buchanan in those years, but one course
of action open to the US government: "The inescapable conclusion
is that the only way to bring an end to the East-West struggle,
the only way to bring true peace to mankind, is to eliminate
the root cause of the century's struggle, the Communist party
of the Soviet Union. Containment is not enough."
HOUSE
OF CARDS
A
few years later, the President whom Buchanan kept well-supplied
with fire-breathing anti-Communist rhetoric had signed a peace
agreement with the Soviet Union radically limiting the development
and deployment of nuclear weapons – and opening the way
up for glasnost, perestroika, and the self-elimination of
the CPSU carried out by Mikhail Gorbachev and his reformist
allies. When the Communist empire collapsed like a house of
cards, some on the Right patted themselves on the back and
looked for new worlds to conquer. But others were reminded
of the original conception of the conservative anti-Communist
crusade as a temporary expedient, an extended but supposedly
necessary diversion from the main task of building a free
society, i.e. rolling back Big Government on the home front.
And they began to wonder whether America's alleged moral obligation
to right every wrong, patrol every disputed border, had become
an intolerable burden.
FROM
TURKEY TO TENNESSEE
Buchanan's
1999 treatise, A
Republic, Not an Empire, relates what happened next:
"The
Cold war was an exceptional time that called forth exceptional
circumstances. A nation that had wanted to stay out of World
War II had declared by 1950 that an attack on Turkey would
be treated as an attack on Tennessee, that the 38th
parallel of Korea would be defended as though it were the
49th parallel of the United States. But when the
Cold War ended, the Cold War coalition collapsed and traditionalists
declared the time had come to dissolve the now-unnecessary
alliances and bring the boys home."
THE
NEW WORLD REALITY
Confronted
with the new world reality, a whole section of the Right began
to rediscover its lost heritage, the rich legacy of the biggest
antiwar movement in American history: the American First Committee
founded in 1940 by a bunch of college students and Midwestern
businessmen who opposed FDR's relentless drive to drag us
into the European war. As the rationale for global intervention
imploded, along with the Soviet empire, the history of the
Old Right was dug up from the cellar, dusted off, and reexamined
in a new light. Galvanized by the Gulf War and inspired by
Buchanan's vocal opposition to this, the first major post-Cold
War military intervention by the US, the so-called "paleoconservatives"
looked to their Old Right roots for insight: the prefix 'paleo'
means getting back to one's origins, getting in touch with
your roots, The arguments made by such Old Right stalwarts
as John T. Flynn, H. L. Mencken, and Garet Garrett that we
would win the fight against national socialism in the trenches,
and lose it on the home front, seemed prescient to those post-Cold
War conservatives looking for some ancient wisdom to cling
to. They took to heart Garrett's warning, made in 1952, at
the height of the Cold War, that "between government in the
republican meaning, that is, Constitutional, represented,
limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other,
there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other or
one will destroy the other."
As
conservatives looked around at the world of the late 20th
century in the wake of their great victory over Communism,
it was clear what had been destroyed. The old Republic was
dead, and a bloated monstrosity of an Empire had risen to
take its place.
LIKE
THE WALLS OF JERICHO
In
the name of "a New World Order," President George Bush launched
a war on Iraq that continues, under a Democratic President,
to this day: a merciless assault on an essentially defeated
and virtually defenseless people that kills 5,000 children
every month. When Buchanan launched his first presidential
bid, in 1992, he rallied his Buchanan Brigades with his electrifying
rhetoric, directly addressing the America's elites and vowing
"when I raise my hand to take that oath, your New World Order
comes tumbling down!"
THE
GLOBAL COLOSSUS
Buchanan's
rhetoric defined the new battle-lines clearly enough, years
before the Kosovo war: on one side, an internationalist liberalism
is asserting its right to intervene anywhere and everywhere
in the name of "human rights" and "democratic values," while
the patriots of every country unite in their opposition to
the globalist agenda. This is the major issue of the new millennium,
the challenge confronting both those libertarian sympathizers
on the Left as well as the Right who fear that freedom will
wither in the shadow of the rising global colossus. For what
is emerging through the mists of the new millennium is an
evolving world government, an interlocking directorate of
transnational corporate and political elites that increasing
resorts to the use of force to achieve its goal of global
hegemony.
THE
RULE OF THE ACRONYMS
Both
conservatives and those to the left of the Social Democracy
find themselves confronted by a system of global mercantilism
(or state-capitalism) in which transnational institutions
oversee and regulate most economic and cultural transactions,
and faceless bureaucrats accountable to no one decide the
economic fate of nations. Little wonder that both the left
and the right are rising up against the rule of the acronyms.
And it isn't just the WTO: as the European mega-state swallows
up the proud old nations of the West, and NATO approaches
the very gates of Moscow, the Old Left and the Old Right unite
against the New Imperialism – and a political realignment
is in the making.
DEFECTORS
FROM THE LEFT
The
rise of the paleoconservative tendency on the Right has its
parallel on the Left in the British "Living Marxism" group,
which evolved as a split-off from Tony Cliff's International
Socialist Organization into an explicitly libertarian analysis
of life in Tony Blair's New Labour paradise. The magazine
dropped its old title, calling itself simply LM and
denouncing what the editors called "a dangerous new mood"
in Great Britain and throughout the West:
"We
live in an age of caution and conformism, when critical opinions
can be outlawed as 'extremism' and anything new can be rubbished
as 'too risky.' Ours is an age of low expectations, when we
are always being told what is bad for us, and life seems limited
on all sides by restrictions, guidelines and regulations.
The spirit of LM is to go against the grain: to oppose all
censorship, bans and codes of conduct; to stand up for social
and scientific experimentation; to insist that we have the
right to live as autonomous adults who take responsibility
for our own affairs. These are basic human values that cannot
be compromised if we are ever going to create a world fit
for people."
DEMOCRATIC
SOCIALIST AIRSTRIKES
Ferociously
critical of the all-pervasive atmosphere of political correctness
that stifles free thought and action in Tony Blair's Britain,
the editors of LM enraged the British Left with their
devastating attacks on Luddite attitudes in the environmentalist
movement, and their debunking of the war propaganda churned
out by the government-aligned media during the Kosovo war.
On Kosovo, LM editor and London Times columnist
Mick Hume mocked Blair's moral pretensions: "So what did Tony
Blair mean when he told Parliament that the war is being fought
'for a moral purpose as much as a strategic interest'? What
moral purpose moved Mr. Blair to become the first Labour Prime
Minister to lead Britain into a major international war, involving
democratic socialist airstrikes on passenger trains, TV transmitters
and homes?"
WAR
AND THE NANNY STATE
But
why shouldn't socialist imperialism be just as rapacious,
relentless, and insufferably self-righteous as the capitalist
variety – if not more so? As Hume points out, the war
had more to do with the politics of Great Britain than events
in an obscure corner of the Balkans: "The war against the
Serbs is primarily about giving Mr. Blair's Government an
aura of moral authority and a sense of mission. It is about
projecting a self-image of the ethical new Britain bestriding
the world. It is a crusade." A crusade entirely consistent
with its socialist (or "Third Way") ideals: "The self-image
of new Britain which Mr. Blair's crusade seeks to endorse
is captured by touching pictures of British Army officers
bottlefeeding Albanian babies and brushing the hair of young
refugee girls separated from their parents. This is a nanny
state with a difference, claiming the right to act in loco
parentis for all those it deems deserving."
SEA
CHANGE
Every
once in a while the political spectrum undergoes a massive
shift, a switch in polarities in which right and left switch
sides on the war question. It happened after 1917, when the
Wilsonian internationalism of the liberals was overcome with
disillusion by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and the
secret codas that divided up the war spoils among the Great
Powers – and virtually ensured a replay of the European
tragedy– was revealed. It happened again in the 1930s, when
conservatives, and midwestern populists and progressives joined
together to oppose US entry into World War II, while the pro-Soviet
left agitated for the opening up of a "Second Front." The
Cold War brought on another polarity reversal, with the anti-Communist
right dropping its Taftian isolationism and signing on to
the deal proposed by budding young Cold War conservative William
F. Buckley, Jr., in a 1952 piece in Commonweal, is
which he launched into what was to be the keynote of the "new"
pro-war Right: as long as the battle against international
Communism continues, he wrote, "we have to accept Big Government
for the duration – for neither an offensive nor a defensive
war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a
totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Never mind all
that stuff about the free market and individual liberty –
that's just rhetoric we roll out every Sunday for the sermon,
and forget about for the rest of the week: instead, Buckley
advised his fellow conservatives to become apologists for
"the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to
support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy." We must
put up with "war production boards and the attendant centralization
of power in Washington – even with Truman at the reins
of it all."
HERE
TO STAY
But
now that the Cold War is over, and the alleged threat from
Communism is just a fading memory, the totalitarian bureaucracy
within our own shores shows no signs of being dismantled.
Instead it is not only bigger and more entrenched than ever,
but shows a disturbing tendency to extend its power internationally.
Conservatives were certainly taken in by this ruse, and are
now scratching their heads and numbly asking: what went
wrong?
IRONIC
VICTORY
The
celebration that greeted the downing of the Berlin Wall drowned
out anyone who might have ventured to ask: but who won the
Cold War, anyway? Well, the West, you say: the Good Guys won.
But the defeat of the Bolsheviks obscured the real news of
the nineties – the ironic victory of the Mensheviks.
THE
MENSHEVIKS
History
seems to have forgotten the old Mensheviks, or "minority"
tendency of Lenin's Russian Social Democratic Labor Party,
who split away in 1903, ostensibly over differences in defining
the nature of party membership. Lenin and his Bolsheviks,
or majority tendency, wanted a centralized cadre organization
of professional revolutionaries, while Martov, the Menshevik
leader, called for a more loose-knit and relatively undemanding
structure. But the real differences were over the basics of
Marxist orthodoxy, which the Mensheviks adhered to by holding
that a socialist revolution in Russia was impossible since
the country had never undergone a capitalist revolution and
overturned feudalism – a precondition for the existence
of socialism, at least according to the original Marxist conception.
Socialism, the Mensheviks averred, would be achieved as the
result of a long-term evolutionary process, not only in Russia
but throughout the world. The Leninists rejected orthodox
Marxist theory and instead proposed that the bourgeois revolutionary
stage of the "inevitable" development of socialism could be
bypassed in Russia if the revolution spread to Europe, where
the industrial proletariat was ripe for revolt.
ORIGINS
OF THE "THIRD WAY"
It
was Lenin and his Bolsheviks who made the 1917 Revolution,
and drove Kerensky and his Menshevik allies into exile, where
they fulminated against their former partners in the Russian
provisional government and merged into the anti-Stalinist
"democratic socialist" milieu, an historical footnote known
only to academic specialists and Marxist ideologues. The irony
is that the end of the Cold War turned out to be their victory.
In the first year of the new millennium, the social democratic
parties of the "Third Way" are in power in every major Western
country, and the Second International reigns supreme. The
Cold War was not a simple black-and-white struggle between
two completely antithetical systems, capitalism and communism,
but a three-way battle, pitting capitalism against both communism
and a Third Way, social democracy – and it looks like
our old friends the Mensheviks have finally come out on top.
THE
COMING COUNTER-REVOLUTION
A
movement is in large part energized and defined by its enemies.
Just as isolationist Midwestern progressive Republicans, disillusioned
liberals, and conservative businessmen came together in the
America First Committee to oppose the war plans of "that man
in the White House," so the opponents of New World Order globalism
on both ends of the political spectrum are increasingly coming
together to fight against the machinations of our latter day
Mensheviks, on all kinds of issues – but especially on
the question of war and intervention. This is the issue that
has always been the catalyst of the various polarity shifts
discussed above, the occasion for a major seismic event to
transform the political landscape, and it is the central axis
on which a new insurgent movement, a new radicalism, will
take shape. Anti-globalist, anti-statist, antiwar and fiercely
regionalist, particularist, and individualistic, the cadres
of the post-millennial radicalization are even now organizing
the Counterrevolution – working for the day when the
Mensheviks join the Bolsheviks on the dustbin of history.
Out of that struggle will come a new ideology, a critique
of the rising global oligarchy, that borrows the insights
of both left and right – and transcends both.
|
