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"Dear
Justin:
"In
your June 5 column, you say: 'So, today, with Buchanan the
only candidate who would stop the murderous war on Iraq, on
those grounds alone he is the one possible choice for
antiwar activists of the left as well as the right.' This
doesn't happen to be the case. I am for total non-intervention
– even more so than Buchanan is. He finds American interests
in some intervention; I find it in none. The principal difference
between Buchanan and me is that he believes a wise leader
(he) can decide properly when government should overrule your
freedom – as in when foreign intervention is warranted,
when you should be prevented from buying what you want from
overseas, when your constitutional liberties should be abridged
in the name of fighting drugs or immigration, and many, many
other areas.
"I
believe neither Al Gore, George W. Bush, Ralph Nader, or Pat
Buchanan is qualified to run your life – and neither am I.
I believe in you. You might believe I'm not worth supporting
because I have no chance to win. But any thought that Buchanan
is going to win is a fantasy. At the present time, the polls
show him with 2% and me with 1%. Given such figures, it would
seem you can make a much better statement on behalf of your
beliefs by supporting the candidate who actually shares those
beliefs.
"With
best wishes,
"Harry"
He
also graciously sent me the foreign policy chapter from his
new book, The
Great Libertarian Offer – an excellent chapter,
and a very readable book, by the way. As one of the few remaining
movement activists who remember the good old days before Jesse
Ventura and Bill
Maher were somehow inducted into the libertarian ranks,
Browne is practically the only movement leader of any stature
who still retains an interest in the Libertarian Party as
a vehicle for social change. He is a charming and knowledgeable
man, and a good candidate. (He is head and shoulders above
his critics – pygmies to a man – who carp and complain
that he isn't "purist" enough: this about a man who
would immediately get rid of most government as we know it!)
As for his foreign policy positions, they reflect the consistent
opposition to US military intervention overseas that has been
encoded in the Libertarian platform since around the mid-1970s
– thanks to Murray
N. Rothbard and Williamson Evers, who in the early days
had to fight off the Randians and others who wanted to enlist
the party in the Cold War. How come I know so much about the
Libertarian Party? I joined the party in 1974, and was active
in the MacBride for President campaign, the LP's second White
House bid, but the first I'd ever heard of – and
I had been looking.
A
LIBERTARIAN YOUTH
You
see, I had been an active libertarian from a very early age;
as a member of the libertarian faction of Young Americans
for Freedom in the sixties, which later made up the founding
cadre of the LP, I was there at the beginning. The first issue
of Reason arrived in my mailbox, way back when that
glossy anodyne was a self-stapled 16-page photo-offset magazine
that wowed its mostly teenaged audience. So I was a prime
candidate for recruitment: it was just that I couldn't find
them! My parents, who were all-too-familiar with my political
enthusiasms, sent me clippings about the founding of the Libertarian
Party, in 1972, but it wasn't until the MacBride campaign,
in 1976, that I actually met a real live member of the Libertarian
Party – and the next few years were a frenzy of political
activity. Back then, the libertarian movement was essentially
the Libertarian Party, and all the movement "greats" played
some sort of role in its internal politics – first and
foremost being Murray N. Rothbard, the libertarian social
theorist and economist, who for years was the Grand Old Man
of the LP, and guided it through its early successes. I stayed
in the party until 1983, playing a very active role, in association
with Rothbard, and ran as a candidate for office several times
in the San Francisco Bay Area, garnering at one point as much
as 8 percent of the vote in a race for State Assembly. In
1983, however, catastrophe struck. . . .
AN
ABBREVIATED HISTORY
That
was the year more than half the party walked out of the national
convention in a debilitating split from which the LP never
really recovered. Although the party's 1980 standard-bearer,
Ed Clark, got more votes, the really high point of the LP,
in an organizational sense, was the presidential campaign
of Ron Paul, in 1988. Paul had previously been a Republican
congressman, gerrymandered out of his district by party bosses,
and thankfully he has regained his seat – but in the
interim he agreed to take on the onerous task of running for
the highest office in the land on a hopeless third party ticket.
He garnered some 470,000 votes, and more importantly built
up the heretofore sagging reputation of the LP as up-and-coming
– "America's third largest party," we used to boast.
What he got in return was ill-treatment by his internal party
critics, a "left" opposition that did not so much object to
Paul's politics as they did to his cultural stance: he didn't
pander to "gays" and concentrate 90 percent of his energy
on the drug issue, he wouldn't mouth liberal platitudes about
abortion, and – far worse, in the critics' eyes –
both he and his charming wife Carol were themselves exemplars
of traditional American culture and bourgeois values: their
"lifestyle" did not involve smoking dope and dancing
'til dawn. In short, they were (and are) precisely the kind
of people that make up the overwhelming majority of Americans,
the Great American Middle that is yearning to be set free
of their bondage to the federal government – and naturally
the LP rejected them.
OUR
LIBERTARIANISM, AND THEIRS
I
won't go into a history of the Libertarian Party here, suffice
to say that, in the meantime, the hypnotic regularity of Libertarian
presidential campaigns has become a quadrennial ritual that
tries the patience – and stretches the pocketbooks –
of its remaining supporters. In spite of supporting a hefty
bureaucracy, the party apparatus does little other than put
out the monthly LP News, run a website, and send out
fundraising letters: the main activity is getting and retaining
ballot status. There is no internal education, and new recruits
are likely to be more familiar with the Jesse Ventura brand
of fruitcake "libertarianism" than the beloved cause of Ludwig
von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and the founding cadre of the
party. Amid much brouhaha, the national party leadership has
been touting the success of its membership drive, in which
they claim to have reached a membership of some 33,000 dues-payers.
An impressive achievement, on paper, but if you look a little
closer . . .
TERRORISM
AND LIBERTARIANISM – A TRULY ODD COUPLE
And
you don't have far to look. One of the featured articles in
the March [2000] issue of LP News vividly dramatizes
the principle that in politics, as in other aspects of life,
quantity is not quality: the breathless announcement that
Irv Rubin,
the "international chairman" of the Jewish Defense League,
has joined the Libertarian Party! The subhead reads: "JDL
head: Jews 'need the Second Amendment.'" We all need the Second
Amendment, but the JDL's endorsement of this libertarian principle
may be less valuable than the writer of this headline imagines.
After all, is it really all that great to have the "international
chairman" of a terrorist organization that openly and proudly
advocates violence, and has a long history of thuggery, suddenly
proclaim that he is a capital-'L' Libertarian and join the
party? Who's next – Osama bin Laden?
THE
LOW POINT
The
LP News article reporting
on this fusion of terrorism and "libertarianism" is a
classic of unintentional humor, and will doubtless go down
in the annals of LP history as the low point, marking
the final stage of its degeneration into a standing joke.
According to this mercifully un-bylined piece, Rubin was motivated
in part "by 'recent attacks on Jews," such as the shootings
in the Midwest last July." Huh? The JDL, like the Minuteman,
white supremacist groups, and other nutball outfits who have
armed themselves in preparation for some supposedly inevitable
apocalypse, operate in effect like criminal gangs. Rubin's
devotion to the Second Amendment to the contrary notwithstanding,
the JDLers want to keep their guns because they fully expect
and intend to use them. It used to be that all Libertarian
Party members had to sign a pledge, attached to their membership
application, that they abjured violence as a means to obtain
their political goals; not that they pledged themselves to
pacifism, but that they could not advocate the 'initiation
of force or violence." But one
of the five principles of the JDL is:
"JDL
upholds the principle of Barzel – iron –
the need to both move to help Jews everywhere and to change
the Jewish image through sacrifice and all necessary means
– even strength, force and violence."
Hel-LO?
Earth calling Libertarian Party – is anybody home?
Am I really the one and only libertarian on earth who thinks
that this seeming contradiction requires at least some explanation
– for we don't get any in this dopey LP News article.
Blithely rattling on, the anonymous author tells us all about
Rubin's career as the Jewish answer to – and mirror image
of – George
Lincoln Rockwell in admiring tones:
"Rubin
brings to the Libertarian Party a long history of political
and social activism – and an association with an organization
that has been both praised and condemned for its vow "to defend
Jewish rights, property, individuals, institutions, and honor
by any means necessary.'"
THE
JDL – A PROFILE IN TERRORISM
Let's
get a grip on whom and what we're talking about here: The
JDL was founded in 1968 by Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jewish neighborhoods
of New York City, first as a vigilante group like the Guardian
Angels and quickly moved into the realm of political hooliganism:
attacks on Arab diplomatic missions at the UN, and bombings
of Soviet tourism, trade, and diplomatic facilities. The FBI
listed the JDL as an official "terrorist" organization, and,
in the period from 1968-83, law enforcement officials ascribed
at least 37 terrorist acts to JDL members. According to the
Historical
Dictionary of Terrorism, by Sean Anderson and Stephen
Sloan (Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995):
"While
the International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events
(ITERATE) database developed on behalf of the United States
Central Intelligence Agency by Edward F. Mickolus recorded
50 such incidents from 1968-1987, making the JDL second only
to the Puerto Rican FALN (q.v.) as the major domestic terrorist
group. Nonetheless the JDL is a legally incorporated political
action group and has officially disavowed responsibility for
any violent actions carried out by its members. Bombings accounted
for 78 percent of all JDL terrorist activities; shootings
accounted for 16 percent; while arson attacks, vandalism,
kidnapping, threats, and verbal harassment accounted for the
rest."
ARMED
AND DANGEROUS
Rubin
has "a long history of political and social activism" alright
– it is the history of an organization of outright wackos
and racists who are, furthermore, armed and dangerous. These
are the same psychopaths who bombed the San Francisco branch
of the Iranian Bank Melli on January 26, 1981 and a JDL bomb
tore through the Iraqi UN Mission on April 28, 1982.. The
JDL planted a bomb in the office of impresario Sol Hurok,
who was targeted because he helped arrange performances of
Soviet ballet troupes in the United States – and killed
one of Hurok's employees. On October 11, 1985, the Los Angeles
offices of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee
(ADC) was bombed, killing the ADC director Alex Odeh, and
on August 15 of the same year 1985, a sixty-one-year-old Tsherim
Soobzokov, was bombed at his Paterson, N.J., home and later
died of his wounds. As Anderson and Sloan put it: "In such
attacks an anonymous caller would claim the action in the
name of the JDL, and afterward an official JDL spokesman would
disavow the group's responsibility. In 1987 several JDL members
were convicted on a variety of criminal charges." When Odeh
was killed, Kahane disassociated himself from the group and
went to Israel, where he founded the virulently racist Kach
movement. Kach advocates the forced expulsion of all Arabs
(and non-Jews) from Greater Israel, the creation of a theocratic
police state, and a relentless war against the Arab states.
"HE
GOT WHAT HE DESERVED"
The
death of Odeh did not disturb Rubin in the slightest: he publicly
stated that Odeh "got what he deserved," adding "I'm not crying
over the death of Alex Odeh. The only reason JDL was brought
into the picture is because Arab Americans were putting pressure
on the government to blame us for it." While Rubin's group
has not been caught breaking the law since the arrest and
conviction of JDL members for terrorist acts in the late 1980s,
Rubin's warnings about alleged "rising violence" against Jews
coupled with his intense desire to be able to get hold of
guns sounds an ominous note. Could the JDL be about to go
on another terrorist binge – just in time to associate
the LP with its demented activities? Although the innocent
victims of the JDL's terrorism have our deepest sympathy,
it will serve the LP right – what are they doing getting
in bed with this nutcase and his cult of deluded and violence-prone
followers?
LP
HAILS STREET THUGS
Naturally
the LP News does not mention the terroristic history
of its newfound allies: instead the JDL is described a "a
nationwide organization dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism,
racists, white supremacists," and "confronting them." Confront
how? The LP News admiringly relates:
"For
example, Rubin has personally been arrested more than 30 times
for agitating against neo-Nazis. And the JDL was denied a
permit to join a counter-protest against a Ku Klux Klan demonstration
in Washington, DC in 1999 after the group candidly told the
Park Service that its members would disregard police barriers
in an effort to physically prevent the Klan from marching."
LP
EMBRACES TIME BOMB
This
outright thuggery is lauded by implication, since the LP
News makes no other comment on this incident except to
note that Rubin has been arrested "over 32 times." Yeah, I'll
bet, and it probably should have been double that: this guy
is a walking time bomb, just waiting to go off. And it makes
one curious as to what other types of rallies and gatherings
Rubin would like to disperse with the fist of the JDL. At
the very top of his list are any public manifestations of
Patrick J. Buchanan's presidential campaign – and he
has already embarked on such a campaign in
alliance with the Libertarian Party. As the JDLers report
it:
"On
April 30th, fifty members of the Jewish Defense League allied
with half a dozen members of the Libertarian party confronted
Patrick Buchanan and his so-called "Buchanan Brigades" at
1823 Foothill Blvd in the city of La Canada. At a palatial
estate, 1000 adoring fans of this filthy antisemite had to
walk by the angry JDL members and a Libertarian contingent.
The JDL and its allies, armed only with megaphones and signs,
appealed to those people not to support this demagogue because
of the numerous antisemitic statements made by Buchanan. .
. . Due to the overwhelming police presence, and discretion
being the better part of valor, the league was forced to continue
its protest in a peaceful manner."
JDL
GOES AFTER BUCHANAN
Discretion
being the better part of valor my eye! If it hadn't been for
the heavy police presence, the JDLers would have been delighted
to spill a little Buchananite blood that day. The Buchanan
campaign is lucky they didn't bomb the place. And that's not
all: In a blatant act of intimidation, this creep Rubin had
the nerve to publish the home number and address of Sam Cohen,
the father of the neutron bomb and a Buchanan supporter who
spoke at the LaCanada event, asking JDL members and supporters
to contact Cohen and "persuade" him to stop supporting Buchanan.
Is this the kind of person that the LP is welcoming into its
ranks – and joining with in public demonstrations? If
so, then on those grounds alone I can never support
the Libertarian Party or any of its candidates, not even for
dogcatcher.
A
JEWISH MUSSOLINI
By
the way, Rubin stipulates that he "agrees with the Libertarian
Party on almost every issue except non-interventionism, arguing
that the LP should endorse the U.S. government's military
support for Israel." Oh well, sacrificing this principle will
be a small price to pay for the privilege of an alliance with
this strutting pumped-up fifth rate rabblerouser – his
loutish countenance leering at us from the pages of the LP
News like a Semitized vision of Mussolini: stomach held in,
arms pumped up like a poisoned dog's, a hostile glare emanating
from his fanatical staring eyes. "However," the LP News
continues, "on almost every other subject, Rubin said he endorses
LP positions – and thinks the LP and the JDL can work
together to accomplish mutual goals." Well, thank goodness
for that! One thing we have to say about the Libertarian Party,
instead of covering up its craven opportunism, the LP trumpets
it. As to who is using whom, it is hard to say, but LP members
and sympathizers would do well to bear in mind Rubin's own
words as reported in the LP News:
"Rubin
said he intends to be an active Libertarian Party member,
and may someday seek elected office as a Libertarian. My LP
membership gives me a platform that I currently don't have
in the broad general public – [and] I hope for a glorious
future in the Libertarian Party."
DIAGNOSIS:
TERMINAL
By
giving this nutball a platform he would not otherwise merit,
a great disservice is being done to an organization that once
stood for high principle, whatever its shortcomings in the
realm of electoral politics. There is something very
wrong with the Libertarian Party, but I long ago gave up trying
to do something about it. Consider this column a kind of valedictory,
a final attempt to come to terms with the party I left behind
but still felt a kind of link to – the way a man feels
towards a divorced spouse, a mixture of empathy and distaste.
With this incident, the empathy is completely gone –
and the distaste is underscored. The crazy alliance of the
LP and the JDL, into a kind of "liber-terrorism," is a nightmarish
concept that I never thought I would live to see. That the
Libertarian Party, of all organizations on earth, was on the
same side of a picket line with this crazed loony bird is
a disgrace to the memory of what the Libertarian Party once
was – and can never be again. I suppose next time I attend
a Buchanan for President event, I am likely to meet up with
this same band of wack-jobs – the rabid racists of the
JDL and the burnt-out remnants of my political past. What
a haunting that will be! I can hardly wait. No, Harry,
I think I'll stick with my chosen candidate, Pat Buchanan,
thank you – and I'll see you and the JDL on the other
sides of the police barriers.
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