A
QUEER THEORY
Podhoretz,
for those who do not know, has been buzzing angrily around
New York intellectual circles since the 50s. He has undergone
many incarnations, at least politically: first as a left-wing
Democrat on the periphery of the New Left, then as a Scoop
Jackson Democrat, and finally as a "neoconservative"
whose desire to nuke the Soviet Union overrode his loyalty
to leftist domestic initiatives. Podhoretz stunned practically
everyone, even those who agreed with his support of the Vietnam
War, with his, uh, unusual thesis, in an essay entitled
"The Culture of Appeasement," that antiwar sentiment
was attributable to the evil influence of homosexuals in our
culture: the works of Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal, and James
Baldwin figured prominently in his analysis. According to
Podhoretz, the intellectual and political atmosphere of the
times was the result of, I kid you not, homosexual lust:
after all, if we killed all the handsome young soldiers, who
would there be left for the queers to bed?
A
MANLY MAN
Podhoretz's
argument – if such it can be called – taken to its
logical conclusion, amounts to this: all opposition to war
is a manifestation of homoeroticism. Given this Podhoretizian
axiom, it might safely be said that there is nary a nelly
bone in Norman's body, for since his break with the Left in
the late sixties he has never met a war he didn't support
– oh, what a man!
THE
LEARNED ELDERS OF SODOM
Now
this is a man who, today, is telling us that Pat Buchanan
is a dangerous hater. If that doesn't beat all records for
shameless hypocrisy, then what does? In the Podhoretzian worldview,
a small cliquish minority – the Learned Elders of Sodom
– exert a powerful and one might almost say controlling
influence over the culture, and manipulate events to suit
their selfish (in this case sexual) needs. I think I sense
a certain pattern here, I get this chill of déjà
vu, the sense that all of this seems somehow familiar.
There is something distinctly Hitlerian in this thesis, at
least stylistically, and now I see what Alan Wald meant when
he wrote, in his book The
New York Intellectuals, that "a consistent feature
of Podhoretz's critique of his fellow intellectuals is the
projection of his own motives onto others." For in smearing
Buchanan as an anti-Semite, this champion scapegoater and
hater par excellence underscores yet another of his
distinctly Hitlerian traits: a propaganda style similar to
that of Joseph Goebbels, whose expertise in the art of the
Big Lie propelled the National Socialists to power.
THE
SELF-REFERENTIAL SCHOLAR
Typically
disingenuous, Podhoretz opens his screed by informing us that
the question of Buchanan's alleged anti-Semitism "first
flared up in 1990 during the months preceding the Gulf War."
Podhoretz would know all about this, since he was the
major source of the phony charge; at one point, Commentary,
a magazine edited by Podhoretz, became a virtual anthology
of Anti-Buchananiana. According to Podhoretz, this wave of
hatred directed at Buchanan "fell into a dormant state
after a flurry of heated debate provoked by his challenge
to George Bush in 1992." Conveniently left out is the
fact that Poddy & Co. were also behind this "flurry,"
which had by this time spread from strictly Podhoretzian precincts
to the wider circles of his neoconservative cronies, Bill
Bennett and Charles Krauthammer. "Now, with his challenge
to another George Bush – a challenge he is expected to
intensify by announcing today that he is leaving the Republican
Party to seek the Reform Party's nomination for president
– it has burst into flames again." Ignited, one
might add, by the very same people repeating the same lies
– all of which Podhoretz seems to have crammed into his
poisonous piece.
SOFT
ON REALITY
Pat's
recent book, A
Republic, Not an Empire, Podhoretz avers is "soft
on Hitler." Without offering a single quote to back up
his claim, nor even a single phrase with quote marks around
it, he simply lies and says that the book claims Hitler had
no real grudge against the Jews. Here we see an example of
the Big Lie technique that would have made Goebbels proud:
not only a lie, but a complete inversion of the truth.
For the reality is that Buchanan holds the Allies, and specifically
Great Britain and France, at least partially responsible for
the Holocaust in the West – ironically echoing some Jewish
leaders and Holocaust scholars who indict the entire West
as well as the Germans in making the Holocaust possible. In
guaranteeing Poland's independence, Buchanan argues, the Western
powers diverted Hitler away from his real goal, the conquest
of the Soviet Union: the Holocaust could have been minimized,
in the West, if not entirely prevented.
WHO
ISN'T A NAZI?
Buchanan's
thesis that Hitler and Stalin would have annihilated or at
least exhausted each other in a prolonged death struggle is
certainly debatable. Indeed, the subject has been vigorously
debated, mostly by scholars, the moment hostilities ended,
and eminent historians have taken both sides in what has been
an interesting and lively discussion. But why is a
position taken by dozens of eminent scholars anti-Semitic?
Was the respected British historian A. J. P. Taylor an anti-Semite
for drawing very similar conclusions? What about the conservative
writer William Henry Chamberlain, whose view reflected that
of the general conservative movement up to the late 1950s
and into the early 1960s. How about Charles Austin Beard,
the distinguished liberal historian and the dean of his profession
in the 1930s? Were all these people closet Nazis, Norman?
TELL
IT TO THE JUDGE
Well,
you see, says Norman, the evidence is cumulative. Why,
Pat has defended "practically anyone" accused of
being a Nazi war criminal, writes Podhoretz, citing only "John
Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine who had been indicted as the
exceptionally sadistic guard known as Ivan the Terrible at
the Treblinka death camp." Podhoretz reluctantly concedes
that, yes, it did turn out to be a case of mistaken
identity, but what about the new accusation that Demjanjuk
was a prison guard at another camp? Yet Buchanan's
newspaper columns on the Demjanjuk case only claimed what
was later proved entirely correct – that this was a case
of mistaken identity. And that was it. But of course,
Podhoretz clearly believes that even questioning the
case against Demjanjuk is an anti-Semitic act. Listen, Norman,
your real beef is not with Buchanan, but with the Israeli
Supreme Court, which exonerated and freed Demjanjuk.
AN
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
On
the theory that the more mud is flung at Pat the more chance
there is some will stick, the smear artists under the
expert tutelage of Podhoretz have developed a whole Buchanan
Mythos, an interlocking series of narratives that validate
their delusional system. But the rules of this alternate universe,
the laws by which it operates, have nothing to do with logic
or reason and everything to do with innuendo and sheer fabrication.
It is a fantasy version of Pat Buchanan, a monster from the
Podhoretzian Id. Like Dr. Morbius in the classic 1950s science
fiction movie Forbidden Planet, Podhoretz is merely
conjuring demons out of his own subconscious desires and hidden
motives. The result is nothing that bears the least resemblance
to Patrick J. Buchanan, either the man or his ideas.
BITBURG,
AGAIN
Incredibly,
the self-styled "Reaganite" Podhoretz brings up
Bitburg, declaring that "through Mr. Reagan's mouth,
Mr. Buchanan declared that the soldiers buried there, who
included members of SS units (reportedly not the special one
in charge of implementing the Holocaust, but still . . .)
were 'victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in
concentration camps.' No more disgusting example of moral
equivalence can ever have been recorded or can scarcely even
be imagined (though a close second might be Mr. Buchanan's
comparison of the Nazi camps with those set up by Gen. Eisenhower
for German prisoners of war)." But if Nazism was an evil
ideology, which the German people had foisted on them, then
why weren't German soldiers victimized by it as well? The
evasive argument that Bitburg housed the bodies of SS troops,
who were ideologically committed to Nazi ideology – made
at the time by President Reagan's liberal critics – is
not even bothered with by Podhoretz He merely launches into
a paroxysm of self-parodying hyperbole, as if everyone agrees
with his bigoted Germanophobic premise – that there are
no good Germans, by definition, and all were responsible
for Hitler's crimes. This is the kind of collective guilt
thesis that one might expect out of someone on the Left, say,
a member of some obscure Marxist sect, or perhaps a liberal
of unusual sternness. The point is that, while enjoying a
reputation as one of the foremost opponents of liberal hegemony
in the world of ideas, Podhoretz is capable of wielding the
sword of political correctness when it suits his purposes.
This is called having your cake and eating it too.
THE
PODHORETZ SCHOOL OF FALSIFICATION
Podhoretz
has been given free reign by the editorial page editors of
the Wall Street Journal to be as hypocritical and sloppy
as he wants. The sloppiness is in the outright fabrication
that the author of this vile piece resorts to: whether out
of contempt for his audience, or perhaps the onset of Alzeheimer's,
Podhoretz offers the following as the definitive proof,
the jewel in the crown of his case against Buchanan:
"Reinforcing
the notorious 'amen corner' crack, Mr. Buchanan went on to
list four prominent Jews who thought war might be necessary.
Almost immediately thereafter, he counterpoised them with
'kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy
Brown,' who would actually do the fighting if these Jews had
their way. Here we had another insult added to another big
lie."
IT'S
THE BRITS, STUPID
What
Podhoretz leaves out is that the "McAllister, Murphy,
Gonzales and Leroy Brown" phrase was in a piece written
in answer to a pro-war editorial in the London Economist
– the point of giving them ethnic names was to underscore
the fact that the causalities would not be primarily British.
Let's get clear on this: Buchanan's turn of phrase had nothing
whatever to do with the Jewishness or non-Jewishness of American
servicemen and servicewomen fighting in the Gulf. The Anti-Defamation
League crib sheet that the intellectually lazy Podhoretz lifted,
without attribution, has simply taken a few sentences from
one newspaper column and inserted it into another. This crude
cut-and-paste technique is supposed to convince us that Pat
Buchanan is an anti-Semite. It doesn't. However, it does
convince any reasonable person that Norman Podhoretz is a
senile and quite vicious old man whose word cannot be taken
seriously on anything. Did he imagine, or care, that
someone would check this transpositioning of quotations and
discover his Clintonian relationship with the truth?
PODHORETZIAN
PATHOLOGY
This
kind of outright fabrication bears a striking resemblance
to the methodology of the Holocaust deniers whom Podhoretz
attempts to link to Buchanan. They will grasp at any straw,
no matter how short, to buttress their preordained "conclusion"
that the Holocaust never happened – in spite of voluminous
testimony to the contrary. This is pathology, not ideology,
and Podhoretz displays similar symptoms. The testimony of
Pat's fellow journalists, who effectively dismissed the charges
of anti-Semitism in 1992 and 1996, is not evidence of Pat's
innocence, according to Podhoretz, but only of a kind of silent
collaboration on their part. Pat's views on Israel were not
only evidence of anti-Semitism but "they were so manifestly
false that it was hard to see how anyone as intelligent as
Buchanan could believe them." Ipso facto, he didn't really
believe them, he was just trying to get at the Jews. But what
does this say about those journalists who defended him –
say, Robert Novak, Al Hunt, Fred Barnes, and others –
are all these people closet anti-Semites, Norman?
MORE
LIES
Finally,
Podhoretz makes the incredible claim that the change in Buchanan's
stance regarding our relationship with Israel is due to his
alleged anti-Semitism:
"Buchanan
had once been friendly to Israel as an ally of the U.S. being
targeted by the Soviet-sponsored Palestine Liberation Organization.
Conversely, he had always regarded any such movement as an
enemy of the US This rule applied to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua,
to the FMLN in El Salvador, to the African National Congress
in South Africa and so on; and it had once, naturally and
logically, applied to the PLO as well. Yet all of a sudden,
Mr. Buchanan was comparing the PLO's struggle against Israel
to that of the American revolutionaries against the British."
NOSTALGIA
FOR WAR
Suddenly?
Did nothing significant take place in the interim, that goes
unnoticed or unmentioned by Podhoretz? What he conveniently
leaves out is that the Cold War ended: Communism imploded
and with it the US interest in opposing the PLO's program
of Palestinian statehood as a matter of high principle. This,
and not the phony charge of "anti-Semitism," explains
Buchanan's change of mind on the question of the Israeli-US
relationship. This seminal event had a decisive impact on
his views in the foreign policy realm generally, as anyone
who has followed his writings since that time can readily
attest. Of course, Podhoretz and his right-wing Social Democrat
friends seem either to have missed the downing of the Berlin
Wall, or else are so consumed by nostalgia for the Cold War
that they cannot admit that it is truly over: still they agitate
ceaselessly for military interventions from here to Bosnia
to East Timor to the very ends of the earth.
THE
IDOLATRY OF POWER
This
brings to mind another comment by Wald in his book on The
New York Intellectuals:
"The
young Podhoretz was extraordinarily impressed when Lionel
Trilling, 'one of the most intelligent men in the world,'
remarked to him that 'everyone wants power. The only question
is what kind.' This seems to have encouraged Podhoretz to
explain the behavior of others in the same way [power hungry]
in which he now saw his own behavior."
Buchanan's
real crime is not his supposed anti-Semitism, but his speaking
truth to power.
A
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
I
will not burden my readers with any more details of Podhoretz's
case against Pat Buchanan – the specifics are not important,
anyway, since anyone who falsifies the record as blatantly
and carelessly as Podhoretz has hardly merits that kind of
line-by-line analysis. But I want to make one last point,
and that is that Norman Podhoretz and his amen corner on the
Left are the biggest and best boosters of anti-Semitism this
country has ever seen. The average American, looking at the
members of the Aryan Nations goose-stepping down the street,
is repulsed, and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of
Zion will never make it to the top of the bestseller lists.
But if people are constantly told that opposition to war and
interventionism, opposition to foreign aid, limits on immigration,
and any one of a number of common sense conservative principles
– held not only by Buchanan but by millions of Americans
– is evidence of anti-Semitism, then that is the
single biggest impetus to anti-Semitism imaginable. To counterpose
the Jewish community to those who oppose intervention abroad
and dare to question the official history or the conventional
wisdom on this or that subject – to equate anti-Semitism
with opposition to orthodoxy – is to play a very
dangerous game. As low as my opinion of Podhoretz is, it is
hard for me to consider the possibility that this may be just
what he intends. Suffice to say that I have three words of
advice to Norman Podhoretz: don't go there.
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