One-Party
Journalism
September 21, 1999
The Weekly
Standard seems to have been created for the
specific purpose of preventing Pat Buchanan from winning the
Republican presidential nomination. Funded by the media mogul
Rupert Murdoch, this skimpy magazine reads as if written by a
group of clever grad students who regard ordinary conservatives as
suckers. Its mission is to promote U.S. military intervention
everywhere.
Naturally, then, the magazine hates Buchanan. The current
issue devotes its cover and three articles to attacking him. An
editorial by publisher-editor William Kristol contends that the
Republican Party is “stupidly and cravenly” trying to
keep him in the fold, when it would be better off without him. It
should accept his “self-serving defection.”
“This would be healthy for conservatism both substantively
and politically.” A second article sneers at Buchanan for
having lunch with a left-winger in the hope of forming a political
alliance with her. Finally, a Vermont professor assails
Buchanan’s new book on foreign policy, A Republic, Not
an Empire: Reclaiming America’s
Destiny (Regnery).
Whenever things seem to be
getting a little too unanimous, you can count on Pat Buchanan. His
book challenges the whole premise of the American
establishment’s internationalism and interventionism. He
boldly adopts the execrated slogan “America First,”
contending (correctly) that so-called isolationism, a tendentious
word for neutrality, was the philosophy of the Founding Fathers
— whose hope, as Buchanan says, was not to
“isolate” America from the world, but only from
foreign war.
Buchanan’s worst heresy,
in the eyes of reviewer Robert G. Kaufman and other liberals and
neoconservatives, is his insistence that the United States should
have stayed out of World War II. Buchanan says it was a fantasy to
suppose that Hitler could or would have invaded the United States,
especially when Germany had lost the Battle of Britain.
“If Goering’s
Luffwaffe could not achieve air supremacy over the
Channel,” writes Buchanan, “how was it going to
achieve it over the Atlantic? If Hitler could not put a soldier in
England in the fall of 1940, the notion that he could invade the
Western Hemisphere ... was preposterous.”
Professor Kaufman makes one
brief admission: “Franklin Roosevelt made mistakes, no
doubt, particularly in his dealings with Stalin’s Soviet
Union.” Yes, mistakes were made. Having won the presidency
as Stalin was exterminating millions of Ukrainians, Roosevelt
wasted no time in giving diplomatic recognition to the Soviet
Union. He continued to coddle, praise, and aid “Uncle
Joe” Stalin and the Soviets. “Of one thing I am
certain,” Roosevelt told an aide at the Yalta conference,
“Stalin is not an imperialist.” He even described Stalin
as something of “a Christian gentleman.”
As a result of the war, and of
Roosevelt’s partiality to “Uncle Joe,” the Soviet
Union swallowed up a dozen traditionally Christian countries in
Central Europe, comprising tens of millions of people, who were
then subjected to the most ferocious persecution in Christian
history. And the Soviets soon acquired nuclear weapons, posing a
truly serious threat to the United States — in complete
contrast to the supposed threat of Hitler’s Germany.
Professor Kaufman mentions none
of these facts. They are no more likely to be cited in The
Weekly Standard than in the New York
Times and other liberal news media. The myth of the holy
war against the Axis is as sacrosanct among neoconservatives as
among leftists. All of them ignore the profound moral pollution of
the U.S. alliance with a mass murderer whose crimes dwarfed
Hitler’s.
Nevertheless, the scandalous fact
is that American Christians in World War II were told they were
fighting for freedom when they were actually fighting for the
enslavement of their fellow Christians in Europe. One of Soviet
Russia’s prizes was Catholic Poland — whose joint
invasion by the Soviets and Germans had begun the war in the first
place.
These little details long ago went
down the Memory Hole and have remained there. The U.S. political
establishment derives its legitimacy from its triumph in World
War II, the “finest hour” of interventionism.
Buchanan describes that
establishment as a “one-party system masquerading as a
two-party system.” We have the same thing in journalism,
with “conservative” magazines like The Weekly
Standard masquerading as opponents of the liberal
New York Times.
Joseph Sobran
Archive Table of Contents
Current column
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information.
|
