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Aside from the notion that America has gone fascist
being utterly absurd, this writer would still be charged
with having to resolve the contradiction inherent in
Senator Kerry’s being both the antidote to —
and a member of — this new American Reich. For
Kerry has been lockstep in line with the Bush administration
on nearly every major political question to come up.
That his election-come-lately opposition to George Bush
has been marked by a not so subtle invocation of populist
principles is no surprise.
It has become almost axiomatic in American politics
that when you’re running to be the Big Man, you
first have to demonstrate that you would almost know
what it would feel like to be average. Whether this
involves lobbing baseballs in Texas or wearing earth
tone colors so as to blend it with the autumn foliage
in Iowa, it’s all the same display of pseudo-empathy
and calculated condescension.
What’s worse than the rich pretending they know
what it’s like to be poor, however, is the poor
being duped into thinking that they to someday can be
as rich as their masters if only it weren’t for
the poisonous influences of immigration and cultural
and social interpenetration. So I was both surprised
and wasn’t to see my fellow Raw Story columnist
Craig Colbert pen a homage to Pat Buchanan at once so
insouciant and so illuminating.
In it, he tells us that he “first started to
look at Pat Buchanan in a different light in the days
following the 2000 Presidential Election when Mr. Buchanan
actually went on the Today Show and stated that most
of the 3,047 votes he received in Palm Beach County
were probably meant for Al Gore….thus the worm
began to turn regarding my view of Pat Buchanan, a man
I had up until that point was an ultra-conservative
nut job.”
Fair enough, but just because Mr. Buchanan went on
national television to point out the obvious, why then
does that mean he should be spared the epithet "nut
job?"
This is a man who thinks that the problem with America’s
role in the world is that America is too small and the
rest of the world too big. He’s the leading member
of the America First movement, a movement which counterposes
itself to the cosmopolitan conspiracy of the UN dominated-finance-capital
funded New World Order.
Indeed, this conspiracy is thought to be the cause
of the recent occupation of Iraq; the cause of chronic
unemployment; and — because a genuine conspiracy
is never a real conspiracy unless it involves the Jews
— the cause of American support for Israel.
Addressing each “cause” in descending order,
first consider Bucchan’s opposition to the war
in Iraq. He has repeatedly intimated that he thinks
the war in Iraq to be a bad idea not because it is imperialistic
as such — no, no, no, a supporter of the Vietnam
war as fervent as he bears no such prejudice —
but because he sees it as “democratic imperialism”
threatening America’s reputation as a “superpower.”
In other words, the Buchananite opposition to the Iraq
war stems from a belief that this war is bad for American
imperialism; not from any principled opinion that American
imperialism is, to phrase it euphemistically, bad for
Iraq.
Furthermore, when he slyly states that “it does
not look like the people that want a democracy are willing
to fight quite as hard as those who would like to get
us out of there,” he is lying. The forces resisting
the occupation are the forces fighting for democratic
sovereignty in as much as it is understood a priori
that democracy in Iraq cannot and will not emerge so
long as the Iraqi people are kept under the rule of
a military dictatorship imposed from without.
As for his critique of capitalist “globalization,”
it is true he has taken up the cause of the white skinned
proletariat and has done his best to pit them against
the Wetbacks, and the rootless cabal of greedy Jews
whom his fellow nationalist co-thinkers Lenora Fulani
and Fred Newman have described as being the “storm
troopers of decadent capitalism.”
To put it concisely, it is not capitalism he has a problem
with per se, but "un-American" capitalism.
Likewise, it is not the hegemony of big business he
is against, but the supposed hegemony of an alleged
Jewish epicenter within the business world who he suspects
of enriching itself at the expense of America's national
treasury.
As for Israel, Buchananan has made it clear that he
thinks the American-Israeli relationship is one where
the “tail wags the dog,” as opposed to the
other way around. By this he means that the United States
government is disproportionably influenced by some shrewd
and sinister cabal of neo-conservative Jewish double
agents.
As someone who abhors the way in which AIPAC and its
attendant propaganda organs slander and smear the Palestinian
struggle for nationhood by equating it with the pogroms
of Tsarist Russia, I can only say that Mr. Buchanan
doesn’t give a damn about either. To him, Israel’s
behavior is further affirmation of an already subscribed
to sinister and paranoid worldview in which the Heebs
are once again guilty of polluting the purity of someone
else’s national home.
The same goes for Iraq. Any condemnation of the Iraq
war by him does not stem from any deeply entrenched
concern for the besieged inhabitants of Falluja. Quite
the contrary, it is because he could care less about
the Iraqis that he doesn't think the United States or
any other "Caucasian" nation should be dirtying
itself in street fights with Shiite slum dwellers, for
what if in all the tussling there is an intermixing
of blood?
At the end of his paean, Colbert writes wishfully,
“He is also a symbol of a growing problem for
the Bush administration and that is a growing number
of conservatives with middle class values who feel their
country has been high-jacked by a neo-con cabal that
does not have their best interests, or this country’s
best interests, at heart.”
Indeed, but this is not the portfolio of a flimsy
or fair-minded conservative who has come to see the
error of his ways. Rather, it is an almost textbook
definition of a tendency quite different, beginning
with the letter "F," the aims and aspirations
of which Mr. Buchanan is the most eloquent personification
in American political culture: fascism. If a second
look is what it takes to find something good in all
of this, might I humbly (but hastily) suggest a third?
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