A friend who agrees with the paleoconservatives on a number of issues
Turning on your country in time of war is not just a slippery slope to the leftist hell, but free fall carrying an anvil. I took part in the John Randolph Club meeting yesterday, a project of the Rockford Institute. The Rockford crowd is Buchananite, but the line between “isolationist” and “treasonous” was never thinner. The resolution was “The US should immediately withdraw its military forces from Iraq.” The first speaker in favor was Kirkpatrick Sale, who made the usual Marxist “anti-imperialism” speech, denouncing the Pentagon-industrial cabal that has run the American Empire since 1941 (an interesting date to choose, without mentioning Pearl Harbor). He blamed the US for a half century of world-wide slaughter, rapine and disease. He then said that a US loss in Iraq just might be enough to bring down the empire. He got applause! Not everybody, but that anybody in a room of supposed “traditional conservatives” would do anything but boo this scumbag out of the room was very disturbing.
The old-time, pre-WWII isolationists thought that the U.S. was too good and pure to entangle itself with the affairs of a decadent Old World. The contemporary breed thinks we’re so wicked that the Old World needs to be protected against us.
Update (9/25/07): Chris Check, executive vice president of the Rockford Institute, sent me an e-mail, posted here with his permission, into which I have interpolated my own comments:
Thanks for the mention of our event. I’m sorry your correspondent did not clarify that the resolution was put up for debate and ably opposed by Srdja Trifkovic, Cort Kirkwood, and William Hawkins, the first two especially receiving abundant applause for their contributions.
I thought that it was obvious that what I posted described a debate and that not everyone in the audience howled with the moonbats. What dismayed my correspondent – rightly, I think – was that an appreciable proportion of soi disant “real conservatives” cheered a socialist, Luddite anti-American.
To take a non-quite-perfect parallel (Mr. Sale is an advocate of mass murder only in the indirect sense that an unintended consequence of his rejection of technological civilization would be the greatest die-off in human history), was it reassuring or appalling that only a quarter to a third of “President” Ahmadinejad’s audience at Columbia applauded him?
Your own remarks about the differences between America pre-Second World War and America today are more accurate than you perhaps are willing to consider. By all sorts of social measure, I am sure, you would agree that America has taken something a moral plummet. Why not then also in matters of foreign policy?
If Mr. Check believes that isolationism was a bad thing in the past, when America was in his view morally superior to its present self, but is the right course today, he is at least consistent. For myself, I won’t try to evaluate whether George W. Bush’s foreign policy is morally better or worse than James Monroe’s, Woodrow Wilson’s or FDR’s. I do think, for reasons that needn’t be detailed here, that allegations of the Sales sort – that our role in the world is wicked and imperialistic – are too absurd for rational belief.
By the way, do you know this line from G.K. Chesterton: (From Orthodoxy, I think): “A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.”
GKC tossed off aphorisms the way a Clinton tosses off campaign promises, and not all of them hit the mark. The problem with this particular analogy is that warning of an upcoming cliff doesn’t increase the likelihood of going over it, whereas domestic division in wartime makes victory more difficult. In the case of Iraq, the only way that our country can be defeated is if we unilaterally decide to give up. People who favor defeat need to weigh carefully whether we would really be better off for having lost a war to a terrorist gang whose declared aim is to destroy our civilization.
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