Buchanan’s Day of Reckoning, Part I

“When the revolution comes and the fascists are overthrown, the people will go through their list of naughty and nice and get to you in the end. When you are hung for your fomenting and support of crimes against humanity and treason, you can take solace in knowing that, while you were strung up by vigilantes, at least you weren't tortured to death….” -note from a reader

In the French Revolution Louis XVI became hated, so he was guillotined. Then the man most credited with the monarch’s downfall, Danton, became hated; so Danton was guillotined at the instigation of Robespierre who was also hated and guillotined. In the end, the promise of freedom brought forth the reality of Bonaparte, who killed even more people. When the French Revolution began, at its outset, one man accurately predicted how it would end. That man was Edmund Burke, considered by some to be the founding father of “conservatism” (i.e., a type of liberalism). He argued against the elimination of rank order. He argued in favor of chivalry and nobility. He defended all “the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society….”

Burke objected to the rough treatment of Marie Antoinette. He wrote: “It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France … and surely never lighted on this orb … a more delightful vision. I saw her … glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.” But revolutionary politicians say a queen is a woman and a woman is an animal that can be put down. Burke therefore lamented: “little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. – But the age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”

Ayn Rand once wrote that ours is an “age of envy.” Nobody should have more than anyone else. To have more justifies hatred and strife. Everyone must be equal. Could it be that some of today’s music, art and opinion is but a means to thwart beauty, spite grace and eliminate dignity? Could today’s politics, with its celebration of the misfit, signify a pathological inversion of values in which the lowest is elevated as a form of mockery? The German poet Goethe, who lived through the period of the French Revolution, once explained that political hatred is “strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.” Who better exemplified this than Hitler, who rose from the gutter to become Chancellor of Germany? In this regard we must remember the words of Lenin, who told his commissars of education: “We must hate – hatred is the basis of Communism.” Oh yes, hatred and envy is the way of small men who intrude on paths intended for great men. All those who would exterminate, eradicate and expunge must rely on this hatred; for hatred actuates the slicing of the throats, the roar of firing squads and the horror of “killing fields.”

Resentment, hatred and jealousy are incompatible with greatness. “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom,” wrote Burke, “and great empire and little minds go ill together.” So Hitler fell, and Lenin lies in his Mausoleum reviled by all – except criminals and political defectives. And yet, the tide of hatred is rising. It will rise further as the global economy cannot accommodate everyone. Ethnic hatreds are being stirred, on all sides. And weapons of mass destruction – nuclear and biological – are being devised.

Touching on this subject, Patrick Buchanan has written a book titled Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed are Tearing America Apart. The book analyzes current trends and policies. According to Buchanan the era of U.S. global dominance is over. Russia, China and Islam are coming to the fore. In a chapter titled “Who Will Inherit the Earth,” Buchanan argues that outside Russia, “there is no great power in Europe.” At the same time, Islam is renewing its “tremendous struggle” with Christendom. China is also emerging. To survive the United States must retreat and retrench. He says we must repent the idolatry of George W. Bush – the idolatry of those who worship at the altar of liberal democracy. America must return to its traditions, which do not include imposing democracy on other nations. Buchanan argues that America’s success was never based on diversity, equality or democracy. It was based on Christianity, English culture and civilization.

This is quite a thesis, and I intend to explore it in the course of several future columns. To begin at the beginning, and to reduce future misunderstanding, there is no question that Buchanan’s criticism of Bush’s foreign policy is valid. The initial purpose of the Iraq invasion was to eliminate a WMD threat to the United States. After losing track of Saddam’s WMDs, Bush reverted to building democracy in the Middle East. This has proven to be expensive and hopelessly absurd. But this was not Bush’s greatest mistake.

As it happens, Pat Buchanan and George W. Bush share the same misconception: namely, that the fall of the Soviet Union put an end to Cold War. Like Bush, Pat Buchanan is unfazed by the continued existence of the KGB and the preservation of thousands of Soviet ICBMs. He is oblivious to the KGB’s role in fomenting the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. As Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats revealed in her book, The State Within a State, the breakup of the Soviet Union was choreographed from the outset. Beginning with Gorbachev’s reforms down to the staged coup attempt of August 1991 and the false democracy under Yeltsin, there never was and never can be an authentic democracy in Russia while the KGB remains in place. Andrei Navrozov made a similar point in his 1991 essay, “The Coming Order.” A stream of post-Soviet defectors (including Stanislav Lunev, Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Tretyakov) have confirmed Albats’s prognosis. Post-Soviet defectors have steadfastly warned that America is still regarded as Russia’s “main enemy.” For all his brilliance, Buchanan completely misses the fact that the Soviet tank divisions withdrawn from Germany in the 1990s were never a threat to America. All along, the real threat was from Russia’s nuclear missiles. And these missiles never went away. They have remained in place, with the addition of new mobile missiles.

Even worse, Buchanan seems ready to blame Bush rather than Putin for a “new” Cold War. This is too much sympathy for the devil, and represents a break with conservative principles. Buchanan has forgotten Burke’s words with regard to revolutionary France: “A state based on the principles of Regicide, Jacobinism, and Atheism, and fortified by the propaganda of a corresponding system of manners and morals, is a standing menace to Europe.” While we have traveled down the road of damnation since 1789, the wickedness of the United States cannot be compared to the wickedness of the Chinese rulers or the wickedness of Putin’s gang in Moscow. In today’s terms, it is appropriate to say that Russia is a state based on assassination, censorship and the confiscation of private property. Whatever evils are practiced by the U.S. government, they cannot compare with the ready elimination of dissidents, an intelligence service allied with international organized crime and a parliament that serves as a hideout for nuclear terrorists.

People will differ, of course, in their political judgments, according to their philosophy. A student of classics at Washington University in St. Louis, Daniel McCarthy, created an ideology selector for determining a person’s political orientation. I used Mr. McCarthy’s selector out of curiosity and rated first as a paleoconservative (see the Rockford Institute’s Web site), defined by Mr. McCarthy as someone “who wants less involvement in foreign affairs than other conservatives and opposes mass immigration.” I rated second-highest in the category paleo-libertarian (see the Ludwig von Mises Institute Web site) who favors less government intervention in the economy. I rated third-highest as a conservative, someone who believes in traditional morality and capitalism, and the need for limited government.

From what I am told the selector cannot be right, but what do I know?

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