A Question of Style and Substance

When William F. Buckley Jr., having assembled an impressive team of right-of-centre men of letters such as his eccentric Yale mentor Willmoore Kendall, ex-Trotskyist Machiavellian Cold War analyst James Burnham, and Austrian Catholic royalist aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, launched his journal National Review in 1955, he declared in its statement of purpose that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. Many, impressed by Buckley’s rhetoric but not by the magazine’s subsequent performance, especially since it has reversed itself on many of the positions it took in the 1950s and 1960s, have suggested that this should read “stands athwart history, yelling ‘slow down’”. Personally, I think that Buckley was somewhat misguided from the beginning and that a nobler purpose would have been to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘turn this sucker around, its heading in the wrong direction.’”

National Review quickly became the flagship publication of the intellectual wing of the American conservative movement which at the time was a loose, “big tent”, coalition of disparate groups and individuals united by their common foes: welfare socialism, International Communism at home and abroad, and the forces of social, moral, cultural, and civilization decay that had begun to manifest themselves in such forms as the sexual revolution and feminism. Many of the elements of this movement were actually liberals in the older, nineteenth century sense of the term, such as the economists of the Chicago and Austrian schools respectively, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. Others were conservative in the traditional sense of the term, including the aforementioned Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and the other Catholic monarchists who had fled the Nazi and Communist occupations of Europe. There were also American born traditionalists who combined elements of traditional conservatism and classical liberalism. In the eighteenth century, the classical liberal or Whig statesman, Edmund Burke, had borrowed the arguments of the Tories, or classical conservatives, for tradition, order, and prescriptive institutions such as the British monarchy and established church, to defend these against the kind of fanaticism that had spawned the violence and destruction of the French Revolution. Russell Kirk, an American disciple of Burke’s, adapted these arguments into a defence of the liberal, republican, institutions of his own country, the United States.

Realizing that a movement needs to be united around something positive rather than merely a common set of enemies, National Review promoted an idea called fusionism, developed by one of its original editorial staff Frank S. Meyer as a synthesis of classical conservatism and classical liberalism that would defend tradition and freedom at the same time. At this point, lest anyone think that the title of my website is a nod to this idea, I should say that I chose “Throne, Altar, Liberty” as a title to advance a different idea – the idea that it is the traditional institutions of monarchy and established religion which provide the necessary foundation and context for personal freedom and that therefore it is and always has been the Tory, the champion of these institutions, who is the true friend of freedom and that he does not need to borrow from the vain philosophies of John Locke and J. S. Mill in order to be such.

Initially, National Review took bold and daring stands against the progressive liberal consensus that the rest of the media was trying to build on a number of hot button issues. It stood up for the Southern states when everyone else was seeking to pillory them, refused to jump on the Martin Luther King Jr. bandwagon, challenged the wisdom and justice of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, defended scientists and academics who did not doctor the facts about matters such as IQ to conform to the neo-Lysenkoism that had become official dogma, and poured contempt on international efforts to bully Rhodesia and Southern Africa into accepting black majoritarian rule. Over the years however, it seems to have toned down its rhetoric, watered down its message, and even reversed its position on a number of issues. On a number of occasions it has jettisoned writers and editors over controversial positions they have taken – examples include Joe Sobran on Israel and the Middle East in the early 1990s and Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan on mass Third World immigration in the late 1990s.

Sometimes the magazine supports a candidate in the primaries for an American presidential election – Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as examples – and sometimes it does not. This year it has chosen to go the route of waging a campaign of opposition against a candidate, the candidate in question being Donald Trump. Last week it posted to its website an official statement from the magazine’s editors entitled “Against Trump”, giving reasons why they feel that conservatives should not support the Donald, as well as a symposium of several conservative figures, who for one reason or another are not in favour of Donald Trump.

Now, as a patriotic Canadian and a firm royalist who does not approve of republics and presidents, I do not, of course, have a proverbial dog in the fight that is the American presidential election. I do confess, however, to having greatly enjoyed watching from up north as Donald Trump has enraged the feminists, open borders liberals, anti-racists, and all the other more-enlightened-than-thou, politically correct, killjoys who are the bane of post-modern existence. Perhaps it is because of this that I am inclined to see National Review’s anti-Trump campaign as yet another example of the magazine’s lamentable decline from the cutting edge challenger of the progressive zeitgeist that it once was.

The editors’ argument against Trump could be summarized in the complaint that he is a populist rather than a conservative. This is true in itself, and the distinction is an important one, but it does not follow from this that conservatives ought not to support Trump. Conservatism seeks to preserve, protect, and pass on the valuable institutions and traditions that have been passed on from the past, whereas populism seeks to mobilize and harness discontent on the part of the populace with the powers that be. It is difficult to reconcile these two projects, and historically the conservative has wisely viewed populism with suspicion because of the great destructive potential of the forces it wishes to unleash. Nevertheless, the reconciliation of the protection of heritage with the giving voice to popular outrage is not impossible, and National Review need look no further than their late former publisher, William Rusher, for a man who successfully combined traditionalism and populist activism. Up here, the last decent man to serve as Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker, was another example. He was on the one hand a prairie populist, who spoke out on behalf of rural, small town and farming, communities and regions against the arrogance of the money and business interests in central Canada and on the other hand a Tory firmly committed to Canada and her traditional institutions, such as Parliament and the monarchy. Indeed, when a powerful elite makes itself the enemy of the traditions and institutions the conservative cherishes, he is forced into the position where he must join forces to some extent with populism.

Interestingly, the editors of National Review themselves provide, albeit unintentionally, evidence that this is in fact the present situation. They refer, in one paragraph, to the “permanent things”, an expression from T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society that Russell Kirk had borrowed to indicate the things which the conservative cherishes and guards. As examples of the permanent things they give “constitutional government, marriage and the right to life.” Leaving aside the fact that in recent years National Review has often seemed to treat these things as expendable rather than permanent, having posted less than a year ago a screed arguing for capitulation to liberalism on a major point touching the second of them, is there any serious doubt that the predominate elites in the United States and the rest of the Western world have aligned themselves against marriage and the right to life?

Now to the preceding argument it may be objected that Donald Trump is not campaigning on a pro-life, pro-marriage platform but on a nativist, anti-immigration, platform. This is true, but in answer to this objection I would respond, first of all, by observing that it is the same elites who have set themselves against marriage and the right to life who are the ones who believe in a world without borders, in exporting jobs to the Third World and importing workers from the Third World, and who cannot stand the thought of closing the borders to any group of people even if doing so is an eminently sensible and obvious thing to do from the perspective of national security. Secondly, I would argue that immigration is obviously another matter on which conservatives should join forces with populism.

As recently as one hundred years ago, there was broad agreement across the political spectrum that it was countries who let immigrants in rather than deciding after the fact what to do with immigrants who let themselves in and however many immigrants a country let in to meet her needs at the time immigration should not fundamentally change the character of the country. A little over half a century ago, when liberals across the Western world began to push for more relaxed immigration policies, they still gave lip service to the old consensus, arguing that their policies would not drastically change the character of their countries, while conservatives, most notably those who were the farthest thing from populist rabble-rousers such as classical scholar-turned-High Tory statesman Enoch Powell in the UK and award-winning Catholic legitimist novelist Jean Raspail in France, argued that it would, and that it should not be allowed to happen. Now that liberal immigration is so changing the character of our countries that it is too obvious to pretend that it is not taking place, the new liberal line of argument is “so what, you are a racist if you have a problem with it.”

That conservatives, of all people, should be opposed to policies that are radically changing the character of our countries, is something of which the present editors of National Review are clearly aware. They therefore do not argue for an outright open-borders position but instead complain that Donald Trump’s proposals are unworkable, his position irresponsible, and his rhetoric vulgar. Whether his proposals would work or not are a matter for discussion and debate, although I think the arguments that they would not are incredibly weak.

The question that remains is do the editors of National Review, agree in substance with the old consensus that it is countries who will decide who they let in, that they will decide according to their own needs, and however many they decide they will not allow the fundamental character of their countries to be changed by immigration, and merely object to the vulgarity of Donald Trump’s populist style? Or is it rather that they disagree with the old consensus, and are really open-borders, one-world, liberals who are using Trump’s vulgar style as a pretext in a desperate campaign against the first man in decades who seems capable of shattering the new, liberal, consensus?

The Lessons of Poetry: Part One - The Crisis of Modern Education

In Mazo de la Roche’s Morning at Jalna, set in 1863, the second generation of the Whiteoaks are still children. Philip, the future heir of the estate and the father of the family’s entire third generation is still a baby, but his older siblings Augusta, the future Lady Buckley, and Nicholas and Ernest, familiar as the old uncles in most of the volumes of the series, are all in their formative years. Plans are made for them to be educated in boarding schools in England but in the mean time they have tutors at Jalna. At the start of the novel an Irishman named Madigan is their tutor but when, after being snared into marrying the daughter of a neighbour he jilts his bride on their honeymoon and disappears, she takes over his position. Shortly after the following ensues:

Lessons began the following morning and Mrs. Madigan declared that never in her life had she met with such ignorance. “Mr. Madigan really taught us nothing but Latin and poetry,” said Augusta.

“It’s what you call a classical education,” added Nicholas.

“And what good will such an education be to you in this country, I’d like to know?” asked Mrs. Madigan, her eyes piercing him like gimlets.

No answer is given to this question, alas, and Ernest then proves himself to be a poor advertisement for the merits of classical education by confusing the date of the year of Columbus’ discovery of America with that of the Battle of Hastings and confidently asserting Charles Lever’s authorship of the works of Shakespeare.

The best answer to those who, like Mrs. Madigan, question the good of classical education is to contrast it with that which has replaced it. Nobody could put that contrast better than the late Joseph Sobran who was fond of saying that “in one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college.” Today in North America and indeed throughout the Western world the law requires that all young people attend school up to a certain age and for most children this means attendance at a taxpayer-funded, bureaucrat-controlled institution. These institutions, which have been laboratories for progressive experimentation for decades now, have become increasingly standardized as more and more control over school curricula and activities has been taken from parents and local trustees who answer to them and placed in the hands of bureaucrats in the Ministry of Education. The more complete the standardization, the more the state schools seem to exist for no purpose other than to churn out the kind of people Nietzsche would have described as “die letzten Menschen”. Those parents who, understandably, want something better than this for their children have the limited options of home or parochial schooling, or, if they have the means, private schooling. Only in these alternatives is classical learning - or at least a near approximation - available today.

That there is a serious problem with the present educational system is widely recognized. As with any illness, however, if it is not properly diagnosed, the proposed treatment may be as bad or worse than the disease. There are many who rightly object to the way the public schools are being used to indoctrinate children with egalitarian dogma and socialize them into the new, hypersensitive, politically correct, multicultural, order who can visualize an alternative only in terms of vocational training. In other words they think that the sole or primary purpose of the schools ought to be to prepare students to get jobs and earn their living or, a variation on this theme, to get better jobs and earn a higher living than they would be able to otherwise. Important as learning a trade or profession undoubtedly is, an educational system that makes this its primary goal is no real alternative to the present system. It, as much as the other, would merely prepare its students to be unthinking cogs in an economic and social machine.

Classical educators had very different goals. They attempted to instil wisdom and not just facts, to train their students to make qualitative and not just quantitative judgements, to develop virtue and good character and not just useful sets of skills. They sought to prepare their students, not for places within a mass society that functions like a machine, but to be free subjects of their Sovereign – or free citizens of the republic if they had the misfortunate to live in a polity of that nature – by forming through its disciplines the habits of mind essential to mature, responsible, freedom. This is why the traditional subjects of a classical education are called the liberal arts. That is “liberal” in the sense of “appropriate for a freeman” not in the sense of “progressive egalitarian democrat”. These were more than just “Latin and poetry”, of course, although “Latin and poetry” can be taken as a fair way of summarizing grammar, the first and most basic of the three elements that comprise the trivium, the foundation of classical education. (1)

The idea that learning dead tongues like Latin and classical Greek and the memorization and recital of poetry ought to be central to the most basic stage of the education of the free subject will strike many today as being quaint and archaic. Let us leave an inquiry into the importance of Greek and Latin for another time, (2) and for now we will consider the importance of the lessons which poetry has for us.

The basic arguments for having children memorize poetry are that it trains the memory, builds vocabulary and syntax, and, in the words of Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Trained Mind, through it students “internalize rhythmic, beautiful patterns of English language” which become “part of the student’s ‘language store,’ those wells of language that we all use every day in writing and speaking”. (3) It is also the way in which poets are made. This is true regardless of which side you come down on in the old classical v. romantic debate about whether good poetry is defined by rules and forms or springs up from inspiration within you. Learning poetry by heart is both an excellent way of mastering rules and forms and, if poetry is something that bubbles up from the heart like water from a flowing well, of filling that well in the first place. The irrefutable evidence for this assertion is the dearth of good poetry written since the advent of modern, progressive, technological education. Bilge, like that written by the late Maya Angelou, does not count.

Learning poetry is important for another reason, however, and it is this reason which I wish to emphasize. Tradition, by which I mean the wisdom distilled from the accumulated experience of past generations and passed down to us that we may benefit from it ourselves, hopefully add to it, and pass it on to future generations, is a rich heritage containing many valuable lessons. Poetry is an indispensable vessel for the transmission of this wisdom. Michael Oakeshott pointed out years ago that although the modern rationalism that now permeates all disciplines tries to reduce all knowledge to the technical and living tradition to rigid ideology, the greater part of human wisdom cannot be reduced to either the technical or ideological. In a similar vein it can be said that much wisdom can be communicated in verse which simply cannot be adequately expressed in prose. The ancients knew this which is one of the reasons why from the very beginning of the Great Tradition, its language has so often been that of poetry, from that of the epics of Homer and Virgil to that of the odes of Pindar and Horace, from that of the Psalms of David to that of the tragedies of Sophocles and Seneca.

To say that the greater, more valuable, part of human knowledge and wisdom can only be expressed in the metric language of poetry rather than the technical language of the natural sciences is to expose the vastness of the gulf that exists between the classical and the modern mind. Technically-oriented training produces minds that seem incapable of viewing goodness, truth, or beauty except through the lens of utility or usefulness, something which could hardly have been said of the kind of education that formed the minds of Shakespeare and Jonson, Donne and Herbert, Pope and Johnson, Scott, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, Hunt and Tennyson, Pound, Yeats and Eliot.

In Part Two we will consider a popular interpretation of an important historical conflict of the last century and the adverse effects this interpretation has had by creating a paradigm into which many have sought to fit subsequent conflicts and we will hold that interpretation up to be judged by the light of the lessons of the poetry of the Great Tradition.






(1) Logic and rhetoric are the other two. The quadrivium, consisting of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, with the trivium, form the seven classical liberal arts.

(2) You can find arguments for the study of classical languages and literature in Victor Davis Hanson’s Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: Encounter Books, 2001) and E. Christian Kopff’s The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition (Wilmington: ISI Books, 1999). Or, if you want it in a nutshell, Dorothy L. Sayers put it this way: “I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent. It is the key to the vocabulary and structure of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilization, together with all its historical documents.” That is from her “The Lost Tools of Learning” which can be read online here: http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

(3) http://www.welltrainedmind.com/poetry-memorization-methods-and-resources/

A Tale of Two Columnists

Death comes for each of us sooner or later.  This month he took away two of my favorite opinion columnists.  On Sunday, May 12^th 2013, Peter Worthington, founding editor of the Toronto Sun passed away.   Then, last Tuesday, May 21^st, Charley Reese, an editorial writer who retired from the Orlando Sentinel in 2001 and from his syndicated column in 2008, breathed his last.

Worthington and Reese were similar in a number of ways.  Both men had served in their respective countries’ military. Worthington, whose father was a career military officer, served in both World War II and the Korean War.  Reese was a tank gunner in the American army for a couple of years.  Both were writers of higher than average output.   Reese’s column, until his retirement, came out thrice weekly, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Worthington’s column also appeared far more frequently than the once or twice a week most opinion writers average.  Both men were small-c conservatives, i.e., men who were conservative by conviction and principle rather than merely by adherence to the Conservative Party.   For both men, the classical liberal ideal of small, limited, fiscally responsible government was one of the most important of those convictions.  Both were hard core, anti-Communist Cold Warriors.   In 1976, when the American liberal media was trying to sell America on the image of Jimmy Carter as an outsider to the world of Beltway politics who would revitalize America with his fresh, new, ideas, Reese became the first American columnist to point out that Carter, a charter member of the Rockefeller funded Trilateral Commission, the membership of which is a Who’s Who of Washington insiders, was anything but an outsider.  Two years later Worthington ran afoul of Canada’s own darling of the liberal media, Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau, when he embarrassed the Trudeau premiership by exposing a number of Canadians who had been lured into betraying our country to the Soviet Union by the KGB.

There were differences as well as similarities.  The one that stands out the most, in my mind at least, is in their views on post-Cold War geopolitics and military conflicts.   This became most noticeable after September 11^th, 2001, because their comments on the Clinton administration’s military adventures were often similar, (1) but the difference really does go back to the end of the Cold War.

Reese believed that with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet regime, the United States should bring home her troops, which had been deployed around the globe since World War II to counter the Soviet threat, and return to a policy of not interfering in the internal affairs of other countries when vital American interests are not at stake.   This view was shared by many who had taken a strong anti-Communist stance during the Cold War including Joseph Sobran of National Review and Samuel Francis of the Washington Times.  There were many others who thought differently, however, and the leadership of the Republican Party was not particularly sympathetic to Reese’s point of view.   The end of the Cold War coincided with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, upon which occasion US President George H. W. Bush declared the dawn of a New World Order, in which the United States would provide leadership to a coalition of democratic and free nations that would police the world against aggressors like Saddam Hussein, a doctrine that he immediately put into practice in Operation Desert Storm.    Reese, in his delightfully curmudgeonly manner, criticized the Bush administration’s actions, ridiculed  their utopian vision, expressed cynicism regarding their motives, and predicted that it would come back to bite the United States. (2) 

Reese subjected the foreign and military policies of the Clinton administration to the exact same criticism.  Nor did he change his tune for the second Bush administration.  This angered a lot of people but it is one of the things I respected the most about him.

Reese had supported George W. Bush in his campaign for the Presidency in 2000.  Patrick J. Buchanan, whose views on most subjects were far closer to Reese’s, was the Reform Party candidate in the same election, but Reese did not believe in third party campaigns. (3) He lauded the election of Bush, mocked leftist outrage over his election (4), defended his nominees from leftist attacks (5),  and for most of Bush’s first year in office he supported the administration in his column.   He defended the administration against the attacks of environmental lobbies when Bush refused to pass carbon-dioxide emission controls (6), told Dick Cheney that he  “had not enjoyed a campaign victory so much since Ronald Reagan’s in 1980” (7), and advised those complaining that Bush had taken the month of August as a vacation to “Give the prez a break. If he wants to shovel manure on his ranch, well, that's better than shoveling it from a podium, which was the year-round pastime of Bill Clinton.” (8)   When the Bush administration did something he disliked, he said so, especially when it came to foreign policy, but for the most part his columns in Bush’s first year in office were supportive.

Then came September 11, 2001 and the terrorist attack on the United States. As the Bush administration responded to this event, declaring a Global War Against Terror, introducing anti-terrorist legislation and a new bureau of Homeland Security, and then invading, first Afghanistan where the Taliban were purportedly hiding Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda high command, and later Iraq, many took the position that the Bush administration should be above criticism. Reese did not. He weighed George W. Bush in the same balance in which he had weighed Bill Clinton and Bush’s father and found him to be wanting.

Reese was no pacifist. His country had been attacked and he believed it had to retaliate, track down the men responsible, and take them out. He condemned, however, the Bush administration’s ill-defined war aims, indiscriminate bombing, and heavy-handed manner (9). When Clinton had tried to pass legislation, following the 2005 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, conservatives had considered it to be an unnecessary assault upon the civil liberties of ordinary Americans. Reese did not change his mind when Bush and company introduced the same kind of legislation, even though many other conservatives began to sing “but it’s cute when our guy does it”. (10) It was foolish, he believed, to treat the September 11th attacks as a blank cheque authorizing the President to enhance Executive powers and wage war at will. (11) Retaliation against the thugs who were responsible for the attacks was justified, but expensive wars of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq were not. Indeed, in re-reading some of his columns written months before September 11th, he almost seems to have anticipated the Bush administration’s post-9/11 actions and condemned them in advance. (12) At any rate, he certainly saw the 2003 invasion of Iraq coming long in advance and warned against it, (13) and he persistently maintained his criticism of the Iraq War through to his retirement. (14)

Peter Worthington saw things differently. He was not a believer in armed neutrality or non-interventionism. He too saw the Iraq War coming in advance, but approved of it. (15) He was enthusiastic about the Bush administration’s response to terrorism (16) and highly critical of our own government here in Canada, for its failure to wholeheartedly get aboard. (17) He acknowledged that we did not have the military resources necessary to play the part in these wars that he would have liked, (18) but this served to illustrate a larger point – that our government was not committing enough funds to defence and was not taking national security seriously and that it had not been doing so since the Trudeau Liberals slashed the military decades previously.

The well-being of Canada’s armed forces, and the soldiers who compose them, was a major concern of Worthington’s. He frequently wrote columns aimed at building up the morale of servicemen currently deployed and took up cudgels on behalf of our veterans or of a particular veteran to whom an injustice of some sort or another had been done. In this, despite their radically different take on post-9/11 conflicts, he and Reese were alike.

It is easy enough to see where Worthington’s focus on the military came from. He was born in the Fort Osborne Barracks here in Winnipeg. His father was F. F. “Worthy” Worthington, who after his early adventures as a mercenary, enlisted in the Canadian Black Watch by mistake (he thought he was enlisting in the British) in World War I, became a Vimy Ridge war hero, and then a career military officer, eventually rising to the rank of Major General. Peter Worthington grew up in army camps and joined the navy in 1944 when he was only seventeen, having previously tried and failed to run away and join the merchant navy when he was fifteen. He was commissioned a sub-lieutenant before the end of the War, and was made a second lieutenant upon his re-enlistment to fight in Korea, in which he joined the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, the division to which his father had belonged when he was born. (19)

After the Korean War, Worthington graduated from the University of British Columbia and studied journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa.   When fighting broke out in the Middle East in 1956, he tried to talk Doug MacFarlane of the Toronto Telegram into sending him to the Gaza Strip.  MacFarlane was skeptical and only agreed when Worthington arranged for his own transportation through his military contacts.  This launched his fifteen year career as foreign correspondent with the Telegram.   In those fifteen years he was sent around the world, to wherever a war had broken out or was likely to break out.   He met all sorts of interesting people, securing a famous interview with King Hussein of Jordan in 1958, when other journalists had failed, through a case of mistaken identity (the King and everyone else present thought he was part of a German trade delegation).  He was present on a number of historic occasions, such as when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. (20)

Worthington’s fifteen years at the Toronto Telegram came to an end when the paper folded in 1971.   Rejected by the Globe and Mail, and offered a job with the ultra-left wing Toronto Star, Worthington instead joined Doug Creighton and Don Hunt in founding the Toronto Sun.   Under Worthington’s editorship, the new tabloid quickly became a thorn in the side of Pierre Eliot Trudeau.

Worthington was, in my opinion, at his best when he was standing up for someone against whom an injustice had been done.   Like when he stood up for Canada’s veterans when the government got the bright idea to merge Veteran’s Affairs with the Department of National Defence. (21)  Or when he helped Kyle Brown, a trooper in the Canadian Airborne Regiment who was made the scapegoat for the murder of Shidane Arone in the Somalia controversy, tell his story. (22)  Or when he risked the wrath of Bernie Farber by opposing the Canadian Jewish Congress’ obscene efforts to have several elderly Ukranian and Polish men who had been captured and forced into service by the Nazis in the World War II and who had immigrated here after the war, deported on the grounds that they were “war criminals”. (23)

In the last example, we see another instance of similarity between Worthington and Reese.   For Worthington also spoke out against the similar persecution of John Demjanjuk, who had been wrongly identified as war criminal “Ivan the Terrible”, stripped of his American citizenship, extradited to Israel, convicted, then had his conviction overturned on appeal when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that evidence proved conclusively that Demjanjuk could not have been “Ivan the Terrible”.  Demjanjuk was subsequently accused of being a different war criminal and extradited to Germany, Israel having refused to hear the accustations.   Worthington condemned the whole affair, placing him in the company of a very small number of conservative journalists who were willing to do so. (24)  Pat Buchanan had been Demjanjuk’s main advocate in the press. Charley Reese was another.

This displayed a trait I admired in these men – the willingness to say what they thought was true, and stand up for what they thought was right, even if it was sure to bring an onslaught of unpleasant name-calling down upon their heads.

Charley Reese exemplified this trait. In an age of ever increasing “political correctness”, in which the Left succeeded in having more and more opinions, once common and freely expressed, driven from the marketplace of ideas, Reese defied them completely. He stood up for Southern Americans, their Confederate heritage and its symbols, for absolute freedom of speech, for gun owners’ rights, for the rights of the unborn, and for a host of other things that it takes great courage to stand for today. I agreed with him on most of these issues, but hope that I could have respected his forthrightness and courage even if that was not the case.

Reese and Worthington both set excellent examples for conservative writers – indeed, for commentators of any sort. May they rest in peace.

(1) For example, compare Peter Worthington’s “NATO’s reputation a casualty of war”, Toronto Sun, November 18, 1999 (http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=/content/monitor/mgen/mgen19.incl) and “The hoax that started a war”, Toronto Sun, April 2, 2001 (http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=article&articleid=6989) with Charley Reese’s “What to do when facts are different”? Why, just stop reporting”, Orlando Sentinel, November 14, 1999 (http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=/content/monitor/mgen/mgen15.incl) and “If there is to be any real hope of peace NATO has to go”, Orlando Sentinel, March 9, 2000 (http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=/content/monitor/koskss/kss44.incl).

(2) Charley Reese, “Time To Give Bouquets and Raspberries for the Persian Gulf War”, Orlando Sentinel, February 28, 1991 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1991-02-28/news/9102280755_1_persian-gulf-war-saddam-hussein-fighting-the-war) “Just What Did We Americans Get Out of the Persian Gulf War?”, Orlando Sentinel, March 28, 1991 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1991-03-28/news/9103270738_1_persian-gulf-war-kuwait-war-machines); “Persian Gulf War Isn’t Off Everyone’s Timetable – Just Ours”, Orlando Sentinel, August 15, 1991 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1991-08-15/news/9108150669_1_persian-gulf-war-arab-world-time-schedule).

(3) Charley Reese, “Tweedle Dee Vs. Tweedle Dum: The Differences Are Important”, Orlando Sentinel, March 26, 2000 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2000-03-26/news/0003250258_1_tweedle-dum-tweedle-dee-i-voted)

(4) Charley Reese, “A Gnashing Sound From the Left”, Orlando Sentinel, January 2, 2001. (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-01-02/news/0101020033_1_george-w-bush-decent)

(5) Charley Reese, “A Good Executive, That’s Bush”, Orlando Sentinel, January 9, 2001, (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-01-09/news/0101090057_1_john-ashcroft-bush-people-project), “Perversion Perfectly Illustrationed”, Orlando Sentinel, January 21, 2001 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-01-21/news/0101200106_1_john-ashcroft-prostitute-fear)

(6) Charley Reese, “Go To Source of Energy Problem”, Orlando Sentinel, March 20, 2001. (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-03-20/news/0103200077_1_energy-problem-consumption-based-on-energy)

(7) Charley Reese, “Phone Chat With Veep a Nice Touch”, Orlando Sentinel, March 22, 2001 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-03-22/news/0103220069_1_vice-president-budget-task-force)

(8) Charley Reese, “Don’t Grumble About the Bush Vacation.” St. Augustine Record, August 26, 2001(http://staugustine.com/stories/082601/opi_0826010035.shtml) The St. Augustine Record ran this column on a Sunday. The King Features Syndicate would have released it during the previous week.

(9) Charley Reese, “Indefinite Bombing Will Get Us In Trouble”, King Features Syndicate, November 14, 2001.

(10) Charley Reese, “Americans Should Worry Lest Liberty Became a Casualty”, King Features Syndicate, November 30, 2001.

(11) Charley Reese,”A Whole Lot of Coincidences Here”, King Features Syndicate, November 26, 2001, “A Poorly Covered War”, King Features Syndicate, December 3, 2001, “Nobody Should Like War”, King Features Syndicate, December 14, 2001, “What Happened to the Tightening Noose”, King Features Syndicate, December 24, 2001, “No Peace, No Good Will, No Justice”, King Features Syndicate, December 31, 2001.

(12) Charley Reese, “Peace? Let’s Just Pray for Good Sense”, Orlando Sentinel, January 4, 2001 (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-01-04/news/0101040068_1_afghanistan-price-of-peace-capability), “One Bad Act Begets Another”, Orlando Sentinel, February 27, 2001. (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2001-02-27/news/0102270037_1_saddam-hussein-nations-charter-united-nations)

(13) Charley Reese, “Don’t Attack Iraq”, King Features Syndicate, January 9, 2002.

(14) See the archives of his columns at paleolibertarian Lew Rockwell’s website (http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese-arch.html) and at Antiwar.com (http://www.antiwar.com/reese/archives.php).

(15) Peter Worthington, “Rogue Nations Beware: Bush Is Serious”, Toronto Sun, February 6, 2001, “Bush’s Pressure is on UN, not just Saddam”, Toronto Sun, January 30, 2003,

(16) Peter Worthington, “War on Terror Right Course”, Toronto Sun, September 5, 2004, “Why George Bush is Today’s Churchill”, Toronto Sun, September 28, 2004.

(17) Peter Worthington, “No Fighting – PM’s decree insults our soldiers and embarrasses Canada”, Toronto Sun, November 23, 2001.

(18) Peter Worthington, “Canuck Army has no Teeth”, Toronto Sun, September 24, 2001.

(19) All of this can be found in Peter Worthington, Looking For Trouble: A journalist’s life… and then some (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1984)

(20) Ibid.

(21) Peter Worthington, “The Kiss of death for Canada’s Veterans”, National Post, July 30, 2010. (http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/30/peter-worthington-the-kiss-of-death-for-canadas-veterans/#ixzz0vDZsnigU))

(22) Peter Worthington and Kyle Brown, Scapegoat: How the Army Betrayed Kyle Brown (Toronto: Seal Books, 1997)

(23) Peter Worthington, “Ukranian guard wasn’t a Nazi”, Toronto Sun, April 5, 2001,“Stay of Execution”, Toronto Sun, November 5, 2002, “Justice a Long Time Coming”, Toronto Sun, June 2, 2004, “Feds’ witch hunt isn’t punishing real war criminals”, Toronto Sun, December 8, 2009.

(24) Peter Worthington, “Germany targets Demjanjuk”, Toronto Sun, March 30, 2009 (http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/peter_worthington/2009/03/30/8934641-sun.html) , “Demjanjuk was not Ivan the Terrible, but he's on trial again”, Toronto Sun, December 11, 2009 (http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/peter_worthington/2009/12/11/12118706-sun.html), “No satisfaction in Demjanjuk case”, Toronto Sun, May 25, 2011 (http://www.torontosun.com/2011/05/21/no-satisfaction-in-demjanjuk-case).

Progressive Do-Gooders and Racial Realities

In The Warden, the first volume of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, we are given an illustration of the mischief which zealous, progressive social reformers can do when they have the support of the news media. The title character is the Reverend Septimus Harding, an elderly clergyman who is the warden of an almshouse operated by the Church of England in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester. A zealous young social reformer and the suitor of the warden’s daughter, Dr. John Bold believes that the warden receives too high of an income from the property which had been donated to establish the almshouse, and takes legal action to correct this perceived injustice. While Bold is able to keep his knowledge of the fact that the warden is a good and honest man in a separate compartment of his mind from that in which he has formed his opinion about the warden’s income, his friend Tom Towers, publisher of the powerful newspaper The Jupiter, joins his crusade by writing and publishing a couple of articles in which he paints the warden in as negative of a light as possible as a greedy hypocrite and robber of the poor. When Bold goes to Towers, tells him that he is wrong about the warden and asks him not to publish any such stories again, he is told that to do so would defraud the public.

Trollope’s novel was first published in the middle of the 19th century and the causes which inflame self-righteous social reformers have changed between then and now. One of the causes which the John Bolds and Tom Towerses of the present day are obsessed with is that of correcting racial injustices. Or rather, that of combating “racism”, which is not quite the same thing. This obsession dates back to World War II, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the international indignation over the policy of apartheid practiced by South Africa back before it became a failed state.

Many are the Septimus Hardings who have fallen victim to the self-righteousness of the pompous do-gooders and their anti-racist crusade. In 1995, award winning editorial writer Samuel Francis was fired from the Washington Times. A few years earlier, Joseph Sobran, a brilliant protégé of William F. Buckley Jr. had been fired from National Review by his old mentor. In both cases the writers were fired by supposedly conservative publications after progressives had accused them of racism – or in Sobran’s case anti-Semitism – over something they had written and said.

The latest victims are Patrick J. Buchanan and John Derbyshire.

Buchanan is a syndicated columnist, a best-selling author, a former adviser and speechwriter to three US Presidents, and a three time candidate for the US Presidency himself. He was fired from the television news network MSNBC earlier this year. Progressives had been demanding that he be fired ever since the publication, last year, of his latest book Suicide of a Superpower, which included a chapter on “The End of White America”. The network’s president announced in January that he thought what Buchanan had written was not appropriate for “the national dialogue” (1) and in February, Buchanan was fired.

John Derbyshire is the author of several books, including We are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. He is also a freelance writer who until recently was published by National Review. Late last week he committed the terrible sin of writing an article for the webzine Taki’s Mag entitled “The Talk: Non-black Version”. Several articles had been published recently which discussed conversations certain black parents had with their children warning them about the racism and prejudice they can expect at the hands of white America. Derbyshire’s article was a response to these in which he presented an alternative “talk”, which he says is derived from conversations he has had with his own mixed-race children about black people. The leftist gutter press, including such trash rags as the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post, threw a conniption over this article and the once conservative magazine’s editor Richard Lowry (2) fired him this past weekend.

What had Francis, Sobran, Buchanan, and now Derbyshire said to warrant this outrage? Did they demand the re-establishment of de jure segregation? Did they suggest that black slavery should be reinstated? Did they say that blacks or members of any other race should be denied the civil rights and legal protections of other citizens? Did they call for the persecution or extermination of people on the basis of their skin colour?

Judging from the hysterical denunciations of these men penned by progressives and pseudoconservatives onewould think that they did all of the above, but in fact they did none of the above, nor anything remotely similar.

These men were accused of racism because they rejected the progressive narrative in which whites, and only whites, are the perpetrators of racism, and non-whites, and only non-whites, are the victims of racism. They were accused of racism because they did not accept the idea that it is “racist” for white people to think of themselves collectively as a group and to look out for their own interests and those of their children but that it is not racist for people of other races to be conscious of a racial identity and work to advance their interests. They were accused of racism because they objected to the way in which governments of Western countries were using liberal immigration policies to adversely affect the future well-being of white people. (3) They were accused of racism because they refused to abide by the liberal-imposed taboos against the discussion of facts which conflict with the idea that the best way to deal with the reality of race is to pretend it does not exist.

Samuel Francis had given a speech in which he connected the achievements of Western civilization to the character of the people who built that civilization and suggested that the survival of that culture and civilization required the survival of that people. (4)

Joseph Sobran, who wanted the United States to withdraw from global military endeavours when the Cold War ended, warned that America’s close relationship with Israel could potentially lead her into perpetual war with the Arab nations. (5)

Patrick Buchanan wrote a jeremiad about the decline of America that pointed out that the USA will be irrevocably changed once whites become a minority in America, as is scheduled to happen before this century is half over, and dared to question whether that change will be for the better.

John Derbyshire told his half-European, half-Asian children that as individuals black people are entitled to the same courtesy and respect as any other citizen, that as a group “there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black)”, that there are major differences between blacks and whites in terms of group averages, and that in certain specific circumstances there is reason to be afraid of blacks. (6)

These men lost their jobs because progressive liberals had determined that the expression of certain facts and truths was detrimental to their cause, that everyone who expressed those facts and truths must be branded a racist and silenced, and because the executives of the largest “conservative” publications lacked the courage to stand up to the bullying demands of the left.

One man who has been much in the news over the last month, stands to lose much more than a job, however, because of the alliance between anti-racist social reformers and the media. That man is George Zimmerman. If progressives and their media allies have their way, Mr. Zimmerman will arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and spend the rest of his life behind bars.

George Zimmerman, for those of you have been vacationing on the moon since Christmas, is a member of the neighborhood watch in the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which is a gated community in Sanford, Florida. On the evening of February 26th, he noticed a 17-year old black youth named Trayvon Martin. Martin, it turns out, had walked from the home of his father’s fiancé to a local 7-11 to buy skittles and ice tea. He was unarmed. Zimmerman thought he looked suspicious, and called police dispatch to report “looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.” The police told him they did not need him to follow Martin and that they would send a car to investigate. When the police arrived they found Martin dead and Zimmerman standing nearby. Zimmerman told them that he had shot Martin in self-defence. The police took Zimmerman in for questioning, but they did not charge him, and eventually released him.

Progressives maintain that this was an act of racism, that Zimmerman was afraid of Martin because of his skin colour, and murdered him in cold blood.

Let me say right now that I do not know that this was not a murder. Perhaps the progressives are right for once – a stopped clock is right twice a day after all – and Zimmerman deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life. I do not know, because I do not know what happened in the interval between Zimmerman’s phone call to the police and their arrival, other than that Zimmerman shot Martin. Neither, however, do the progressives know what happened. They were not there anymore than I was.

I do know that the media falsified evidence to support the progressive interpretation of these events.

The National Broadcasting Corporation, for example, played an excerpt from Zimmerman’s call to the police that went “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.” In fact, Zimmerman’s actual words were “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The words “he looks black” were in response to a direct question from the police “OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?”

When this was made public, NBC promised to investigate, and wrote the entire thing off as an “error”. (7)

It is difficult to imagine an “error” that would edit a conversation and make it into a racist statement. It is not difficult, unfortunately, to think of a plausible reason why a media company would intentionally do so.

Think about it. There are countless numbers of tragic deaths that occur in the United States every year. Why has this particular case attracted international media attention?

It has done so because the case has been depicted in the media as a classic example of racism. It has been turned into a morality tale to instruct us as to the evils that come from racial profiling. It is being offered as proof that the United States, over 140 years after abolishing slavery, over 40 years after the abolition of Jim Crow and the replacement of de jure discrimination against blacks with de jure discrimination in their favour, and 4 years since they elected their first black President, is a white racist society. The story of racist Zimmerman shooting down an innocent youth in cold blood because he was black is a story tailor-made to suit the purposes of those progressive anti-racists who seem to think that Adolf Hitler is going to break out of hell and start up anew in North America any day now.

The facts of the story, however, do not seem to fit the mold into which the progressive media has been trying to force it.

For one thing, Zimmerman, despite his German/Jewish last name, is not white. He is of mixed race, his father being white, his mother being Peruvian Hispanic. He identifies himself as Hispanic when voting. The media has taken to referring to him as a “white Hispanic”, although he is of dark complexion and it is not customary to refer to people of mixed ancestry in this way. It does not seem to have occurred to the media, that their insistence upon calling Zimmerman “white” in order to associate the shooting of Martin with “whiteness” is itself racist against whites.

For another thing there is evidence to support Zimmerman’s account. The police reported that he was bleeding from his nose and the back of his head and that he showed signs of having been on the ground himself. The surveillance video of Zimmerman entering the police station, despite claims by ABC News to the contrary, shows those injuries. A witness testified to seeing Zimmerman lying on the ground with Martin on top of him punching him.

It should go without saying that this event was a tragedy one way or another. A 17 year old, unarmed kid, was shot dead on his way home from the store. However he dressed, whatever he called himself on Twitter, he did not deserve that. Having said that, however, it does not follow that Zimmerman is the cold-blooded killer that he has been portrayed as in the media. The way the media has handled this affairs means that it will be virtually impossible for Zimmerman to receive a fair trial if he is arrested and charged. Sir William Blackstone once said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” Progressives appear to be willing to sacrifice this noble principle, a key element of the English concept of justice, to the cause of anti-racism.

What the progressives want us to believe is that the Martin shooting proves that white racism is a significant social problem in Obama’s “post-racial” America which justifies legislation and social programs aimed at correcting that problem. The facts are otherwise. If there is a major problem with racism in the USA today it is not the racism of whites against blacks, but of blacks against whites.

Data compiled by the American government demonstrates that the vast majority of crimes committed in the United States are intraracial, i.e., committed against someone of the same race as the person committing the crime. When whites commit crimes, it is most often against other whites, when blacks commit crimes it is most often against other blacks.

The date also shows that interracial crimes, i.e., crimes committed against someone of a different race than the perpetrator, are far more often committed by blacks against whites, than the other way around. (8)

Progressives insist that crimes should receive a greater punishment if they can be shown to be motivated by racial prejudice. They have succeeded in getting laws passed against “hate crimes” in many places. Yet black on white crimes, despite being more frequent than white on black crimes, are seldom if ever treated as hate crimes. Nor do they receive the media attention that the much rarer white on black crimes receive. Particular black on white crimes only seem to receive the kind of media attention the shooting of Trayvon Martin has received when they involve a celebrity like O. J. Simpson.

The progressive/media campaign against racism is a very selective campaign indeed. Certain statements are mercilessly condemned as “racist” when made by whites, even if they are unquestionably true, whereas violent crimes committed against whites are excused as being the expectable response to white racism, rather than racism against whites.

In Trollope’s novel the efforts of John Bold and Tom Towers do not, in the end, help the people in whose name they had appointed themselves to speak but actually make their condition worse. Towers’ accusations drive the warden from the almshouse, the bishop decides not to replace him because of the controversy surrounding the warden’s income, the institution falls into decline, and the residents are deprived of a good friend and of the allowance he had paid them out of his own pocket.

How about the progressive campaign against racism? Has it benefited those in whose name it is fought?

No, it has not. The major injustices committed against blacks in the United States, slavery and de jure segregation, have been abolished for decades. The anti-racist movement continues to blame the problems blacks face today on these injustices however. This does nothing to improve relations between the races, generating distrust on both sides. If blacks and whites both would be benefited from better race relations, then the anti-racist movement is harming both races.

Black people have far more important problems than racism to deal with. Many live in urban centres that have been turned into slums by misguided urban planning on the part of the American federal government (9). A black middle class took shape and began to grow in the decades before the Civil Rights movement began (10), but upward mobility among American blacks has actually slowed down since the Civil Rights movement many urban blacks today find themselves trapped in multi-generational poverty and dependence in part due to anti-family incentives in social programs designed ironically to combat poverty (11). A negative culture which glorifies crime and violence and preys upon black youth has developed and this culture contributes significantly to the high crime rates, both as perpetrators and victims, among American blacks (12).

Progressive and media anti-racism encourages black leaders to turn white people into scapegoats for all these problems rather than to seek real solutions to them. It also contributes to the problems, especially the violent youth culture.

Everybody, white and black alike, suffers from the actions of our contemporary anti-racist John Bolds. If anyone benefits, it is the self-righteous progressive do-gooders themselves, who are usually the first to put into practice in their personal lives the advice John Derbyshire gave his children in his brilliant article.

1. Patrick Buchanan tells the story of his firing in this column here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/2012/02/16/blacklisted-but-not-beaten/ You can read my review of his book here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/11/fate-of-america.html

2. Lowry became editor of National Review in 1997. The editor who preceded him was John O’Sullivan, who had taken over the editorship when Buckley stepped down and semi-retired in 1988. Officially O’Sullivan announced that he was resigning the editorship. There is evidence, however, that William F. Buckley Jr. forced him to step down. O’Sullivan had approved a cover story for the magazine entitled “Time to Rethink Immigration?” in 1992, written by finance columnist Peter Brimelow, who would later write the 1995 bestseller Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster calling for immigration restriction and found the immigration restrictionist webzine VDare. Brimelow was fired from National Review at about the same time O’Sullivan “stepped down.” The new editor, Lowry, brought the magazine more in line with “neo-conservatism”, an ideology originally associated with former ‘60’s and ‘70’s radicals and liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, which basically consists of support for American military crusades to spread democracy and capitalism around the globe, a strong American alliance with Israel, free trade and immigration. .

3. Sobran was a late convert to the immigration reform/restrictionist movement, following the publication of Buchanan’s State of Emergency.

4. The speech was given at the first American Renaissance conference in May 1994. It was later adapted into the article “Why Race Matters: The assault on our race and culture must be met in explicitly racial terms”, which appeared as the cover story of the September 1994 issue of American Renaissance. It can be read online here: http://www.amren.com/ar/1994/09/#cover American Renaissance is a monthly publication that deals entirely with racial issues. It was founded by Jared Taylor, a Yale University graduate, whose book Paved With Good Intentions, first published by Carroll & Graf in 1993, argues that efforts to create racial harmony in the United States following the American Civil Rights Movement through affirmative action and the dismantling of white racial identity have in fact produced the opposite of racial harmony. Politically, Taylor holds to a modified libertarianism in which the state restricts immigration, but is domestically colour blind. Taylor has pointed to studies that show that people of all races prefer to associate mostly with members of their own race, and argues that people of all races should be free to self-segregate or to mix, as they wish. His views can be taken to be the editorial position of American Renaissance, which publishes well-written articles by academics or scientists (some writing under pseudonyms for obvious reasons) which challenge the various racial taboos of progressive America.

5. Sobran expressed these opinions, not in the pages of National Review, but in his syndicated column. This was around the time of Patrick Buchanan’s first presidential campaign and Buchanan expressed similar views, as did Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. It is noteworthy that these conservative columnists were all strong Israel supporters during the Cold War. Each of them believed that the USA should withdraw from military interventionism and adopt a position of armed neutrality after the collapse of the Soviet threat. The accusations of anti-Semitism came primarily from neo-conservatives who wanted the exact opposite of this, a Pax Americana in which liberalism, capitalism, and democracy would be spread throughout the world with the backing of the US military. Often the progressives who repeat the neo-conservatives accusations of anti-Semitism against men like the Buchanan, Reese, and the late Sobran, are the same progressives who lionize Palestianian terrorists as “freedom fighters” and demonize Israel as an “apartheid state”.

6. http://takimag.com/article/the_talk_nonblack_version_john_derbyshire While I don’t agree with his advice in 10h, the facts as he presents them are correct, and his advice based upon them is largely common sense.

7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/nbc-issues-apology-on-zimmerman-tape-screw-up/2012/04/03/gIQA8m5jtS_blog.html h/t Lawrence Auster http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022083.html

8. http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams081899.asp This column was written in 1999. In it Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, tells how he independently verified the findings of The Color of Crime, a report published by the New Century Foundation earlier that year. The New Century Foundation is the company that publishes American Renaissance, referred to in footnote 4. In 2005 a second, updated, and enlarged edition of The Colour of Crime was published. It is available to download in .pdf format here: http://www.colorofcrime.com/colorofcrime2005.pdf The report finds that blacks commit 85% of interracial crime in the United States, and whites commit 15%. Blacks are 12% of the American population, whites are over 60%. Note carefully what these figures say and what they do not say. They do not say that the majority of black Americans commit interracial crimes. They do say that the vast majority of interracial crimes in America are committed by black Americans.


9. Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates how slums are created on pages 117-122 of Human Scale (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). The example he uses is the South Bronx. He traces its decline, beginning with federal government intervention in the housing market after World War II to housing projects in the 60’s and 70’s. He does so to illustrate the concept of prytaneogenesis – “damage actually generated by the state”.

10. The history of this can be read in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

11. A strong family structure helps deter multi-generational poverty. This structure is weakened when social programs provide – unintentionally – incentives to men to desert their wives and children, for a father and mother not to marry, and for women have children outside of wedlock with multiple fathers and raise those children alone. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994), particularly pages 124-133.

12. If you look at the total number of crimes committed in the United States, and break it down by race, blacks do not commit the majority of crimes in the United States. They do, however, commit a very disproportionate percentage of the crimes. What that means is that for the vast majority of American crimes, the percentage committed by blacks is much higher than the roughly 12% that is their percentage of the American population. Progressives typically explain these figures away by accusing police and judges of being racist. Racial arrest and conviction figures however, correlate strongly with the racial analysis of the testimony of crime victims. The Color of Crime, referred to and linked to in footnote 8 does this correlation. The most recent edition is 7 years old but updated source data is available for at the websites of the FBI and the US Bureau of Justice. The US Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey can be found here: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245 The following link includes a number of reports from the survey that deal specifically with race: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922 The FBI’s United Crime Reports can be found here: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr Reports for the years 1995 to 2010 are available as is a preliminary report for 2011. To find the racial figures, first click on one of the years, then on “rates” under “Offences Known to Law Enforcement”. This will open a page with a series of options in a horizontal bar at the top. Click “Persons Arrested” then choose the options available for “race” under Expanded Arrest Data at the bottom of the page. Note carefully, that because most crime is intraracial, these figures mean not only that blacks commit a disproportionate number of American crimes, but that they are victims at a disproportionately high rate as well. Therefore, the constant attempts of progressives and their media allies, to slander and libel anyone who points these facts out as a “racist”, is harmful rather than helpful to black Americans, because it covers up a problem that afflicts them worse than anyone else in the USA.

On the Passing of a Christian Anarchist

J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford literary professor, devout Catholic, and cultural conservative who is remembered today primarily as the author of The Lord of the Rings, once wrote to his son saying:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) -- or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy.

My own preferences are for monarchy. This essay, however, is a tribute to another reactionary, now deceased, who came to believe in anarchy.

M. Joseph Sobran, who passed away on September 30th, shared Tolkien’s Catholic faith and his love of the English language and its literature. That was his major in Eastern Michigan University, where in 1971 he first met William F. Buckley Jr., the legendary founder and editor of National Review magazine. Mr. Buckley was impressed by a letter Mr. Sobran had written defending the invitation Mr. Buckley had received to speak at the school. He interviewed Mr. Sobran who subsequently received an invitation from Buckley to come to New York and write for the flagship journal of the American conservative movement. He accepted and on September 11, 1972 began his career as a writer and later an editor for National Review.

A man of Joe Sobran’s literary talents could not be limited to one outlet. When J. P. McFadden founded the Human Life Foundation in 1975 he invited Mr. Sobran to be a regular contributor to the foundation’s quarterly journal. The Human Life Review, devoted to promoting the cause of human life against what would come to be dubbed “the culture of death” proved to be an excellent forum for a socially conservative young writer. In 1983, the Human Life Press released a collection of Mr. Sobran’s articles from the journal under the title Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions. These essays, consisting of brilliant and witty commentary on such issues as abortion, sex education, the family, secular humanism, fatherhood and pornography, earned their author praise from such luminaries as Clare Boothe Luce, Malcolm Muggeridge, and of course, his mentor William F. Buckley Jr. The praise was well deserved.

Mr. Sobran’s writings began to receive even wider circulation when his Los Angeles Times column was picked up for wider syndication by the Universal Press Syndicate.

In the 1980’s, as the dawning of the end of the Cold War began to appear on the horizon, several writers began to examine critically America’s military presence around the world, maintained since the end of World War II for the purpose of containing the Soviet menace. Would continuing this military presence serve America’s interests in the absence of a Soviet threat or would America find herself pulled into needless and costly wars? Mr. Sobran began to argue that the latter was most likely.

Although he had sound, conservative reasons for taking this position, it earned him the animosity of a number of ex-liberals who had attached themselves to the American conservative movement in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. They especially objected to the way in which Mr. Sobran, in articulating his “America First” views, suggested that America should distance herself from the Middle East conflict. Mr. Sobran wrote a few columns critical of the Israeli lobby in Washington, D. C. and in in 1986 he criticized the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya.

This occurred a year after U.S. President Ronald Reagan had come under attack for his visit to the Bitburg Cemetary in Germany on the 40th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The occasion gave offence because S.S. troops represented a small portion of those buried in the cemetery. The same year it was discovered that Jonathan Pollard was smuggling classified information from America’s Naval Intelligence Service where he worked to Israel. Mr. Sobran defended Ronald Reagan in the first controversy and condemned the espionage in the second controversy.

Mr. Sobran’s detractors drew from all this, the ridiculous conclusion that he hated the Jews, and complained to William Buckley. Mr. Buckley brought the concerns to Mr. Sobran’s attention, published an editor’s note in the July 4th, 1986 issue of National Review in which he wrote:

What needs to be said first is that those who know him know that Sobran is not anti-Semitic.

That was all that needed to be said. Unfortunately, Mr. Buckley did not stop there. He rebuked Mr. Sobran for insensitivity and defended “the structure of prevailing taboos” which has more recently, and quite rightly, come under attack as “political correctness”.

The controversy continued, Mr. Buckley continued to be pressured by people like Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz who wanted him to fire and denounce Mr. Sobran. In December 1991, Mr. Buckley devoted an entire issue of National Review to the subject of “In Search of Anti-Semitism”, focusing on the accusations against Mr. Sobran and against Patrick Buchanan. This issue was one of the most notorious examples of cowardly fence-sitting in the history of the printed word. While continuing to affirm that he did not believe them to be personally anti-Semitic, he refused to defend his friends against the outrageous accusations that were being leveled against them and which he was giving greater publicity to.

Mr. Sobran was not impressed and wrote so. His relationship with Buckley and National Review ended with his being fired in 1993. In the last years of Mr. Buckley’s life, the two would renew their friendship, and Mr. Sobran wrote a most gracious tribute to his former mentor upon his death. The Christian forgiveness Mr. Sobran displayed, should be sufficient evidence to any reasonable person, that he simply did not harbor the irrational hatred of which he was accused.

The end of his career at National Review was not the end of his writing. The conservative Catholic newspaper The Wanderer continued to publish his “Washington Watch” column and his syndicated column continued to be carried by UPS for several years after which it was carried by Griffin Internet Syndicate. In 1994, he launched SOBRAN’s: The Real News of the Month a monthly newsletter published by Griffin Communications which ran until 2007. He also wrote for Chronicles Magazine and in the late 2000’s he was taken on by Chronicles as a contributing editor and his column “The Bare Bodkin” began to be published regularly.

As the title of his Chronicles column would indicate, Mr. Sobran was a Shakespeare expert, having majored in Shakespeare in his graduate studies. In 1997, his book Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time, was published by the Free Press. In this book, Mr. Sobran argued for the Oxfordian position on the authorship of the Shakespearean writings, i.e., that they were really written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Mr. Sobran remained a cultural and social conservative to the end. In the early years of the new millennium, however, he announced his conversion to the kind of anarchism Tolkien spoke of in his letter to his son. The men who brought about this conversion were Dr. Murray N. Rothbard, a brilliant culturally conservative libertarian who had had a falling out with William F. Buckley Jr. considerably earlier than Mr. Sobran did, and Hans-Herman Hoppe. Mr. Sobran announced his conversion in the December 2002 issue of his newsletter, in an article entitled “The Reluctant Anarchist”. Here is how he described the argument that won him over:

Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution “meant,” steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power.

That a conservative Christian would accept such a notion is not as strange as it might seem at first. Nothing has done more to undermine Christian morality, the family, the social and moral order, and the influence of the Church in recent years, decades, and centuries, than the state. Its growth in size and power has been at the expense of all Christian conservatives hold dear. I don’t accept Mr. Sobran’s conclusions, and find his attempts to harmonize anarchism with St. Paul particularly unconvincing, but I can see the attraction that anarchism held for him.

Mr. Sobran’s writings were full of wit, charm, and intelligence. Contrary to the accusations of his detractors, far from being obsessed with one or two hobby horses, he covered a huge range of topics in his columns from culture (both high and low) to religion to politics. If there is any topic that dominated the rest, it was Jesus Christ. Countless columns were devoted entirely to the subject of his Lord and Saviour – “The Man They Still Hate”, “The Optional Jesus”, and “The Words and Deeds of Christ” are but select examples.

Joe Sobran will be missed, not only by his family and friends, but by all of us who never had the opportunity to meet him in person, but who knew him through his writings. May he rest in God’s peace.