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Sunday Dec 30, 2007
Inside the Middle East: Crude and tasteless
Posted by Martin Kramer
Comments: 6
    
In September of last year, Pat Buchanan, founder of the weekly magazine The American Conservative, published an article on its pages entitled "Fascists Under the Bed." In that piece, Buchanan attacked President Bush for his assertion that we are "at war with Islamic fascism." As a prelude, Buchanan made a general critique of the reckless way analogies to fascism have been deployed in American politics. Buchanan:
Orwell said when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is, "I hate Smith." By calling Smith a fascist, you force Smith to deny he's a sympathizer of Hitler and Mussolini...Since the 1930s, "fascist" has been a term of hate and abuse used by the Left against the Right, as in the Harry Truman campaign. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to see in the Goldwater campaign "dangerous signs of Hitlerism." Twin the words, "Reagan, fascism" in Google and 1,800,000 references pop up.The loose use of the fascist analogy, claimed Buchanan, was a trademark of the far left, so that those who identified the enemy as "Islamofascism" simply betrayed their intellectual origins: Unsurprisingly, it is neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-Social Democratic Left, who are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaida, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran into an "Islamofascist" kill box, then let SAC do the rest. The term represents the same lazy, shallow thinking that got us into Iraq, where Americans were persuaded that by dumping over Saddam, we were avenging 9/11. Having read Buchanan's denunciation of fascist-name-calling as a far-left and neo-con rhetorical device--on the pages of The American Conservative--I almost fell over when I saw the cover of the current issue of The American Conservative:
A few bloggers have commented that Giuliani is cast here as a Mussolini figure. No he isn't. He's being portrayed as a Nazi. It's not just the armband, it's the pose and the fine details of dress, all of which refer back to this iconic image, from the poster for the 1933 Nazi film, S.A.-Mann Brand ("Storm-Trooper Brand"):
 So you get the picture. Pat Buchanan gets himself into a righteous lather if you dare to compare Osama bin Laden to a fascist. But on the cover of the very magazine where he does that, it's perfectly legitimate to compare Rudy Giuliani to a Nazi. The cover of The American Conservative seems to have been concocted by someone steeped in the tradition of... well, the Trotskyite-Social Democratic Left. But here's another irony: the cover article it illustrates, criticizing Giuliani's foreign policy vision, is by Michael Desch, who's well-known for his belief that the civilian leaders of this country exercise too much control over the professional military. Is this bizarre convergence of far left and far right either American or conservative? I don't know, but I do know that its graphic rhetoric is crude and tasteless.
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The Other Alan, New Jersey,
Monday Dec 31, 2007
A perfect rendition of a Giuliani administration in my opinion. Wiretaps, video surveillance, police brutality, picking on the destitute, World War IV, war profiteering, etc. All this we have to look forward to with Rudy. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Rudy rules.
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Rob - New York,
Monday Dec 31, 2007
Rudy is a great friend to Israel and that is why the far left and far right hate him so.
3 |
Jew, from America,
Monday Dec 31, 2007
Kramer is an advisor for Giuliani, and should have said so. However, Kramer's point is valid. Giuliani won't massacre 50 million people anytime soon. And neither the Left nor the Right actually have an action plan for terrorism or any of the problems of the Muslim world. I'm no fan of Kramer, but this is a good point. Hillary, Obama, Romney - what would you do different? Don't give me well-I-wouldn'ts about individual mistakes of the Bush administration (the vapid "consulting with my allies" is one of these). What WOULD you do?
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Peter Canada,
Monday Dec 31, 2007
"righteous lather"? Mr. Kramer seems to be accusing Pat Buchanan of something bad but its not clear at all what that bad thing might be. Hypocrisy would be my guess provided that founding a magazine makes you responsible for everything it ever publishes. If thats the logic behind the accusation then it is pretty thin. The article to which the link is provided seems to be very sober and well thought out. I am not sure about the Trotskyist-Social Democratic Left connection but I believe that Pat Buchanan has the same right to be wrong in his theories as anybody else.
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Peter Canada,
Monday Dec 31, 2007
(cd) To make it perfectly clear, I am defending basic logic here and not Pat Buchanan who may care to do so himself provided he reads this blog. One more thing: there is at least one portrait of Mussolini that the Giuliani caricature reminds one of.
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bozhidar balkas,
Tuesday Jan 01, 2008
it is the long standing u.s. foreign and domestic policies that we need to dwell on and evaluate and not what clinton, bush, obama or any other individual says. |
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