Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of the valuable Antiwar.com site. I have quoted him on a number of occasions, and I think his analysis is often valuable.
However, Raimondo's perspective on American foreign policy is very different from mine. His perspective seems to be basically Old Right isolationism, in the sense it was known from the 1930s to the 1950s. So he opposes the Iraq War and various risky, confrontational military policies. But he's just as suspicious and even scornful of international institutions and international law as the neoconservative "unilateralists."
In fact, the Bush Doctrine known as unilateralism is actually a variant of isolationism, both of which take a narrow nationalistic view of American interests. The other major trends in foreign policy are "realism", the favored approach of Old Man Bush and Brent Scowcroft, and "liberal internationalism", which tends to be the favored approach of Democrats.
Raimondo had an article in the print edition of American Conservative's 10/10/05 issue (Pat Buchanan's magazine) called "Realists, Not Leftists: The reborn antiwar movement transcends ideology." For anyone who thinks of Iraq War critics as internationalist liberals, this article has some jarring passages. For instance, on the Second World War and the American First movement, he writes:
World War II witnessed the upsurge of the largest antiwar movement in our history: the America First Committee, with over 800,000 dues-paying members and chapters in every state. In spite of a Communist-led smear campaign, America Flrsters harbored no sympathy for the aims and ideologies of the Axis powers. Rather, their opposition to entering the war was anchored in the suspicion that "we would win the battle against national socialism in the trenches and lose it on the home front," as novelist Rose Wilder Lane put it. (my emphasis)
This was one of the arguments of the America First Committe, true. Did they mean that they were afraid that somehow the American equivalents of Hitler (or close to it) - the Silver Shirts, the followers of Father Coughlin, and so forth - would manage to take over the country in the wake of a war? Well, not exactly. Groups like the Silver Shirts and Father Coughlin's anti-Semitic enthusiasts supported the America First movement. The "national socialism" they feared was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
Raimondo seems to be down with that perspective:
Roosevelt, many if not most conservatives believed, was intent on making himself a dictator, and the court-packing scheme, the National Recovery Administration, and the pronouncements of his more radical henchmen did nothing to disabuse them of this notion. Just as important in framing their antiwar stance was their anti-Communism: when Hitler turned on his ally Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, American Communists were desperate to get us into the war in order to save the "workers' fatherland." American conservatives, such as newspaper magnate Robert R. McCormick, stiffened their antiwar stance: "Our war birds may try to welcome [the invasion) as reason for getting into war. To other Americans," he wrote, " to the majority of them, it presents the final reason for remaining out".
This is just stock John Birch Society type drivel. The America First movement did attract a wide range of war opponents, including the labor leader John L. Lewis. In Lewis' case, his perspective was heavily shaped by his interpretation of what happened to American labor during the First World War. He believed that the labor movement's independence had been seriously compromised, and didn't want to see a repetition of that experience.
But the overt and not-quite-overt fascists, all of whom were very outspoken in being "anti-Communist", not all of whom were quite so outspoken about being "anti-democracy", did support the America First movement out of sympathy for Hitler Germany. This does not mean that everyone who opposed Roosevelt's preparedness program hated democracy. Many of them no doubt thought that American interests would be better served by staying out of the European war, even if that worked to Germany's advantage in the short run.
Rightwing Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish, for instance, may have been sincerely misguided when he told an America First rally in August of 1941:
Germany has a right to play with South America. If Germany wins, her wage scale and buying power will go up and she will buy more of our products, and if she loses, her wage scale will go down, which will mean more competition in the world markets, and less buying power to purchase goods in the American markets.
And there was an anti-militarist atmosphere in the US in the 1920s and 1930s that is hard to imagine today, as a result of the widespread belief that the Great War (First World War) had been a bloody mess ginned up by munitions manufacturers and various kinds of war profiteers.
The biggest star of the America Firsters, though, was the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was a more overt admirer of Nazi Germany than Congressman Fish. It's hard to imagine that he was scrupulously watching out for the country's national interest when he told an America First audience in Des Moines in September of 1941 (9/11/41, actually):
The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration.
That was Lindbergh's most notorious speech. And his admirers have done considerable comma-dancing over the decades to explain away the plain meaning of his words.
And the Axis powers, both Germany and Japan, did try to actively and directly promote the American First Committee, and not just by vague pronouncements of support. Although there was that, too. In January of 1941, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry's shortwave broadcasts to American declared, "The America First Committee is truly American and truly patriotic!"
One of the Committee's most popular speakers, Laura Ingalls (not the author of the Little House on the Prarie books!), was actually a paid agent of Nazi Germany. She was convicted and sent to prison in 1942 for her work for the Germans.
Raimondo's benign description of the America First movement immediately raised by rightwing-nonsense detector's alert.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a Fortune magazine investigative reporter named John Roy Carlson went underground and circulated among far-right activists. He published an account of his experience and findings in 1943 in a book, Under Cover. He gives an account of an America First rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1941. One of the speeches was given by the Socialist Party's Norman Thomas. But the audience was, to put it mildly, far to the right of Thomas. Rightwing notables like John T. Flynn, later to become an FDR-planned-Pearl-Harbor conspiracy theorist, and fascist leader Joe McWilliams. The featured speaker was Charles Lindbergh:
The wildest demonstration I have ever heard met Lindbergh. It was unlike anyting else I had known. A deep-throated, uneartly, savage roar, chilling, frightening, sinister and awesome. It was a frenzied mob-cheer adulating the hero of the hour in recless hysteria.
And what of the blond god who for six full minutes smiled like an adolescent as the mob stood to its feet, waved flags, threw kisses and frenziedly rendered the Nazi salute? Lindbergh impressed me as the most naïve of men politically. He did not impress me either as an organizer or a leader - but as a man who, while himself being led by the nose, had a tremendous capacity to lead the masses by serving as their idol owing to his gift of personal magnetism for a certain class of men and women. Lindbergh - who had turned his back on America to live first in England, then France, then was reported to be considering the buying of a house in Germany - seemed confused with and uncertain of himself, but a hero with the mob.
Carlson quotes a description from McWilliams of the ideal American fascist leader, which Lindbergh seemed to Carlson to fit:
A man that the mob can look up to - but not touch. A man who has come from the people, but has reached so high that they dare not call him their own, but one appointed by God to speak for them!
Of course, far-right groups have factions just like every other political movement, often worse. Flynn challenged Joe McWilliams' presence from the platform:
"I repudiate the support of the [pro-Nazi German-American] Bund, the Communist and the fascist parties. One of their leaders is in this hall tonight. His name is Joseph McWilliams. I don't know whose stooge he is, but newspapermen can always find him where they want him."
But instead of booing, the Coughlinite [anti-Semitic] mob burst into applause for Joe!!!
Flynn was taken aback as the fascist pack threatened to get out of control. ... In the meanwhile, ushers and cops surrounded the spot about ten rows from the ringside, where Joe sat smiling and nonchalant, waving his American flag and enormously pleased at the show. I stole a glance at Lindbergh. He was looking at Joe. He, too, was beaming. ... (emphasis in original)
That was the America First Committee. And, yes, there's every reason to assume that Pat Buchanan knows what he's invoking when he uses the slogan "America First".
Other parts in Raimondo's article are also out of the Old Right isolationist playbook He quotes with apparent approval the reactionary newspaper magnate Robert McCormick on the Korean War:
This preoccupation with the unintended consequences of intervention - "Having helped [Stalin] win," McCormick presciently inquired, "should we then have to rescue the continent from him?" - was the theme of "isolationist" opposition to the Korean War. (my emphasis)
Raimondo sketches the anti-Vietnam War movement as hardline leftists:
"Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!" was a popular chant at antiwar demonstrations during the 1960s, and a small but very visible contingent invariably carried Vlet Cong flags.
Apparently, in his view, the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party were the prime actors in the antiwar movement, along with "the various Marxist factions of Students for a Democratic Society". To complete the Bircher caricature, he writes:
[S]ympathy for the ideology of the enemy clearly predominated over the more thoughtful "self-corruption" arguments advanced by anti-imperialists of yore. Only the libertarians grouped around economist-philosopher Murray N. Rothbard and his journal Left & Right remembered the remonstrations of the Old Right warning that "we have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire."
This is far-right boilerplate, with the standard mixture of half-truths and wild confabulation that is charateristic of such propaganda.
His sketch of more recent history isn't as loopy. But it's from a rightwing isolationist viewpoint:
When George Bush went to war against Iraq to establish a New World Order, many conservatives dissented on grounds of principled opposition to Wilsonianism, but Democrats protested largely because this was "Bush's war." A few years later, when Clinton bombed Baghdad, hardly a peep was raised in these quarters. By the time he struck at Belgrade, a Democratic secretary of state was proclaiming the hegemony of America - "the indispensable nation" - and complaining to Colin Powell, when he balked at sending troops to the Balkans: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"
Rainmondo is more supportive of the current antiwar movement, of which his Antiwar.com site is a significant online presence. He still has to bitch and moan a bit about leftwing factions who also opposed the Iraq War. But this conclusion is sensible enough:
In the post-9/11 world, the realism of the antiwar camp was accentuated to the exclusion of all other factors. There is no one, short of a few isolated figures, who considers bin Laden to be another Aguinaldo nor, in spite of the War Party's propaganda, is anybody rooting for him. The critique of the Iraq War proffered by most critics is realism narrowly conceived: the invasion and conquest of Iraq is seen as the greatest boon bin Laden could have wished for, so much so that Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIAs bin Laden unit, now characterizes the U.S. as al-Qaeda's "indispensable ally."
And, despite his ridiculous picture of the Vietnam War era antiwar movement, he makes a point about the role of soldiers and veterans in today's antiwar movement:
The bitter irony of the neocon Right's charge that the war's opponents are engaging in a "stab in the back" directed at our soldiers in Iraq is underscored by the movement's military focus. Such groups as Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans Against the War are among the brightest stars in the antiwar firmament. They glow the fiercest, perhaps because their passionis personal rather than merely ideological.
That aspect of the movement was the same in the Vietnam War days, however much credibility Raimondo may give to the John Birch Society view of that earlier movement.
Given his fondness and/or gullibility for rightwing propaganda postures in describing past few decades, I look at Raimondo's charges about Israel's role in promoting certain policies like the Iraq War with an especially critical eye. Anyone reasonably familiar with the issues can tell the difference between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. But anyone familiar with far-right propaganda also knows that criticism of Israel and Zionism is often framed in an anti-Semitic fashion. And Raimondo at times phrases his analyses in ways that, at a minimum, lend themselves too easily to the latter usage.
For instance, in AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty as Hell/Pentagon analyst plea bargains, threatens to expose Israel's Washington cabal Antiwar.com 09/30/05, it seems to me that Raimondo pushes the limits. It's no new thing for allies to spy on each other. And even allies get in trouble for it, as in the AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) case involving Larry Franklin.
But plain bad judgment and human stupidity play an important role in governmental decisions, even those involving major foreign policy issues, which those looking for conspiracies often forget. And Raimondo seems just a little too eager to find a sinister, far-ranging conspiracy in this article. At best, rhetoric like the following is careless phrasing, and that's most likely being far too generous:
Now the man they portrayed as being a persecuted victim [Larry Franklin] is admitting that, yes, he spied for Israel, and, furthermore, the clear implication of this apparent plea bargain is that he is prepared to expose the spy ring that Israel was – and perhaps still is – running inside AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.
This case has received relatively little publicity in relation to its importance. It isn't just the fact that, for the first time in recent memory, Israel's powerful lobby has been humbled. What is going on here is the exposure of Israel's underground army in the U.S. – covert legions of propagandists and outright spies, whose job it is to not only make the case for Israel but to bend American policy to suit Israel's needs (and, in the process, penetrate closely-held U.S. secrets). ..
Israel's secret war against America has so far been conducted in the dark, but the Rosen-Weissman [AIPAC] trial will expose these night creatures to the light of day. Blinking and cursing, they'll be confronted with their treason, and, even as they whine that "everybody does it," the story of how and why a cabal of foreign agents came to exert so much influence on the shape of U.S. foreign policy will be told.
In the course of bending American policy to the Israelis' will, they had to compromise the national security of the United States – and that's what tripped them up, in the end. (my emphasis)
That kind of phrasing is just over the top, and is the kind of thing that almost anyone will process as "Jewish conspiracy". It's possible to discuss American-Israeli policy differences and even to discuss an espionage case like the AIPAC one with resorting to that kind of language.
Just to be clear, much of what Raimundo writes is valuable and sensible. He seems in many ways to be a careful researcher. But he's clearly not immune to the pull of some of the Old Right's darkest prejudices.
No comments:
Post a Comment