SOBRAN'S -- The Real News of the Month September 2006 Volume 13, Number 9 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates. Print version: $44.95 per year. For special discounted subscription offers and e-mail subscriptions see www.sobran.com, or call the publisher's office. Address: SOBRAN'S, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Website: www.sobran.com Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 or www.griffnews.com Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-513-5053. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue. CONTENTS Features -> The Coming Fury -> Publisher's Note -> Prescriptions for the Public Good? The Sobran Forum -> The Political Victory of Political Correctness Cartoons (Baloo) "Reactionary Utopian" Columns Reprinted in This Issue FEATURES The Coming Fury (page 1) As Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez, cuddled with the ailing Fidel Castro on the occasion of the latter's eightieth birthday, I found myself thinking of a name from the past: Manuel Noriega. Remember him? He was the pocky-faced dictator of Panama toppled by the first President Bush in 1989, on the pretext that he was trafficking in drugs, with the usual Hitler analogies justifying the latest U.S war in Central America. After he finally surrendered, Noriega was somehow tried under U.S. law (though he hadn't set foot in this country) and of course convicted. The last I heard, he was in an American prison and had converted to Christianity. This remains the most recent of America's many little interventions in the region. We tend to forget them quickly, but those on the receiving end remember them. This is why rulers like Castro and Chavez are as popular as they are in Latin America: whatever their faults, at least they defy the bullying Yanqui. About all I remember about the Panama war is that it seemed quite unnecessary to me, while my conservative friends were all for it. I never understood their enthusiasm, except that the Cold War was coming to an end and they relished the chance to exercise American power abroad against an enemy, any enemy, and Noriega would serve. I thought it was shameful. Obviously Noriega was no threat at all to the United States; you might say he was the Saddam Hussein of the Eighties. And we wonder why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world. Lately I've been reading Pat Buchanan's latest book, STATE OF EMERGENCY, a warning that immigration by unassimilable aliens now threatens not only America but Europe. Given our history of absorbing newcomers peacefully, I was disposed to be skeptical. But after only a few chapters I found myself, against my will, shaken and convinced. The new influxes, chiefly Mexican here and Muslim in Europe, are totally different from early waves of immigrants -- and far more dangerous. At present rates, it won't be long until there are no majority white Christian countries on earth. And the new nonwhite majorities will be deeply hostile to the natives. In his brilliant, neglected book, THE MIGHT OF THE WEST (1964), Lawrence Brown observes that we remember the nineteenth century as a period of peace only because the white nations seldom made war on each other. The rest of the world experienced it differently. The white man's technology, chiefly gunpowder, enabled him to invade and conquer red, brown, yellow, and black men around the world, with enormous attendant slaughter and disruption. To these peoples it must have seemed as if a strange race of pale aliens, armed with malevolent magic, had arrived from another planet to destroy them. They were all but helpless against the enemy's guns, then a terrible novelty and mystery to them. We ruled the world, and it seemed we would go on ruling it forever. But now -- suddenly, in historical terms -- the tables are turned, and it is we who seem helpless against the colored races' explosive populations. They are driving us out of their world and moving into ours in huge numbers. And they are in no mood either to adopt our ways or to forgive us. Publisher's Note (page 2) Dear Loyal Subscriber, Several months ago, I wrote to you about the great financial need we have in order to continue publishing SOBRAN'S. I'm grateful that a number of people responded. I was encouraged, too, by the feedback and by the many prayers that were offered for the success of the newsletter. So far, we have met about half of our goal. There is still time -- and still a need -- to make a pledge or send a gift to assist us in meeting our financial crisis. Frankly, keeping the doors open requires the participation of those who believe that SOBRAN'S plays a vital role in the battle of ideas. Because of your support, votes of confidence, and prayers, we are indeed making progress: * Patrick J. Buchanan's new website, www.Buchanan.org, reprinted one of Joe's WANDERER newspaper columns in which he reviewed Pat's blockbuster book, STATE OF EMERGENCY. Joe's column got thousands of "hits" from Buchanan website readers. Joe's lead piece in this issue is being reprinted by MIDDLE AMERICAN NEWS (www.manews.org), a widely circulated conservative newspaper. * Joe's column, "The Real Bill Buckley," (see the July SOBRAN'S or http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/ 060530.shtml) was reprinted by the "Conservative University," an on-line classroom (www.acuf.org/issues) that gets nearly 50,000 visitors. Also, the column came to the attention of Mr. Buckley himself, who wrote a nice note to Joe about it. * Joe's recent speeches in Detroit and Washington, D.C., were well received, as was his appearance on James Edwards's nationally syndicated radio talk show. To set up a speaking engagement or fundraising party, please call John Mangopolous. (See side panel for his contact information.) * Of course Joe continues to be attacked by the left-wing press -- another sign of our success. The October 9, 2006, NATION magazine says that Joe doesn't "fall into that [racist] category," but claims he is a "right-wing columnist drummed out of his post at NATIONAL REVIEW for his anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism." For the record, Joe holds neither view. In the meantime, Joe has his nose to the grindstone as a contributor to a new college textbook on "Shakespeare" plays for a major publisher. (See his piece on page 8 or see http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/ 060912.shtml for a sneak preview.) Finally I am delighted to announce that our 12th anniversary SOBRAN'S Charter Subscribers' luncheon will be held on Saturday, December 9, at Maggiano's Little Italy restaurant in McLean, Virginia. As usual, Joe will be giving a talk and we will have two special guest speakers as well: Tom Fleming, editor of CHRONICLES magazine, and author and policy analyst Doug Bandow. This event is for benefactors of SOBRAN'S who have already pledged or wish to pledge at least $1,000 to support the newsletter. Please note: we have now established a flexible payment schedule, so if you wish to donate on a long-term basis, we would be grateful. An invitation and handy reply form outlining the options is enclosed. As you might imagine with avid readers of SOBRAN'S, those attending are well-read and fascinating dinner companions. In past years such luminaries as Pat Buchanan, Howard Phillips, Taki Theodoracopulos, Dr. William Campbell Douglass, Tom Bethell, Ann Coulter, Grover Norquist, and Michael Peroutka have been sitting in the audience. Space is limited and reservations have already started to come in, so let me know as soon as possible if you plan to be there. If you cannot come but would like to help sponsor the event or wish to make a pledge to help Joe and the newsletter, you may contact me directly by writing, e-mailing, or calling -- or simply push that "Donations" button at www.sobran.com. Remember, your financial, moral, and prayer support are vital to the continuation of this modest enterprise. And, as always, my deepest appreciation goes out to every loyal supporter of SOBRAN'S. Sincerely yours in Christ, Fran Griffin Prescriptions for the Public Good? (pages 3-4, 6) When, early this year [1983], the Department of Health and Human Services required that parents of children receiving prescription contraceptives be informed of this fact, the regulation was greeted with catcalls by the enlightened. Editorials in the NEW YORK TIMES denounced "the squeal law," and the WASHINGTON POST reported with pokerfaced prose that "civil liberties and family planning groups" were filing suit to prevent implementation. The rhetoric is interesting. Words like "squeal" and "civil liberties" imply that the child's privacy is at stake. Only one thing is forgotten: that a public agency is interposing itself between members of that most private of all human institutions, the family. The protesters are in effect arguing (though not very candidly) that distributing contraceptives is properly a matter between child and state and that parents have no legitimate interest in the transaction. If the argument were put so boldly it would be breathtaking. But of course the enlightened are loath to admit there is a any serious principle at stake here at all. Who can approve of squealing? Who can oppose civil liberties? Who is so heartless as to wish that young people, succumbing to the common weaknesses of this our flesh, should therefore be visited with the twin blights of disease and pregnancy? Who would obstruct "family planning"? I deliberately saved the worst for last. Skin should crawl when that innocuous phrase -- "family planning" -- is invoked. The family! Ah, yes, we all revere the family, don't we? Planning! Excellent thing, planning. The very opposite of improvidence, by which so many have been brought to ruin. Put them together and you get a doubly good thing: families *should* plan. Except that what is really meant, as appears from the squeal-rule controversy, is not that the family will plan, but that it will be planned by somebody else. Family-planning groups are groups that have plans for the family. We now see that they are not necessarily eager that the family be informed. (That might upset the plans.) On the one hand we are told that sex is a purely private affair; on the other we are told (convolutedly) that public agencies -- including the federal government- -- have an interest in teenage sexual behavior, but that parents of those teenagers don't. Parents are to pay their taxes and not ask any questions as to what the money is spent on. The POST reported that even the Salvation Army -- seldom thought of as a radical or even trendy denomination -- had protested the squeal rule. This was a detail that saddened me, I confess. It was no surprise that some other churches would join the pack, but the Salvation Army! That genuinely Christ-loving and consequently fashion-free sect, whose sacrifices for others are so constant and palpable. For *them* to be drawn into this conspiracy against the family was worse than disgusting. It hurt. Parents, it used to go without saying, have not only a biological and economic but a moral and spiritual interest in their children's conduct. It used to go without saying because it didn't need to be said. Today it goes unsaid because so few in leadership positions have the courage to say it. Churchmen are urged to "speak out" on the issues, but everyone understands that this loaded locution is really an invitation for them to speak out on the side of "social change." Those who speak out on the other side can count on being ignored, ridiculed, and reviled for "resisting change." This may seem a rather light cross to bear, but it is evidently too heavy for many in the clergy, and we should pray that they will be given the strength to do it, because what is in progress is a concerted assault on the core of society, and many elements within the churches have become part of that assault -- reverse martyrs. In what I consider the most seminal book of our time, THE SOCIALIST PHENOMENON, Igor Shafarevich argues that we now call "socialism" is really a recurrent process of social dissolution. When the central institutions of society -- religion, the family. and private property -- lose their vigor, power flows to the state, and the seekers of power in turn rationalize the destruction of these institutions or their transformation into mere appendages of the state (like the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union, where the family may be broken up if parents instruct their children in the Christian faith, and private plots of land are tolerated only because there would be mass starvation without them). Since the great apostasy of the West, the same process has been under way generally. Here it is disguised, not spearheaded by a powerful Left. Still, it is noteworthy that the American Civil Liberties Union, which has predictably opposed the squeal rule, began as a socialist legal agency. Its founder, Roger Baldwin, often praised the Soviet Union, taking the view at one point that, where you have the workers themselves in charge of the state, you don't really need civil liberties quite so much: i.e., civil liberties are a means, not an end in themselves. Like most socialist organizations, the ACLU has put distance between itself and the Soviet Union. This is incidental; the principle is what counts, and the ACLU's selected liberties do not, contrary to popular rumor, encompass the entire Bill of Rights with indiscriminate passion. (What about the Second Amendment? the Ninth? the Tenth?) Instead it supports those liberties best calculated to weaken the bonds of the family, the influence of religion, and the security of private property. To what extent the leaders and members of the ACLU are consciously socialist is not for me to say, nor is it my primary care here. What really matters is the compulsive assault on traditional social order in the name of individual freedom. However, the individual who will remain when all the institutions that support and unite individuals are gone will be a naked little fellow indeed. Literally. There is now a pederast's organization, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, whose avowed goal is to legalize sexual "love" between men and boys -- in the name of the boys' sexual rights or, as they put it, "liberation." The founder of this outfit, David Thorstad, has described himself as a Marxist-Leninist, by the way, and tellingly informed one interviewer that "this society is a real cesspool." Many people on both sides seem to feel that way now, and I can't help wondering (without, I hope, unfairly prejudicing a serious issue) whether much of the power of the nuclear-freeze movement doesn't come from the sheer demoralization of people who might otherwise be disposed to insist on the essential incompatibility of East and West. In January I went to Washington for the annual Right to Life march, and on the way back chatted with a neighbor of mine, a goodhearted, apolitical woman who has become extremely worried about nuclear war. She quite naturally and properly fears for her children, and she may be right. All the same, there was a tone in her words which I doubt would have been there 15 years ago -- a tone of despair and confusion, as if to suggest that, in the wake of things such as the legalization of pornography and abortion, the exclusion of religion from public life, and so forth, East and West have become, grimly, compatible. Why perish in a conflict between two secularized, socialist -- dying -- societies? We used to call the Soviets things like "godless" and "atheistic." Now we have been taught to ridicule these once uncontested terms, as Richard Weaver called those terms that stand for the great unchallenged values of any culture. We have ourselves become, operationally, godless and atheistic. This is not to say that a godly and theistic people should lightly aim nuclear weapons at other countries' population centers. It is to say that we may be seeking the wrong kind of peace for the wrong reasons. I suspect we want to avoid war, not out of love for our neighbors, but out of indifference to what *makes* them our neighbors. I have friends who are devout Catholics of politically conservative principle who with deep sophistication hold that nuclear weapons are essentially immoral, not because such weapons are apocalyptic, but because they are indiscriminate to an utterly intolerable degree. This is a serious position, to which I have no good answer. I mention it because it represents a healthy opposition to nuclear war, in the sense that my friends love God, believe in the Redemption, oppose socialism, support the family, and are totally convinced of the evil of the Soviet Union. This places them in sharp contrast to those vague souls who seem to think that the surrender of faith and principle are somehow necessary to physical survival -- and *worth the price.* All this leads to a practical conclusion. Christians -- those who believe that the Son of God died on the cross to redeem us -- must be prepared to go eyeball-to-eyeball with progressives, planners, peace movements, and the rest. We have to get in the habit of asking them, as a lobby so to speak, what their policy prescriptions imply *for us.* Is what they advocate compatible with our faith? Does it depend on our acceptance of their premises about man's nature? Does it require us to behave as if God had not revealed himself to us? We will have to beware of the old trap of trying to persuade them on their own principles, and insist that they either persuade us on ours or be prepared for our opposition. So far we have allowed public policy to be based increasingly on purely secular assumptions; we have been needlessly cowed, I think, by the charge that in bringing our own principles to bear we are seeking to "impose our views" -- a charge that comes oddly from people who are ready, willing, and eager to regiment all society into a new order as soon as possible. The essence of a healthy polity is that it acts corporately for the common good, The common good must be understood in an inclusive sense, that is, to include things of the spirit, and the only practical test of this is whether the Christian community is able to make itself heard and felt. As it has not yet learned to do. Christians tend to assume that they are a majority and that under a system of majority rule there is no special reason for them to bestir themselves. Neither assumption is true. Jews wield far more political clout than Christians. Even homosexual groups, opposed and despised by the great majority of Americans, mange to get tax money, while Christians can hardly get tax relief for their schools. More insidiously, the mass media award publicity mostly to those Christians who "speak out" for the progressive agenda, giving only fleeting and negative attention to those who oppose it. When was the last time the press mentioned the Salvation Army before it joined the opposition to the squeal rule? We are not facing a heresy in the traditional sense, with clear-cut doctrines that may be met by argument. If only we were! We are facing, instead, a kind of generalized decadence whose representatives resist defining their terms or admitting that key principles *are* at stake. Our main order of business, in my judgment, is forcing the public to see the real implications of a mass of hypnotic slogans that are by now too familiar to seem sinister. Satan, in our time, speaks in a bland and offhand idiom. [This essay originally appeared in Center Journal (Spring 1983) of Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, Indiana.] THE SOBRAN FORUM The Political Victory of Political Correctness by Paul Gottfried (pages 5-6) According to recent reports, French politician Jean Marie Le Pen must stand trial a second time for remarks made to a reporter from the right-wing newspaper RIVAROL in January 2005. In his controversial interview, Le Pen had expressed the opinion that the German occupation of France "wasn't particularly inhumane, even if there were some blunders, which were inevitable." The new suit for group defamation and, by implication, for criminally denying the official facts about the Holocaust that were issued by the international Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946, is being brought by the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees of France, an organization with long-standing and transparent connections to the French Left. A convenient peg for suits of this kind is the Loi Gayssot legislation, which builds on a law against collective defamation going back to the early 1970s. This important law -- both sponsored by and named for a Jewish Communist deputy in the National Assembly, Jean-Claude Gayssot -- criminalized speech that might offend self-designated victim minorities, while making sure that denials of Communist mass murder, however explicit, would be exempted from prosecution. In a response to anti-Communist critics in the French Assembly in November 1997, Premier Lionel Jospin refused to condemn the mass killing done by the "anti-fascist" Joseph Stalin. Nonetheless, Jospin did not run the risk of being accused of a delit d'opinion (a crime of opinion). The premier, by this act, was not condoning anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic deeds or opinions but doing something deemed less reprehensible, refusing to be judgmental about Stalin's efforts to deal with a class enemy. Although most of the Loi Gayssot designates and criminalizes hate speech against religious and ethnic groups, Article 9, Title 2 condemns specifically the public expression of views that conflict with the condemnation of genocide and crimes against humanity enumerated by the Nuremberg Tribunal. In this postwar judgment by, among others, Stalin's handpicked judges, only certain kinds of mass murder and violence could incur legal action. In fact, only those crimes that the Communist condemned as "fascist" would be subject to criminal prosecution. If the Communists, who were the coalition allies of Jospin's Socialists, had nothing unkind to say against Stalin's or Mao's campaigns to rid their countries of "fascist" collaborators, what right then do French progressives have to raise objections? In his response, Jospin accused his critics of treating on an equal basis two "incommensurable phenomena": a set of not particularly blameworthy Communist blunders and the most evil of all evils, "fascist racism." In Germany, such vile mistakes can bring legal actions in addition to professional ruination. Those with insufficiently anti-fascist opinions can be listed as a "danger to democracy" by the governmental Protectors of the Constitution or else be dragged into court for "trivializing the Holocaust." This last misstep might include paying excessive attention to Stalin's mass murders, which has been interpreted as deliberately diverting public attention from the inexpiable enormity of German fascist crimes. Whatever may have been Le Pen's reason for uttering his statements, his historical judgment is certainly defensible. The Nazi occupation of France was not exceptional for twentieth-century occupations carried out by unfriendly invaders. A comparison with the Soviets' takeover of the Baltic countries may be instructive. There the French Left's "anti-fascist" former Big Brother, then allied to Hitler, succeeded in carrying out a far higher proportion of political murder and deportation than did the Nazis during the German occupation of France. Almost half of the Balts were deported or killed under Stalin, a figure that was reached in France only for foreign-born Jews during the German Occupation. Most of the French Jewish indigenes (more than 190,000) managed to escape with their lives, and the vast majority escaped deportation, largely because of French Christian assistance. Of the 330,000 Jews who were in France before the war, 170,000 stayed in France and almost all of them survived the Occupation. Moreover, the German occupation was far less destructive for French Christians than the German presence in Poland or Russia was for inhabitants there. And if one takes into account the hideous slaughter wrought by the Japanese on the Chinese and Filipinos, or the far worse slaughter of Jews in the East than in France, Le Pen's statements were not as outrageous as one might guess from looking at the press. Certainly they are not the sort of thing that a civilized country should throw someone in jail or threaten with a huge fine and public disgrace for uttering. Note, Le Pen's assertions are also far less questionable as historical statements than the Holocaust-denial that they are imagined to illustrate. They should not be compared to those greatly reduced figures for the Holocaust that were associated with British historian David Irving, before his recent arrest and incarceration in anti-fascist Austria. This comparison is worth making, despite the fact that Irving's fate for his politically incorrect history was both outrageous and typical. It was outrageous, given the self-promotion of Western "liberal democracies," which have become controlled hothouses of politically correct opinion. And this jailing of an aged scholar for his historical judgment made in a different country at a different time is all too typical. The victory of multiculturalism in the "Western democracies" has given rise to a totalitarian domination as loathsome and intrusive as the real Marxist-Leninism that it is replacing. Whether it goes by the name of multiculturalism, sensitivity-training, or cultural Marxism, this combination of ideas and sentiments has taken over Western administrative states and their cultural industry. There is no way of combating this danger, save for an angry mass rejection of what the destroyer preaches, and a disempowering of the mind-snatching states that impose "tolerance" by force and through public education. Immigration from the non-Western world and particularly of Muslims, who are now streaming into Western and Central Europe, has been a tool for breaking down the pitifully little that remains of Western social and cultural authorities. Not all immigration expansionists are misguided fools. Many of them dislike or fear what Western societies were and did in the past, and have set out to reconstruct them by supplanting their old core populations. Others of those who are now engaged in this enterprise are, of course, useful idiots. Here, one thinks of the leadership of the Republican Party, who seem to be reaching out in the wrong direction even strategically by joining the vanguard of the immigration expansionists. But the effect of such politics, no matter what the motivation, is to aggravate the trend toward cultural breakdown, thereby helping along the multicultural experiment that is now unfolding throughout the West. The demographic erosion of Western peoples, the war waged by state and culture against inherited structures of authority, and the "celebration of diversity" all belong to the same process of orchestrated change that has contributed to the legal difficulties of Jean Le Pen. [Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of AFTER LIBERALISM, MULTICULTURALISM AND THE POLITICS OF GUILT and THE STRANGE DEATH OF MARXISM. A version of this article originally appeared in VDARE.com at www.vdare.com/gottfried/060816_west.htm] NUGGETS DICTATORSHIP MAY DEPEND on torture chambers, but democracies run to bamboozle. -- from page 29 of REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME by Joe Sobran; $5 postpaid or free with a renewal of your SOBRAN'S subscription. THE FINAL STEP: Gay marriage is not enough. We won't have true equality until there are gay shotgun weddings. -- from page 49 of REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME by Joe Sobran; $5 postpaid or free with a renewal of your SOBRAN'S subscription. CARTOONS (Baloo) http://www.sobran.com/articles/leads/2006-09- cartoons.shtml REPRINTED COLUMNS ("The Reactionary Utopian") (pages 7-12) * Everybody Knows (September 14, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060914.shtml * Wild Justice (September 12, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060912.shtml * Victim of McCarthyism (September 5, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060905.shtml * Heavenly Turmoil (August 17, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060817.shtml * Nation-Building and Islam (August 15, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060815.shtml * Language in Rubble (August 10, 2006) http://www.sobran.com/columns/2006/060810.shtml ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All articles are written by Joe Sobran, except where explicitly noted. You are receiving this message because you are a paid subscriber to the Joe Sobran column or a subscriber has forwarded it to you. If you are not yet a subscriber, please see http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml for details or call 800-513-5053. Copyright (c) 2006 by the The Vere Company, www.sobran.com. All rights reserved. [ ENDS ]