---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2001 14:11:19 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Were in a time machine - and its the early 60s (again!)
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RETRO-REALITY
<http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j112301.html>
We're in a time machine - and it's the early '60s (again!)
by Justin Raimondo
November 23, 2001
Karl Marx, that old shyster, must be chortling in his beard (somewhere
near the bottom rung of Hell): Communism may be as dead as its founder,
but one of Marx's more memorable aphorisms has certainly proved all too
true. "Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world
history reappear in one fashion or another," averred Marx, in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. "He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the
second as farce." Suddenly, it seems, we are hearing all the old bromides of
the 1960s, regurgitated by a whole new generation of deadheads or, in
many cases, some of the very same deadheads. "America, love it or leave it!"
"You hippie, get a job!" Anyone who dissents from the prosecution of the
war is denounced for being "anti-American." You should see some of the hate
mail we get at Antiwar.com "Why, you traitor, I only hope you're drafted and
sent to the front lines in Afghanistan!" Traitor, fifth columnist, the
"hate America
crowd" ^ and these are just some of the milder epithets that come in over
the wire.
It's the sixties all over again and, this time, it truly is a farce^.
LET THE NIGHTMARE BEGIN^
There is a nightmarish quality to this whole scenario, one that I find
particularly
frightening.
For, you see, I just turned 50 the other day, the age at
which everything is supposed to come together and finally
finally! we're all grown-ups around here. And yet,
suddenly, it seems as if I'm going back, back, back in time,
so that I'm forced to relive (and re-fight) the controversies
of yesteryear. Except that, this time, instead of being
exciting, the whole thing seems about as interesting as
reruns of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
A THEORY OF REINCARNATION
The dreariness of life in wartime is multiplied a hundred-fold by the oddly
repetitive quality of the rhetoric.
Now, in looking to document this contention, I figured all I
had to do was go to Lucianne.com, and I wasn't
disappointed: the second posted item from the top of the
front page was a screed by one Lisa De Pasquale, program
director of something called the Claire Boothe Luce Policy
Institute, entitled: "Is Patriotism Dead on America's College Campuses?"
It seems Ms. De Pasquale is shocked -
shocked! - that "more than 100 campuses in America have
held anti-war demonstrations." Furthermore, pro-war
sentiment is supposedly being stifled, and there follows a
long litany of outrages De Pasquale seems to think are so self-evidently
horrific that she has only to describe them.
At Florida Gulf Coast University, faculty members were supposedly
told to take down their "Proud to be an American" stickers because
they might offend international students; at San Francisco State University,
the obviously subversive "Students for Peace" has raised a typical
pinko-commie
slogan: "Fight War, Not Wars!" And
imagine this! at Wittenberg College, in Ohio, "students are displaying the
peace sign rather than the American flag."
The problem, says De Pasquale, is all those pinko college professors.
Is that Dick Cheney or Spiro Agnew I hear, denouncing
those "nattering nabobs of negativism"? Any minute now,
Abbie Hoffman is going to leap back into the spotlight,
reincarnated, perhaps, in the body of the Wittenberg College student who
explained the peace sign is better than the flag because its circular shape
"promotes a more inclusive atmosphere." Hey, Abbie, is it really you?"
LITTLE OLD LADIES IN TENNIS SHOES
Ms. De Pasquale, for her part, could be the
reincarnation of whom? Perhaps those infamous little old
ladies in tennis shoes who, like Ms. De Pasquale, were
convinced back in the 1960s that American youth were all
in on some insidious commie plot, although, today, I guess
you might call it an "Islamist" plot. "These campuses," she
moans, "were once a haven for the exchange of ideas. But
today flags are being torn down, ROTC offices are being
closed and students are being silenced. Anti-American
sentiments are tolerated under the protection of free speech
while ideas on unity and patriotism are called ^A'intolerant' and
^A'oppressive.'" What's next will "Up With People" make a
comeback?
A COSMIC CATASTROPHE
Oh, the horror of it all! Just when it seemed the human
race may have made some progress, with the cold war
ended and Communism impaled on its own sword, we seem
to have been thrown back in time by the sheer force of the
9/11 explosion. It's as if the shock of the extreme violence that
occurred that day tore open a hole in the space-time continuum,
and time went into reverse. We are now living, post-9/11, in this
retrograde reality, doomed to relive endlessly! what has gone before,
like characters in some tiresome Existentialist play.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MUSINGS
At the height of the Vietnam War I was a rather
precocious junior high school student who had joined the
major and the only national right-wing youth
organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). When
I wasn't writing unpublishable short stories and even worse
poetry, I was churning out screeds demanding that the US
bomb Haiphong harbor. Among us young rightists, for some
reason, the whole solution to the Vietnam war question
seemed to be tied up with the utter destruction of that
commie harbor. If only the President would unleash the
military, and perhaps even consider the use of nuclear
weapons then and only then would the commies be
defeated, rolled back, and the South (and, perhaps, the
North, too) would be "liberated."
During the course of my career as a right-winger, however,
I soon came to know better, in part due to my contact with
libertarian ideas, and specifically the worldview of
libertarian theorist Murray N. Rothbard, but that was only
much later. My conversion to non-interventionism came, in
even larger part, from the mere sight of the war as it
unfolded on national television. I remember seeing the
famous execution of a hapless Vietcong sympathizer by one
of our noble South Vietnamese allies: the gun put right to
the side of the guy's head, and BLAM!, his brains were
blown out as cameras clicked and whirred. Is this what
we're supposed to be fighting for? I thought and so did millions
of Americans, who turned away in horror from that monstrous sight.
FROM INTERVENTIONISM TO ISOLATIONISM
My own evolution from traditional conservative with
libertarian leanings to a consistent advocate of a noninterventionist
foreign policy is not really the subject of this column: I bring it up
only to illustrate a point about the evolution of foreign policy ideas
in general. For the reality is that, at least up until 9/11, the conservatives
had long since given up their reflexive belligerence and adopted a policy
often derisively referred to as "neo-isolationism."
The hebephrenic hyper-interventionism of the Clinton
years, combined with the growing realization that the cold
war had led to the creation of a Welfare-Warfare State,
inspired many conservatives to take a noninterventionist
stance. It had suddenly dawned on many of them that, with
the cold war over, the Right could get on with its original
mission: reducing the size and power of government and
unleashing the power and productivity of the free market
economy. Furthermore, they began to understand the
intimate correlation between freedom at home and peace on
the international front: the great leaps in the power of
government, they noticed (albeit in retrospect) had always
occurred during wartime. As liberals like Al Hunt
triumphantly declare that the era of antigovernment activism
is over, these conservatives are having the peace-and-freedom
correlation shoved in their faces even as President Bush and
the Senate Republicans capitulate to the left and federalize the
airports, while John Ashcroft tramples the Constitution underfoot.
YESTERDAY'S PEACENIKS, TODAY'S
WARMONGERS
The post-cold war Left, on the other hand, evolved in
the exact opposite direction, becoming increasingly
militaristic. Many former leftists, having "converted" to the
Rightist cause, repented of their sins and jumped on the
neo-conservative bandwagon. Post-9/11, these former peaceniks
are now the biggest warmongers on the block.
The paradigmatic example is David Horowitz, the former
leftist turned rightist, who once blasted the Vietnam War
from the pages of Ramparts magazine, and is now libeling
the antiwar movement as "traitors," "fifth-columnists," and
"anti-American" becoming a parody of what he used to hate.
ROLE REVERSAL
When Horowitz was marching against the Vietnam War, Pat
Buchanan was on the other side of the barricades, advising
Richard Nixon on how best to discredit the commie-peacenik-Black Panther
popular front that filled the streets with protesters. Today, they are
still on opposite sides of the barricades, but have switched positions:
Horowitz, the former antiwar writer and activist, ceaselessly agitates
for extending the Afghan war to Iraq and beyond.
Buchanan, on the other hand, denounces the War Party and avers that
declaring war against 1 billion-plus Muslims is not putting America first:
"Without evidence of Saddam's collusion in the terrorism
of Sept. 11, an attack on Iraq would be seen as an
unprovoked, unjust war that could bring Arab and Islamic
mobs into the streets from Morocco to Indonesia, risking
the survival of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. What
would it profit America to march to Baghdad, only to have Cairo
fall to anti-American mobs?"
THE SIXTIES SCENARIO
While the specifics of the story-line are different, and
many of the players have switched sides, what we're seeing
is the sixties scenario reenacted in all its essentials. Once
again, the War Party is intent on launching and, this time,
winning an unwinnable war in Asia. On the other hand,
we have a Peace Party that sees the threat of a wider war
poses to civil liberties at home, as well as our real interests
abroad. Once again, the War Party charges the Peace Party
with "treason," and raises the specter of state repression.
The weird sense of dj vu is heightened as all this takes
place against the backdrop of an economic downturn and
looming social and political upheaval. Those who fail to
learn from history are doomed to repeat it this is an old
aphorism that advocates of yet another invasion of the Asian
landmass would do well to keep in mind.
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