While watching the video of efforts by left-wing thugs to disrupt Richard Spencer’s recent talk on affirmative action at Providence College, I was reminded of a conversation I had sometime in the late 1980s with a former member of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society who had been involved with the movement to oppose the Vietnam War since its inception circa 1962. He recalled how in the early days of the antiwar movement, protest organizers were thrilled if they could get fifty people to show up for a rally. To publicly oppose the war at the time was physically dangerous, and such rallies were always at risk of being physically attacked by vigilantes shouting epithets like “communist” at the protestors. If organizers of the rallies could get police protection at all, they were happy to have it. Not only were public demonstrations in danger of such assaults, but so were quiet and peaceful meetings of those who opposed the war held in church basements or on university campuses. Of course, we all know that the anti-Vietnam War movement morphed into a mass movement just a few years later.

So it is indeed ironic that half a century later it is those who challenge the established dogmas purveyed by the Left who similarly experience the disruption of their efforts to peacefully speak and organize, who become the targets of epithets like “racist,” “sexist,” or “classist,” and who are threatened with physical violence. Incidents of this type are exceedingly common. It is now widely known that conservative speakers on university campuses, even entirely mainstream neocon-friendly “movement conservative” types, are routinely shouted down and threatened by leftists. As most readers are probably aware, right-wing organizations outside the mainstream, such as American Renaissance, have endured even worse attacks. At times, simply attending an anti-illegal immigration rally can be all that it takes for one to become the victim of a physical assault.

A number of observations could be made concerning the demeanor and behavior of the disrupters of Richard’s presentation at Providence. One is the obvious fact that they are so certain of their own moral superiority and the nobility of their crusade that they feel ordinary rules of civilized discourse or common courtesy no longer apply to them. Another is that far from their image of themselves as enlightened, free-thinking rebels, they come across more like brainwashed zombies similar to members of the LaRouche cult or the Moonies I used to encounter selling flowers on the streets of Washington, D.C. years ago. Their level of intellectual prowess seems to amount to little more than thinking that merely throwing labels at people and ideas they find disagreeable counts as a valid refutation of the opposing viewpoints.

Judging from the hysteria of their reaction, one would think that Richard was advocating genocide rather than arguing for the fairly standard right-of –center position that affirmative action is a bad idea, a position that even some minority scholars and analysts hold. It is also rather difficult to see how Richard was arguing for “white supremacy” given that the data he was presenting actually showed Asians to be the top performers with regards to SAT scores. As Richard pointed out in his talk, it was he who was the moderate and the protestors who were the extremist nutjobs.

For the diversitarians, affirmative action is not merely a policy preference, but a sacred article of faith, like the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception. Affirmative action is a political tool the liberal establishment utilizes to maintain the loyalty of one of its core allies and constituent groups, the black elite and the middle class professional sectors of the black population. Affirmative action is an entitlement used as a reward for political loyalty from these sectors. It is doubtful that AA is of much benefit to genuinely impoverished or disadvantaged blacks, many of whom do not even finish high school, much less attend college or obtain professional-level occupations. And as Richard pointed out, if the goal of AA was to help the poor and disadvantaged in the first place, AA would be class-based rather than race-based.

Indeed, “black conservatives” like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have documented a myriad of ways in which policies implemented by the welfare state and civil rights bureaucracy that has meta-morphed in recent decades have severely undermined the organic economic, cultural, and family life of urban black communities, and contributed exponentially to the social pathologies often found in those communities. Likewise, the black libertarian economist Walter Williams has produced rather extensive evidence indicating the contribution of efforts at intrusive economic micromanagement to high unemployment rates among urban blacks.

Additionally, there is some evidence that black children who are educated in culturally specific Afro-centric schools perform much better than black children who receive conventional public schooling. The reasons as to why this is so are inconclusive but what is interesting is that the efforts of either conservative and libertarian black scholars like Sowell, Wright, or Williams, or of Afro-centrists with a nationalist or separatist outlook, are routinely attacked or dismissed by white liberals and the captains of the civil rights industry alike. Indeed, such people are often reviled by the Left. The obvious reason for this is the fanatical egalitarian-universalist ideology that has come to dominate the Left, an ideology that just happens to coincide with the political and economic self-interest of those who push it. It is an ideology that seeks a society where all resources are controlled and managed by the state and administered according to a spoils system the ostensible purpose of which is the imposition of bureaucratically-managed “equality.” The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

When I first read Pat Buchanan's latest column, I thought he was using sarcasm to make a point.  When I read it again, I feared that he was actually being serious. Here are the relevant passages; you decide:   

Bonfire of the Quarans

Creators Syndicate

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Sept. 10, 2010

 

[...]

Everybody frets and wrings their hands. No one acts.

Yet if, as President Obama and his commanding general both say, the torching of hundreds of Qurans could so enrage the Islamic world as to incite terror-bombings against U.S. troops and imperial our war effort, why does not the commander in chief send U.S. marshals to arrest this provocateur and abort his provocation?

For Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

And if Petraeus says letting Jones set this bonfire could imperil U.S. troops, Obama should act to stop it. And if he is so paralyzed by uncertainty as to whether he can do anything -- and, as a result, soldiers die -- what would that tell us about their commander in chief?

Would stopping Jones and confiscating the Qurans violate Jones' First Amendment rights?

Perhaps. And perhaps not. But if Eric Holder cannot find a charge against Davis, or an inherent power of a war president to prevent actions imminently damaging to the war effort, Obama should find some Justice Department attorneys who can.

Let the ACLU make the case that interfering with Davis' bonfire violates his First Amendment rights. Let a U.S. court decide whether Obama has the power to take a decision previous wartime presidents would have taken without hesitation.

And if Obama does not have the power to stop actions like this, imperiling our troops, then we should get out of this war.

This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of the Quran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a "long war" in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?

Action creates consensus, Mr. President. People follow when a leader leads.

There are a couple of sentences that still make me think that Pat was being sarcastic; these include, "And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a 'long war' in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?" Pat has been forthright about America's inability to ever win the war for global democracy that Bush, Obama, and the neocons have defined.  

Fresh off his calls to strip Americans of their citizenship for having the wrong political sympathizes so they can be legally tortured, Joe Lieberman has proposed giving the president the authority to shut down the internet in "times of war."

"We need this capacity in a time of war. We need the capacity for the president to say, internet service provider, we've got to disconnect the American internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country, or we have to put a patch on this part of it," Lieberman told CNN's Candy Crowley Sunday.

"So I say to my friends on the internet, relax. Take a look at the bill. And this is something that we need to protect our country. Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its internet in case of war and we need to have that here too," he said.

 

 

And remember, as conservatives like to remind Obama, we're at war as long as there's an anti-American goat herder somewhere in the world with a tape recorder.

Knowing there are patriotic Americans like Joe Lieberman out there worrying about our safety allows me to sleep easily at night.  One man doing so much to protect us.