-Caveat Lector-
October 25, 1999
Buchanan and Anti-Semitism
By Norman Podhoretz, editor-at-large of
Commentary, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and
author,
most recently, of "Ex-Friends" (Free Press, 1999).
Is Patrick Buchanan an anti-Semite? This neuralgic
question first
flared up in 1990 during the months preceding the Gulf
War but
fell into a dormant state after a flurry of heated debate
provoked
by his challenge to George Bush in 1992. Now, with his
challenge
to another George Bush--a challenge he is expected to
intensify
by announcing today that he is leaving the Republican
Party to
seek the Reform Party's nomination for president--it has
burst into
flames again.
Mr. Buchanan, being unrepentant and pugnacious as ever,
has
responded by gleefully pouring a few gallons of gasoline
onto the
fire. This politically reckless act has taken the form of
his new
book, "A Republic, Not an Empire." There he offers a
revisionist
account of World War II which is as soft on Hitler as,
conversely,
the revisionist historians of the Cold War were once
(rightly)
accused of being on Stalin.
Blithely circling around a mountain of evidence to the
contrary, Mr.
Buchanan maintains that wiping out the Jewish people was
not
one of Hitler's major aims. To the extent that he
actually tried to
accomplish this objective, he was driven into it by
Britain and the
U.S. (against which he also had no designs).
What made the book even more
inflammatory was that it came on the
heels
of two other earlier expressions of
softness
on Hitler. One was his description of
the F�hrer as "an individual of great
courage, a
soldier's soldier in the Great War, . .
[a]
genius," etc. Admittedly this
tributehad been
preceded by an acknowledgment that
Hitler
was also "a man who without compunction
could commit murder and genocide." But
in
acknowledging the obvious, Mr. Buchanan
was unable or unwilling to muster as
much
rhetorical force as the startling
praise that
followed.
This acknowledgment of Hitler's capacity for evil was
further
undercut by the second of the two manifestations
ofsoftness on
Nazism: Mr. Buchanan's habit of championing the cause of
almost anyone accused of participating actively in
Hitler's
genocidal campaign against the Jews.
One of these was John Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine who
had
been indicted as the exceptionally sadistic guard known
as Ivan
the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. When an Israeli
court
ruled that this had probably been a case of mistaken
identity, Mr.
Buchanan loudly claimed vindication. But it turned out
that if Mr.
Demjanjuk had not been a guard at Treblinka, he had
served in
the same capacity at Sobibor, another death camp.
As a Ukrainian working for the German occupiers of his
country,
Mr. Demjanjuk might conceivably have been regarded as
something of a victim. Yet Mr. Buchanan has looked upon
even
Germans who confessed to war crimes in the same light.
Among
them was Arthur Rudolph, a German rocket scientist who
admitted involvement with slave labor and other
atrocities.
Incredibly, Mr. Buchanan drew a parallel between Rudolph,
who
had been a fervent Nazi, and the great Soviet dissident
Andrei
Sakharov.
From such thinking came the equally incredible words that
(according to the Washington Post) Mr. Buchanan wrote for
Ronald Reagan in justifying a presidential visit to the
Bitburg
cemetery in Germany. Through Mr. Reagan's mouth, Mr.
Buchanan declared that the soldiers buried there, who
included
members of SS units (reportedly not the special one in
charge of
implementing the Holocaust, but still . . .) were
"victims of the
Nazis just as surely as the victims in concentration
camps." No
more disgusting example of moral equivalence can ever
have
been recorded or can scarcely even be imagined (though a
close
second might be Mr. Buchanan's comparison of the Nazi
camps
with those set up by Gen. Eisenhower for German prisoners
of
war).
As if all this were not bad enough, Mr. Buchanan lent his
weight to
some of the preposterous claims of yet another school of
revisionists--those who believe either that the Holocaust
never
occurred or that "the Jews" have wildly exaggerated the
number
of lives it claimed. For instance, he argued that the
exhaust from
diesel engines--which was used at several extermination
camps
(Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor and Belzec) as well as by
the
Einsatzgruppen, the roving Nazi killing squads within the
Soviet
Union--"did not emit enough carbon monoxide to
killanybody." And it was from the same school of
Holocaust deniers that Mr.
Buchanan borrowed the concept of a "Holocaust survivor
syndrome" involving "group fantasies of martyrdom and
heroics."
In other words, even under the dubious assumption that
Hitler
seriously intended to eliminate the Jewish people from
the face of
the earth, and even though he was somehow driven by the
Allies
into making the attempt, he could not possibly have
murdered as
many as six million of them. The idea that he did is a
fantasy
(exploited, in the poisonous judgment of the Holocaust
revisionists, to gain sympathy for Jewish causes, and
especially
Israel).
I have deliberately begun with Mr. Buchanan's attitude
toward
Hitler and the Nazis because it is relatively free of the
political
complications surrounding the issue of Israel, on which I
myself
first reached the conclusion that Mr. Buchanan had become
an
anti-Semite. I arrived at this conclusion
reluctantly,because Mr.
Buchanan had been an old comrade-in-arms during the Cold
War. Even so, there was no way I could evade the
implications of
several comments he made on television and in his
syndicated
column about Israel and its American Jewish supporters
during
the debates over whether the U.S. should go to war after
Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
Mr. Buchanan himself, and his many apologists, seemed to
have
no trouble at all in evading these implications. They
defended him
by indignantly insisting that one could be critical of
Israel, or even
generally anti-Zionist, without being anti-Semitic. True
enough, as
I myself stipulated at the time. But it was one thing to
be critical of
Israel or its policies, and another to accuse it of
conspiring with
the Jewish community to drag us into a war in which Mr.
Buchanan could perceive no vital American interest, and
that he
kept insisting no one else wanted. To be sure, it would
have
helped him off the hook if these accusations were true.
But they
were so manifestly false that it was hard to see how
anyone as
intelligent as Buchanan could believe them.
If preventing a dictator like Saddam from seizing control
of the oil
fields of the Persian Gulf was not an American interest,
what
was? As for Mr. Buchanan's breezy assurance that "there
are only
two groups beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle
East--the
Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the
United
States," he was very well aware that Arab nations like
Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and even one of Israel's most fanatical
enemies,
Syria, not to mention Britain's Margaret Thatcher, were
"beating
the drums" for war much more loudly than Israel. Nor
could Mr.
Buchanan have failed to notice that scores of influential
non-Jews
in America were beating the same drums, and that the
polls were
showing more and more support for war among the American
people, who he kept insouciantly asserting were on his
side.
Reinforcing the notorious "amen corner" crack, Mr.
Buchanan
went on to list four prominent Jews who thought war might
be
necessary. Almost immediately thereafter, he
counterpoised
them with "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy,
Gonzales and
Leroy Brown," who would actually do the fighting if these
Jews
had their way.
Here we had another insult added to another big lie. And
they
were not just any insults. Each carried in its train an
anti-Semitic
pedigree. First, the "amen corner" crack resurrected the
old
canard of "dual loyalty." This concept held that American
Jews
were more committed to Israel than to the U.S. And if
there had
once been any lingering doubt that in his eyes Jews were
a breed
apart from their fellow citizens, it was dissipated when
he
instructed Jewish leaders that they were not "good
Americans" in
pleading with Reagan to cancel his visit to the Bitburg
cemetery
Another traditional anti-Semitic canard--this one
concerning the
alleged unwillingness or inability of the Jews to
fight--was
embedded in Mr. Buchanan's juxtaposition of the prominent
Jewish figures who favored the war with the non-Jewish
"kids"
who would be sent to die in the Persian Gulf. One might
have
thought that the brilliance of the Israeli military
forces would
forever have buried the hoary stereotype of the cringing
and
cowardly Jew. But when it came to digging up anti-Semitic
filth
from the foul swamps where it was buried, Mr. Buchanan
was
deterred neither by facts nor by the stench arising out
of his
exhumations.
A related and very telling observation was made by Joshua
Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute in a
definitive
analysis in Commentary of the whole issue of Mr.
Buchanan's
attitude toward Israel in particular and Jews in general.
Since, Mr.
Muravchik pointed out, the Jews on Mr. Buchanan's list
were all
hawkish in the defense of American interests, just as Mr.
Buchanan himself had once been, it was he and not they
who
were being inconsistent. The real question, then, "was
not
whether [they] were hawks on the gulf crisis just because
of their
attachment to Israel, but whether Buchanan was a dove on
the
gulf crisis just because of his animus against Israel."
This animus was both new and inconsistent with the
worldview
Buchanan had only recently held with characteristically
great
fervor. Mr. Buchanan had once been friendly to Israel as
an ally of
the U.S. being targeted by the Soviet-sponsored Palestine
Liberation Organization. Conversely, he had always
regarded any
such movement as an enemy of the U.S. This rule applied
to the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to the FMLN in El Salvador, to
the
African National Congress in South Africa and so on; and
it had
once, naturally and logically, applied to the PLO as
well.
Yet all of a sudden, Mr. Buchanan was comparing the PLO's
struggle against Israel to that of the American
revolutionaries
against the British. Mr. Buchanan granted no remotely
comparable indulgence to any of the PLO's kissing cousins
in
other parts of the world. Clearly, his new hostility
toward Israel
was so great that, as Mr. Muravchik remarked, it even
"outweighed his hatred of Communist-style
'national-liberation'
movements."
To their undying moral credit, a goodly number of
non-Jewish
conservative individuals and organizations were willing
to call Mr.
Buchanan's anti-Semitism by its proper name and to
denounce
him for it. But there were others, including some of his
Jewish
colleagues in the media, who either waffled or defended
him.
Among those who defended him, one group did so by saying,
in
effect, that some of his best friends were Jews. It was
hard to
understand how, after so much fun had been poked at that
line
over the years, they could have been oblivious to its
traditional
use as an apology for even more blatant anti-Semites than
Mr.
Buchanan's.
Then there were others who could detect no evidence that
Mr.
Buchanan was anti-Semitic. These were the same people in
whose eyes charges of anti-Semitism were just as bad as
(if not
worse than) anti-Semitism itself. Their reasoning seemed
to be
that the accusation of anti-Semitism was so damaging that
not
even egregiously anti-Semitic statements should be
labeled as
such. This group resembled the reporters who refused to
use the
term communist even to describe candidates (like Angela
Davis)
running for office on the Communist Party ticket.
Still others made a distinction between being an
anti-Semite and
saying or writing things that could reasonably be
interpreted as
anti-Semitic. Here, at least, was a point worth taking
seriously.
Since accusing a person who denied the charge of being an
anti-Semite was tantamount to judging his innermost
thoughts
and feelings, the job was better left to heaven. On the
other hand,
my own advice to such a person was that if he wished to
avoid
being called an anti-Semite, all he had to do was stop
sounding
like one.
This was not advice Mr. Buchanan was prepared to take. "I
don't
retract a single word," he declared in 1990, after being
confronted with several scrupulous analyses of what his
words
inescapably implied or insinuated.
By the time Mr. Buchanan ran against President Bush in
the
presidential primaries of 1992, he was not only sticking
by these
particular guns, but--in contravention of the Republican
Party's
principles and the Reaganite legacy it claimed to be
upholding--he had also become an outspoken isolationist
and a
protectionist. He had even brazenly adopted the slogan
"America
first" for his campaign, thereby linking himself to the
committee of
that name that, in the 1930s, had opposed our entry into
the war
against Hitler (precisely what Mr. Buchanan would
retrospectively
do in his "A Republic, Not an Empire").
Hence there was ample reason for the Republican
leadership to
disown Mr. Buchanan even apart from his well-documented
anti-Semitism (which should have been enough by itself).
Nevertheless, fearful of alienating his followers--whose
numbers
were wildly exaggerated by a misreading of the primary
results--the Republican managers, with Mr. Bush's
acquiescence,
allowed Mr. Buchanan to make the kickoff speech at their
national
convention. Mr. Bush lost anyway, and many Republicans
were
convinced that Mr. Buchanan's prominence at the
convention was
one of the causes.
Since then, Mr. Buchanan has neither apologized for his
anti-Jewish slurs nor retreated from them. On the
contrary, he has
added a few new fillips, like attacking policies he
dislikes by
associating them whenever possible with the obviously
Jewish
names of their sponsors, as in the "Rubin" bailout of
Mexico, or
the "Barshefsky" trade agreements. Does he know that this
kind
of thing was the stock-in-trade of both the Nazis and the
Soviets?
Does he care?
Yet George W. Bush has been as pusillanimous toward Mr.
Buchanan as his father was before him. The fault,
however, lies
not in the stars or in the genes but in a poll showing
that if Mr.
Buchanan makes good on his threat to abandon the
Republicans
and gets the Reform Party's nomination for president,
George
W.'s present lead over Al Gore would shrink by about 10
points. It
is for the sake of this poll, taken more than a year
before the
election and matching George W. up against a candidate
who
may not even become the Democratic standard bearer, that
the
young Mr. Bush and the head of the Republican National
Committee have begged Mr. Buchanan to stay in the GOP.
Winston Churchill said in 1938 of the policy of appeasing
Hitler
(another policy Mr. Buchanan now retrospectively defends)
that it
left Britain with the "bleak choice between War and
Shame. My
feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War
thrown
in a little later." Well, in their own way, George W.
Bush and the
RNC are also choosing shame, and they too will soon have
a
declaration of political war against them "thrown in" by
Mr.
Buchanan.
Luckily for them, the chances are very good that Mr.
Buchanan will
turn out to be a paper tiger with too small a
constituency to hurt
the Republicans. Furthermore, as William Kristol of The
Weekly
Standard has speculated, Mr. Buchanan's defection may
help Mr.
Bush (if he gets the nomination), much as Harry Truman's
campaign was given a boost when Henry Wallace bolted from
the
Democrats and ran on the Progressive Party ticket in
1948. With
Wallace and his communist manipulators and supporters out
of
the Democratic Party, Truman was no longer so vulnerable
to
Republican charges of being "soft on communism."
Similarly,
without the Buchanan albatross around his neck, Mr. Bush
will be
protected against the Democratic accusation that he is a
moderate fronting for the worst elements of the radical
Right.
For all that, even if, as I expect, Mr. Bush should win
the "war" with
Mr. Buchanan he has been trying to avoid by choosing
shame,
and even if he should then, as I also expect, go on to be
elected
president, the taint of having refused to disown
thisanti-Semite
will remain.
By inspiriting contrast, Mr. Bush's rival for the
Republican
nomination, Sen. John McCain, has encouraged the
departure of
Mr. Buchanan. He has thereby chosen (and not for the
first time in
his life) honor over shame. As a politician, Mr. McCain
has had to
be a bit circumspect in phrasing his wish to see Mr.
Buchanan
go. But operating under no such constraint, I am free to
say flat
out what I suspect has been in Mr. McCain's mind all
along in his
position on the anti-Semitic isolationist Mr. Buchanan
has
become: Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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