The decline of the white race in America and the world, in proportional numbers and, I am quite certain, in blood-purity.
It is because he speaks for a lot of Americans who think the same way. Let’s not be in denial here.
If there is any doubt, please read this.
It’s all there . . . racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, sexism . . . even anti-democracy. And that’s not including the past 13 years.
Also clearly in the paleocon lineage: George Wallace’s American Independent Party. (Not that that has anything to do with Buchanan, who was working for Nixon at the time.)
I like Pat but have never voted for him. He’s a man of principle, but his principles are too far Right, and while not outrightly racist or anti-Semitic, I admit flirt a little too close for comfort for me.
I do not at all believe he is a Holocaust-denier, but is skeptical of some claims & accusations. Most of all, he neglects to see it as a uniquely evil horror and puts it alongside the slaughters & oppression of Communism and other historical horrors.
Most of my disagreements with Pat, I will admit, are more a matter of tone than substance, tho to some extent the harshness of the tone is the substance.
I still remember Pat at the Republican convention stating that we are in a religious war for the soul of the nation. I wonder what side Pat believes he is on? His latest book makes the case that the USA should have stayed out of WW2, and if that meant the death of every Jew in Europe that’s just the breaks. In his youth he assaulted a police officer and his family of many brothers had the reputation of being a big bunch of thugs and bullies in the Washington area. Still I enjoy listening to him for some odd reason.
I disagree completely. His column directly printed material denying that thousands of Jews could have been murdered at Treblinka. That is indeed holocaust denial. That is not skepticism. To my knowledge he has never admitted that he was wrong nor has he apologized for his behavior. That is Neo Nazism and has no place in public discourse.
His latest book was promoted on a Neo Nazi racist radio show. He is the Father Coughlin of our time. It perpetually astonishes me that he is treated as a respectable public figure.
For a minute I thought Pat wasn’t so bad, but during the congressional page bruhaha with Foley, I remember him on Hard Ball espousing some fallacious homophobic reasoning for why gay men shouldn’t be in office. His logic was based on stats that supposedly showed that gay men were more likely to be convicted pedophiles than straight men.
Um, by that logic, men period shouldn’t be in office and women should rule the world. Of course Chris didn’t point that out.
The world could definitely use a bit of tidying up. Some drapes.
I enjoy his presence on television. He’s an interesting spokesman for the opposite side regarding many of my opinions. He does sometimes have an appallingly nonprogressive ingredient to his views, which reinforces my own belief that one of the best things for the progress of the human race is that each of us hold stagnant principles that will die with us. Sometimes I think he’s old fashioned and sometimes I think he’s abhorant.
I am not sure that is a fair characterization. I remember his argument to be that by avoiding all-out war, the greatest good could have been done for the greatest number – he certainly would include the subsequent victims of communism among that calculus, but I don’t recall that he just said F the European Jews and their plight.
There’s nothing to choose in value between a life lost under Hitler and a life lost under Stalin; nevertheless, a political commentator who cannot see plainly and clearly that fascism is even worse than Communism is hardly worth listening to.
Same reason Coughlin was: He has a real mass constituency and there’s no denying it.
I don’t know if that’s as clear cut as you’re putting it. Both are pretty horrific, but I’d probably rather live in 1960s Spain than 1960s Poland.
Bolding mine.
There is as principled an argument to be made against insisting that any one horror is “uniquely evil” vis a vis others as there is to be made against “hate crime” laws. Which is to say, a fairly substantial one.
First, who judges?
Second, how do you make such a declaration without essentially issuing a free pass to all future evildoers – they can never qualify for more than the silver medal? Do the Rwandan thugs – who acted out of very similar evil motives of ethnic resentment and dehumanizing the “inferior” tribe – get an oh, well, it could have been worse, 'cause nothing’s as bad as what the Germans did to the Jews? I kind of think it was pretty much just as bad, which is to say, very.
Finally, how do you single out unique evil without devaluing the lives of those who suffer evil deemed less unique.? Dead is dead. Thank God I’ve never been in the position, but I have a very firm conviction that being told you and your family are about to die because you’re filthy subhumans, and being told you and your family are about to die because you’re peasants and we’re shelling your village, or you are going to die because you’re wearing the wrong army’s uniform, feel almost indistinguishably equally crappy. (I’ve harped on this before when people stress the atrocity of killing women and children – Hell, the accident of birth that left Hans or Tommy male and 20 wasn’t exactly his doing, and I’d suppose he valued his life against unfair deprivation as much as anyone else).
Franco was not strictly speaking a fascist, though he came to power in part with fascist (i.e., Falangist) support; he was a traditionalist, where fascism is really as revolutionary as Communism. (See Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell.) (Pinochet was not a fascist either.)
Fascism is even worse than Communism because, among other reasons:
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Communism has high, noble ideals and usually fails to live up to them, or ignores them on “the ends justify the means” grounds; fascism has not even any ideals or goals that are not evil.
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Communism (like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, BTW) is in the Enlightenment tradition of Voltaire that exalts rationality; fascism is in the Romantic tradition of Rousseau that exalts irrationality. (See the Pournelle Chart; see also Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.) Both are flawed approaches to public affairs when taken to the extreme, but any thinking person can see irrationality is essentially far worse.
- Communism is at least in principle internationalist. Communists in power tend to act like nationalists, of course, as national leaders generally do; nevertheless, Communism and, more broadly, socialism are almost the only political movements that proclaim internationalist ideals. (The only other movement now current that can lay any claim to some form of internationalism is neoliberalism, of which the less said the better.) Fascism is essentially nationalist in the worst possible sense, in theory and in practice.
If the definition of fascism were “Government’s only function is to kill Jews,” that would be true. But Wiki tells me, in the first sentence, that fascism was “ideology focused on solving economic, political, and social problems .” Solving problems? That doesn’t sound evil to me in itself as a goal. That fascism as applied identified the wrong problems and tried to solve them the wrong ways is amply true – but that doesn’t mean the jokers who came up with it (and remember that political theorists more often resemble ivory tower jerkoffs than they do leering Lex Luthors) were devoid of (misguided) optimistic and idealistic (run when you hear that word) aims.
There’s nothing remotely rational about thinking, after thousands of years of human history, that human nature is going to change so as to make one dude work on behalf of another dude he never met, on a system wide basis. And when he doesn’t, he’ll change his mind after oh hey ten years in the gulag.
In short, there is as much basis for saying “fascism gets a bad rap because no one’s really practiced it the right way” as there is for saying that of communism, which is to say, little.
In short, neither of them is any great shakes and I think this tends to support my point that awarding “most evil” in a world where man’s inhumanity to man is one of the few constants reduces to angels on pins in the worst instances. It’s kind of like that forensic psychologist who had the gimmicky “Most Evil” show on Discovery, ranking serial killers using his “scientific scale.” Ya know what? 50 way tie for first in my scientific scale.
That’s every ideology; it doesn’t mean they’re all the same. Fascism is based on the core tenets of radical (even mystical) nationalism; “third way” economics; authoritarianism and totalitarianism; and militance and militarism. The second element is the only one that is in any way defensible and it can be practiced in a non-fascist setting.
I didn’t say it’s rational, I said it exalts rationality; that is, it is rationalist; which at any rate is better than irrationalist or romantic. Michael Lind explains the difference in this article:
National renewal, community, national unity, patriotism, discipline, order, social conformity? Those are all fascist “ideals” or fascist “values”, and none of them are neccesarily evil.
I’m not entirely convinced that the ideals of Communism are entirely high and noble either. Equality certainly can be a virtue, but the idea that you can reduce all of human behavior to economic and commercial factors seems overly simplistic, and the idea that private property shouldn’t be respected is a justification for theft.
(Bolding mine.) Why? it’s not obvious. Remember, when Pournelle mentions rationality and irrationality on his chart, he’s talking about the belief that human beings are rational. It’s the idea that society is mechanistic, and that it’s possible to solve societal problems by changing the laws or economic conditions by which people live. So, on that chart, for instance, Communists believe that if you get rid of economic inequality and private ownership, people will live in harmony with each other. Ayn Rand believed if you got rid of limitations to the free market and the idea of selflessness being a virtue, society would become great and everyone would live up to their true potential. (I don’t know why Max Steiner is on there…apparently he thought that the world would be perfect if everyone had a summer place.)
Or, as Pournelle himself put it:
And it might be that Pournellian “rationalism” is inherantly preferable to Pournellian “irrationalism” (Pournelle wouldn’t agree, I don’t think, knowing his political views, but…), but that’s not something that’s going to neccesarily be obvious to “any thinking person”.
Edited to Add-I looked at the chart more closely, and saw that he was referring to Max Stirner, which makes more sense than Max Steiner.