Author: Paul Gottfried

Last week I listened with growing disgust as Charles Krauthammer berated President Obama for something that struck me as eminently defensible. According to a ranting war monger whose likes have not been seen since the fall of the Third Reich, Obama “dishonored our nation” on a recent visit to Hiroshima, when he “implicitly apologized” for the nuclear destruction of that city in August 1945. By regretting that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in the course of what was apparently a holy crusade against infidels, the US president, it is claimed, brought shame on the entire country. But the one who … Continue reading →

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A young friend, who writes brilliantly on Kant und Heidegger, sent me a commentary “In Defense of the Tribe,” which had just been posted on NRO .The author of this piece, Brian Stewart, states that human happiness is most fully achieved where some kind of “tribal life is maintained.” Stewart cites a World Happiness Report, 2016 Update, and a book On Homecoming and Belonging, by New York Times journalist Sebastian Junger, both of which indicate that where human beings are integrated into a community they feel physically safe and emotionally content. According to my correspondent, Stewart’s remarks could have a … Continue reading →

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At the recent Scholars’ Conference (sponsored by the L von M Institute) I asserted that while anti-New Deal commentators between the two wars were not entirely wrong in their analysis of fascism, current attempts to identify fascism with the Left are rarely more than GOP rhetoric.  Since this point may have puzzled my listeners, it may be helpful to explain what my statement meant. My clarification may be all the more necessary since I said roughly the same thing on Tom Woods’s radio program, without going into details. In the 1930s and 1940s, such critics of the New Deal and … Continue reading →

The post Is This Neocon Right About Fascism? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Having just read Ilana Mercer’s blistering attack on the pseudo-conservative credentials of Donald Trump’s “conservative” opponents, I sent her polemic to a young friend. Whereupon the friend told me that Ilana’s blast at South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s for pulling down the Confederate Battle Flag may not be a good thing for Trump to get into.  After all, many Americans now identify the Battle Flag with the Swastika; and bringing up this divisive matter may not be advisable for a Republican presidential candidate. I disagree totally and don’t believe that leftist bullies, including Max Boot and his ilk, can be … Continue reading →

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On April 24, the New York Post published an article claiming to expose the “smug life” of the establishment Left. On the basis of research conducted by Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto who has been investigating the “young-adult site Vox,” author Kyle Smith concludes that “liberals have stopped debating ideas, instead dismissing their opponents and half the country as stupid.” Smith’s article tries to drive home the point that while the “conservative” side is eager to debate delicate issues, the other side is full of “liberal smugness.” Indeed, even a glance at Vox would illustrate that “liberals don’t want to … Continue reading →

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As the person who has been asked to deliver this year’s Murray N. Rothbard address, it seems appropriate to relate my remarks to the person being honored. Although the observations that follow may not have come directly from Murray, he and my speech do have some connection. My pleasurable, often edifying conversations with this remarkable polymath, the letters we exchanged, his book America’s Great Depression and, not least of all, his study of American intervention in the First World War strengthened for me beliefs that I continue to hold. I never truly grasped where we were heading as a country … Continue reading →

The post The PC Takeover appeared first on LewRockwell.

Among the replacement religions for a weakened Christianity in the West, the most insidious may be the worship of “democracy.“  What makes this form of idolatry (note the neoconservative journalist Norman Podhoretz once described himself as an “idolater of democracy”) particularly hard to stop is that it rages among supposed spokesmen for the Right. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan spoke frequently in public about their devotion to what they thought were universally exportable democratic ideals. Indeed President Reagan, in a widely publicized address before the English Parliament on June 8, 1982, declared it the sacred duty of the two leading … Continue reading →

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April 25, 2011 If the European franchises were still not universal in 1860, neither were they in many American states where suffrage was limited to white male property holders. I’m not saying this in a spirit of leftist condemnation. Extending the franchise has rarely increased the degree of self-government. It has usually produced the opposite result. Bloated voting rolls, especially those full of government workers, relief recipients, and those not rooted in established communities, have helped transfer power toward centralized bureaucratic administrations which are imagined to look out for the “people.” Lincoln had claimed a right of secession in 1848 … Continue reading →

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Although I fully share the jubilation of others that Donald Trump may be taking a wrecking ball to the GOP establishment, I don’t hold the view that Trump’s candidacy will reduce neoconservative power. Matthew Richer, Justin Raimondo and other writers whose columns I usually welcome all believe that Trump’s rise as a Republican presidential candidate may help bring down his bogus conservative enemies. The more Trump’s popular support soars, the more the neocons have supposedly turned themselves into paper tigers. The establishment Republicans whom they “advise” have not marginalized Trump; nor have the neocons and their clients been able to … Continue reading →

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Reading in Breitbart Report about conservative deep thinker Ben Shapiro turning up at Cal State University in Los Angeles on February 23 to lecture students and faculty on the latest restrictions on the academic free speech made me think that it’s truly “déjà vu all over again.” Shapiro was reprising the role of those 1960s freedom riders, who would be caught (hardly by accident) on camera demonstrating against segregation in cities in the Deep South. With some luck, these demonstrators, who were already celebrities, would be arrested as disturbers of the peace and then after being shown on TV with … Continue reading →

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I recently read two texts that are related in ways that are not immediately apparent. One is a preachy column, published on February 19, by minicon yenta Mona Charen, scolding people on the right who have had the chutzpah to attack the Republican establishment and who have helped push Donald Trump into political prominence. The more serious reading matter is a recently published book by political scientist George Hawley of the University of Alabama, Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism (University of Kansas Press, 2016). What these texts have in common is recognition of the presence of a formidable and by … Continue reading →

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In his latest column Pat Buchanan writes eloquently about a “civil war on the right.” According to Pat, “conservatives” are now locked in mortal combat over the future of the American Right, and the sides are divided between the fans and despisers of populist presidential candidate Donald Trump. From this narrative it seems that while some “conservatives” are rooting for the Donald, others are ready to bolt the Republican Party if he picks up the Republican presidential nomination. Although the events Pat describes are indeed unfolding, his label is misleading. Whatever political term one may decide to confer on Trump, … Continue reading →

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Several recent experiences drove home for me the extent to which any independent intellectual Right (perhaps any independent non-Left) has been kept out of the public discussion. One such experience was being interviewed on his radio program (perhaps for the fifth or sixth time) by Tom Woods and noticing that my host was even more exercised than I by how neoconservatives misrepresented their conservative and paleolibertarian opponents. First, they managed to stick the ideas of those who offended them down a memory hole, and then the ruling class had the chutzpa to lie about those whose lives and reputations they … Continue reading →

The post From Under the Rubble appeared first on LewRockwell.

For the last thirty years I have devoted my energies to defending the German people against a variety of charges directed against them by their leftist and neoconservative critics in the US and Germany. Many of the points that I’ve raised about the historical past don’t have to be amended, because they continue to be true, e.g., about the Allied responsibility for the outbreak of World War One,  the silliness of looking for Nazi ideas throughout the German past, and the brilliance of German philosophical and literary accomplishments. Nothing that is now occurring would cause me to revise my critical … Continue reading →

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Although I have frequently accused Jonah Goldberg of being an intellectual vulgarian, his latest column “The Term Neocon Has Run Its Course” has convinced me that he also lives on a different planet. On this celestial body, “neocons weren’t any more hawkish than anyone else on the right.” Moreover, this group is now vanishing as a recognizable sect and anyone who persists in “using the nut charge” is embracing an anti-Semitic slur, that is, “a code for suspiciously Hebraic superhawk.” Since Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz recently suggested that he would pursue a more moderate foreign policy than the group … Continue reading →

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