Sorry but not surprised to hear of the old lion's passing. One of this country's greatest intellects and best advocates of Conservative thought.
Sorry but not surprised to hear of the old lion's passing. One of this country's greatest intellects and best advocates of Conservative thought.





Are you crazy?
Fuck him and good riddance.
He was responsible for morphing conservatism from true conservatism into the neo-con mess we deal with now.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me





Not wrong at all. It was his challenging of the Old Right that lead to the current state of conservatism. He was highly militarist, in-favor of the welfare-state at home to gain favor for the militarism abroad.
Buckley was a totalitarian.
in his own words:
"We have got to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."
One reading of Up From Liberalism should be enough to pretty much condemn Buckley forever.
He fired Sobran from NR because Sobran was against the first gulf war.
And BTW, norman Podhertz was a big fan of Buckley. Articles from Commentary could easily be mistaken for late-year NR articles, and vice versa
And in fact, they have already posted a tidbit about his passing:
They agree with me. He was the one responsible for transforming the American Old Right.William F. Buckley, Jr.
John Podhoretz - 02.27.2008 - 11:23
Bill Buckley has died at the age of 82. This American original probably did more to transform the American ideological landscape in the second half of the twentieth century than any other writer or editor, and he did so with surpassing grace. We’ll have far more to say about this on CONTENTIONS as the day and week unfold.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me





From Bill Buckley: Pied Piper of the Establishment
And I'm sure you know that the neo-cons were all ex-communists.Those who dominated National Review at its inception… were ex-Communists, Trotskyites, socialists, and CIA stalwarts who deplored the excesses of Communism but who had no objection to steering America away from personal freedom and national independence. Yet this was the magazine that was supposed to provide pivotal opposition to America’s increasingly dominant Eastern Establishment, whose elitists had long been laboring to undermine our nation’s independence and erode the people’s freedom!
You should get this book and take another look at this "lion."
Hell has just been split WIDE OPEN to welcome ol Bill Buckley.
I'm not even a conservative or feel any need to defend them, but it's pretty clear he was the major instrument in changing the Right into the morass it is now of militarism, free market lip-service, and social democrat welfare-state promotion.
Or even better, just read HIS books, all of which I can loan you, and see for yourself his naked promotion for aggrandizing the state.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me
I wish he'd willed his vocabulary to me.
Buckley injected badly needed life and levity into Conservatism. He was viciously anti- Communist which caused him to tolerate a drunken clod like Joe McCarthy
and even write a book defending him. In the 1950's And he tolerated more government than many of his fellow Conservatives even up to the present day.
He wasn't happy about it but didn't think it possible to roll back.
However, Sobran was fired for anti-semitic writings at N.R. that blamed our Iraq
War participation on Israel. Bucley and Podhoretz publicly and acidly parted company over our continued presence in Iraq. Buckley repeatedly said that he understood how the intel picture and Saddam's behavior then justified the war at the time BUT that : " If I knew then what I know now, I would have opposed the war."
He was far from perfect and was no libertarian. His doctrinaire Catholicism fueled
much of his thinking but so what ?





Badly needed life? No. He injected militarism, a rejection of the good ideals of the Old Right, an embrace of the welfare-state, petc.
Being viciously anti-communist wasnt a good thing if that means butt heads militarily with them everywhere, which he favored. his defense of McCarthy was pretty soft and that drunken clod's intuition was pretty spot-on, as the released records of the Venona Project shows us now.
i'm also opposed to CommunISM, but that doesn't mean I advocate total warfare against communISTS everywhere on earth. Anybody who has read East Minus West Equals Zero or the works of my mentor Antony Sutton should surely know that the USSR was no real threat to us. Buckley surely was not stupid or even ignorant. So he had no excuse.
It was possible to roll back, he was just willing to reject any conservative ideal necessary to get the militarism accepted.
It's not antisemitism to criticize Israel or to say they might be happy at our attacking Saddam. It makes quite a bit of sense to me(though I hold other ideas on why). The idea that criticizing ISRAEL, the country, is antisemitism is one of the worst PC thought crimes in political commentary. It's great for Israel as they get to have any negative reports on them nipped in the bud.
What was there to know then that he didn't know? The War was opposed by many sides who told it exactly how it was and saw the fraud in the first Gulf War.
I don't think much of what he wrote had anything to do with his Catholicism. Tom Woods is a Cathoic, as was Lord Acton. They don't have much in common with Mr. Buckley.
He was not a libertarian. I agree. He was a totalitarian militarist.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me
Before the eyes of our fellow S-webbers glaze over any further; let's agree to disagree.





Nah, that's the pussy's way out.
Most are probably ignoring this thread anyway when they see who is posting in it. They'll forgive us.
My life's calling is to abuse those who promote war and statism. Buckley deserves such abuse far more than most.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me




The Soviet Union was no threat?? I guess we were invulnerable to that huge stockpile of arms and nukes...
If the guy across the street has a tank pointed at your house, he's a threat, no matter what... Going across the street and kicking his ass might be a bad idea, but ignoring him is an even worse idea.





The Soviet Union was no threat. Military establishment agrees today, since there is no money in fighting Communism anymore.
In fact, not only was the USSR not a threat, but we paid for a lot of it. Without aid from the West, the USSR would have barely been able to feed itself, much less wage aggressive war on the West.
Even assuming it had the capability, the Soviet Union never had tanks pointed at any American houses. Last I checked, the Fulga gap isn't anywhere near Boston. Europe is not a franchise of the US, unless we presume to be an international empire and Europe is our dominion. We were more aggressive toward the Soviets than they were towards us. We instigated a lot of the near-WWIII scenarios. This was the result of people like Buckley forever promoting the idea of needing to conquer the entire world to save it.
A mentor of mine, Antony Sutton, wrote the definitive works on the Soviet Union's capabilities. Most were aimed at academics, but he wrote a few aimed at the general public. One in particular I will quote from, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy.
From the forward:
In the mid-1970's, the original version of this book led to the destruction of Antony Sutton's career as a salaried academic researcher with the prestigious (and therefore, not quite ideologically tough enough) Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. That was a high price for Sutton to pay, but not nearly so high as the price you and I are going to be asked to pay because of the activities that this book describes in painstaking detail.
Antony Sutton is not about to offer the following evidence in his own academic self-defense, so I will. Perhaps the best-informed American scholar in the field of Soviet history and overall strategy is Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard University. In 1984, his chilling book appeared, Survival Is Not Enough: Soviet Realities and America's Future (Simon & Schuster). His book tells at least part of the story of the Soviet Union's reliance on Western technology, including the infamous Kama River truck plant, which was built by the Pullman-Swindell company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a subsidiary of M. W. Kellogg Co. Prof. Pipes remarks that the bulk of the Soviet merchant marine, the largest in the world, was built in foreign shipyards. He even tells the story (related in greater detail in this book) of the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company of Springfield, Vermont, which sold the Soviet Union the ball-bearing machines that alone made possible the targeting mechanism of Soviet MIRV'ed ballistic missiles. And in footnote 29 on page 290, he reveals the following:
In his three-volume detailed account of Soviet purchases of Western equipment and technology . . . [Antony] Sutton comes to conclusions that are uncomfortable for many businessmen and economists. For this reason his work tends to be either dismissed out of hand as "extreme" or, more often, simply ignored.
Prof. Pipes knows how the academic game is played. The game cost Sutton his academic career. But the academic game is very small potatoes compared to the historic "game" of world conquest by the Soviet empire. We are dealing with a messianic State which intends to impose its will on every nation' on earth — a goal which Soviet leaders have repeated constantly since they captured Russia in their nearly bloodless coup in October of 1917.
It's great stuff. Certainly the kind of stuff that makes a once dedicated Marine think twice about the world and maybe realize he was conned.
update: here is buckley on Sobran:
"Joe had become, for all intents and purposes, a member of the American pacifist movement"
Last edited by Sh0t; 02-27-2008 at 05:18 PM.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me




I guess the Americans put those Soviet nukes in Cuba. That explains why the Soviets said there weren't any there...




Ohh and I bet there was no blockade of Berlin either, we just wanted to show off our airforce...
"The" definitive work rests with the predilection or impressionability of the reader. There were numerous potential flashpoints, none of which happened, thankfully. Europe may not be a present day franchise of America, but they are allies, after all, and had Soviet forces poured across US military bases in Europe, the US would have been compelled to reason, and boom. The Soviets also had ICBMs and submarine missiles pointed at us.
Having said that, i don't think there's much doubt that the Soviet conventional capabilities were quite exaggerated by our side, and a real question exists how they could have fared in a sustained war (arguably heightening the advisability of a blitz on their part if they were inclined to war). A mostly useless question now, though. Unless putinpolitik starts bringing in the satellites again.





Sure the Soviet Union was putting nukes in cuba, but remember where we had nukes, too. Turkey et all. A lot of the technology in those missiles were part of the transfers Sutton talks about, notably the ball-bearings needed to make the MIRVs work.
And again, Berlin is not Boston. Why defend the same Germany was had just expended all those resources to defeat? Uncle Joe went from being our great friend to our great enemy once we needed another excuse for high military spending(not that many didn't predict post-WWII USSR even before we even got into WWII).
We don't need Europe as allies, it only drags us into more quagmires(like the one brewing in Serbia potentially right now). Entangling alliances and all that. Our European allies(notably Britain) got us into WWI and WWII after all. sadly we had more Anglophiles than Americanophiles in high government at the time.
It's not about predilection or impressionability. It's about facts. FACT: We supplied the USSR. No amount of smearing those who report it changes that. Not only facts, but State Department documented facts. Stats and numbers have no ideology. You can maybe argue that giving the USSR the resources to potentially kill us was a good idea or not, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen or discount views that it was a terrible and self-destructive idea.
And again, why were those potential flash points even potential flash points to begin with? Because of our beyond-our-borders presence. All of our foreign policy problems have always stemmed from sticking our nose where it doesn't belong.
Why should American, especially minority Americans like myself, care and risk our lives to defend evil colonial empires like Beglium, France, Britain, Germany? 3 out of 4 had overseas empires at the time, and right after WWII, France was RIGHT back into the empire game, in indo-china.
It's a hard thing to sometimes revisit the history of your own country and realize it might be the bad guy, but that's certainly how it looks to me. And militarism at the root of the problem.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me




Don't give me that bullshit... I said they were a threat, I made two points about how they were a threat (I have plenty more). You can banter on about whether or not those threats were justified all you want... I'm not arguing with you about that... But right or wrong, that doesn't mean a threat didn't exist...




Are you honestly saying we should have stayed out of WWII?? Watch Europe and Asia fall to the Germans, and give up our Pacific property to the Japanese? How long do you think we would have lasted as the sole civilized world not under German control?




An author selects the facts subjectively and spins them to advance his or her philosophy. No great revelation there.
Uncle Joe was not our great friend. He was a very bad guy and Germany's friend until Germany turned on him. Then he became useful as the enemy of our enemy, and yeah, we helped keep him going. There were no false allusions about the depth of the friendship. Yalta was an angry conference, and the Allied commanders were strategizing to take on the Russian army in Germany in case things got too unruly.
I've always wondered why we made Europe our primary battle theater when the imminent danger was in the Pacific. There's no doubt, though, that a Nazi Europe was not good for the world, and the world in which we are a part is better off without it. From that standpoint, I don't regret the European involvement.
We've acted well, and we've acted badly. I have no problem with seeing either of those as the facts tend to present them.
Once we had Germany subdued, we kept forces there to prevent a repeat of Versailles and its aftermath and to keep our Russian "friends" from pulling a Manchuria in western Germany, which it quite probably would've done.
So, yeah. Russia was a threat. Doesn't make Buckley right on a lot of stuff. I liked him for his eloquence, disliked him for his arrogance. I didn't see some of his wackier thoughts any less believable than a lot of political punditry that is pushed around by ideologues of all stripes.





You gave two, but you are missing two points:I said they were a threat, I made two points about how they were a threat
Europe is not the US, so them threatening Europe is not threatening the US
Their nuclear and military technology was subsidized by the West(the US). You have to go back to the proper point on the time-line. We created our own enemy.
If we wanted to beat them, all we had to do was stop funding them.
That's what I'm saying. Taking Europe first,why not let Germany take over? The countries we saved were no better than Germany was. Britain had 1/4 of the globe under their dominion, France had a big empire, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc. All we did was save some evil nations from other nations. And of course, let us not forget that nobody who fights on the side of Stalin can claim any kind of moral high ground. Stalin killed most of his millions before Hitler even touched a Jew. knocking out Germany sets up the Soviet Union to take hegemony over half of Europe.Are you honestly saying we should have stayed out of WWII?? Watch Europe and Asia fall to the Germans, and give up our Pacific property to the Japanese? How long do you think we would have lasted as the sole civilized world not under German control?
The smart move would have been to let Stalin and Hitler kill each other off. Hitler didn't want war with Britain anyway. He even offered to ENFORCE the British empire's territorial integrity with German troops.
We never would have had any beefs with Japan if not for the Anglophiles in the US trying to get us into the War with Germany through the back door.
Enemies foreign and domestic!
Lots of people were around in the 80s and didn't go so far as saying that.
You can't love something you think is flawless - me




What funding are you going on about? Besides even if we made them a threat, they were still a threat!
Evil nations? Post WW2 these nations started letting those colonies go... You think Germany would have done that?
Stalin was a nessecary evil. We killed millions of Native Americans before any of those countries did anything like that... Should the French have left us to the Brits? Leaving Germany alone set them up to have hegemony over all of Europe most likely Russia and eventually Africa/Middle East.
Stalin and Hitler wouldn't have killed each other off, Hitler would have eventually won, even if he had to retreat and lick his wounds, he would have taken Europe withough U.S. support. Hitler also signed a non-agression pact with the Soviets, followed that one well, didn't he?
WHAT??? The Japanese attacked us?? Before Pearl Harbor even. They wanted Pacific Naval Superiority and would have done anything without it. PH was a backdoor into WWII but that doesn't mean we didn't have a problem with Japan.
Yes many did say that. Many other did. And a lot of the ones not saying things like that, were also not saying anything when their neigbors got ostracized, and their coworkers got fired.





it's amazing which historical developments get remembered versus which ones are (conveniently) forgotten ...
- American bankers made huge profits financing Germany in the 1930's and early 1940's
- the US arguably provoked the Japanese by blockading their shipments of oil and other raw materials from the Dutch pacific colonies since the Dutch navy was unable to do so (i.e. a blatant act of support for one 'side' in a war we were not partipating in)
- Germany had fairly high levels of support within the USA in the 1930's, given that (with almost the sole exception of Jews) our financial, political and economic policies were similar.




^^^We were protecting out position in the Pacific and trying to help the cause without getting directly involved a la lend lease and what not...
I think it probably had more to do with the huge number of German americans in the USA...
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