The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Friedrich Nietzsche vs. Robert E. Lee

Posted on | July 23, 2026 | No Comments

One of the benefits of being a bad student is that, by the time I began to take the world of ideas seriously, I was already an adult, with a job, a wife, three kids and a mortgage. It was in the early 1990s, when I was on the staff of the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune, that I began haunting the local used book store, snapping up old volumes at 50 cents or a dollar each, pursuing an autodidactic course of remediation, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge that had by then become apparent to me.

The reason I view this way of learning as beneficial is that, unlike my younger self — a carefree hedonist, partying his way through school, paying just enough attention to scrape by — the 30-something me had sufficient life experience to evaluate ideas in a pragmatic manner. By comparison, those who were more diligent and conscientious during their schoolboy years are apt to be impressed by intellectuals in a way that it was impossible for me to be impressed. Understand the difference I’m attempting to illuminate here. Suppose, hypothetically, that I had actually given a damn about my grades when I was in school. In such an imaginary scenario, I would have eagerly followed the instruction of my teachers, taking notes as they explained subjects, striving to internalize the conceptual theme of their lessons so that I could regurgitate it on tests, in essays, etc. In other words, I would have become a mental carbon copy of my teachers, my knowledge limited by whatever was in the assigned textbooks and emphasized in the classroom lectures.

Think about the earnest young student, devoted to maintaining a top GPA, who takes a political science course in which Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an assigned text. In the usual order of things, the professor will have an outline of the lessons he intends to teach during the three or four class meetings in which Tocqueville is discussed. The diligent student will be expected to know by heart some specific points the professor seeks to drive home — the stuff he’s got to know for the final exam — and this summary version is likely to be the entirety of what the student remembers about Tocqueville’s great book. By comparison, think of me, a young newspaper staffer with a full-time job and a family, taking it upon himself to read Democracy in America in his spare hours, with no professor to tell me which parts of Tocqueville’s book I should underline and memorize for the final exam.

Encountering the text as a grownup, without the guidance or assistance of any instructor, with no agenda other than to acquire knowledge of a hitherto neglected subject, is a very different experience than how the high-GPA teenager encounters the same subject. And I pursued this autodidactic experience with many subjects: Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, on and on. Which brings me, after that 500-word preamble, to the case of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Richard Spencer, moments before the world-famous punch.

Remember the “punch a Nazi” meme? On the day Donald Trump was first inaugurated in 2017, Richard Spencer was on a sidewalk in D.C. giving an interview to the Australian Broadcasting Company, when some Antifa thug blindsided him. Spencer was widely recognized as a leader — arguably the leader — of the so-called “alt right,” and it was this notoriety that made him a target of violence. I’d known him for nearly 10 years by then, having first met him when he was still a graduate student at Duke University, when we were both members of a panel discussion of the notorious Duke lacrosse rape hoax. Richard Spencer is extremely intelligent. He got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, and was pursuing a Ph.D. at Duke before he dropped out of that program. These are all prestigious, selective universities, and we may therefore deduce not only that Spencer scores very high on standardized tests (which, as everyone knows, are a proxy for IQ), but that he is also a diligent student.

Years ago, I remarked that Richard’s basic problem is that he read Nietzsche at too young an age. Thank God I avoided that, because if I hadn’t been already a busy adult when I finally got around to reading Nietzsche, perhaps I might have been similarly radicalized.

Fortunately, I knew about Nietzsche before ever bothering to read anything he’d written. Nietzsche has a dreadful reputation among the kind of Christians I grew up around. Nietzsche has been widely denounced as an apostle of nihilism, the man who provided the philosophical basis of Nazism. There are those who insist that Nietzsche has been misunderstood, and that he doesn’t deserve such a bad reputation, but my point is, I was warned, and took those warnings seriously. So when, in my early 30s, I spent a weekend actually reading Nietzsche, my attitude toward his work was much like my attitude toward Karl Marx’s writings, which I’d also read extensively during those years.

Does Nietzsche “think outside the box,” as they say? Yes, and in doing so, he reminds us why the box is there in the first place. If “God is dead,” to take his most famous phrase seriously, then where are we? What are the rules in a godless world? Absent a shared moral code, what can be the basis of law? What does it mean to be Beyond God and Evil?

As a sort of thought experiment — the stuff sophomores chat about in a dorm room after they’ve had few bong hits — Nietzsche’s vision has some merit, and I would not deny that there could be benefits to engaging with his ideas, so long as you are adequately forewarned, as I was. Some very profound and scary stuff there and, reading it as an adult, my reaction was to cling even more tightly to “that old rugged cross.” Taking seriously the concept of a post-Christian world, and realizing what it might actually mean, I would urge everyone to pray that no such nightmare ever befalls us. And all of that (now past the 1,000-word mark) is preamble to explaining why I am bringing up Robert E. Lee.

“Boomer conservatives suffer from slave morality,” was the sentence which got me started on this. Never mind who wrote that sentence on X, but of course I recognized “slave morality” as one of Nietzsche’s most influential concepts. It is a deliberate insult to Christians and also, more infamously, an accusation against Jews. Without going into a detailed lecture, suffice it to say that Nietzsche accuses the Jews of devising a subversive value-system, subsequently embraced and spread by Christians, that seeks to undermine the earlier aristocratic value-system of the pagan world — “the transvaluation of all values,” as he calls it.

If one wanted to defend Nietzsche, it might be said that he makes this argument in the context of criticizing the kind of “democratic” egalitarianism that conservatives have always deplored. All of us know people whose ill-considered liberalism is rooted in a confused mishmash of pietistic notions of charity, mercy without judgment, etc. Rather than be content with such specific criticism of the soft-headed foolishness of liberals, however, Nietzsche’s “slave morality” argument attacks Christianity, per se, and in doing so, indicts the Jews as the authors of a devious scheme to sabotage everything noble and aristocratic.

Now, pay careful attention to this:

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

These are the words that Robert E. Lee wrote after the war in a letter to his former staff officer, Col. Charles Marshall. Pause for a moment to consider everything that Lee had lived through at that point, and how much cause he had for discouragement. What tremendous courage he displayed in refusing to “despair of the future”! Well do we understand why Lee has been so widely admired, and praised by men of judgment. Churchill called Lee “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived, and one of the great captains known to the annals of war.”

Re-read Lee’s letter, now, and what do you notice? He professed his duty “to serve” his fellow man, which is what he had done his entire life. Lee was the very embodiment of the “servant-leader” role that Christian preachers urge men to embrace. It is in serving our fellow man, after all, that we emulate Christ. A Christian does not even expect gratitude from those who benefit from his service. Like a soldier, he does his duty not because he expects to be praised, but simply because it is his duty.

Christian faith is, or at least ought to be, a sort of internal guidance system. Seeking always to do the right thing because it is right — rather than because you fear punishment for doing the wrong thing, or because you expect some kind of reward — this is true morality. The fact that Lee, who had commanded a mighty army that fought the greatest battles in his nation’s history, should in his final years of life speak of himself as disposed to serve others, rather than expect them to serve him, is testimony to how deeply rooted his moral code was.

What would Nietzsche have to say of Lee? Certainly this “great captain” embodied everything that an aristocratic value-system would consider praiseworthy. His ancestry was impeccable, the Lee family having been among the most eminent in Virginia since its earliest colonial period, and if anything, his mother’s side of the family was even more eminent. The greatest stain on Lee’s fortunes was that his father, the Revolutionary hero “Light Horse” Harry Lee, had been bankrupted because of bad postwar investments — the victim of a swindle — so that young Robert grew up in the shadow of genteel poverty, his mother dependent on her Carter relatives. By his own good behavior, however, Robert E. Lee made himself recognized as a man of promise at an early age, showing his merit in the Mexican War and other appointments as a young officer.

“Then the war came.” So many Southern stories turn upon that sentence. In the span of just a few months, the nation found itself thrust into a crisis that led inevitably to war, and over the next four years, the South was devastated in a way no one had imagined was possible before the war came. Lee became world-famous as a result — a historic figure in every sense of the word — and yet here he was, the president of a college in rural Virginia, writing a letter to his former aide to explain that his painful experiences had not “indisposed me to serve” his fellow man.

“Slave morality”? If so, we need more such slaves. But don’t come hurling at me phrases from Nietzsche as an insult, because I might be less courteous and patient than General Lee was. Deo vindice.



 

Category: History, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 07.22.26

Posted on | July 23, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Epic Indie Summer Sale Is On!
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: U.S. Crime Rate versus Canada and Australia, also Don’t Bring a Knife to a Gunfight
Doug Ross: Cuba Report – The Comic Book Version
EBL: Allen West Explains The Uncomfortable Truth, Fileting, The Real Tragedy of the Odyssey, Battle of the Pyramids, and MAGA Kamala Kamalot
Twitchy: Fifteen-Year Pro-Hamas “Forever Student” At Columbia to Be Deported, Rep. Gill Introduces Bill To End Birthright Citizenship For Children Of “Invaders”, and “It Never Happens” – Mexican Illegal Sexually Abuses & Murders Two-Year-Old In Virginia
Louder With Crowder: Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton Claims ICE Is Killing Illegals That No One Knows About, Thousands Of Illegals Were Registered To Vote In New Jersey, The Democrat Governor Calls It An Oopsie, Ratchet Crockett says if you rooted for Argentina over Spain in the World Cup, you’re, like, totally racist, Smithsonian director forced to testify under oath if she still thinks politeness is, “white supremacy”, and Trans Democrat Candidate Brags About Living In Poverty In Cringe Campaign Ad
Vox Popoli: The Byron AI Campaign, The Thumb on the Scale, Augmentation, Not Replacement, Let’s You and Him Fight, and One Trump, Two Trump
Stoic Observations: The Examined Life
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow Strip #15
Jim McCoy: Interview With Sam Robb
Ammo.com: What Causes Mass Shootings?
Upstream Reviews: IndieVerse Allies

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Cuba Libre
Don Surber: The Boasberg boomerang
STUMP: Chicago Pension Watch – No, There Aren’t Many Choices

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Snacks & Sweets
Survival Food


 

Category: Linkagery

Of Lawyers, Samoans and Journalism

Posted on | July 22, 2026 | No Comments

Over the weekend, I wrote:

What is terrorism? It is the use of violence for political purposes, and is akin to guerrilla warfare — “insurgency,” as we are now wont to call it.

My use of the word “wont” in that sentence drew praise in the comments from my old friend Bert the Samoan lawyer:

Also, beautiful use of “wont.” The Bunhead would be proud.

“The Bunhead” is a reference to Mrs. Opal Lovett, an English instructor at Jacksonville (Alabama) State University who taught both Bert and me back in the day. Mrs. Lovett wore her hair in a bun, as did all proper old-fashioned Southern ladies back in the day. There were many such old-fashioned Southern ladies among the teachers of our youth. For example, my homeroom teacher in seventh grade was Mrs. Alexander, who spoke in a very deep drawl, more common in the coastal lowlands of the South than in the Piedmont region near Atlanta where I grew up. One of my childhood friends liked to tell about the time when Mrs. Alexander, offended by the smell of some students’ inadequate hygiene, briefly lectured a classroom about their “foul body odors,” which with her drawling voice struck my friend as hysterically comical.

Mrs. Alexander was the wife of Robert Alexander, who was principal of Turner Middle School at the time. His long and distinguished career as an educator in Douglas County made him the namesake of Alexander High School. When there was recently a sex scandal at Alexander High that made national headlines, I felt that scandal rather personally, having known the man for whom the school was named. Such behavior is unworthy of anyone associated with that name. But I digress . . .

JSU student newspaper staffer, 1983.

Bert the Samoan Lawyer will attest that, in my youth, I wasn’t much concerned with propriety and reputation, to put it mildly. Had there been a vote for “Most Likely to Become a Conservative Pundit,” certainly no one would have nominated me. While I showed some penchant for feature writing, as entertainment editor of the student newspaper at JSU, I had no interest in politics. It was Mrs. Lovett, in fact, who suggested to me my senior year that I should take some assignments writing regular news, sports, etc., in order to accumulate clippings that would demonstrate my ability to do different kinds of journalism. Almost by accident, after a couple of post-collegiate years doing various other things — nightclub DJ, forklift driver, rock-and-roll bands — I stumbled into a $4.50-an-hour entry-level job as a staff writer for a weekly paper in Austell, Georgia, and from there slowly worked my way up the ladder until I landed at the Washington Times in 1997.

“Writing is a skill, not a talent, and this difference is important because a skill can be improved by practice.”

That’s one of my quotes someone collected online, and a point that needs to be emphasized. At a family reunion down in Alabama many years ago, one of my great-aunts or distant cousins asked me what I was doing, and when I told her I was working for a newspaper, she replied, “Oh, you were always so creative!” Well, perhaps so, but newspaper reporting isn’t about “creativity.” In fact, it’s quite the opposite — in this business, you get fired for “creating” anything (e.g., Stephen Glass).

It is kind of weird, when you think about it, that we should regard the ability to write narrative prose as a creative talent akin to composing symphonies or carving statues. However good any journalist may be at his craft, he isn’t Mozart or Michelangelo. Grant that there is some element of innate aptitude involved in journalism, but merely being able to write a news story about a school board meeting — the kind of stuff a local newspaper reporter does — isn’t a “talent,” it’s a skill. Having started my career on the very lowest rung of the ladder, I was keenly aware that improving my skill was the key to getting ahead, and I consciously committed to improvement: Work harder, work faster, get better every day — but never let ’em see you sweat.

Eric “Otter” Stratton is my role model here. When he’s practicing golf with his Animal House brother Boon, there’s this colloquy:

Boon: “I gotta work on my game.”
Otter: “No, no, no, don’t think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.”

Treat your “work” as fun, and strive to make it seem you achieve success effortlessly. Those other guys, half-assing their way through life? They’re not even in the building when you’re burning the midnight oil, cranking it out in a desperate rush to meet your next deadline. You don’t owe them anything, especially not an explanation of why you’re better than them. You earned what you got, and if they envy the apparent ease of your success — imagining you’re just lucky — why let them in on your secret?

There was a time in the 1980s, when Bert the Samoan Lawyer was editor of a small newspaper in Alabama, and I was driving a forklift, and how I envied him! Even though Bert explained that it was a crappy job — overworked and underpaid — still it was obviously more prestigious than what I was doing, and I was surprised when he later quit the newspaper business and went to law school. Probably I should have heeded his warning about conditions in the journalism racket. There have definitely been times I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have stuck to driving a forklift. However, Bert became a remarkable success as a lawyer, and on occasion has provided me with very valuable legal advice, free of charge. Somehow or other, the envious shoe got switched to the other foot, and Bert has from time to time expressed the idea that my Gonzo adventures in journalism are a greater achievement than his lofty status as the most eminent Polynesian-American attorney in the Southeast.

Being a great lawyer involves a lot of writing, and Bert’s scholarly work has been featured in a number of legal journals, although such writing doesn’t afford him much opportunity to display his penchant for satirical humor, for which he was well-known in his JSU years. The Bunhead taught us well, in terms of grammar and such, and Bert was always a more diligent student than I, whose collegiate career was an extended party occasionally interrupted by attending classes. There are some who have accused me of engaging in satire, of being “creative” in my writing, an allegation I strenuously deny. Believe it or not, there are some people who have gone so far as to insinuate that Bert is not even a Samoan, but trust me — I report only the facts. As is my wont.

Yes, it can be used as a noun, too. Class dismissed!



 

Category: Education, R.S. McCain School of Journalism

In The Mailbox: 07.21.26 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

Blast from the past

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Ross: The Day Daniel Boone Escaped The Shawnee (1778),
357 Magnum: Portland Police to Citizens – You’re On Your Own
EBL: The Acali Raft Experiment, Michael Knowles Odyssey Review, “Charlemagne”, and Shakira World Cup Half Time Show
Twitchy: United Airlines Agent Calls Passenger Racist, Threatens To Call ICE On Him, Van Jones Dismantles The DSA And Socialists Just Can’t Deal, and Suck, Suck, And More Suck From The Rotard
Louder With Crowder: Democrat Candidate Demands More Foreigners Like Her Take Over the Government to Advocate for “The Global World Order”, Black Texan puts James Talarico on blast for refusing to answer questions from voters, Sunny Hostin busted using her celebrity privilege when cops caught her son trespassing, Zohran Mamdani gets confused and thinks New York City is not part of America, and ABC News expected Trump bashing, but Bill Maher wanted to blast commies taking over the Democrat Party instead
Vox Popoli: The State of the State, Conflict Incapable, Smells Like Corruption, “A Historic Disaster”, and SANS BEAUTY
Upstream Reviews: The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffin
John C. Wright: Aition & The Honor of Poets

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: Do You Know Why The PRC Has A Polar Strategy?

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Home & Kitchen
New Releases – Home & Kitchen


 

Category: Linkagery

The Pro-Hamas Socialist Democrats

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

Anti-Israel protesters in New York City

Six months ago, a poll showed Mallory McMorrow leading in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in Michigan being vacated by the retirement of Sen. Gary Peters. Two weeks ago, McMorrow quit the race after polls showed her support dwindling to a single-digit percentage. Meanwhile, Abdul El-Sayed, who was in third place in January, had surged into a nine-point lead in the primary by mid-June, with Rep. Haley Stevens in second place. McMorrow’s exit from the campaign has now turned the bid for the Democratic nomination into a two-horse race, and Stevens is ahead — but just barely — mainly because AIPAC has been pouring tens of millions of dollars into the state to try to stop El-Sayed. The Michigan primary is August 4, and it is fair to say that AIPAC is desperate to halt the slide of the Democratic Party into the de facto American branch of Hamas. Recent primary victories by anti-Israel candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have set the alarm bells ringing. It all goes back to October 2023:

Most Americans to this day have only the slightest inkling of the atrocities Hamas terrorists perpetrated against innocent civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. If they knew, surely they would be revolted by the way so many Democrats — particularly those affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — have embraced the anti-Israel narrative of the war Hamas began that day. Indeed, it is fair to say that much of the DSA’s rhetoric on this topic is indistinguishable from Hamas propaganda.
The grinning poster boy for democratic socialism, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, is up to his eyeballs in this pro-terrorist agenda, as the American Jewish Committee has observed:

For example, the DSA’s New York City chapter, with which Zohran Mamdani is affiliated, organized a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square the day after the October 7 Hamas massacre. At the rally, protesters chanted slogans including “Resistance is justified,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Smash the settler Zionist state”

Take note that this DSA rally happened before Israel had launched its military response to the 10/7 massacre. And what sort of “resistance” by Hamas did the DSA mob declare “justified” on that day? . . .

Read the rest of my latest American Spectator column.



 

Category: Democrats, Israel, Terrorism

In The Mailbox: 07.20.26

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

If I had any brains, I’d just go back to bed, but…
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Is Self-Defense Legal in the UK? also, Another Failure of the Victim-Selection Process
Doug Ross: A Drone Watched Rome From 753 BC To Today, A Drone Watched Jerusalem From 990 BC To Today, and Chairman Xi Could Pin A Medal On Governor Hochul,
EBL: Argentina Chimichurri and Spanish Mackerel, Circus Maximus, Smoked backbone grouper, Pan Fried Fish, and MAGA Prime Time Speech
Twitchy: Trump Stuns Doomer Experts Again, Don’t They Know Who She Is? and Ben Shapiro Can’t Help Noticing The Worst People All Agree On One Thing
Louder With Crowder: Democrat Senator ups the stakes, now says the SAVE Act is WORSE than Jim Crow, Tim Walz Doubles Down On Pardoning a Child Abuser, Frontrunner to replace Graham Platner in Maine is this beautiful and brave female writer, Marco Rubio GOES OFF on left-wing violence, brings receipts in this must-watch appearance, and Democrat socialists (aka, the new Democrat Party) announces new platform that declares the end of for-profit companies
Vox Popoli: The Postmortem, Never Give Up Cash, Japan Rejects Clown World, The End of General Purpose AI, and The Hellmouth’s Last Gasp
Defending The Wood Perilous: Fishman Island & The Weight of a Grudge
Cedar Sanderson: Lightly Toasted Marshmallow Strip #14, Non-Traditional Ending, and Stick the Landing
Jim McCoy: Fade
Sensurround: I’m Angry (Part II), Democrats – Please Get Your Act Together, and Flock Around & Find Out
Ammo.com: Medical Marijuana & Gun Ownership
Postcards From Barsoom: The Last Human

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: The Wild Weasels of Midnight Hammer, also, Fullbore Friday
Dana Loesch: Trump Sounds The Alarm Over Election Integrity, also, The Vance-Rogan Interview
Don Surber: The world sees America is great again, also, Modern time began in 1883
Elizabeth Nickson: Thunder & Lightning In Election Fraud Land
Glenn Reynolds: What I Did This Summer
Racket News: Anatomy of a Struggle Session
STUMP: Sports (and other) Gambling – The Modern Scourge

Amazon Warehouse Deals
Best Sellers – Automotive
New Releases – Automotive

 

Category: Linkagery

Rule 5 Monday: Redhead in Denim

Posted on | July 21, 2026 | No Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Son of Silvercon IV ended yesterday – great success! Here’s a redhead in overalls.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, The Odyssey, Dead Calm & Sam Neill RIP, England vs. Argentina, Mad Anthony Wayne, France vs. Spain on Bastille Day, The Other Bennet Sister, The Westies, Turbulence, and “Disco Inferno”

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Emily Feld, Fish Pic Friday – Lil Red Heidi Hood, Tattoo Thursday, The Wednesday Wetness, Frankenfish Invade Pennsylvania (Again), Tuesday Tanlines, Bubble Pop!, The Monday Morning Stimulus, and Palm Sunday

BACON TIME: Rule Five Butt It’s Friday

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Deals on Premium Beauty Products
Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop
Shop Sex & Sensuality Gifts


 

Category: Rule 5

Communism, the Palestinian Death Cult and the Pro-Terrorism Red-Green Axis

Posted on | July 18, 2026 | 1 Comment

Sometimes I have to remind people that I actually knew Sam Francis who, in recent years, has been recognized as a sort of prophet who foresaw the rise of what has become known as the MAGA movement.

Most of Sam’s younger admirers, knowing of his long battle against neoconservatives — which came into focus with his criticism of the 1991 Iraq war — are not exactly friends of Israel. What many of them may not realize is that Sam made a remarkable contribution to an understanding of the Middle East conflict, which his neoconservative opponents sought to erase from memory once he fell out with them during the first Bush presidency. Good luck finding an online copy of Sam Francis’s 1981 policy paper, “The Soviet Strategy of Terror,” which had an enormous influence on the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Sam was at one point a research fellow for the Heritage Foundation, which published that paper, but once he was cast out for being too politically incorrect, Heritage effectively “de-published” it, removing it from their website, a deliberate insult they have not repented more than 20 years after Sam Francis died.

Years ago, I obtained a samizdat copy of “The Soviet Strategy of Terror,” but it’s packed away in my papers somewhere in the garage, so I can’t quote it, however the key insight is this: The Soviet Union, in its worldwide warfare against the West, sponsored terrorist activity as part of a general strategy. In other words, terrorism wasn’t merely a tactic, but had deep roots in the Communist worldview, by which its use was justified, and was employed to destabilize conditions in such a way as to foment revolutionary upheaval and advance Soviet interests.

What is terrorism? It is the use of violence for political purposes, and is akin to guerrilla warfare — “insurgency,” as we are now wont to call it. Guerrilla warfare is used by those who, unable to defeat a stronger opponent through open combat between regular military forces, engage in raids and ambushes, then return to concealment among the civilian population. The distinction between guerrilla warfare and an organized terrorist campaign can be difficult to make. For example, during the Vietnam War, sometimes the Vietcong acted as guerrilla combatants and other times they were engaged in terrorism.

A Vietcong terrorist is executed in Saigon, 1968

As someone has remarked, the lesson of the Spanish Civil War is that if you think you’ve killed enough Communists, you’re wrong. And at the same time America was fighting Communists in Vietnam, the Soviet Union was sponsoring terrorism against Israel. This relationship began when Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser became a client of the Soviets in the 1950s. Under Nasser’s sponsorship, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created in 1964 with Ahmed Shuqeiri as its leader. However, after Egypt was humiliated in the 1967 Six-Day War, the PLO came under the control of Yassir Arafat, whose Fatah organization had been engaged in terrorist attacks on Israel since 1964. (You can read the relevant history from Discover the Networks, which is far more informative than Wikipedia.) It was the Six-Day War that put Israel in possession of Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the entirety of the Sinai peninsula. When Egypt and the other Arab powers counterattacked in 1973 (the Yom Kippur War), Israel successfully defended itself, and was thus dealing from a position of strength when it agreed, in the 1978 Camp David Accords, to return the Sinai to Egypt in a historic peace agreement. Despite making peace with Egypt, however, Israel was still viewed as a target by the Soviets, which continued sponsoring terrorism by the PLO.

The very concept of a “Palestinian” nationality is an invention of Soviet-sponsored propaganda. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s recall the Soviet “brushfire” strategy, of sponsoring Communist insurgencies all over the world in so-called “wars of national liberation,” of which the terrorist campaign against Israel was just one example.

The history of the so-called “Red-Green Alliance” between leftists in the West and radical Islamists has been recounted by Eli Lake. What actually unites them, of course, is their anti-American fanaticism which is itself a legacy of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War (which did not end until I was in my 30s), there was always a non-coincidental convergence of Soviet propaganda themes and the rhetoric of leftists in the West.

One of the things I learned during the years in the mid-1990s when I went from being a yellow-dog Democrat to being a “right-wing extremist” was passed along to me by a former member of Rep. Larry McDonald‘s staff: Just because the Soviet Union collapsed did not mean that Communism was no longer a threat. Communism’s friends in the West didn’t just strike the tent and go home in defeat when the Berlin Wall fell and Gorbachev was ousted in Moscow. The radicalism of the “free Palestine” mobs is not actually a protest against Israeli policy or U.S. policy because, to invoke one famous maxim of the Left, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

It is unfortunate that some of our friends on the Right have allowed their opposition to neoconservative interventionism (“forever wars”) to lead them into a de facto alliance with the pro-Hamas leftists who portray Israel as the villain in the Middle East. There has been a lot of divisive online conflict between “America First” activists (including some I consider my friends) and the more outspoken Zionists in the Republican coalition (also including some of my friends). My own Zionist credentials being indisputable, I lament both this intramural conflict itself and the excessive vehemence of the rhetoric involved. “Mark Levin said this!” “Tucker Carlson said that!” Is this actually an argument about policy, or is it something else? Regardless of what anyone may say, I cannot help but ask: Cui bono? Who benefits from divisions within the Right?

There is a reason why you rarely see me jumping into these arguments to denounce people by name. Sam Francis got purged from the Official Conservative Movement™ as a result of foreign-policy quarrels in the 1990s, and the only reason we are where we are now — i.e., with the populist grassroots energy of MAGA now the dominant force in Republican politics — is because some of us were wise enough to keep our powder dry, to be discreet in our communications, and to maintain our focus on truly important issues. There have been times when I’ve foolishly lost my temper, or otherwise strayed from the advice I give others in these matters. Nevertheless, I continue to urge patience, and to counsel against joining circular firing squads. Always aim downrange. There are too many obvious enemies on the Left for us to waste ammunition fighting amongst ourselves. But you can see that Communists are still what they always were, even if they call themselves “progressives” now. They still embrace the same terrorist strategy that the Soviets pursued for decades. Let us focus on exposing them and defeating them, and not let ourselves get distracted from that mission.



 

Category: History, Israel, Terrorism
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    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

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