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Old March 19th, 2014 #29
Alex Linder
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Joseph Sobran was, for decades, the writer whose columns and articles provided me with the greatest amount of information and understanding of world events: he had one equal, and that was Pat Buchanan. These two men brought to their writing a density of contextual historical detail that made reading their work thrilling–-patterns and insights emerged as I read. Here is a small Sobran sampling. Though not in special order, The Friends of Uncle Joe, might actually be my #1 choice, since it was, for me, such an eye opener into WWII. Because of length, I’m submitting this in two parts. MOB

http://www.sobran.com/friends.shtml
THE FRIENDS OF UNCLE JOE (Sobran’s Vol. 7 No. 2 February 2000)
The year 2000 has brought a predictable flood of retrospection, with several equally predictable nominees for Man (or rather “Person”) of the Century. These include Albert Einstein (chosen by Time), Winston Churchill (the choice of The Weekly Standard), and Franklin D. Roosevelt (the choice of several, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the New York Daily News).
The gushing encomia deal very lightly, as one might also have predicted, with one fact common to all three: their fondness for Joseph Stalin, perhaps the Mass Murderer of the Millennium. Time fails to mention that the saintly Professor Einstein, a man of “humane and democratic instincts,” was a relentless fellow-traveler who defended even Stalin’s macabre 1938 Moscow show trials; the anti-Communist philosopher Sidney Hook recalled in his autobiography, Out of Step, that getting Einstein to criticize the Soviet Union was like pulling teeth.
Roosevelt’s eulogists likewise avoid the subject of Stalin, for whom FDR had the highest regard, calling him “a Christian gentleman” during the Yalta conference. He had befriended Stalin from the first year of his administration, when he extended diplomatic recognition to the murderous pariah state. Time and again he chose to help “Uncle Joe” when he didn’t have to, appeasing him from a position of strength. Even Neville Chamberlain never idealized Hitler as “Uncle Adolf.” When FDR asked Pope Pius XII to condemn Hitler, Pius sent back word that if he did so he would also have to condemn Stalin; Roosevelt withdrew the request.
As for Churchill, we are assured that he had no illusions about Stalin, which only makes his wartime indulgence of the tyrant harder to excuse. His 1946 complaint (in a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri) about the “Iron Curtain” falling on Eastern Europe after World War II is treated as prophetic, when it was just the opposite: a totally hypocritical gesture. Anyone who didn’t know what to expect of Stalin by 1946 — or who could believe his guarantees at Yalta in 1945 — was a moron. And Churchill was no moron, only a cynic feigning alarm at the obvious.
Stalin had shown his true colors long before Roosevelt and Churchill took on as their ally the brave, bluff “Uncle Joe.” Had they never heard of the forced famine of Ukraine, the NKVD mass arrests, the Gulag camps, the purges and show trials, the murder of Trotsky, the invasions of Poland (with the Katyn Forest massacre of 15,000 Polish officers), Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania? All these things, and more, revealed not only the brutality of Stalin but the logic of Communism itself, which had begun its reign in Russia with the mass murder of Orthodox priests under Lenin. Communism was in essence a reversion to the principles of primitive warfare, directed not only against external enemies but against its own subjects if they resisted (or were even suspected of a disposition to resist) its tyranny.
The alliance with the Soviet Union is a permanent bloodstain on the Western democracies. It was part of what F.J.P. Veale, a British jurist, called the Allies’ “advance to barbarism” in his mercilessly trenchant book of that title. Long out of print, Advance to Barbarism is now available only from the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. The book is both essential to read and difficult to obtain. It’s remarkable for the iron logic with which Veale seizes on the damning casual admissions, and even the occasional twinges of conscience, of the victors of World War II. (He finds such twinges far more often in Churchill than in Roosevelt.)
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http://www.sobran.com/issuetexts/2002-05.htm
THE OBSESSION
Now and then I get letters and e-mail messages asking why I am so “obsessed” with Jews and Israel. The question amuses me. It would be one thing if I often wrote about Mali, or Honduras, or Borneo, or any other nation or country most people remember only as a name from geography class.
I should think it’s obvious that I’m *responding* to an obsession — an obsession of contemporary culture, politics, the media, the arts. We have been getting 24/7 coverage of Jews, the Holocaust, and Israel for years now. The front pages, the evening news, the magazine covers devote so much attention to Israel — a country the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world — that you could get the impression that it spans several time zones and includes much of the world’s population (plus a few gentiles). Many columnists write about it more often than I do: Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, Cal Thomas, Paul Greenberg! , Mona Charen, and George Will, to name a few. Of course they write uncritically about Israel, so they aren’t considered obsessed; Eric Alterman of THE NATON has compiled a list of more than 60 well-known pundits who “reflexively” support Israel, while finding only 6 who are frequently critical.
Every American president has to spend a disproportionate amount of his time coddling Israel and denouncing or actively fighting Israel’s enemies. It’s become part of the job description, as much as if it were written into the Constitution — or more so, since constitutional obligations have become optional and *this* obligation is definitely not. At the same time, no president or any other politician may suggest that the American-Israeli alliance imposes undue risks, costs, or burdens on the United States.
Journalism still devotes so much attention to the Holocaust that, as I once quipped, “The NEW YORK TIMES should be renamed HOLOCAUST UPDATE.” Books and movies about it continue to pour forth; bookstores have whole sections on the Holocaust, and universities consecrate entire departments to “Holocaust studies.” Holocaust memorials spring up everywhere. Elie Wiesel preaches that we *should* be obsessed with the Holocaust, as he is. Churches, accused of silent complicity in, and even ultimate responsibility for, the Holocaust, do their best to repent and atone.
Current Jewish sufferings are treated as specially tragic facts, extensions of the Holocaust itself. When Arab terrorists seized an Italian ship, the Achille Lauro, and threw a Jewish passenger overboard, a leading American composer, John Adams, wrote an entire opera, THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER, about the incident.
“Anti-Semitism” has become the chief of sins. It’s seldom helpfully defined, but it seems to take a thousand forms, from outright genocide to indiscreet bons mots about Israel. Many gentiles live in dread of being labeled anti-Semitic, a charge against which there is no real defense or appeal: to be accused is to be guilty! The burden of proof, as I’ve often pointed out, is on the defendant – and a difficult burden it is, since he hardly knows what he’s being accused of. How can you prove your innocence of an undefined crime? By the same token, there is no penalty for false charges of anti-Semitism, since a meaningless charge can’t be proved false anyway.
No gentile is quite safe from the charge. The Gospels, Catholicism, and the papacy have been indicted; so have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Edmund Burke, Dickens, Henry James, Henry Adams, Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hemingway. (So far Jane Austen and Emily D ickinson seem to have escaped the accusation.) Then there are whole anti-Semitic nations, among them Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Germany, France, and Spain, lately joined by most of the Arab nations (thereby proving it is possible to be Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same time).
. . . The plague-carriers, so to speak, are the secularized, liberal, middlebrow Jews whose vulgarity sets the tone for American politics, public discourse, and popular culture. Some of them, like Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand, have real talent, of sorts; most of them are good at making money and aggressive in using it for their pet causes. Above all, they have a low genius for propaganda — for shaping the popular mind and its characteristic platitudes.
This is the prevalent body of Jews, our unacknowledged third party — the party of Zionism, Holocaust promotion, secularism, sexual license (including “gay rights” and legal abortion), and an aggressive U.S. foreign policy (in the interests of Israel, not the United States itself). The Jewish Party, only a small fraction of the U.S. population, donates more than half the! money received by the presidential candidates of the two major parties. It also dominates the major news and entertainment media.
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http://www.sobran.com/articles/faction.shtml
THE JEWISH FACTION (Expanded from SOBRAN’S, May 2004, pages 3–6)
As with other “minorities,” the Christian habit with the Tribe is simply to pretend not to notice obvious and distressing things. This, we assume, is just their nature; they aren’t going to change; maybe they can’t help being this way.
This is what “interfaith dialogue” has come to: Christian despair and surrender.

http://www.sobran.com/establishment.shtml
THE JEWISH ESTABLISHMENT by Joseph Sobran
In the early 1930s, Walter Duranty of the New York Times was in Moscow, covering Joe Stalin the way Joe Stalin wanted to be covered. To maintain favor and access, he expressly denied that there was famine in the Ukraine even while millions of Ukrainian Christians were being starved into submission. For his work Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. To this day, the Times remains the most magisterial and respectable of American newspapers.
. . . It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief measure of its power: its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing down the taboos of others – you might almost say its prerogative of offending. You can read articles in Jewish-controlled publications from the Times to Commentary blaming Christianity for the Holocaust or accusing Pope Pius XII of indifference to it, but don’t look for articles in any major publication that wants to stay in business examining the Jewish role in Communism and liberalism, however temperately.
. . . Power openly acquired, openly exercised, and openly discussed is one thing. You may think organized labor or the Social Security lobby abuses its power, but you don’t jeopardize your career by saying so. But a kind of power that forbids its own public mention, like the Holy Name in the Old Testament, is another matter entirely.
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http://www.sobran.com/articles/leads/2006-07-lead.shtml
FEAR OF THE SMEAR (SOBRAN’S, July 2006, page 1)
As you probably already know, Israel is the only “democracy” dedicated to the proposition that all men sure as hell aren’t created equal.
More than sixty years after Hitler’s death, this seems to be the golden age of anti-Semitism, judging by the frequency with which the charge is made. Apparently anti-Semitism was the first word Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz, and the neoconservatives learned to pronounce right after mama and dada. An anti-Semite used to be a guy who hated Jews; now he’s a guy whom Jews hate.
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http://www.sobran.com/fearofjews.shtml
FOR FEAR OF THE JEWS (Expanded from SOBRAN’S, September 2002, pages 3-6, taken from a speech given at the IHR Conference held in Los Angeles, June 21û23, 2002.)
The news that I would be addressing the Institute of Historical Review came to some people as … well, news. It was mentioned in the Jewish newspaper Forward and on the Zionist Wall Street Journal Online. The editors of two conservative magazines called and wrote me to express their concern that I might damage my reputation, such as it is, by speaking to “Holocaust deniers.”
I’m not sure why this should matter. Even positing that I was speaking to a disreputable audience, I expect to be judged by what I say, not whom I say it to. I note that my enemies have written a great deal about me, yet they rarely quote me directly.
, , , The charge of anti-Semitism doesn’t have to be proved; and it can’t be disproved. It’s an assertion about motives, not actions. That’s the beauty of it: its unfalsifiability. Joe McCarthy was ruined for calling too many people Communists, even card-carrying Reds; but has Norman Podhoretz paid any penalty for calling too many people anti-Semites?
, , , Any number can play, including gentiles. Taki was accused by his Catholic publisher. My fate was crueler: I was defended by mine. Bill Buckley denied that I was anti-Semitic, but wrote a sentence, or a chapter (with Bill, the difference may be unclear), adding that though I was innocent of the crime, I somehow deserved to be falsely accused of it. That was a little like saying, “True, he was a guard at Auschwitz, but let’s give him credit: he always showed up for duty on time.” Thanks, Bill!
. . .In a peculiar way, the Holocaust story has promoted not only pity, but actual fear of the Jews. It has removed them from the universe of normal moral discourse. It has made them victims with nukes. It has made them even more dangerous than their enemies have always charged. It has given the world an Israel ruled by Ariel Sharon.
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http://www.sobran.com/columns/2007/070319.shtml
THE NEW TABOOS (SOBRAN’S – February 1998)
A French court recently fined the nationalist leader Jean-Marie LePen a quarter of a million dollars for belittling the Holocaust — a hate crime, under French law. Other countries have similar restrictions on speech; the dissident historian David Irving has been prevented from visiting some countries because of what might be called Semitically incorrect things he has written in England. A new twist on international law, I suppose. And I suppose we might escape such penalties by announcing that we believe the Nazis killed whatever the minimum number of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and others the law permits you to believe in the, er, democracies. Just to be on the safe side, we could even profess to believe the actual number of victims was double the permissible minimum.
. . . Ours is a golden age of taboos. They surround the Holocaust and other Jewish sensitivities, race, “gender,” and, just as much as ever, sex. The old taboos have been reversed, not abolished: it’s the concept of perversion that’s forbidden now, not perversion itself. Even conservative Christians feel compelled to mention that they have gay friends.
. . . Among the strongest of the new taboos are those imposed on public religious expression. The courts have outlawed many traditional religious observances in public schools and on any public property. The “holiday season” bears witness to the growing prohibition on the very mention of Christmas (though not Hanukkah or “Kwanzaa”).
The “multicultural” agenda professes equal tolerance for all cultures. But at its core is a fanatical hatred of Christian culture.
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