William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)
posted by John | 3:21 PM
Republicus
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." The Statue of Liberty (P.S. Please be so kind as to enter through the proper channels and in an orderly fashion)
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11 Comments:
Vade in Pacem, Bill Buckley. Pax Christe tecum.
Amen.
His excellent intellect was cultivated by private Catholic schooling-- the (truly) liberal rigor of the curriculums modeled after the fine scholastic traditions introduced by St. Loyala, who produced the finest schools in Europe during the counter-Reformation.
As my elder brother lauded, Buckley was one of the last of the Great American aristocrats.
whatta guy!
the face of conservatism.
r.i.p., mr. buckley.
I'll miss that keen sparkle he'd get in his eyes whenever he conveyed a particularly relevant point...
...to Gore Vidal, for example. :)
I cut my political teeth reading Bill Buckley and his magazine. I still, to this day, cannot imagine where I would be without his razor sharp intellect.
He was the first and finest of the Libertarians, and our lives are now diminished.
Or Noam Chomsky...
Very revealing debate. Besides Chomsky reminding me of a young Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, his counter-attacks to Buckley's ideological pro-Western anti-Communist discriminations were always an attempt to dismiss the discrimination and engage in moral equivalence, level the playing field, and distract from the essentials of Buckley's argument (i.e. Freedom is good, Communism is bad) by bogging him down in "You-guys-started-it" and "I-know-you-are-(e.g. an imperialist) but-what-am-I?" games, conveniently staying evasive on the imperialist nature of Marxist ideology itself and furthermore granting the communist insurgents of Greece (who were lying murderers influenced by alien ideologies) the status of "The People," the will of which arbitrarily overrides the will of the democratic peoples in southern Greece and those who fought and died in the national army because the latter had "evil" America's backing.
And voila: He inverts Buckley's argument of Democracy vs. Communism into "Democracy" vs. Imperialism, sowing confusion by messing up Western word values and then pulling the switcharoo.
Not a peep about the Soviet Union backing the communists (and even receiving the Greek children who were sent there against there parents' wishes).
And Chomsky likes to say "It was the Greek people, there was no Soviet army," but that's insidious. Many of the Greek communist leaders were schooled in the Soviet Union and came back as Marxist demagogues who went brainwashing, blackmailing, and murdering from village to village and took over, so he's being very weasly about there being no "foreign army."
The Truman Doctrine was a "disaster?' Only for the Soviets and Greek communists and comrade Chomsky himself. Truman was beloved by many a Greek and Greek-American.
Chomsky basically filters his arguments through a prism that disbands and rearranges the light through a Marxist-Good/America-Bad spectrum, which projects and inverts everything.
Indeed he does. And he has done much to reproduce this prism and affix it to the eyes and ears of the intellectuals of the New Left.
I hate to say it but Marxism (and its' precursers) contaminate everything they come into contact with. But I guess we wouldn't be living in The Modern Age without them.
Upsidasium is not an element that should be mined by amateurs. ;-)
Until the 1950's, classical liberals were content to limit their endeavors to the optimization of negative liberty. But when Herbert Marcuse (aka - Father of the New Left) of the Frankfurt School succeeded in fusing Marxism to Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory (Eros & Civilization), "neo-liberals" justification for breaching the barrier into the realm of positive liberty was openned.
Unfortunately, that "justification" was forged upon the anvil of a misapplication of Marxist "surplus value theory" to psycho-analysis and the "idea" of "surplus repression" in man's "unconscious mind" forged through man's nurture/culture.
This led to an attack on the nuclear family, radical women's/ gay liberation and other John Lennonesque Imaginings.
Now there is no psychological "surplus" repression. There is only "repression". And to remove or weaken that restraining force means to remove or weaken all subconscious constraints to human activity (not just selected ones we don't like) (Freud, "Totem and Taboo").
But the "idea" that there was such a thing as "surplus" repression seduced many a classical liberal into Marx's camp. Hence you see a modern day emphasis on authenticity, the archetype for a New Soviet Man of the New Left.
"This led to an attack on the nuclear family, radical women's/ gay liberation and other John Lennonesque Imaginings."
And an attack on traditional Christianity, as well, and it became important to present "the historical" Jesus as marrying and procreating but not to emphasize the importance of family (Magdalene was a single mother off the bat, according to the narrative) but to underscore the primacy of the sexual urge (Freud's Prime Mover).
Simultaneously, the "special relationship" with Jesus and his young disciple John is explored with similar Imaginings.
Very interesting stuff, FJ.
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