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Government is far too big. But that’s not to say that it has much control. It makes a million laws and can’t enforce most of them. So many laws, so little order.
Joseph Sobran has died. Sobran was a figure of some note in the conservative movement, and later the paleoconservative one — a key member of National Review’s founding era, Sobran was later driven from the magazine’s pages by William F. Buckley Jr. in the early Nineties. Sobran was accused of anti-Semitism by several, most notably Norman Podhoretz. It was an accusation that was certainly borne out by his later writings, and by his association with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review.
The firing was a severe blow to a man who’d invested twenty-one years of his life in a publication and was shown the door in middle age. It’s clear that Sobran never truly recovered, though he did reconcile with WFB before the latter’s death.
I met Sobran at a dinner more than a decade ago, where he expounded on his pet Oxfordian theories. He still had that hollowed-out look of someone full of regret.
Yet it’s conservatives who should be regretful. Sobran’s early work has much to recommend it — he is at times supremely eloquent, with a fierce logic behind his words. Read his Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions, published in 1983, and you can see why Buckley liked the man. But at some point, Sobran lost his mental footing: the darkness came, and he descended rapidly into the paranoia of glowering anti-Semitism.
I am sad about Joe Sobran. He was a brilliant fellow in some respects, but he lost himself to darker things. So, in much the same way I will be sad when Pat Buchanan inevitably passes, and Peter Brimelow, and yes, Andrew Sullivan — I am sad tonight for what this man could have been, and what he instead chose to be.
Follow me to freedom.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Exactly what did Peter Brimelow say/do to merit your wistful musings about him wandering off the trail of “mainstream” conservatism?
Presumably, he was not always a despicable racist.
Joseph Sobran was not an anti-Semite and for you to toss that around so loosely while the guys body is still warm is tasteless. Joseph Sobran was a foreign policy non-interventionist and bemoaned the excessive influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy. You may disagree with foreign policy non-interventionism, but that does not make Sobran an anti-Semite.
Rather than quote the words, I'll just let the links suffice, and the words from the man himself.
http://sobran.com/jewid.shtml
http://www.sobran.com/fearofjews.shtml
Sorry, just saying “Pete Brimelow is a racist,” doesn't necessarily make it so. Please provide some evidence for your conclusion.
There are two issues here. First, the polemic obituary is tasteless. At least allow a sufficient time to pass after his death before you start hurling charges. The very classy notification of Sobran's passing at National Review makes this point.
Second, if you believe the two links you provided prove objective anti-Semitism than that illustrates the problem Sobran is grappling with in the second link – the charge of anti-Semitism is intentionally ill-defined and is intended to be a rhetorical bludgeon and a thought-stopper, not to convey actual information. Sobran does a fine job of defending himself against the charge. (The text you provide is from the first link.) His contention that “an anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews.” rings very true.
At least counter his arguments with your own arguments. I don't agree with every thing he says in both these articles either. But if challenged I would be happy to point out what and why. To simply harrumph that he is anti-Semitic and post two links without comment as if that is sufficient proof is lazy and contributes to the toxic atmosphere that already surrounds all discussion of things Jewish and Israel. (If you posted a link to something he had written where he said “I hate Jews,” then that would be sufficient, but these links are far from that.)
Sobran resurrected medieval lies about the Talmud and Judaism. He saw Jews as inherent sinners and bringers of sin.
But I suppose it is wrong to use the term, “antisemitic”, created by Wilhelm Marr. The older term of Judenhaus (hatred of Jews) is more explicit.
BTW. Paleocons are betraying themselves in supporting Sobran. Sobran sold out America and the West on immigration. http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017492.html
Loving him because neoconservatives hate him is petty.
I don't link to hate sites. You're welcome to explore VDare-dot-com at
your convenience. I'd suggest being prepared to scrub your brain in
lye afterward.
Hi there. Just to save you the “cowards-you're-afraid-of-the-truth-hiding-behind-your-moderating-your-website-sucks-I'm-taking-my-ball-and-leaving” rant: We don't care. We don't provide free bandwidth for people who “speak needed truths” (and synonyms thereof) about the Jews.
You know how it is. Let one dancing anti-Semite in, you end up with truthers, VDare transplants, and Little Green Footballs commenters.
if Joe hadn’t been a man of conviction and courage, writing about what he believed and why, he wouldn’t have small dogs nipping at his legacy.
He’ll be well remembered for such great lines as “The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”
Talking about taboo subjects with compelling arguments will also be part of Joe’s reputation. As a writer and thinker, that’s not a bad way to be remembered.
if Joe hadn’t been a man of conviction and courage, writing about what he believed and why, he wouldn’t have small dogs nipping at his legacy. He’ll be well remembered for such great lines as “The U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.”
Talking about taboo subjects with compelling arguments will also be part of Joe’s reputation. As a writer and thinker, that’s not a bad way to be remembered.
Typical smear.
He matured and realized the threat of the State, even from the Right. He turned against war, so he's smeared as an anti-semite. No, he became a libertarian anarchist and that was too much for the elite.
They say the same about Ron Paul.
Disgraceful.
Ben,
These quotes do not support a charge of anti-semitism. Your have adopted the commonplace default assumption that the Jews, or at least very motivated and influential portions of the Judaic tribe, have in no place and at not time pursued an agenda that is contrary to the interests of their gentile neighbors. Such an assumption cannot be held by anyone looking at the state of Israel today, or the deformed condition of American foreign policy in the middle east, with a full understanding of the forces that have so deformed it. You know this to be true, and your pretense of not knowing it is both dull and disgraceful. Joe Sobran often criticized the Jews, always for reasons he believed to be true, and typically for reasons that were certainly true. Yet he never harmed a Jew, not ever advocated injustice toward any Jew. If anything, Sobran was a philo-semite, someone who, like the old testament prophets, believed the Jews were a great people, but a people that often behaved in ways that were beneath them, and in ways that brought unnecessary opprobrium upon them. That can be proven with quotes. I'll pass them on if you don't want to do your own research.
Historical reality sucks, don't it Ben?
Anti-Semitism was a nineteenth century neologism invented to distinguish traditional Christian opposition to Judaism from a racial objection to Jews (e.g., National Socialism). Obviously, Mr. Sobran was not an anti-Semite by this definition. The term anti-Semite is now a smear word to associate anyone opposed to Judaism or Zionism with a racial objection to Jews. The problem with Jews is not their race but their revolutionary opposition to Christian civilization. Mr. Sobran saw this with great clarity.
So does de facto laicization.
Usually only people who believe “the Jews” act as a coordinated entity get that particular sobriquet.
Make of that what you will about Congressman Paul and the late Mr. Sobran.
Ben, you confuse Sobran's dislike of Zionism with anti-semitism. “Anti-semite” has become little more than a slogan for the unthinking.
BTW, I wonder what you think are the untrue parts of the passages you quoted.
I'll respectfully disagree with your conclusion based on zero facts, hearsay and your opinion. Labeling an entire website “racist” makes you as illiberal as possible.
I found this Sobran quote insightful: “What we really ought to ask the liberal, before we even begin addressing his agenda, is this: In what kind of society would he be a conservative?”
Demonstrably silly. Can we presume that the Klan's several pages;
Stormfront; and Black Panther sites are racist? Yet a “whole site”
that treats men as substantively different because of skin color
cannot be, else we be “illiberal” to describe it so.
Simply, this is your desire to pretend up is down because someone you
otherwise respect founded it; or because you don't want the
objectively accurate adjective applied to beliefs you and the writers
of that site share.
Either way, I'm not interested in outraged, baseless apologia.
If you took the time to read his articles and essays, Mr. Domenech, you would have learned that Sobran was no anti-Semite, and neither was he paranoid. He had nothing but praise for Orthodox Jewry and non-media secular Jewry. He had the guts to enter taboo territory: criticism of Jewish media hypocrisy. And he paid dearly for it. What “he chose to be” was intellectually and morally honest. Conservatives are indebted to this man. Even as Buckley and the National Review were caving in to the Israeli lobby and encroaching liberalism, Joe stood his ground, and we loved him for it. DAVID FOGLIETTA, OLD FORGE, PA.
No, of course, we cannot presume that the Stormfront site is “racist”. Stormfront is nothing but a website (which virtually no one has ever heard of), and the only way to determine the character of its content is to review it!
But, no, you presume to decide for us. You're an authoritarian monster!
If only I could believe that satire.
Satire? You are pure evil. A complete moral monster merrily engaging in genocide. And, at some level, you know it.
That's why you are unable to converse with the rest of us. You know we are right, and you are wrong, and your position can be defended only through censorship.
Joe Sobran opposed sending American soldiers to fight Israel’s wars. He had trouble seeing why the invasion of Arab countries that Israel doesn’t like was so vital to our national defense. In refusing to wave the flag and sing along with Lee Greenwood in celebration of pointless slaughter, he revealed himself as an obvious anti-semite. If only he’d been more like Bill Kristol or Rick Brookhiser.
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