ON THE LEFT But this opposition to foreign adventurism is normally activated only after we actually go to war. Active opposition to interventionism in between wars is therefore limited to the "far" left and the "far" right. We have the remnants of the Old Left, whose best elements are represented by a man like Alexander Cockburn - and whose worst aspects are exemplified by the neo-Stalinist robots of the Workers World Party, whose "International Action Center" has marginalized the opposition to the Kosovo war as a wacko sideshow far better than the War Party ever could...
REALIGNMENT ON THE LEFT Over on the left, another sort of realignment was taking place, with the formerly antiwar Communist Party turning on a dime: the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact had motivated their opposition to intervention, but when Hitler turned on his twin brother in the Kremlin, Stalin's American agents changed their line in mid-sentence - and without missing a beat. Suddenly, the Commies were the biggest warmongers on the block, stridently demanding that the US open up a "second front" and save the Soviet Union, and demanding that all opponents of the war be jailed as "traitors" - this from a party funded and directly controlled by a foreign power, a party that now billed Communism as being the living incarnation of "twentieth century Americanism"!
KARMA IN HISTORY The Communists had been on the outs with their liberal friends and potential fellow travelers on the war question, but just as soon as the Commies were pro-war they were let into the government and the seats of power without question. The Communists hailed the passage of the Smith Act, which criminalized opposition to the war, and cheered when Roosevelt jailed some 30 members of the Socialist Workers Party, which opposed the war. A few years later, the same law was used to jail leaders of the Communist Party - which demonstrates how the principle of karma in operates in history.
MASKS The War Party, as we have seen, has worn many guises throughout American history. Sometimes it is left-wing, at other times it is a creature of the Right. The party of peace is likewise prone to switch polarities. If you live long enough, you can start out your life as a liberal, and wind up a right-wing reactionary without undergoing any fundamental change of views. That is what happened to H. L. Mencken, who was considered the guru of the freethinking "flaming youth" of the 1920s and early 30s - and later consigned to the fever swamps of "right-wing extremism" for his opposition to the war and his visceral hatred of Roosevelt. The same was true of Albert Jay Nock, and John T. Flynn: their views did not change so much as the perception of them did. Opposition to war, imperialism, and the centralized State was "left" at the turn of the century and "right" by the 1930s. In the 1960s it was considered"radical" - that is, radical left - to oppose our policy of global intervention, whereas the noninterventionist of today is far more likely to be a conservative Republican or a member of the Reform Party than a liberal Democrat.
THE LONG ARM OF THE GLOBAL HEGEMON The idea of an alliance between the antiwar Left and the anti-imperialist Right is a concept rooted in more than just the opposition to war. For out of the struggle against the Empire will arise a whole new way of looking at the world, a common analysis of how the few use the State to rule the many. Naturally, there will be disagreements, and competing analyses, and a lot of initial confusion: but over the long haul, the two sides in the battle for hearts and minds in the post-millennial world will sort themselves out. A movement in opposition to imperialism must, in this day and age, necessarily become a struggle against globalism, against the idea of a world state. In the era of enforced globalization, the Peace Party is the greatest defender of national sovereignty as a bulwark of resistance to the emerging transnational tyranny, while the War Party is the great champion of a world without borders - or, indeed, any place to evade the long arm of the Global Hegemon. Now that the epic battle between Communism and capitalism has been decisively decided in favor of the latter, a new struggle of "isms" is breaking out, this time between globalism and nationalism - and Kosovo was just the beginning.
COCKBURN WOWS CONFERENCE This year's Antiwar.com conference was a great success, in terms not only of publicizing the idea of a "Left-Right" alliance against interventionism, but also in the more concrete sense of making the links between people that really forges an effective movement. Alexander Cockburn thrilled and delighted an audience made up primarily of conservatives (and even outright reactionaries like myself). They cheered at his scathing expose of the Army "psyops" infiltration of CNN during the Kosovo war, enthusiastically applauded his denunciations of Waco-like police assaults - imaginatively and convincingly linking David Koresh and Amadou Diallo - and gave him a standing ovation. Left and Right meet - and it was love (at least on our part) at first sight!
PAT The media was naturally attracted by the presence of Pat Buchanan, who has now emerged as the focal point of populist rebellion against the twin hand puppets put up by the two "major" parties - although I like to think that my clever little news release that said, "Buchanan and Cockburn at the same antiwar conference - what's up with that?" had something to do with attracting the media spotlight to our obscure little corner of California. Buchanan's speech, posted here almost as it was being delivered, was magnificent: clearly he intends to make opposition to global intervention the main theme of his campaign. All I can say is, God help the globalists. They will never recover from the blow we are about to deal them.
TAKING IT TO A HIGHER LEVEL The conference was an attempt to bridge the gap between left and right, to bring the fight against war and globalism to a higher level - and to begin to organize the first real opposition to the War Party since the 1960s. There were many voices of protest at this year's gathering, from Tom Fleming and Srdja Trikovic, editors of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, to old-fashioned Marxists like Alexander Cockburn - and virtually everything in between. As the rule of the acronyms - WTO, NATO, EU, UN - replaces the self-rule of sovereign nations, a broad opposition is sure to arise. Who can say whether it is "right" or "left" - and, in the end, what does it matter? Such labels no longer describe anything meaningful - and that, really, is the whole point.
Read the Introduction to Justin Raimondo's Reclaiming the American Right by Pat Buchanan
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