September 09, 2009

Human Events vs. Pat Buchanan

By Charles Bloch

The conservative newspaper/website Human Events gets a great deal of mileage by carrying Patrick J. Buchanan’s columns. According to its advertising directors, over half a million readers signed up to get his columns sent—along with ads— directly to their e-mail. Buchanan and Ann Coulter usually trade spots for the most popular columns on the site. Although several sites—such as VDARE.COM—carry Buchanan’s column online, when you click on “Pat Buchanan” at Drudge Report, you go straight to the Human Events archive.

How does Human Events return the favor? Whenever Buchanan says anything politically incorrect on certain subjects, it either trashes him or sends his columns down the memory hole.

(Apart from anything else, this means the Human Events archive of Buchanan’s columns is incomplete—unlike VDARE.COM’s!)

Recently, for the 70^th Anniversary of the British declaration of war against Germany, Buchanan wrote a piece entitled, “Did Hitler Really Want War?” The column reiterated the thesis of his latest book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War —which is that Britain could have taken steps to avoid war with Germany.

Of course, this is controversial. But many eminent intellectuals, such as George Kennan and the British left-wing historian A.J.P. Taylor have taken the same position. And it’s apparently not impossibly controversial—Human Events happily gives the Amazon link to the book at the bottom of each of the Buchanan columns it posts, with no sign that it will refuse the resulting commission if you click through and buy.

But a liberal group called the National Jewish Democratic Council [email them] started a campaign to get MSNBC to kick Pat off the air. Numerous lefty sites and blogs like Huffington Post and Media Matters quickly parroted the complaints. MSNBC responded by taking down Pat’s column off its website explaining, "An editorial decision was made to remove the column from msnbc.com. Pat is a contributor to MSNBC, his syndicated column does not speak for the network or represent the views of MSNBC.”

MSNBC is the leading left wing cable network, so it is not surprising that would respond to a witch hunt by lefty groups.

But Human Events does not have that excuse. In fact, Human Events regularly denounces the groups organizing the witch hunt. Nonetheless, it also deleted Pat’s column—with absolutely no explanation.

This is not the first time that Human Events has betrayed its popular columnist over what the left decrees are politically incorrect statements about World War II. When the 89 year-old Ukrainian immigrant John Demjanjuk was for a second time stripped of his citizenship and sent overseas for a show trial, Pat Buchanan bravely defended this elderly target of the immigration authorities in a column—certainly hard-hitting—entitled “The True Haters”.

As Pat noted, Demjanjuk was previously accused of being a particularly sadistic concentration camp guard, “Ivan the Terrible”, at the Treblinka concentration camp. The U.S. stripped Demjanjuk of his citizenship and extradited him to Israel. He spent over six years in an Israeli prison—four on death row—for his supposed crimes at Treblinka. But the charges were completely fabricated, and in 1993, the Israeli Supreme court unanimously overturned the verdict and fully exonerated Demjanjuk.

Not willing to acknowledge their mistake, however, the professional Holocaust Industry immediately claimed Demjanjuk was a concentration camp guard at another camp—though they now acknowledge he was conscripted into service and was not particularly sadistic. The witch hunt against Demjanjuk continued until he was deported to stand trial in Germany on May 11.

Human Events ran a violent piece by columnist Joseph Rehyansky, attacking Buchanan for his defense of Demjanjuk [Buchanan Is Wrong About Demjanjuk, May 5, 2009]. Rehyansky did not dispute any of the important facts about the case, but nevertheless called Pat a “lost soul” who had confined himself to what Rehyansky called, quoting William F. Buckley, “the fever swamps of the right

Rehyansky comically appealed to Winston Churchill and Buckley as authorities on Jews and anti-Semitism. He said: “I am Zionist in the same sense that [Churchill] was” and quoted the British leader—

“We owe to the Jews a system of ethics which, even it were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all wisdom and learning put together.”

But what Rehyansky did not mention is this came from Churchill’s 1920 essay, Zionism vs. Bolshevism—in which he wrote that there was a “sinister confederacy” of “International Jews” who made up a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization” that was the

“mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”

Churchill supported Zionism—but as an alternative that would focus Jewish political energy away from Europe.

Similarly, Rehyansky repeatedly cites Bill Buckley’s In Search of Anti-Semitism. But in fact Buckley did not make Buchanan’s defense of Demjanjuk part of his case against Pat. In fact, Buckley acknowledged that it is “conceivable that the defendant Demjanjuk…is actually the wrong man”.

Had Israel hanged Demjanjuk, he would have been the first person executed by Israel since Adolf Eichmann. And unlike Demjanjuk who—at worst—was a 22 year conscript forced to work in a concentration camp, Eichmann was the chief architect of the “Final Solution.”

But in 1961 Buckley called the prosecution of Eichmann a “show trial” and a “lurid extravaganza” which would "almost certainly encourage the Hate Germany movement." [Let's All Hate Germany, Comrade, National Review, March 25, 1961(PDF)]

By any standard what Buckley said about Eichmann and what Churchill said about “International Jews” is far more “anti-Semitic” than anything that Pat Buchanan has ever written.

The truth is that neither Buchanan column at all defends Hitler, belittles the Holocaust, or suggests that Nazism was a good system.

But simply questioning the causes of the war, or defending an ailing man against witch hunt, is now unacceptable.

This is not the first time Human Events has pitched politically incorrect pieces, or writers, down the Memory Hole. In 2004, after receiving a phone call from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the editors [Email them] fired managing editor Kevin Lamb and deleted all of his articles, along with those of Marion Kester Coombs and Wayne Lutton, from its website.

Americans already have to worry about the Department of Homeland Security in alliance with groups like Media Matters, the ADL, and the $PLC, shutting us up.

We do not need ostensibly “conservative” publications collaborating with this mounting Reign of Terror.

Charles Bloch (email him) is a Jewish supporter of Pat Buchanan