Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  1. “Reflections on Covenant and Mission: Consultation of The National Council of Synagogues and The Bishops Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, USCCB,” August 12, 2002 (online at http://www.gccuic-umc.org/web/webpdf/cove-nantreflections.pdf).

  1. Osama bin Laden, transcript of videotaped comments as broadcast by Aljazeera, Reuters News Service, December 26, 2001, online.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: Dr. Jones's position is a challenging and provocative one, and certainly not one to be rashly dismissed. The essence of his argument is that what masquerades as “conservatism” is not “conservative” at all in any authentic sense. On the contrary, it's a very useful tool in the hands of our political masters.

  Undoubtedly, there is room for disagreement with this thesis, but what it highlights is a larger truth that we believe irrefutable. That truth declares that the two mainstream camps – Democrats or Republicans, left or right, liberal or conservative – are essentially the two broken pieces of a dysfunctional political system, both tools of the ruling class. This is the thesis that Gore Vidal gets in so much trouble for, though no one ever proves him wrong.

  The list of grievances one might have against one or other camp is indeed long. As far as the war in Iraq is concerned there's plenty of blame to go around. The opposition of the “left” to the war reminds one of the old saying, “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” Excluding the few honest “radicals,” the Democrats were worse than useless, John Kerry's inability to articulate a convincing anti-war position – or any position, for that matter – being the perfect example of this. The “conservatives,” on the other hand, who are supposed to represent “liberty” and “freedom” against the bureaucratic paternalism and coddling of the liberal welfare state, dutifully lined up to support overthrowing a legal government and waging war to change a society wholesale. The Iraqis who were broadly happy with the way things were evidently didn't qualify for consideration among those to whom Rebublican bombs and bullets bring such “liberty” and “freedom.”

  All of which is to say that thinking Americans – particularly those that identify with either of the “mainstream” parties – would do well to take a long, hard, objective look at where their loyalties lie, and why. As Dr. Jones says, it's quite possible things are not what they seem. And if they aren't, odds are they're much worse.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Manipulating Catholic Support for the War:

  The Black Operation Known as “Conservatism”

  ………

  E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.

  IN MARCH 2003, with American troops massing on the border with Iraq, Rod Dreher, a Catholic columnist for National Review, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal saying that Catholics didn't have to listen to the Pope – who was opposed to the war in Iraq – because of the truly scandalous pedophile issue that has been rocking the Church.

  In his article, “Finally, a Rapid Response: Why didn't sex-abuse scandals stir Vatican action the way war has?” WSJ online, March 7, 2003, Mr. Dreher opined that “Catholics are not obliged to agree with the Pope on this issue. The rightness or wrongness of this or any particular war is a matter of opinion …. The 50% of America's Catholics who stand by their President, and not their Pope, in this matter do not thereby diminish their standing as Catholics.” He went on to say that it was “appalling to watch President Bush, who has responsibility for safeguarding 280 million of us from terrorist and terror states being lectured … by a Church that would not even protect children from its own rogue priests and the bishops who enabled them.”

  David Frum of National Review went so far as to attack paleoconservatives as traitors in that journal's effort to get Catholics to support the war and disregard what the Pope had said to the contrary. More on Frum later.

  All of this was part of a propaganda barrage launched by neoconservatives to silence domestic critics of George W. Bush's war on Iraq. A barrage that was aimed at gaining Catholic support for the war by undermining the influence and authority of the Church which stood overwhelmingly in opposition to it. A barrage that had its roots in the editorial offices of some of the country's leading opinion journals, and even in the shadowy depths of the CIA.

  Christopher Manion (son of Clarence Manion, former dean of the Notre Dame Law School, a founding father of the post-WW II conservative movement, and one of the original conservative radio broadcasters) was outraged by Dreher's column. “Mr. Dreher's syllogism,” Manion wrote, in a piece which appeared on lewrockwell.com, “requires that the Pope be a perfect administrator, able to prune away all evil from his bishops and priests before he is qualified to teach anyone – let alone our fine President! – about morality.” But what Manion considered the most curious part of Dreher's Wall Street Journal article was the by-line that stated: “Mr. Dreher, a Catholic, is a senior writer for National Review.”

  Why, Manion wondered, was Dreher identified as a Catholic? “When I wrote for National Review and the Wall Street Journal,” he said, “I was never identified as 'a Catholic' (although I am), even though I often wrote about issues of ethics, religion and politics. I have never seen other writers there identified by their religious affiliations. Strange.”

  Strange, indeed. Manion added that his “curiosity is compounded because Mr. Dreher appears to identify himself as a Catholic in order to garner additional authority to condemn the Church as an institution with no moral authority.”

  Did Dreher do this because he is a bad person? I leave that question, as Mrs. Winterbourne did in Daisy Miller, to the metaphysicians. One explanation is that he did it because he was an employee of National Review; and the “conservative” network was pulling out all the stops in support of the neocon war in Iraq. That required, to use Chris Manion's phrase, “sliming the Pope.”

  Now why would someone who identifies himself as a Catholic want to do something like that? The more we probed for answers, the more questions we came up with. So let's start at the beginning: who is Rod Dreher?

  Rod Dreher is a relatively new star in the firmament of conservative journalism. He was born in 1976 and grew up in Starhill, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge. He was raised in a nominally Methodist family and attended Louisiana State University, where he got a degree in journalism. While in college he had a religious awakening which led him to become first an Episcopalian, then a Catholic, and then a serious conservative Catholic, as evidenced by the autobiographical articles he wrote for Touchstone, which began to appear in June of 2000. In his piece, “Right-wing in New York,” in the September 2000 issue, Dreher announced that he had arrived in the Big Apple in 1998 to become a columnist for the New York Post. He informed us that – as an indication of his “Catholicity,” one supposes – he and his wife Julie “practice Natural Family Planning out of obedience to the Church.”

  One year later, Dreher was still listed in his Touchstone by-lines as a columnist for the New York Post. He was also going through some kind of crisis, which he described for Touchstone readers in an October 2001 article entitled “Holding my Own in New York.” The crisis had to do with 1) his father and 2) whether Dreher should raise his son, Matthew, in a pure but “culturally backward” place like Louisiana where his career would not thrive, or in New York City, where his career was just beginning to take off. “I'm doing well in my vocation, and have even begun to appear on national TV every couple of weeks. For me, it's onward and upward.” But in New York he was apparently subjected to some temptation that he couldn't quite bring himself to articulate beyond his worry that “Matthew will never look up to me in quite the same way as I did to my father.”

  Why was that? “Because the tasks I and urban dads like me are required to perform aren't as physically arduous” as catfish grabbing and other exploits that Dreher described in his article. But, we wondered, wouldn't little Matthew be proud when his dad “appear[s] on national TV every couple of weeks”? Evidently not. Dreher kept trying to convince himself that it was morally licit to live in
New York City, “even though I won't have the opportunity to be a hero to my son in the same way my dad was to me.” Well, it may very well be that Dreher wouldn't be a hero to his son, but it's difficult to see why this was a question of geography. Heroism is bound up with morals not geography.

  So what was Dreher's reason for remaining in New York City when his child's moral development was apparently at stake? “We live in New York City because we love it, and that's where my job is. In my field, at my level, there is little work for me down South.” (Dreher's most recent career move, paradoxically, took him to Dallas, Texas.)

  By what means, then, did he resolve the issue? Did he pray to the Holy Ghost for guidance? Did he make a Novena? No, he talked to “a wise old Jewish friend, a life-long veteran of the media biz,” who told him that “the impact of any book you write, and of any printed work you do, is enormously magnified by a New York by-line.” Moreover, the wise Jew warned him ominously, “once you leave, you're probably not going to be able to come back.” So, as a result of this public soul-searching, Dreher came to the conclusion that: “Maybe I have to be unfaithful to my father to be faithful to my Father.”

  So for Dreher to have a career in journalism, at least journalism in New York, apparently meant that he had to be unfaithful to his father, a man Dreher admired. One might conclude that journalism as Dreher practices it must involve something less than admirable, a betrayal of what his father believed in, a betrayal of something Dreher believes in as well. Dreher was probably not planning to write piece after piece about his father per se, but within a matter of months he wrote a number of articles on the Pope – otherwise known to us as the Holy Father – pieces which were critical of the Pope's opposition to the war in Iraq. Perhaps what Dreher was really telling us was that in order to be the kind of journalist he intends to be, he had to be as unfaithful to the Holy Father as he was to his biological father. Otherwise he, too, may end up back in Louisiana “grabbing catfish.”

  Two months after this series of articles, Rod Dreher was working for National Review (NR), where it seems that one of his main editorial duties was, to quote Chris Manion again, “sliming the Pope” as a part of the neocon propaganda barrage leading up to the invasion of Iraq. It was from this editorial platform that Dreher launched what some characterize as a meteoric rise into the stratosphere of “conservative” punditry.

  But before we describe Dreher's journalistic rocket ride, we need to devote a few words to the vehicle. Just what is National Review? The answer to that raises a related question: what, in the early days of National Review, was “conservatism”? The answer is simple: conservatism (neoconservatism, actually) was a black – as in “covert” – operation. That contention comes from Murray Rothbard, whose arguments can be reviewed online in their entirety under “Neoconservatism: A CIA Front?” at lewrockwell. com. Rothbard, who grew up among the Messianic Jewish sects of New York City, and knew them intimately, felt that National Review was a CIA front operation and marshals his arguments in the same article.

  As he and others have made clear, the CIA was, from its inception, in the business of media manipulation. “Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947,” Rothbard writes, “the American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level of propaganda in the service of U.S. foreign policy objectives in the cold war …. At its peak the CIA allocated 29 percent of its budget to 'media and propaganda.'” Because of the intensity of the internecine hatred which Communism created, one of the main groups willing, if not positively eager, to grasp the levers of the anti-Stalinist propaganda machine were the Trotskyites.

  According to Rothbard, the neoconservatives “moved from cafeteria Trotskyites to apologists for the U.S. warfare state without missing a beat.” The CIA established the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) as its premiere anti-Stalinist organization, but that organization's credibility was destroyed when it became known that it was a CIA front. James Burnham, one of the co-founders of National Review, worked for the CCF. He was also a former Trotskyite and a CIA agent. Also associated with the CCF was the father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. After World War II, Kristol was editor of Commentary, the American Jewish Committee's magazine. Then in 1953 he became editor of Encounter, which Peter Coleman exposed as a CIA front operation in his largely sympathetic book, The Liberal Conspiracy. Kristol at first denied knowing that Encounter was a CIA front operation. Later, in his autobiography, he admitted knowing that the CIA was involved but tried to play down the scale of his participation. But Kristol was being disingenuous. As Rothbard points out, Tom Braden, then head of the CIA's International Organizations Division, “wrote in a Saturday Evening Post article, a CIA agent always served as editor of Encounter.”

  Now if National Review, like Encounter, was a CIA front, what purpose did it serve? The answer is simple. National Review existed to destroy competing conservatisms. It used conservatism as a way of mobilizing certain groups – as in ethnic groups – such as Catholics, for example, behind government policies. It existed to colonize these groups, to divide and conquer, and, ultimately, to get them to act against their own ethnic interests.

  More specifically, National Review was created to destroy isolationist conservatism. People who criticized America's march to empire from the conservative point of view were to be demonized and decertified. NR has shown undeviating consistency in this regard, the most recent example being David Frum's diatribe against the paleoconservatives, “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” in the March 19, 2003, issue. The paleocons, according to Frum “have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist anti-war movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.”

  All of this, according to Frum, flies in the face of the “50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests throughout the world, which inspired the founding” of National Review.

  Murray Rothbard has a slightly different take on the founding of this magazine that became the editorial home of David Frum and Rod Dreher. According to Rothbard, “the idea for National Review originated with Willi Schlamm, a hard-line interventionist and feature editor with the Old Right Freeman” who was at odds with the isolationism of the right. Revilo Oliver, a friend of the Buckley family, said pretty much the same thing in his autobiography. National Review, according to Oliver, “was conceived as a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A surreptitious deal was cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably Schlamm) to turn the magazine over to Buckley.”

  By 1955, the year National Review was launched, Buckley had been a CIA agent for some time. One biography of Buckley claims that he served under E. Howard Hunt in Mexico City in 1951. Rothbard says that Buckley was directed to the CIA by Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall, who introduced him to James Burnham, a consultant to the Office of Policy Coordination, the CIA's covert-action wing. While at Yale, Buckley served as an on-campus informant for the FBI, “feeding,” in Rothbard's words, “God only knows what to Hoover's political police.”

  Virtually everyone associated with the founding of National Review was either a former CIA agent or someone in the pay of the CIA. In addition to Buckley, Kendall, and Burnham, that included William Casey, who would go on to become head of the CIA. Casey drew up the legal documents for the new magazine. Of the $500,000 needed to launch the publication, $100,000 came from Buckley's father. The source of the rest of the funding is unaccounted for. It was this and other evidence that led Frank Meyer (see Culture Wars, reviews June 2003) to confide privately to Rothbard that he believed that National Review was a CIA front.

  Another purpose of National Review was to purge “bad” conservatives. First, the isolationists and anyone with residual sympathies for the pre-World War II America First movement, including the followers of Father Coughlin, were purged. Then the John B
irch Society was purged. Then the Ayn Rand cult was purged. Then Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan were purged after Buckley denounced them personally as “anti-Semites.”

  A further objective of National Review is to run the “conservative blacklist.” We know this because, as in the case of David Frum's previously mentioned article, the list gets published periodically. I was not included in the Frum attack on the paleoconservatives, probably because I am perceived primarily as a Catholic, not as a paleo; but it became clear to me long ago that I was on their list of “bad” conservatives.

  An example of this can be found in Michael Potemra's review of my book, Monsters from the Id, in the May 22, 2000, issue of NR. In the same issue, a book by Thomas Hibbs is reviewed as being “correct in excoriating The Exorcist for its view of the Enlightenment,” whereas I am ridiculed for saying essentially the same thing. Potemra goes out of his way to praise my publisher, Spence Publishing, as the up and coming conservative publishing house, but then, as if to help ensure they don't publish me again, he goes equally out of his way to criticize Monsters for “the sheer outlandishness of its thesis.”

  So what's the problem here? The “conservatives” at the Washington Times liked Monsters and understood its essentially conservative message. Then why was it denounced as “outlandish” in a magazine that calls itself “conservative”? The answer is simple. I have been blacklisted by a movement that does not want to see me offer a competing brand of “conservatism.” The point, then, is not what you say, but how you are perceived and by whom. Thus National Review's job is to keep certain groups on the “conservative” reservation; and to “excommunicate” anyone who might lead them off that reservation.

  One of the main groups to be kept on the reservation is America's Catholics. Kevin Philips articulated his strategy for bringing Catholic ethnics into the Republican Party in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. National Review was at work on this project long before Philips wrote his book. If William F. Buckley is famous for a phrase, it is certainly “Mater, Si; Magistra, No,” his response to papal encyclicals in general, when they deviated from the “conservative” party line. What the phrase means is that being a “conservative” is supposed to trump anything a Pope says when it comes to determining the views of American Catholics.