Patrick Buchanan Quacks Like a Nazi Sympathizer

After a spokesman for the Obama campaign observed quite accurately that many American Jews consider Patrick Buchanan, the former right-wing Republican presidential candidate and aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, to be a Nazi sympathizer, Buchanan's friends on MSNBC's Morning Joe show, where he is a frequent guest, rallied to their friend's defense. Not once, however, did Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, co-host Mika Brzezinski, or columnist Mike Barnicle ever question Buchanan about any of the many anti-Semitic comments he has made over the years, or about his extensive record of defending Nazi war criminals and making disparaging comments about Holocaust survivors.

The subject came up in the first place because Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wore a Buchanan campaign button in 1999 when he visited Wasilla, Alaska where she served as mayor. Buchanan himself said on Chris Matthews' Hardball that she and her husband had been among his "brigaders." While it is disconcerting that John McCain does not consider a repudiation of everything Buchanan stands for to be an essential quality in a running mate, I am even more disturbed by the fact that Buchanan's media colleagues, who usually hold their interviewees' feet to the fire, gave their friend a free pass.

Buchanan is bright, erudite, personable, and a first-rate political analyst. He is also a reactionary who has publicly expressed blatantly anti-Semitic sentiments again and again. No less a conservative icon than the late William F. Buckley wrote in his book, In Search of anti-Semitism, that "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination, the military build-up for the Gulf War, amounted to anti-Semitism."

In 1941, Charles Lindbergh, one of the most prominent of the pro-Fascist America-Firsters of that era who desperately tried to keep the United States out of World War II, charged that "the three most important groups who have been pressing the country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." After the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Buchanan said on national television that, "There are only two groups that are beating the drums right now for war in the Middle East, and that is the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

Shortly thereafter, Buchanan, who at times has referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory" and called Israel "a strategic albatross draped around the neck of the United States," singled out then New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, columnist Charles Krauthammer, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the promoters of a U.S.-Iraq war. One does not need to be an ethnographer to figure out that Rosenthal, Perle, Krauthammer and Kissinger are all Jews, and that Buchanan deliberately did not mention any of the many non-Jewish supporters of Operation Desert Storm. And Buchanan made absolutely clear what he meant by subsequently writing in one of his columns that the Americans who would die in such a war were "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown."

In a September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan said that, "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." When John Cardinal O'Connor deplored Catholic anti-Semitism, Buchanan declared, "If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O'Connor of New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him 'there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic'...he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith."

Which brings us to whether Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer. He certainly has engaged in the constitutionally protected perversion of championing the cause of a succession of Nazi war criminals, from John Demjanjuk to Karl Linnas to Arthur Rudolph. Buchanan has also called for the abolishment of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, which prosecutes and seeks to deport Nazi war criminals from the United States, because he considered the unit to be "a shark force . . . running down 70-year-old camp guards."

In the Spring of 1985, when Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, then Chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, urged President Reagan not to go to the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany where members of Hitler's notorious Waffen-SS lie buried, Buchanan, then a White House aide, was one of the most ardent proponents of the trip who, according to fellow White House staffer Ed Rollins, kept writing the phrase "succumbing to the pressure of the Jews" on his notepad during a meeting with Wiesel.

In 1977, Buchanan wrote that,

Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier . . . a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him.

Buchanan has also argued that it would have been impossible for hundreds of thousands of Jews to perish in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp, a perverse obscenity regularly disseminated by Holocaust deniers. And he has referred to a "so-called Holocaust Survivor syndrome" which he described as involving "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics."

Patrick Buchanan walks like a Nazi sympathizer and quacks like a Nazi sympathizer. Over the course of his long career he has defended a host of Nazi war criminals, made numerous anti-Semitic slurs, and disparaged Holocaust survivors. If anything, therefore, Obama campaign spokesman Mark Bubriski engaged in colossal understatement when he accurately observed that "many Jews call" Buchanan "a Nazi sympathizer." The more relevant issue is why Buchanan's media colleagues don't denounce his ugly rhetoric and instead consistently legitimize him by failing to confront him with his own record and past statements.

Menachem Rosensaft is a lawyer in New York City, and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

Comments

[demigod]

I don't know if Pat Buchanon hates jewish people - that to me is anti-semitism. I don't like him and disagree with him on almost every issue. I have never read any of his books. But I do not consider political opposition to Israel based on national interests to be anti-semitism. There can be no doubt that the U.S. is in the stranglehold of forces aligned with Israel, and there can be no doubt that America pays an increasingly crushing price for this bizzarre international alliance. Just today it has been reported that Sarah Palin is being coached in internation relations by Senator Joe Lieberman, and part of that coaching includes being personally introduced to AIPAC. As I read history, I find the creation of Israel indefensible on the merits, and it should have been predictable in 1948 that this international action would lead to terrible problems for the United States, which it has. This is all simply geopolitical fact. It has nothing to do with hating jewish people.

[DAE]

The ironic pity of it all is that Bush was elected in 2000 due to elderly Jews mistakenly voting for Buchanan

[sweetieheartsobama]

I had the misfortune of watch the segment live on Scarborough and it was pitiful. The entire panel attacked Wexler and the Obama campaign and called them "scum".

Not one person asked Buchanan why someone would call him a Nazi sympathizer because they knew it was true.

During Obama's pasto problem, Buchanan felt compelled to blog the following statements:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks.
It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and
prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American. Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the "60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

For Buchanan and his friends to deny he's a "natzi sympathizer" (I say anti-semetic) and racist is like denying that McCain was a POW for 5 1/2 years (I needed wikipedia on that analogy because McCain doesn't really like to talk about his 5 1/2 years as a POW even though he was a POW for 5 1/2 years.

[Bitsko]

Back when Pat last ran in the republican primary, he appeared in the annual Tucson Rodeo Days Parade (the world's longest non-mechanized parade, as they like to say). When the parade got to the Chicano south side of town, the heckling by the public was so bad that Pat had to jump out of his car and leave the area. A precious memory I will always savor.

[TruthBFree]

Mr. Rosensaft's rant has simply lifted talking points from anti-Catholic, anti-Buchanan smear sheats.

Lie: In 1987 Buchanan lobbied to stop deportation of Karl Linnas, accused of Nazi atrocities in Estonia.


Truth: Buchanan's objection to the summary deportation of Karl Linnas to the Soviet Union -- where he had been tried in absentia and sentenced to death in 1962 -- was not that a Nazi war criminal ought not to be deported and executed, but that Linnas' deportation was based on a trial in the Soviet Union where no U.S. standards of justice applied. That judgment was seconded at the time by the Washington Post, which opined that "a true and disturbing question remains whether justice by accepted American standards was done in this case, where a human life - never mind what kind of a human he may have been -- is on the line,"

[Witkacy]

I'm puzzled and disappointed that you didn't treat Buchanan's new book on "the Unnecessary War"...It seems of a piece with his cagey defense of the Nazis.

Even after years I'm unable to grasp how MSNBC management are OK with Pat's on-air presence...Why is this man on TV?

[TexasDem0]

On television, Pat Buchanan seldom has a valid point and seems to have only two ways to express himself, whining or throwing a screeching temper tantrum. He, like all people with weak opinions, shouts over anyone who attempts to make a counter argument. Maybe he should stick to writing, where he doesn"t have to interact with civilized people.

[Pdubya]

If you examine all of Buchanan's writings - for and against - various groups, cliques, people, he is very critical of a. corruption, b. pandering, and c. dishonesty. he is also supportive of 1. free speech, 2. freedom to assemble, and 3. constitutional rights.

he has some harsh words. but are they untrue? congress is owned by three giants: a. military industrial complex, b. healthcare industry, and c. aipac.

does buchanan loathe lieberman because he is a jew? no, he detests the man because he doesn't have any principles and does the bidding of the neo-cons on the behalf of aipac.

when pat buchanan (read Day of Reckoning) and naomi wolf (End of America) have the same talking points, we know the days of "journalistic jerrymandering" will soon come to an end.

maybe we'll get some news then and be able to decide for ourselves.

[davidly]

More than a mountain of grains of salt is where he violates his "dishonesty" critique in favor of proclaiming one religion superior to another. "The Christians" are just as much to blame as the AIPAC for the current state in the Middle east, but you don't often see the scapegoating of everyone that'd ever been baptized.

[moriarity]

Smart and well read, ok. But bear in mind his chosen profession was propagandist and he worked at very high levels.

[CaptainStormfield]

I try to keep an open mind. I started finding Pat's articles on Anti War.com and Lewrockwell.com
mostly relating to the mis-adventure in Iraq. I have not read all of his works by any means so if you have
links or footnotes to Nazi sympathizing or Anti Semitism please publish them. Israel's influence on American Policy seems to be a controversial subject for some. Why should it be? What other PAC has all the presidential candidates making a pilgramage and pleging alliegance to a foreign country?

[parkerfly38]

Saudia Arabia.

[CaptainStormfield]

Good one. And your right

[mlaiuppa]

Is it any wonder Palin wanted to ban books in the Wasilla Public Library?

Probably wanted to have a good old fashioned book burning.

[charon]

I don't think Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer. His antisemitism is a variety of older European antisemitism (nativist antisemitism being another), common among Catholics of this country (e.g., Father Coughlin) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly newer immigrants from Ireland and Eastern and Southern Europe.

Naziism split off after WWI from racial antisemitism, a different and more rabid form of European antisemitism that developed in the late 19th century from figures like Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlain. I believe Buchanan would unequivocally reject violence against Jewish people or even legal prejudice against them, but will use "Jew!" as a pejorative.

I believe that although the believers in the older European antisemitism in America may have sympathized with the Nazis before WWII, most rejected Naziism after the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed. I think "proto-fascist" is a better descriptor of the modern ideological heirs, like Buchanan, to European antisemitism.

[moriarity]

"...common among Catholics of this country (e.g., Father Coughlin) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly newer immigrants from Ireland and Eastern and Southern Europe."---Charon

Charon, Buchanan is only one quarter Celtic or non-Scots Irish. He's half German by ancestry. But he now says he's Scots-Irish which he is one quarter of.

[moriarity]

"...common among Catholics of this country (e.g., Father Coughlin) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly newer immigrants from Ireland and Eastern and Southern Europe."---Charon

Charon, Buchanan's half German and one quarter Scots-Irish (don't tell them they're Irish if you know what's good for you!) and one quarter regular Irish (Celtic or non-British origin Irish).

[gwinegarden]

A Nazi sympathiser, probably not. A fascist, yes.

[Pdubya]

buchanan a prot-fascist? ha. he hates neo-cons, the true fascists.

[JLee]

Hitler, a first-rate political organizer? Surely a smart guy like Pat should no better. Hitler's command structure was a huge mess of overlapping duties and competing bureaucrats who despised each other. His organizational skills were close to abysmal, I'd say.

[Bobrobert]

Say what.

Read history - the man almost kicked our butts.

[parkerfly38]

Um, no he didn't. His military put up a fight, but he didn't.

[RedDogBear]

Bob, you need to read more history, or read it more carefully. Its true that German technical and military brilliance nearly conquered the world but it was more in spite of rather than because of Hitler. Hitler was a great rabble rouser but as JLee points out he was a terrible organizer. One excellent example can be found looking at the way the German military failed to exploit there break through technology of the Jet engine. They had several different overlapping and competing groups developing different designs. As a result the technology that could have been used to create planes that would annihilate the allied air forces was squandered on many different designs, none of which got critical mass. The early amazing military victories of the third reich were because Hitler let the generals execute their own plans. As Hitler started to take more and more control, one disaster followed another.

[charon]

I have heard it said that the Nazi administration was more like an organized crime syndicate than a rational political structure. Hitler ruled by fear and fiat. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound much different than bushco, or at least what they aspired in the early days when Abramoff was their thug pushing Congressmen and lobbyists around.