By now, most of us on the Old Right are painfully aware of the project spearheaded by Bill Bennett, the organization called Americans for Victory over Terrorism (AVOT). According to Jim Lobe's AlterNet piece, "War on Dissent Widens," one of the goals of AVOT is to propagandize college campuses in order to prevent a public backlash against the War on Terror similar to the one that doomed the Vietnam War. Bennett's choice of the Vietnam War as his point of departure reveals much about his statist commitments, and exposes him as an intellectual accessory to the crime that the War on Terror constitutes against America's youth.
Bill Bennett's statist roots stretch back to the 1960s, when he spent his time rooting for Martin Luther King, Jr. to encourage the government to abrogate the freedom of association. My parents spent those years going to school, working for a living, and then supporting Governor George Wallace's presidential campaigns. They hoped to defend the America they grew up in, and countervail both Bennett's efforts as well as those of the counter-cultural Left.
Bennett, as a statist cheerleader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, harmed my generation before it was born. As a fervent war propagandist, Bennett again threatens to harm my "Twentysomething" generation, some forty years later. Bennett's warmongering activities constitute a theft of terrible and enraging magnitude, for it violates the pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn that was spoken of by Edmund Burke. It is sad and ironic that someone young like me has to remind Bennett about the implications of true conservatism.
The short familial political history I provide above is meant to set the proper context in evaluating Bennett's Vietnam comparisons, which are straw men. Bennett is wrong to portray the anti-war position as Leftist or otherwise unpatriotic. The true opposition to the War on Terror does not come from the minuscule yet loudmouthed counter-cultural Left, which can always be expected to shill for the latest cause-of-the-month at a moment's notice. The true opposition arises from those on the unreconstructed Right that Bennett and his neocon allies have forsaken, those who still love the more permanent things, the "little platoons" that make life worth living.
AVOT proselytizes for a War on Terror that runs the risk of becoming perpetual and much more destructive. It is following a course that will needlessly sacrifice America's flower, Midwestern farm boys, across the world, from far-flung Philippine jungles to the burning sands of the Middle East. My parents saw their friends return home in body bags from Vietnam. I do not want to see my friends (who are part of the "little platoons" that make life worth living) meet that same fate in the War on Terror, which is merely another war that is neither necessary nor justified.
Bennett's "Remember 9/11" crowd fails to grasp that 9/11 stems from an immigration problem, not a military problem. The events of 9/11 are ultimately traceable to the resentment caused by America's interventionist foreign policy abroad. The very fact that 9/11 occurred is a striking testament to the congenital incompetence and malignancy of government. Government is forever cursed with the Midas touch in reverse. As my parents saw from its behavior in Vietnam, government always brings pain and betrayal. It never delivers on its promise of a quality product or outcome. It never restrains itself within limited, rational objectives. The War on Terror is a classic example of these inherent failures of the State. We still have not captured Osama bin Laden or Mohammed Omar, and the war has expanded across the world with no end in sight.
The War on Terror reveals a slight difference between liberals and neocons in their orientation toward government: liberals want to spend other people's money on projects intended to benefit special interests, while neocons prefer to sacrifice other people's lives in service of their pet crusades. Life and private property are inextricable, so the varying tactics of the liberals and the neocons are equally dangerous and immoral.
Another slight difference between the liberals and the neocons lies in their choice of which special interest they favor. Lobe's article traces a major source of AVOT's funding to Lawrence Kadish, showing that the special interest that the neocons slavishly promote is the State of Israel. Israel is to the United States what Cuba was to the former Soviet Union: an entity that remains solvent only through massive transfer payments from the host nation. The liberals, in contrast to the neocons, have always tended to be fans of the Soviet Union privately, and of Cuba more openly. This analogy becomes stretched, however, when one considers what the United States gets in return from Israel. At least the Cubans sent the Soviets oranges and sugar cane. All the United States receives from its relationship with Israel are Mossad agents and Arab hatred and terror. In the likely event that the United States one day collapses in the same manner (and from many of the same causes) as the Soviet Union, at least some measure of justice will come when Israel withers on the vine just as Cuba has in the absence of Soviet backing.
While we await that ultimate collapse to arrive, it is useful to "hasten the day" by chipping away at the intellectual foundations of the liberals and neocons. The Old Right must counteract the efforts of AVOT by proclaiming the truth that there has never been a worthy war in the twenty-first or twentieth centuries. All wars during that span were unwise and unnecessary, including the two wars most sacralized by the Establishment: the Second World War and the Cold War. The War on Terror – the Cold War substitute implicitly touted by men like Bennett as the "Vietnam done right" – must be exposed as just another act of state-sponsored intergenerational fraud and theft.
April 22, 2002
