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Max Forte's List: Right Wing Anti-Imperialism

    • Many of his views, particularly his opposition to American imperialism and the managerial state, echo those of the Old Right Republicans of the first half of the 20th century
    • Buchanan decries US entry into the Spanish-American War and every war since

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    • Patrick Buchanan's entry into the presidential sweepstakes underlines an acute dilemma in redesigning American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. Almost everyone agrees we ought to be less activist and interventionist, but how much less, and how? 

        

      In Buchanan's case, the answer is plain: a lot less activist and interventionist, right now, by American decision. What you see is what you get with Buchanan - "America first," which means in substance a narrow-gauge nationalism

    • With the Cold War ending, we should look, too, with a cold eye on the international set, never at a loss for new ideas to divert US wealth and power into crusades and causes having little or nothing to do with the true national interest of the United States. High among these is the democratist temptation [free the world], the worship of democracy as a form of governance and the concomitant ambition to see all mankind embrace it, or explain why not. Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process[political pragmatism] for a love of country. The true national interests of the United States are not to be found in some hegemonic and utopian world order. Bush holds global democracy as a goal. This is a formula for endless conflict
    • How can all our meddling not fail to spark some horrible retribution.... Have we not suffered enough--from Pan Am 103, to the World Trade Center, to the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam--not to know that interventionism is the incubator of terrorism? Or will it take some cataclysmic atrocity on US soil to awaken our global gamesmen to the going price of empire?

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    • Let me begin by commending you all -- on the campaign by Antiwar.com  and the Center for Libertarian Studies -- to forge a new  anti-interventionist American coalition. Only an engaged and informed  citizenry can bring about a reversal of the neo-imperial foreign  policy that has been foisted upon us in the post-Cold War era by the  elites of both Beltway parties.
    • What is best for America and the world, they tell us, is that the  United States should remain a superpower sheriff, the Wyatt Earp of  the West, possessed of the sole right to deputize posses, or go it  alone if necessary, to discipline evil-doers, wherever our "values"  are threatened. I submit that this foreign policy poses a great and  growing danger to the peace and security of the United States.

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    • Is Ron Paul the new Pat Buchanan on the Republican presidential trail?
    • he raised the consciousness of America during the most recent presidential debate when he associated 9/11 with actions previously taken by America

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    • Like other Republican conservatives, the Presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan opposed United States intervention in Kosovo and wants to limit or eliminate American participation in the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. But in ''A Republic, Not an Empire,'' Buchanan justifies these stands by presenting a grand theory of American history and foreign policy. While he rejects the term ''isolationist,'' his foreign policy recalls that of the conservatives who dominated the Republican Party from 1919 until 1952.
    • adopts an extraordinarily narrow criterion for American intervention abroad

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    • By late 1863, Lincoln’s war to crush Southern secession was about whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall ... perish from the earth.” By 1917, the European war whose causes Wilson professed not to understand in 1916 had become “the war to end all wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy.”
    • Leaders alchemize wars begun over lesser interests into epochal struggles for universal principles because only thus can they justify demands for greater sacrifices in blood and treasure

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  • Aug 02, 09

    Christopher Hichens' critique of Pat Buchanan on Republic vs. Empire

    • I myself would vastly prefer a republic to an empire, which is why I wrote so much against the Buchanan-North campaign against Nicaragua and El Salvador -- a campaign that knowingly involved imperialism abroad and subversion of the Constitution at home. It's depressing to see liberal commentators -- even some Nation contributors like Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne -- falling so easily for such demagogy and excusing Buchanan because he doesn't like NAFTA or because he doesn't care about Kosovo. The blunt fact is that the tradition of Lindbergh and Buchanan would not have kept America out of war, or innocent of overseas adventures. But it would have pledged a not-so-surreptitious neutrality to the other side in that conflict, and perhaps come by its empire that way.
    • Reform Party presidential contender Pat Buchanan said Friday that elitists in the Democratic and Republican parties have crafted a ``neo-imperial foreign policy'' of U.S. intervention in conflicts around the world even when American interests are harmed.   

      The former Republican, in language reminiscent of the isolationist movement prior to World War II, said his party could serve as ``a peace party'' working to keep America out of ``the religious, ethnic and territorial wars of less fortunate lands.''
    • The House voted 405-1 today for a resolution in support of the Iranian dissidents and condemning the ruling government. And the one man who opposed it was...Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).
    • Paul said in his floor speech that he was in "reluctant opposition" to the resolution -- that he of course condemns violence by governments against their citizens. On the other hand, he also doesn't think the American government should act as a judge of every country overseas, and pointed out that we don't condemn countries like Saudi Arabia or Egypt that don't even have real elections.

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  • Aug 02, 09

    MP3 file here.

    Notes:
    We go to war for the wrong reasons.
    Law says only Congress can declare war, Pres. has no authority.
    U.S. has neither declared any war since WWII, nor won any.
    Our Constitution --> non-intervention
    U.S. now deals with Vietnam, without having won war against it. No war needed.
    Moral superiority, impose our will -- wrong
    Our foreign policy is that of EMPIRE.

    • Ron Paul has been rightly critical of Barack Obama’s interventionist desires. It certainly seems the only foreign policy difference between our outgoing meddling President and our incoming one is the venue of destruction. Bush’s crusade was Iraq. It looks like Obama’s will be Afghanistan
    • Right now it seems like the progressive global “god-in-waiting” can do no wrong
    • We spend $1 trillion a year overseas. If you want to take care of people at home, you’ve got to cut someplace. But here we’re adding $700 billion to the budget, the national debt going up to $11.3 trillion. 
       
    • Truly conservative in the sense of the words “to conserve our true values” means being serious about taking our oath of office to the Constitution. Limit the government’s size, the spending, the deficits, and the exposure around the world. If the US is as great as I believe it should be and can be and has been, we will have influence around the world. We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun. It fails because it destroys our goodness by doing it that way.

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    • By the mid-1970s, LaRouche and his movement were no longer promoting a socialist agenda. Marx and Lenin were off the reading list for LaRouche's followers and were replaced by Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich Schiller, Plato, Avicenna, Nicolas of Cusa, and others.
    • LaRouche founded the U.S. Labor Party in the early 1970s as a vehicle for electoral politics, maintaining that both the major parties had abandoned the American System economic policies that the LaRouche organization had embraced (LaRouche named Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin as exemplars of this school of thought).

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  • Aug 02, 09

    Concerning Lyndon LaRouche's political history.

    • a three-time presidential candidate espousing right-wing views
    • "Men and women of other nations have seen proof that the spirit of 1776 is still alive within these United States," LaRouche told the group, while his words were translated into four languages and piped into foreign visitors' earphones. "The United States of 1776 is not yet fully awakened, but forces within our government and among our citizens are sitting up and rubbing their eyes."

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    • Buchanan argues that the United States' ability to control its own affairs is under siege due to free trade ideology, globalism, globalization and other issues, discussed below. He once remarked, "we love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like 'new world order,' we release the safety catches on our revolvers."
    • For example, Buchanan once suggested that the U.S. remove the United Nations headquarters from New York City and send in the Marines to “help pack”. He supports withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty, the Rome Treaty and most of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He also suggests that foreign aid be rolled back and that all US troops pull out of Europe. [1] In The Great Betrayal, he wrote, "Like a shipwrecked, exhausted Gulliver on the beach of Lilliput, America is to be tied down with threads, strand by strand, until it cannot move when it awakens. Piece by piece, our sovereignty is being surrendered."

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