Blood and Politics (43 page)

Pat Buchanan was born in 1938 (eleven years after Willis Carto). His early heroes included Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, both ultra-authoritarian and anti-communist. Buchanan’s Catholicism was pre–Vatican II and traditional. While an aide in the Nixon White House, he opposed efforts at racial integration, often in the most caustic terms. As a columnist he flirted with an anti-egalitarian critique of democracy. He claimed homosexuality lead to the “decay of society.” By the mid-1980s he had started waving the banner that became white nationalism’s clarion call in the twenty-first century. “The central objection to the present flood of illegals,” he wrote in 1984, “is they are not English-speaking white people from Western Europe; they are Spanish-speaking brown and black people from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean.”
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Buchanan even explicitly posed the question of whether the United States would “remain a white nation.”
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(Apparently the descendants of Africans brought in chains, the mestizo population of the Southwest, and the Chinese laborers who built the railroads were either invisible to Buchanan’s historical eye or not to be counted as natural citizens of his nation.)

He also exhibited a nervous disbelief in the charges leveled against those believed to be war criminals. At different times he rose to defend Arthur Rudolph, Karl Linnas, Kurt Waldheim, John Demjanjuk, and others. In the Demjanjuk case Buchanan’s skepticism of Justice Department actions ultimately proved justified on several key points of evidence. Buchanan challenged more than just the rules of evidence used in cases against war criminals, however. As an aide to President Reagan he helped formulate a 1982 trip to the military graves at Bitburg, Germany. At Buchanan’s behest, Reagan memorialized the Waffen SS along with ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, setting off international protests at the honoring of Hitler’s henchmen. Buchanan added to the outrage when he claimed that Jews could not have been gassed by diesel engines at the Nazi concentration camp at Treblinka. He was soon publicly and widely accused of giving “aid and comfort” to those, like the Institute for Historical Review, that maintained the Holocaust hadn’t happened.
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Shortly after his Persian Gulf “amen corner” remarks, charges and countercharges about Buchanan’s personal prejudices flew among media elites. One highly regarded
New York Times
columnist, A. M. Rosenthal, accused Buchanan of repeated anti-Semitism. Buchanan replied in turn that Rosenthal was accusing him of anti-Semitism in order to silence all political opposition on foreign policy matters. Other commentators, both liberal and conservative, defended Buchanan on these same
grounds. They knew Pat Buchanan, they said. They had been to dinner with Pat Buchanan, and the refined Pat Buchanan was not a bigot. Buchanan’s opponents, on the other hand, rehearsed a string of his offending remarks and actions, including his defense of Nazi war criminals.
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The debate over going to war in the Persian Gulf so roiled Buchanan’s ideological peers that months later
National Review
, the conservative movement’s publication of record, published a long William F. Buckley, Jr., essay devoted to anti-Semitism. “Buchanan could not be defended from the charge of anti-Semitism,” even if some of his best friends were Jews, Buckley royally concluded.
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Something more was afoot than Pat Buchanan’s personal tastes in friends. He had been a reliable, traditional conservative, an anti-communist who had backed the Vietnam War while working in President Nixon’s White House and during President Reagan’s invasion of the tiny island nation of Grenada in 1983. Buchanan had been formed in the mold of anti-communist interventionism that dominated the conservative movement during the Cold War. Although he quieted his dissent after the shooting started in Iraq, during the months prior he was the most visible Republican opponent of President Bush’s war plans. He broke the pattern of past conservative thought in favor of a new form of isolationism.

“In shaping a post–Cold War foreign policy,” Buchanan wrote, “the contest will be between acolytes of globalism and advocates of a new nationalism, America First.”
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The Populist Party, always on the lookout for any potential rift within conservative ranks, noticed the change almost immediately. By its lights, Buchanan was fighting the same battle it was, while using virtually identical terms of debate. He had become transformed from a “fearless conservative to [a] fearless nationalist,” the party’s newsletter averred.
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It declared him the “personification of Populism.” The party’s enthusiastic display of support for Buchanan’s new politics equaled its encouragement of David Duke. “There are others who can be considered Populists, because of their stand on several issues, but Buchanan is 100% Populist in his outlook,” one party officer concluded.
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Some even fantasized about Buchanan’s leaving the Republicans and becoming the presidential candidate of their “third” party.
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Since the Populist Party’s founding in 1984, its leadership had searched for an avenue into the conservative movement, hoping to recruit a standard-bearer from outside the ranks of known white supremacists. Each effort had failed. Olympic gold medalist Bob Richards smelled the party’s anti-Semitism. Former Republican Congressman
George Hansen turned down the nomination. Arizona Governor Evan Mecham decided against attending a meeting with David Duke. For Richards, Hansen, and Mecham, going from the mainstream to the margins was a losing strategy. Now Pat Buchanan was doing exactly that, abandoning a position within the borders of accepted conservative opinion and heading straight to the outside. The Populists argued that a realignment of the right was taking place via a “melding of Populism and nationalist conservativism into a powerful new force.”
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On this point the Populists proved to be essentially correct in their analysis. Among conservatives, Buchanan’s opposition to Bush’s war plans and the “New World Order” was not unique. A split among conservatives over issues such as immigration, free trade, and national identity had been brewing since the mid-1980s. Now, at the occasion of the Persian Gulf War, the differences in approach became unbridgeable. George Bush’s wing was still globalist and interventionist. The other tendency, following Buchanan, became nationalist and isolationist. At the same time, a different political force, consisting of David Duke and the mainstreaming breed of white supremacists, was self-consciously moving toward the edge of the Republican Party. It would only be a matter of time before these two different vectors ended up at the same white nationalist nexus.

The significance of Buchanan’s transformation should not be lost in the minutiae of petty party politics. He still did not fully embrace a biological determinist view of society. But without any evident intervention by white supremacists, Pat Buchanan was talking and walking much as they did. Contrary to natural intuition, however, Buchanan himself had not changed much. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, Buchanan had simply stood still while the world changed around him. His metamorphosis from establishment conservative into an anti–New World Order propagandist was a function of the change in the geopolitical gestalt and not an existential crisis. The Cold War ended. The New World Order was just beginning.

December 31, 1991.
Fifteen months after the unification of Germany, and nine months after the Iraqi army had been pushed out of Kuwait, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formally dissolved. It had encompassed fifteen republics and numerous autonomous regions populated by more than one hundred recognized nationalities. It had stretched from a border with Poland in Europe to China and the Sea of Japan in Asia, from the Arctic Circle in the north to the Black Sea in the south. With a population approximating three hundred million, a literacy rate of 99 percent, and a strong military possessing its own nuclear weapons arsenal and space program, the Soviet Union had been the second strongest superpower, after the United States. Buffered on its western borders by a string of sycophantic socialist regimes, it had projected itself across the globe as the communist alternative to capitalism.
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Despite this empirelike power, the Soviet Union had cracked apart like a three-minute egg. After a small clique of Stalinist military officers staged an abortive coup, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had seized the moment, put down the plotters, and supplanted the reform-minded Communist Party chief Mikhail Gorbachev with a promise to bring democracy and a market economy. During this period, republics and nationalities linked to the Great Russians since the czars broke away in quick succession. The republic of Georgia declared its independence, as did the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Ukraine, long considered an appendage of Russia, also announced its independence. So did the Caucasian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Inside Russia itself Leningrad became St. Petersburg again. Several of these republics reconstituted themselves as a loose federation
known as the Commonwealth of Independent States, and a segment of the Russian leadership never lost its designs to remain a world power. Communism as a geopolitical power, however, was dead. The Cold War was over.
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Hungary and Poland quickly sold off their state-owned industries and adopted free market economies as they moved out of the Soviet orbit. The bonds of “communist internationalism” dissolved, and long-suppressed sentiments of ethnic and religious nationalism came to the fore in several of these new “democracies.” In Czechoslovakia, an amalgamation put together by the entente powers after World War One, the Czech and Slovak republics separated peacefully, leaving two nation-states where there had previously been one country. But in other places, declarations of independence precipitated ethnic wars. Two former republics of the Soviet Union—Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan—engaged in a bitter military contest over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh until a cease-fire was imposed in 1994. Similar conflicts broke out in the Caucasus region and Eastern Europe. A conflict between Romanians and Russians for control of the newly independent republic of Moldova and an ethnic independence war inside Russia by Chechens continued into the 1990s. In Yugoslavia, an ethnic civil war became the most widely recognized symbol of ultranationalist fratricide in the years immediately following the Cold War.
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Before the Soviet bloc’s last gasp and final collapse, Willis Carto had already recognized the epoch-changing character of the events in Germany and Eastern Europe. “Now that the distraction of communism has been removed,”
The Spotlight
opined,
“we are entering a new era where the battle lines are clearer than ever. The new struggle (actually an old one)—the struggle of the 21st century—will pit nationalism vs. internationalism
” (author’s emphasis).
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In this view, little distinction was drawn between the growth of ethnic nationalism across the ruined borders of Eastern Europe, the anti-immigrant racism of political parties in Western Europe, and the emergence of Buchanan-style America first nationalism in the United States. While Carto’s notions of “nationalism” and “internationalism” were not widely shared outside his movement, he had in fact struck at a much larger truth: as the Cold War receded from view, ethnic and religious wars began to take its place.

William Pierce’s views on the shift in world events mixed prescience with ideological illusion. He correctly predicted that once the Soviets failed to use military force to stem the moves toward independence in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism was a “foregone conclusion.”
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As will become evident, Pierce’s anti-Semitism (temporarily) blinded him to the opportunities—domestic and foreign—emerging for racial nationalists like himself. The National Alliance did happily report that every nationalist organization in Russia, including the highly visible Pamyat, was anti-Semitic. It also noted that nationalists in Hungary, Romania, Lithuania, and Poland had similar beliefs. Pierce’s analysis suffered, however, from fears that the various reform movements were infected with Jews. One by one, Pierce ticked off the list: in Poland, where the Solidarity movement had first shaken loose Communist Party control, he believed Jews had actually increased their power. Romania had always been too friendly to the Jews after World War Two. Hungary had too many Jews, and one of the top two reformers there was, well, a Jew. In the lands of the former East Germany, reformed communists had elected a Jew, Gregor Gysi, as their chief. “And that in a country which officially numbers only a few thousand Jews among its population of 17 million,”
National Vanguard
noted with evident exasperation.
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From the day Pierce had first formed the National Alliance and started publishing
National Vanguard
, he had argued that communism was a Jewish creation. Now, fifteen years later, as communism in Eastern Europe collapsed, he believed the Jews were still in control. Such views also led him to misunderstand the changes within his own organization, which had benefited from a spike in membership applications as the decade turned. He believed this growth reflected a “palpable sense of unease” among white people, caused in part by “signs of a major setback” in the economy.
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He did not count German unification or the Persian Gulf War or the Soviet Union’s collapse—or any combination of these three world-shattering events—among the causes of his good fortune.

For the most ideologically internationalist of America’s white tribal-ists, Pierce’s blindness was an ironic twist in his twenty-year rivalry with Carto. For Pierce, the initial moments of the Soviet collapse simply signaled a change in the face of Jewish-run regimes. Carto, on the other hand, sensed a set of new opportunities in the changes ahead. With or without their self-conscious understanding, however, the end of the Cold War meant a significant realignment.