Au Revoir, Dear Readers

"Why do we hold such different views of Nazis and the Soviets?" asks the great Arnold Beichman in a Washington Times book review of Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread. Why do we, indeed. Beichman is an academic who is also street smart. He goes on to tell us that in New York’s "gentrified slum," the East Village, there’s a bar by the name of KGB that’s jammed to the rafters night after night but most of all on Sundays, when writers read from their works, and publishers come to meet the next Saul Bellow. The KGB Bar has a corporate symbol, the hammer-and-sickle, which as some of you may remember was the symbol of the most inhuman regime in history. This is where Beichman comes into his own. "The parent KGB specialized in torturing and killing writers and artists… How long would a New York night spot last if its name were Gestapo and there were posters of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Therisienstadt, portraits of such Nazi worthies as Julius Streicher, Hermann Goering or Heinrich Himmler plastered on its walls and a big swastika on its entrance?"

Hear, hear! Beichman, who is Jewish, calls Stalin a monster who surpassed Hitler in evil, and also points out that The New York Times blessed the KGB Bar with a long, admiring feature article. "Can you picture the New York Times writing admiringly about a watering hole called ‘Waffen-SS Bar’?"

What I’d like to ask is, haven’t any of these crumbums ever read Robert Conquest’s memorable The Great Terror? Or the seminal work, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago? Why is it that the left has never come to terms with the great moral wrongs of communism, or even regarded those horrors as worthy of serious discussion?

Well, if I had the answers I’d come up with them, but I don’t. Like political correctness, which has replaced communism as an attempt to make the world a better place, our egghead elites seem to be driven by totalitarian instincts–we know better than you little people, just keep working and leave the thinking to us. Mainly it’s a hatred of America and of free enterprise, the system that, with all its faults (Waksal, Boesky and so on), nevertheless provides the opportunity for anyone to grow rich, a fact that drives the liberal elite ballistic with envy. Yes, dear readers, it is as simple as that, and if anyone tells you different tell him or her to go and ask for yet another grant from the government.

I’ll never forget meeting a reporter for the Times during the 1960 campaign–he was covering Henry Cabot Lodge, running as Richard Nixon’s veep–and the loathing he expressed for Cabot Lodge’s patrician bearing and manners. "He got everything handed to him on a silver platter," said the hack in impeccable cliche form. He was obviously talking to the wrong person. "At least he didn’t spend it on a yacht, but went into public service," said a 23-year-old me. But the hack wouldn’t hear of it. He looked down on Nixon because of his lowly antecedents, and loathed Cabot Lodge for his aristocratic upbringing. Needless to say, his love for the thuggish Kennedys was on a par with my then passion for Ava Gardner.

The media’s insatiable concern with Watergate shows how truly on the left most journalists are. Kennedy’s and LBJ’s coverups dwarfed Watergate, yet the Fourth Estate chose to look the other way. It only turned against LBJ’s war when it smelled a possible American defeat. (It was this moral blindness that played into the hands of the murderous regimes of North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.) Clinton’s perjury ditto, not to mention his politics of personal destruction of anyone who dared oppose him.

So now we have p.c. as our moral guide, the bible of our liberal elite. What it really means is never having to face the truth. Or employ common sense. It has no interest in justice or fair play, but it’s based on the inaccurate assumption that men and women are exactly the same when it comes to ability, strength and attitude. This is what that old murdering monster V.I. Lenin used to tell the masses, and, being serfs, they believed him. Seventy years and tens of millions of dead later, they got the message. Well, let’s make sure we don’t fall for the same bullshit over here.

Which brings me to the sad part of this column.

It is my last one, at least for a while. No, I haven’t been fired, I’m leaving of my own volition in order to edit and write for The American Conservative, a fortnightly out of Washington, DC, of which Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell are my co-editors and partners. It will be a costly endeavor, but one that is worth a kopek or two. Our main aim is to remind America that since we are a predominantly white society rooted in Christianity, ancient Greece and Rome, our responsibility to immigrants is to bring them into our culture, not the other way around. But I will not bore you with details. All you have to do starting Sept. 25 is either subscribe to it, or click onto amconmag.com, it’s as simple as that. Our address is 1300 Wilson Blvd., Suite 120, Arlington, VA 22209.

Who was it who said that saying goodbye is such sweet sorrow? Okay, go ahead and laugh at my cliche, but it sure hurts to leave a paper whose editors never cut a word, never complained about how bad at times the column was and never had a cross word to say to me about my politics and my prejudices. Russ Smith, John Strausbaugh and Lisa Kearns have to be the three best editors a hack can possibly write for. New York Press is the alternative free paper, mainly because it gives the freedom to its writers to write what they feel strongly about. I shall miss all of you, but will keep in touch, rooting for you all the way. And perhaps one day, if I’m still welcome and still kicking, I could be back. So, it’s not goodbye, but au revoir and a bientot.