politics, no musical content

Brian Lyons (brianlyo@Wolfe.net)
Thu, 29 Feb 1996 11:59:19 -0700

>To: "San FranDisco Ravers List" <sfraves@hyperreal.com>, cc@cyborganic.com,
> diva@simon.sfsu.edu, twaxx@netcom.com, ses@eit.com,
> "Geoff White" <geoffw@eit.com>
>Subject: know thine enemy
>Date: Thu, 29 Feb 96 03:45:34 -0800
>From: "Niels P. Mayer" <mayer@netcom.com>
>Sender: owner-sfraves@hyperreal.com
>Precedence: bulk
>
>
>Or at least, remember to not live in states where buchanan has won.
>Unless, of course, you're into fascism...
>
>------- Forwarded Message
>
>FAIR Report:
>PATRICK BUCHANAN -- IN HIS OWN WORDS
>February 26, 1996 Contact: Steven Rendall
>
>In the flap over Larry Pratt and other unsavory characters
>associated with the Patrick Buchanan campaign, journalists
>typically framed the question: Is Buchanan linked to extremists and
>bigots? But there is a more basic question journalists should ask:
>Is Patrick Buchanan himself an extremist and bigot?
>
>Here is a sampling of Buchanan's views:
>
>ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS
>
>After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a
>Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was "putting on
>an act" by associating the Confederacy with slavery: "The War
>Between the States was about independence, about self-
>determination, about the right of a people to break free of a
>government to which they could no longer give allegiance," Buchanan
>asserted. "How long is this endless groveling before every cry of
>'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively
>throws up?" (syndicated column, 7/28/93)
>
>On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no
>politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The
>'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants,
>bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
>(Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131)
>
>Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court
>decision of the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin
>Luther King Jr. as his own editorials in the St. Louis Globe
>Democrat in the mid-1960s. "We were among Hoover's conduits to the
>American people," he boasted (Right from the Beginning, p. 283).
>
>White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969
>memo not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of
>Martin Luther King's assassination, warning that a visit would
>"outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a
>demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil
>incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary
>history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)
>
>In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration
>of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is
>less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual
>friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government
>side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92)
>
>In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate
>grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time,
>on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up
>with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to
>the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the
>blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school
>system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)
>
>Buchanan has repeatedly insisted that President Reagan did so much
>for African-Americans that civil rights groups have no reason to
>exist: "George Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that
>black America has grown up; that the NAACP should close up shop,
>that its members should go home and reflect on JFK's admonition:
>'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask what you
>can do for your country.'" (syndicated column, 7/26/88)
>
>In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided
>the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi
>"costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues
>and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such
>as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated
>column, 2/25/89)
>
>Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the
>notion that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong.
>Where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe
>this." (syndicated column, 2/7/90) He referred admiringly to the
>apartheid regime as the "Boer Republic": "Why are Americans
>collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?"
>(syndicated column, 9/17/89)
>
>ON IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR:
>
>"There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue
>that we are a European country." (Newsday, 11/15/92)
>
>Buchanan on affirmative action: "How, then, can the feds justify
>favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought
>in World War II or Vietnam?" (syndicated column, 1/23/95)
>
>In a September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
>described multiculturalism as "an across-the-board assault on our
>Anglo-American heritage."
>
>"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year,
>or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be
>easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people
>of Virginia?" ("This Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91)
>
>ON JEWS:
>
>Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory."
>(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)
>
>During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating
>the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense
>ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States." ("McLaughlin
>Group," 8/26/90)
>
>In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic
>and genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great
>courage...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts
>alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the
>character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in
>the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." (The Guardian,
>1/14/92)
>
>Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the
>historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by
>diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough
>carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90)
>Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the
>German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that
>claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.
>
>Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of
>Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals,
>because it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York
>Times, 4/21/87)
>
>Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite
>protests -- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS
>troops were buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly
>reminded Jewish leaders that they were "Americans first" -- and
>repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to the pressure of the
>Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald
>Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were "victims
>just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." (New
>York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)
>
>After Cardinal O'Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the
>controversy over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan
>wrote: "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." (New
>Republic, 10/22/90)
>
>The Buchanan '96 campaign's World Wide Web site included an article
>blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli
>intelligence agency, Mossad -- and alleging that Foster and Hillary
>Clinton were Mossad spies. (The campaign removed the article after
>its existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish
>Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)
>
>In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
>declared: "Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior
>because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that
>makes men free." (ADL Report, 1994)
>
>ON GAYS:
>
>In a 1972 memo to Richard Nixon, Buchanan referred to one of George
>McGovern's leading financial contributors as a "screaming fairy."
>(Newsday, 2/8/89) Buchanan has repeatedly used the term
>"sodomites," and has referred to gays as "the pederast
>proletariat." (Washington Post, 2/9/92)
>
>"Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only
>immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what
>most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by
>an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence
>and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle."
>(syndicated column, 9/3/89)
>
>In a 1977 column urging a "thrashing" of gay groups, Buchanan
>wrote: "Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always
>is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society
>and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family." (New
>Republic, 3/30/92)
>
>"Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-
>Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that
>all consensual sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-
>biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie."
>(Buchanan column in Wall Street Journal, 1/21/93)
>
>On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have
>declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful
>retribution (AIDS)." (Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86) Later that
>year, he demanded that New York City Ed Koch and New York Gov.
>Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or else "be held personally
>responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague." "With 80,000 dead
>of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on
>Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990 (syndicated column,
>10/17/90). In the 1992 campaign, he declared: "AIDS is nature's
>retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times,
>7/31/93)
>
>ON WOMEN:
>
>"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not
>endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition
>and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of
>Western capitalism." (syndicated column, 11/22/83)
>
>"The real liberators of American women were not the feminist
>noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the
>shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the
>freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p. 149)
>
>"If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to
>every difficult marriage, that career comes before children
>... no democratic government can impose another set of values
>upon her." (Right from the Beginning, p. 341)
>
>ON DEMOCRACY:
>
>Attacking what he considers the "democratist temptation, the
>worship of democracy as a form of governance," Buchanan commented:
>"Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the
>real, a love of process for a love of country." (Patrick J.
>Buchanan: From the Right, newsletter, Spring/90)
>
>In a January, 1991 column, Buchanan suggested that "quasi-
>dictatorial rule" might be the solution to the problems of big
>municipalities and the federal fiscal crisis: "If the people are
>corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the government." (Washington
>Times, 1/9/91) He has written disparagingly of the "one man, one
>vote Earl Warren system."
>
>In Right from the Beginning, Buchanan refers to Spanish dictator
>Francisco Franco as a "Catholic savior." He called Franco, along
>with Chile's Gen. Pinochet, "soldier-patriots." (syndicated column
>9/17/89) Both men overthrew democracy in their countries.
>
>Buchanan devotes a chapter of his autobiography -- "As We Remember
>Joe" -- to defending Senator Joe McCarthy. He advocated that Nixon
>"burn the tapes" during Watergate, and he criticized Reagan for
>failing to pardon Oliver North over Iran-contra.
>
>Buchanan, shortly before he announced he was running for president
>in 1995: "You just wait until 1996, then you'll see a real right-
>wing tyrant." (The Nation, 6/26/95)
>
> ***
>
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>
>------- End of Forwarded Message