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Let British Liberalism Die
With William F. Buckley

by Nancy Spannaus

It is only fitting that Beast-Man Dick Cheney would have led off his March 11 speech to the rightwing Heritage Foundation with a paean to the recently deceased William F. Buckley. Buckley, whose name was virtually synonymous with the filthy Neanderthal section of the U.S. Republican Party over the last 60 years, died at the age of 82 on Feb. 27, leaving a long legacy of evil behind him, an evil which Cheney is committed to continue.

Why not simply let Buckley and his memory disappear from the political scene as fast as possible? Because the unfortunate fact is that he represents a very active disease still threatening the American population, the disease of British Liberalism.[1]

That disease can best be understood not by reading Buckley's works, or even looking at his evil deeds, which include attempts to overthrow the legitimate governments of Cuba and Mexico, support for McCarthyite domestic measures, for the degenerate Roy Cohn, and for the election of scoundrels such as Joseph Lieberman. Buckley, who gloated in his reputation as a erudite snob from Yale, was best cut down to size by Lyndon LaRouche, in a book released in 1979, entitled How to Defeat Liberalism and William F. Buckley.

LaRouche provides the essential conception in the Foreword to that book, written in the midst of his own first campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. After noting the snake-like mannerism of television personality Buckley (he hosted a show called "Firing Line" for decades), LaRouche notes that "the snakelikeness mirrors the quality of the soul beneath." We quote:

Using the very strictest standards adopted by British nineteenth-century 'philosophyical radicalism'—the liberal philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Benjamin Jowett, John Ruskin, et al.—William Buckley's soul is that of a British liberal, through and through. He calls himself a 'conservative,' and professes his thoughts to be the purest red, white, and blue. Inside, he is all British liberal.

Therein lies the quality of the snake.

He [Buckley-ed.] has publicly advocated the use of the injurious, mind-altering substance, marijuana. He has publicly professed to smoke the poisonous stuff, at least on his yacht, in the safety of extraterritorial waters. Worse, he is officially associated with the leadership of the marijuana-pushing lobbying organization, NORML.

The 'mental map' exposed by Buckley's defense of his marijuana pushing is that of a Benthamite 'philosophical radical'—a modern British liberal. This case constitutes more or less what scientists term 'crucial experimental proof' of his innermost nature..."

The only significant objection one should anticipate for such a characterization would be that Buckley, a professed Catholic, is influenced additionally by that variety of American-Jesuit aberration which Pope Leo XIII denounced in 1899 as the 'American heresy.' There is, admittedly, a connection between the notorious brothers, Michael and Jeremy Novak. If we focus on the internal features of the Novaks' methodology, we discover that there is no methodological distinction between their own and Benthamite varieties of sophistry.

A Danger to Our Republic

LaRouche further elaborates on how Buckley's liberalism dovetails with that of the avowed left wing.

The clinical usefulness of citing Buckley as an exemplary liberal masquerading in "conservative" colors is this. An adequate appreciation of the internal danger to our republic requires us to list a certain type of professed "conservative" as part of the same problem more shamelessly professed by the Institute for Policy Studies and the 'Kennedy machine.'

There is abundant corroborating evidence of this connection and its significance.

The interchangeability of certain liberals and self-styled conservatives is exemplifed by comparing Keynesian liberal Abba Lerner, a close collaborator of the Hoover Institue's social-democratic Sidney Hook, with the Mont Pelerin Society's professed 'conservative,' Milton Friedman. Both have publicly associated themselves as admirers and followers of Nazi Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht—the same Warburg-sponsored Schacht who put Adolf Hitler into power in Germany....

The pedigree of Buckley's own National Review (the magazine he edited for about 50 years-ed.) dovetails with this. The foremost celebrity behind the development of the National Review was Max Eastman. Eastman was a 'Trotskyist' before Trotsky himself, closely associated with Trotsky's English-language publishing activites into the 1930s. Eastman was more generally a leading anglophile liberal during most of that part of the twentieth century which he inhabited. Another key figure of National Review, and long associate of Sideny Hook, is James Burnham, a leading figure of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party from 1938 into the first half of 1940....

During those migrations, there has been no significant change in the 'map' of Burnham's mind. He, like Eastman, like Charles A. Beard, is typical of modern British or anglophile liberals who move rather freely from liberalism, to fascism, to communism, and back into varieties of the same old liberalism with a 'conservative' veneer. During the late 1920s and 1930s, 'communism' of assorted varieties was among the modish occupations for a young British or anglophile liberal to pursue for a while. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the 'conservative,' Cold War profile became a more favored occupation for such ex-communists. When U.S. extensions of British intelligence elected to launch the perennial 'boy wonder' Buckley into a political career, liberal old hands such as Eastman and Burnham were assigned to show the raw young Buckley 'the ropes,' and to provide the subtler sort of 'slick tricks' only such old hands would know....

Modern British, or anglophile liberalism and its 'radical' offshoot are the chief adversary of the United States and its people. These forces are presently engaged in a willful destruction of the value of the U.S. dollar and of the U.S. industrial economy. This treasonous endeavor CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) praises and urges under the heading of a policy of 'controlled disintegration.' Together with such Trilateraloid aspects of CFR as Samuel Huntington, these liberals have proposed to bring democratic-republican forms to an end inside the United Sates, as well as among other nations. Presidential Review Memorandum 32, recently implemented by the Carter administraiton, has Huntington's explicit purpose behind it. Senator 'Ted' Kennedy, the centerpiece of raving liberalism in the Congress today, is sponsor of a 'Project '87' scheme to rip up the U.S. Constitution. Otherwise, these same liberals, supported by Buckley, are engaged in destroying our nation's youth, through the promotion of marijuana and other dangerous, mind-altering substances.

Buckley himself stands self-discredited, but there are many liberals in 'conservative' disguise permeating the ranks of accredited conservatives in the Republican and other parties, and in other instituions relevant to policy-making processes. The modern British liberals have thus deployed a pincers movement against the political institutions of the United States. The overt liberals attack from the 'left,' while the fifth column of liberals in conservative disguises infiltrates from the 'right,' and shatters the resistance against liberalism from within.

The admittedly self-discredited Buckley is analagous to a loose bit of yarn in a knitted garment. Tug away at Buckley and one can unravel the entire liberal 'fifth column' penetrating the ranks of those who would defend the American System from the criminal onslaught of British liberalism. So, the unwholesome, ill wind blowing from Buckley's mouth can be turned to some useful purpose.

[1] As should become clear in the course of this article, 'British liberalism' is best known as representing an utter lack of scientific or moral principles, and disdain for the unique creative nature of the human individual. A full elaboration is available in LaRouche's writings on www.larouchepub.com.

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