On Lukacs And Buchanan (II)
Posted on May 24th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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At Taki’s Magazine, Marcus Epstein makes quite a lot, indeed too much, out of the publication in the forthcoming TAC of the fairly negative Lukacs review of Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War and explains it in terms of the magazine’s difference from paleoconservative outlets. That must be why Tom wrote a post attacking the review…on TAC’s main blog. If that weren’t enough, the editors have been very cunning in masking this distance from paleoconservatism when they brought Eunomia in to be part of their website as recently as three months ago, and I then went and confused things even more by writing a critical post against the review. As ever, I hope my views on Churchill and Lincoln, among other things, remain anything but boring or conventional, but this is hardly the first time that an argument in support of a more conventional view of American, to say nothing of British, involvement in WWII has appeared in TAC. Prof. Andrew Bacevich wrote an article (sorry, not online) on FDR and WWII back in June 2005 to which I took great exception, but I never supposed that his argument demonstrated anything about TAC other than the intellectual diversity of the magazine’s contributors that has been one of the great qualities of TAC and also something that I believe is fairly typical of paleoconservative outlets. Certainly, that is something to which we ought to aspire if it isn’t always the reality. Both Takimag and TAC publish Austin Bramwell, yet he has in the past written things far more critical of paleoconservatives as a group than anything that Prof. Lukacs has ever written, and so what if he has? Healthy criticism and pushback are vital to making our arguments better and keeping us from drifting into intellectual torpor. The last thing the right needs are additional echo chambers in which we congratulate one another on our purity of belief.
For whatever it’s worth, the editors also ran a fairly critical review of June 1941 in June 2006, which prompted a rare rebuke from Lukacs in the letters section. (As it happens, I also wrote a letter protesting that review, but understandably the book’s author took precedence.) That review made rather exaggerated and uncharitable claims about Lukacs’ alleged greater comfort with communism on account of his long-standing judgement that the Soviets posed the lesser threat. Viewed in one way, one might read the new review as a response to that earlier one, and whatever is unfair in this one is more than balanced out by what was in that one. More simply, and with much less gnashing of teeth, it is easy to understand why someone such as Prof. Lukacs, who has researched and written extensively on Churchill, Hitler and Europe before and during WWII, would have strong views about a book that, so far as I can tell without having read it in its entirety, directly challenges or rejects central judgements that he has made about all of the above. One might more appropriately view the publication of such a review as part of TAC’s ongoing effort to maintain lively debate and welcome differing perspectives within the same magazine. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that a magazine that abandoned that original goal would quickly become as boring and conventional a paleo journal as some mainstream magazines have become in their way.
So I would close by saying that it is absolutely crazy for us to be attacking one another in such terms over legitimate differences of historical interpretation. Obviously, invoking the name of David Irving was quite unnecessary for the purposes of the review (though I understand why Lukacs used it to make his traditional point about the danger of half-truths), but then so is throwing around the epithet neocon or accusing John Lukacs of all people of holding neoconservative views. I am not normally confused with someone who makes a lot of irenic arguments, so I hope this may help persuade everyone to keep this review in perspective and refrain from flinging accusations or charges at people with whom we agree perhaps 95% or more of the time.
P.S. Think of all this another way: what is TAC’s position on Barack Obama? Can you gauge that from what has been published over the last year? If you looked only at Steve Sailer and the critiques of his foreign policy, you would think that the magazine is unreservedly hostile to him, and if you looked only at Scott’s piece on Obama’s views on Israel and Prof. Bacevich’s “conservative case for Obama” you might think that the magazine was cheering him on, yet the editors have published all of these.
Filed under: politics
Another example would be how Bill Kauffman writes for TAC sometimes, although in his book “Look Homeward America” he calls paleoconservatives, especially the ones who rally around Chronicles Magazine, intoxicating. What’s really intoxicating are people who believe in untested, unproven nonsense like anarchism, like Bill Kauffman.
Daniel,
Just for the record, I do not agree with John Lukacs 95% of the time. 20% of the time might be more accurate. The finest conservative analysts of my life have been Pat Buchanan and Sam Francis, each of whom I have been privileged to have as a friend. I thus regard critical reviews of Buchanan somewhat differently than I would critcal reviews of someone I do not know.
Of course, Buchanan and Francis each have supported populism, nationalism, and anti-Communism, and thus, according to Lukacs’ taxonomy, are not really conservatives at all. Needless to say, I disagree with Lukacs here too.
Tom, we agree that Buchanan and Francis have been outstanding conservatives, and I understand and share your desire to defend Mr. Buchanan. Even so, I think 20% agreement with Lukacs probably understates things. I take your points about populism, nationalism and anticommunism. Prof. Lukacs makes claims about the Populists that I don’t find persuasive, as I’ve said before, and obviously he makes claims about the Orthodox world that I find to be very misleading, but it seems indisputable that we agree with him in how we see the world far more than we don’t. Generally, I tend to agree with him and Kennan about the power and dangers of nationalism and popular anticommunism, and I think they show that it is possible to be strongly anticommunist in one’s views, as he is and Kennan certainly was, without embracing the more dangerous aspects of mass anticommunism.
[...] Pat Buchanan’s new book about Churchill and World War II has gotten a lot of attention. I will be interested to see the argument, which we ought to keep an open mind to, Daniel Larison reminds us, instead of just accepting the received interpretation. [...]
Well said, Daniel. Lukacs is a welcome voice, and it would be pretty dreary if paleoconservatives started to have strict litmus tests on complicated matters of historical interpretation. It’s a question of grammar more than it is one of specific positions.
Thanks, Chris. I liked your response over at Takimag, and I plan to follow up more over there. Not only would it be dreary to start pushing litmus tests on these things, but it also makes no sense to then pick fights with Lukacs’ broader body of work along with making specific objections to the claims he makes in the review.
Those who want to throw stones at the idea of anti-anticommunism, for example, should ponder what that kind of thinking must mean for conservatives who object to the more reckless aspects of modern anti-jihadism. There is a sober sort of anticommunism that informed the “doctrine” of containment, and then a more reckless sort that saw the fall of South Vietnam as integrally linked to U.S. national security. Likewise, I think there can be sober anti-jihadism that recognises the reality and evil of the threat without jumping on board with every call for intervention in the Near East or elsewhere.
Also, what can it mean to call John Lukacs a “crank”? If he’s a crank, God knows what that makes the rest of us.
Your points are well taken. Groupscules hurling anthemas are, alas, common enough in certain circles, and worst of all, tend to be quite boring.
It occurs to me that this debate about WWII (and WWI, necessarily part of the discussion) gains energy from the fact that advocates of this or that intervention constantly hurl references to Chamberlain’s umbrella and Lindbergh in lieu of analysing the present situation with care. For some interventionists, its Groundhog Day, 1938, every day, and until the eloquent bulldog Churchill came aboard to right the ship, Britain was ruled by limp-wristed Germanophile toffs who were taken in by, and refused to stand up to, Hitler.Those who support a bit of prudence and caution are simply Nevilles without the accent.
The rhythmic repetition of this claimed analogy can easily lead anti-interventionists to question not only whether today’s jihadis equal 1938’s Nazis, but whether the reduction of pre-WWII politics to the image of a Neville and his umbrella is historically accurate, and whether one can imagine alternate histories based on different strategies.
In the end, of course, everyone lost WWII, except the Americans, who kept their powder dry the longest, and perhaps the Soviet nomenklatura, whose country was shattered but came to dominate Centural Europe for 44 years.
For me, it’s easier to make Woodrow Wilson the villain of the piece who set the dominoes falling in the name of his absurd idealism. It’s easy to denounce Wilson. Understanding 1938 and all that requires nuance.
Perish that thought.
If Lukacs is a crank, then we are enemies of the people.