Antiwar.com Blog

The Smear Bund never rests — not even on Christmas. Especially not on Christmas. And they’ve been really active lately, what with Ron Paul gaining in the polls and in the hearts and minds of a growing number of young people: we can’t have that! I’ve waded through the muck and mire, so you don’t have to — go here to read a full accounting.

One would think that the sheer counterintuitiveness of the proposition that the country’s leading libertarian politician is a Nazi sympathizer would deter the Smear Brigade from trying to pull that one off — but no. From the left-leaning cyber-lair of “Orcinus,” where the professional “extremist”-hunter David Neiwert (a kind of low-budget John Roy Carlson) holds court, to the supposedly opposite end of the spectrum over at “Stormfront,” where the “Commander” of the American National Socialist Workers Party pontificates, the hue and cry is going up: Paul is a Nazi!

This morning the New York Times took up this theme, with a vicious taunt coming out of the mouth of Virginia Heffernan, who repeats the laughable accusations of an admitted Nazi as indisputable fact. Paul “seems to have Nazi troubles, as in they’re saying he’s one of them,” she gloats — and hails a “vid-lash” against Ron Paul. Yeah, the Paul supporters have so far dominated Youtube and the internet in general, where their movement was born, but we’ll show them: Heffernan posts a video by one Mike Fluggenock, a shrill leftist propganda short that focuses not on Paul’s positions but on two or three individuals in a crowd of some 5,000 at a rally in Philadelphia.

What’s interesting about Senor Fluggenock, however, isn’t his skills as a film-maker, or even as a propagandist, but the fact that he was one of six American “artists” to make contributions to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust cartoon contest. Here it is.

Gee, I don’t wonder that Fluggenock’s entry didn’t place. That is kind of heavy-handed, even for the Iranians. After all, is the evil of the Holocaust really equivalent to the admittedly brutal Israeli occupation? I haven’t noticed the Israelis killing 6 million Palestinians in extermination chambers, but I’m sure this is just an oversight on my part. What I couldn’t help noticing, however, is that Fluggenock travels in some of the same circles as Bill White, the neo-Nazi “Commander” and source of the charge that Paul is a secret “white nationalist. DC Indymedia, where Fluggenock is part of of the “editorial collective, seems to have it’s own Nazi problem. DC Indymedia has also been promoting White’s story. Hmmmmm …..

Ms. Hefferan, described herein as “a newly ubiqitous [sic] cultural critic,” apparently determined to follow in the footsteps of Judith Miller, isn’t too picky about her sources. Judy had Chalabi: Virginia has Bill White, the supreme “Commander” of the American National Socialist Workers Party, and Senor Fluggenock, a cartoonist with a cartoonish view of world politics.

In her MediaBistro interview, the fresh-faced golden-haired Ms. Heffernan burbles on about her faaaaabulous career, from fact-checker [!] at Tina Brown’s New Yorker to her ascendance as A Newly Ubiquitous Cultural Critic:

“I was disillusioned—not radically disillusioned, just a little disillusioned—with graduate school, and had decided to spend the summer in New York working at a bookstore—Chapter & Verse on St. Marks, which isn’t there anymore. My now-friend Rob Boynton came in while I was reading Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, and struck up a conversation. I learned he was a journalist, and it was through him that I got the idea that it could be a profession.”

She was disillusioned — and now I am. How in the name of all that’s holy could such an air-head possibly become A Newly Ubiquitous Cultural Critic? Yes, but air-heads have their uses, and the Smear Bund couldn’t function without them: smearing doesn’t take much talent. And it pays.

On Dec. 14, Ali Shafeya al-Moussawi, a correspondent for Alive in Baghdad, was killed. He had been working on a series of stories about a militia in Baghdad.

See Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists for more.

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” – George Washington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775

In my most recent interview of The Other Scott Horton (no relation), the heroic anti-torture human rights attorney, Columbia lecturer and author of the indispensable blog “No Comment” at Harper’s magazine, we discussed the prisoner of war policies of General George Washington, Commander of the Continental Army, and an incident after the Battle of Trenton, New Jersey on December 26, 1776.

It seems that after the battle, the Continentals were preparing to run some of the British Empire’s German mercenaries through what they called the “gauntlet.” General Washington discovered this and intervened. As Horton explained in the Huffington Post, Washington then issued an order to his troops regarding prisoners of war:

“‘Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren who have fallen into their hands,’ he wrote. In all respects the prisoners were to be treated no worse than American soldiers; and in some respects, better. Through this approach, Washington sought to shame his British adversaries, and to demonstrate the moral superiority of the American cause.”

In the worst of times – when foreign troops literally occupied American soil, torturing and murdering American patriots – and few believed that the cause of the revolution could ultimately win against the might of the British Empire, the first Commander in Chief of the U.S.A. set the precedent that this society is to lead even our enemies by “benignant sympathy of [our] example.” To win the war against the occupying army of Redcoats, the American revolutionaries needed right on their side.

And it worked. Many of the German Hessians in fact joined the revolutionaries in their fight against the English and stayed here in America to be free when the war was won.

Must we abandon this legacy? Is it already too late to reclaim it?

Merry Christmas.

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The new site is located at http://antiwar.com/radio

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Since they will be dumping Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer.

As I have written about over and over and over again, the purpose of the military should be to defend the country. That’s it. One would think that the Secretary of Defense would know that. Yet, in a recent speech before the Association of the United States Army, Robert Gates articulated the following role for the U.S. military:

“Army soldiers can expect to be tasked with reviving public services, rebuilding infrastructure and promoting good governance. All these so-called nontraditional capabilities have moved into the mainstream of military thinking, planning, and strategy—where they must stay.”

That is, anything but do what the military should do.