Is it just me or Judeofascism's fortunes are fizzling?
A crusading [Judeo]con among English Tories
Geoffrey Wheatcroft IHT
Monday, March 15, 2004
Conrad Black
BATH, England With every day, the career of Conrad Black seems more like something from a lurid Victorian novel. An adventurer arrives from the colonies, buys London newspapers, becomes a peer, cuts a dash. His colorful wife flaunts her $1,000 shoes and $75,000 dresses, while telling interviewers, superfluously (and hubristically, as it proves), "I have an extravagance that knows no bounds."
Investors in New York start wondering just how that extravagance was paid for, and turn nasty. With his financial position crumbling, Lord Black of Crossharbour tries to sell his papers behind the backs of that "bunch of self-righteous hypocrites and ingrates," while adding, in words a novelist might have hesitated to attribute even to the most eccentric character, "I'm not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility."
But a judge in Delaware rules against him, calling him "cunning and calculated ... evasive and unreliable." In the latest and cruelest blow, Black is unceremoniously kicked off the board of his Telegraph papers in London. As the novelist might say, our hero's fortunes have sunk very low.
At such a moment, it is worth recording that Conrad Black was not a bad newspaper proprietor. He may have harangued his editors with midnight calls, and written weird letters denouncing journalists in his own papers, but he didn't censor those writers, and the editorial policy of his papers was not simply tailored to his corporate financial interests.
And yet there is a fascinating and important political sub-plot to this story. Black's ambition was to become the godfather of [Judeo]conservatism. Anyone who wants to know the names of the neocon elite has only to look at the masthead of his Washington magazine The National Interest. Luminaries such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle were recruited onto his boards and handsomely rewarded, even if they seem to have taken their fiduciary duties somewhat lightly.
In his London papers, Black promoted a group of writers whose devotion to American power was all the stronger because they belong to that curious category, self-hating Canadians. Black himself, his wife Barbara Amiel, David Frum, and Mark Steyn all loathe their native country, evidently under the impression that Canada is on the brink of Bolshevism because it has a national health service.
It was Frum who, as President George W. Bush's speechwriter, coined the phrase "axis of evil," which Europeans thought a dangerous and absurd way to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea (evil, yes; axis, no). Having tried, at the time of President Bill Clinton's travails, to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the number of dirty jokes any journalist could print, Steyn insisted that Bush would win a landslide victory in the presidential election, and now insists that "George Bush is winning at home and abroad." Undaunted by earlier unhappy predictions, he also said last December that Osama bin Laden "will continue to be dead throughout 2004."
But the most fascinating of the group is Lady Black of Crossharbour, otherwise known as Barbara Amiel. With her privileged position at the Daily Telegraph, she has been able to say the unsayable, and thus give us a glimpse of the ideology in raw form. Even the headlines of her columns make a kind of [Judeo]con prose poem:
"The UN is fast becoming a threat to world peace"; "Why protecting the peace will make a mockery of justice"; "No more Mr Nice Guy: the lesson America has learnt"; "The BBC has become an open opponent of America's policies"; "Islamists overplay their hands but London salons don't see it"; "British journalists just don't understand the American way."
Where the standard neoconservative line is aggressively optimistic - Israel is here to stay, and don't forget it - Amiel is revealingly different. While lamenting that "it is too late to kill Arafat," she suggests that "this conflict in the Middle East is not amenable to a peaceful solution and can only be solved by the total victory of one side."
"This means the Arabs annihilating the Israelis or the Israelis being forced to use every means, not excluding nuclear power, to defend themselves." Or, still more bleakly: "Sharon or the next Israeli leader might conclude that the dream of an Israeli homeland is finished and the Israelis will not get out alive."
"If so," she continued, "he might further conclude that if we Jews cannot have the sliver of land for which we never wished to hurt anyone, if we must be pushed into the sea either literally or by demographics and attrition, we owe it to the memory of our forefathers to extract the highest price and not to go alone. After all, some ancient Asian cultures believed that whomever they killed would be their servant in the next world."
Apart from anyone else, Israelis might raise their eyebrows at such arcane urgings to massacre and self-immolation, all delivered from the front line of Palm Beach.
Whether or not she realizes it, her strange worldview is simply not shared by most readers of The Daily Telegraph, an old-fashioned Conservative (rather than [Judeo]conservative) paper. Most British people broadly support the United Nations, and the recent campaign against the BBC by Prime Minister Tony Blair's former press aide Alastair Campbell was followed by opinion polls in which, on the question of the government's dossier on arms of mass detruction, three times as many voters said that they believed the BBC as believed the government.
Although England is not, as Amiel says in her scolding way, awash with hatred of all things American, it is true that Bush arouses mixed feelings here, and not only on the left. When he paid his state visit to London last year, the visit was more unpopular with Tories than with Labor voters.
While the Conservative leadership supported the Iraq war, many ordinary Tories did not. Boris Johnson, a Tory member of Parliament who is also editor of Black's weekly magazine The Spectator, has said that a majority of members of the party committee in his constituency were opposed to the war, and another Tory legislator says privately that his party members were two-to-one against.
The truth is that the zealous brand of North American [Judeo]conservatism is quite at odds with traditional English Toryism, which is stolid, pragmatic, skeptical and profoundly nonideological. That could explain why the British indeed don't understand "the American way" as interpreted by Washington - and why they increasingly resent Blair's policy of following the American lead at all times. Along with the nostrums of Lord Black's coterie, this may yet prove to be a transient episode in British political and journalistic history.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include "The Controversy of Zion" and "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France."
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