Goldwater a peacenik? Are they fucking crazy, he called for nuking Vietnam:
In asking my friend about this, he provided the comment, atop the article from 1964, both of which are consistent with all that I’ve read, and experienced amongst Conservatives whom I’ve known. Chalmers Johnson, who we should be reading and not the 1950s - 1960s war fanatics, quotes Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in "The Sorrows of Empire,” on the 1st Anniversary of 9/11: “One of the astonishing events of recent months is the presentation of preventive war as a legitimate and moral instrument of U.S. foreign policy . . . . During the Cold War, advocates of preventive war were dismissed as loonies . . . .”
I shouldn’t need to name the names of the loonies who advocated “preventive war,” during the Cold War, but they’ve been named here, but in a very positive light, which in the early years of National Review, they were listed on the masthead, to especially be distinguished with those who had CIA employment on their resumes. As for Goldwater, Ike’s opinion of him is well documented as one of those “loonies,” and Ike probably said something similar to what my friend did. I will do additional research at the Eisenhower Library when I pass through Wichita in November.
But this gives a flavor of the “loonies’ opinion of Ike, and George Kennan, whom they also despised for his advocacy of “containment,” versus their preferred “rollback,” war, policy:
BLUF: "But the villains were not Soviet commissars or domestic Communists. Instead, Goldwater and Bozell trained their fire on liberals, including those who called themselves moderate Republicans. Targeting liberal wolves in gop sheep's clothing was a shift in the strategy of the Right as it directed political focus away from the McCarthyite witch-hunts and toward a political rhetoric that sought to exploit fissures in the postwar liberal consensus.”
Those “Liberals” would have included one-time members of this email list, particularly Bill Polk, who led the Adlai Stevenson Institute at one time, and whose ideas need to be defended here it seems, as Bill and his ideas are now obliquely attacked by Conservatives here, as are Chalmers Johnson’s, and Chas Freeman’s even in propounding Yoram Hazony’s extremist, Kahanist like ideas. Which should be to the shame of everyone who stays silent here while attacks are carried out in the Leo Strauss and his friend’s manner, by way of quoting ideas spewed out by some other odious character, like Rousseau, as speech for the person quoting them.
There is clearly a concerted campaign of “historical revisionism” within the Conservative ranks, out of such platforms as The American Conservative, and their Straussian brethren, of Hillsdale and Claremont, which even the most ignorant of “investigative journalists” would readily find. As that revisionism has been presented here too often, it calls for a rebuttal, which I attempt to offer, as someone needs to, lest authoritarian doctrines such as proposed by Rousseauist Rightists go unchallenged such as Originalism, even though they stand opposed to everything the Committee for the Republic professes to stand for. And the fact that the Democrats have so embraced ideas first put forward by the CIA founded “Conservative Movement” makes it more imperative to understand the “Origins” of these ideas, and the National Security ideology they were intended to create, and did. But look to Goldwater and the Conservative ideologists who spoke through him, Bozell, Jaffa, et al., as the “Founders."
Goldwater a peacenik? Are they fucking crazy, he called for nuking Vietnam: