historiblogography

that nostalgic yearning for the strong hand

As the Soviet Union mercifully collapsed and passed from the earth, the Washington Post reporter David Remnick met a woman who burned with resentment over the loss. Remnick, now the editor of the New Yorker, was invited to dinner with Kira Korniyenkova, a virulent Stalinist. He tells the story of that grim evening in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Lenin's Tomb. Korniyenkova knew in her heart that Stalin's purges had been a glorious idea:

"People who want to build a monument to the so-called victims of Stalin should think about that a little. It's not necessary to build a monument to people who were imprisoned. They had something to answer for. It's not necessary to build monuments for rich peasants who were purged. They should build monuments to the Communists. Traitors don't deserve monuments...I am for real order, an iron hand or some other kind of hand. I am for a situation in which people are answerable for their deeds."

Remnick encountered several Russians who shared Korniyenkova's nostalgia for the days when internal enemies were identified, flushed out, and dealt with unambiguously. Communists at communism's funeral, they held on to the nasty little dream: paranoid, urgently alarmed, seeing danger everywhere, and determined to see central authority take unapologetically tough action.

And so now we have Daniel Pipes, Middle East scholar and professional hysteric, who continually warns of the bloodthirsty American Muslims living among us (who must have launched an unbroken wave of thousands of attacks against Iowa and Ohio, judging by their numbers and Pipes' description of their enormous threat to the country).

In a December 28 column in the New York Sun*, Pipes praises another weak and panicky hysteric, Michelle Malkin, for being brave enough to argue that "Civil liberties are not sacrosanct." Malkin, like Pipes, insists that the United States is crawling with internal enemies -- aided by the coddling of our oversoft federal government. Malkin has called for a militarized border, a major increase in Border Patrol staffing, and the deployment of massive numbers of "interior enforcement agents" to protect the nation against illegal immigrants. This call for an enormous increase in the power of the central government as an armed presence in everyday life, it turns out, is a "conservative" view. (Perhaps in her next book Malkin will really prove her conservative credentials by calling on the government to quarter troops in private houses.)

Pipes, another putative "conservative," approves of it all, and in his recent column joins Malkin in recasting the truth about the internment of Japanese-American U.S. citizens during WWII. In some truly glorious language, Pipes even notes that the camps were "for the most part administered humanely." Yearning for the great old days when the central government didn't let lilly-livered notions of legality and humanity stand in the way of firmness, Pipes approvingly notes Malkin's conclusions, agreeing all the way:

"She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies..."

So. I've said this before, and I'll say it again and again:

These people are not "conservatives."

Call them "authoritarians," if you'd like, or the appropriate but overplayed "fascists." Me, I'm sticking with my old favorite. Malkin calls, in her book, for Muslim-American "disloyalty" trials, the suspension of those non-sacrosanct civil liberties, and the unrestrained purging of apparently ubiquitous internal enemies; she is now joined by Daniel Pipes in expressing warm admiration for the days when the central government threw its citizens into internment camps by the box lot. These, ladies and gentlemen, are Stalinists. Kira Korniyenkova would know them by their ideas, and respect them as comrades.

Mercilessly crush and defeat the enemy within! We must be Stakhonovites for the anti-Muslim cause! (It's not necessary to build a monument to people who were imprisoned. They had something to answer for.)

No wonder David Horowitz is so comfortable with this crowd.

(*Thanks to Eric Muller for his post on the Pipes column, which brought it to my attention. Do click on that link and read Muller's post; he nails Pipes for what appears to be a serious act of dishonesty.)

posted by Chris Bray @ 1:28 AM