Now What Should I Buy?

An email request for documentation sends me back to the NR Archives on National Review Online, which reminds me that I have a credit of eight articles in the National Review archives.

I have already bought such classics as George F. Will's declaration that the leading lights of the "new conservatism" are "Governor [Jerry] Brown of California... and... Daniel Patrick Moynihan... [all] splendid from National Review's point of view"; James Burnham's flat-out declaration that "Francisco Franco was this century's most successful ruler"; William F. Buckley's declarations that Franco was "an authentic national hero" and that "history will attest" that Franco "did save Spain in her greatest crisis"; Robert Moss's declaration that General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte and his colleagues were "pro-American"; Brent Bozell's claim that those being chased by dogs and sprayed by water cannon in Birmingham were "Negro rioters" engaged in "insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy... [so that a] class or part of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law"; Wilmoore Kendall's Straussian attack on Abraham Lincoln as a fascist tyrant; Wilmoore Kendall's declaration that "by no stretch of the imagination can the freedom-of-speech clause be construed as prohibiting society its use of... techniques for keeping itself non-open... by which society ultimately defends itself against the corruption of its orthodoxy"; the declaration by someone--"A.H.M."--who has never dared to reveal his identity that "Martin Luther King will never... keep a rabble awake, if it were past its bedtime"; Joseph McCarthy's review of Dean Acheson's books; Frank Meyer's declaration of Joe McCarthy that "His was not a common role... he was a prophet"; Brent Bozell's declaration that the sainted Joe McCarthy was "temperamentally incapable of bearing personal malice"; James Burnham's declaration that anti-McCarthyism was "the broadest and most successful" Communist front operation in this country; et cetera.

What else? Anybody have any other favorites I should add to my collection?

Comments

[John Emerson]

The Straussians now admire Lincoln because he fought a bloody war and suspended habeas corpus. Please update your database. (Probably the wiser, deeper Schmittian branch has gained power within the Straussian cult.)

Strauss was an anti-Nazi by accident of birth, as his letters to the Nazi-to-be Carl Schmitt show. The French thinker Strauss most wanted to meet when he fled Germany for France in 1932 was Charles Maurras, who came within an inch of being hanged as a Nazi collaborator.

[trotsky]

Jerry Brown, the "new conservative"? Whoa, is that posted somewhere?

[Miracle Max]

The "jig is up" editorial welcoming the political demise of Adam Clayton Powell.

[walkingtheline]

Why not buy yourself a refund?

[Carter]

National Review has declined so much it's easy to forget what a great magazine it once was. Thanks for reminding us. As for other articles from the NR archives worth reading try any written by Florence King.

[Nicholas Beaudrot]

Is it just not worth it to purchase various articles from the civil rights era, particularly William F. Buckley's articles opposing desegregation in 1956? Presumably there are others.

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/national_review.html

Or are we giving Buckley credit for admitting that opposing civil rights bills was an error?

[Roger Bigod]

Buckley suggestion to tattoo AIDS patients on the butt with a health warning. IIRC, it was in a column. Surely he put it in NR, since it's so characteristic of his wit and high spirits.

[LP Steve]

Are you looking only for articles that make NR seem racist and/or foolish? If not, try looking up Whittaker Chambers' review of "Atlas Shrugged." He more or less wrote Ayn Rand out of the conservative movement, for which she and her acolytes never forgave the magazine.

[Bruce Moomaw]

Don't, for the love of God, forget John Greenway's articles and book reviews from 1969-79 -- especially his imaugural 1969 piece "Will the Indians Get Whitey?", his 1970 piece on folk music (in which he referred to opposition to slavery as "etiolated puritanism"), and his Sept. 1976 review of Susan Sheehan's "A Welfare Mother" ("Mongrel dam of mongrel spawn, dropping children as a sow drops piglets...")

Also, don't forget some of W.H. Von Dreele's juicier explicitly white-racist poems -- especially his 1978 ones on Martin Luther King ("Why Not Honor Father Divine Too?") and Earl Warren ("He's up -- or down below -- too late --/Commanding THEM to 'INTEGRATE!' ")

[garhaneg]

I hate to see the name of Lincoln associated in any way at all with that disgusting moral reprobate and reactionary conspiracy formenting creep Strauss. Just look at the damage his corrupt and self destructive notions have worked on your country.