Fun_People Archive
27 Feb
QsOTD - Buchanan's Bigotry

Date: Tue, 27 Feb 96 00:38:56 -0800
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: QsOTD - Buchanan's Bigotry

From: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting <fair@igc.apc.org>

FAIR Report:
PATRICK BUCHANAN -- IN HIS OWN WORDS
February 26, 1996                           Contact: Steven Rendall

In the flap over Larry Pratt and other unsavory characters
associated with the Patrick Buchanan campaign, journalists
typically framed the question: Is Buchanan linked to extremists and
bigots?  But there is a more basic question journalists should ask:
Is Patrick Buchanan himself an extremist and bigot?

Here is a sampling of Buchanan's views:

ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS

After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a
Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was "putting on
an act" by associating the Confederacy with slavery: "The War
Between the States was about independence, about self-
determination, about the right of a people to break free of a
government to which they could no longer give allegiance," Buchanan
asserted.  "How long is this endless groveling before every cry of
'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively
throws up?" (syndicated column, 7/28/93)

On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no
politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The
'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants,
bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."
(Right from the Beginning, Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, p. 131)

Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court
decision of the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin
Luther King Jr. as his own editorials in the St. Louis Globe
Democrat in the mid-1960s. "We were among Hoover's conduits to the
American people," he boasted (Right from the Beginning, p. 283).

White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969
memo not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of
Martin Luther King's assassination, warning that a visit would
"outrage many, many people who believe Dr. King was a fraud and a
demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others consider him the Devil
incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary
history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)

In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration
of blacks and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is
less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual
friction, as the incapable are placed consciously by government
side by side with the capable." (Washington Post, 1/5/92)

In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate
grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time,
on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up
with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to
the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the
blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school
system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)

Buchanan has repeatedly insisted that President Reagan did so much
for African-Americans that civil rights groups have no reason to
exist: "George Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that
black America has grown up; that the NAACP should close up shop,
that its members should go home and reflect on JFK's admonition:
'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask what you
can do for your country.'" (syndicated column, 7/26/88)

In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided
the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi
"costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues
and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such
as] reverse discrimination against white folks." (syndicated
column, 2/25/89)

Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the
notion that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong.
Where did we get that idea?  The Founding Fathers did not believe
this." (syndicated column, 2/7/90) He referred admiringly to the
apartheid regime as the "Boer Republic": "Why are Americans
collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?"
(syndicated column, 9/17/89)

ON IMMIGRANTS AND PEOPLE OF COLOR:

"There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue
that we are a European country." (Newsday, 11/15/92)

Buchanan on affirmative action: "How, then, can the feds justify
favoring sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought
in World War II or Vietnam?" (syndicated column, 1/23/95)

In a September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
described multiculturalism as "an across-the-board assault on our
Anglo-American heritage."

"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year,
or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be
easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people
of Virginia?" ("This Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91)

ON JEWS:

Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory."
(St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)

During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating
the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense
ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States." ("McLaughlin
Group," 8/26/90)

In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic
and genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great
courage...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts
alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the
character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in
the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path." (The Guardian,
1/14/92)

Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the
historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by
diesel exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough
carbon monoxide to kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90)
Buchanan's columns have run in the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the
German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that
claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.

Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of
Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals,
because it was "running down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York
Times, 4/21/87)

Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite
protests -- to visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS
troops were buried.  At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly
reminded Jewish leaders that they were "Americans first" -- and
repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to the pressure of the
Jews" in his notebook.  Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald
Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were "victims
just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." (New
York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)

After Cardinal O'Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the
controversy over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan
wrote: "If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the
Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is
mistaken. When Cardinal O'Connor of New York seeks to soothe the
always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him 'there are many
Catholics who are anti-Semitic'...he speaks for himself. Be not
afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and
priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith." (New
Republic, 10/22/90)

The Buchanan '96 campaign's World Wide Web site included an article
blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli
intelligence agency, Mossad -- and alleging that Foster and Hillary
Clinton were Mossad spies. (The campaign removed the article after
its existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish
Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)

In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
declared: "Our culture is superior.  Our culture is superior
because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that
makes men free." (ADL Report, 1994)

ON GAYS:

In a 1972 memo to Richard Nixon, Buchanan referred to one of George
McGovern's leading financial contributors as a "screaming fairy."
(Newsday, 2/8/89)  Buchanan has repeatedly used the term
"sodomites," and has referred to gays as "the pederast
proletariat." (Washington Post, 2/9/92)

"Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only
immoral, but filthy.  The reason public men rarely say aloud what
most say privately is they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by
an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence
and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle."
(syndicated column, 9/3/89)

In a 1977 column urging a "thrashing" of gay groups, Buchanan
wrote: "Homosexuality is not a civil right.  Its rise almost always
is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society
and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family." (New
Republic, 3/30/92)

"Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-
Christian morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that
all consensual sexual acts are morally equal.  That belief is anti-
biblical and amoral; to codify it into law is to codify a lie."
(Buchanan column in Wall Street Journal, 1/21/93)

On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have
declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful
retribution (AIDS)." (Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86)  Later that
year, he demanded that New York City Ed Koch and New York Gov.
Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or else "be held personally
responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague."  "With 80,000 dead
of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on
Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990 (syndicated column,
10/17/90).  In the 1992 campaign, he declared: "AIDS is nature's
retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times,
7/31/93)

ON WOMEN:

"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not
endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition
and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of
Western capitalism." (syndicated column, 11/22/83)

"The real liberators of American women were not the feminist
noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the
shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the
freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p. 149)

"If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to
every difficult marriage, that career comes before children
... no democratic government can impose another set of values
upon her." (Right from the Beginning, p. 341)

ON DEMOCRACY:

Attacking what he considers the "democratist temptation, the
worship of democracy as a form of governance," Buchanan commented:
"Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the
real, a love of process for a love of country." (Patrick J.
Buchanan: From the Right, newsletter, Spring/90)

In a January, 1991 column, Buchanan suggested that "quasi-
dictatorial rule" might be the solution to the problems of big
municipalities and the federal fiscal crisis: "If the people are
corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the government." (Washington
Times, 1/9/91)  He has written disparagingly of the "one man, one
vote Earl Warren system."

In Right from the Beginning, Buchanan refers to Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco as a "Catholic savior."  He called Franco, along
with Chile's Gen. Pinochet, "soldier-patriots."  (syndicated column
9/17/89) Both men overthrew democracy in their countries.

Buchanan devotes a chapter of his autobiography -- "As We Remember
Joe" -- to defending Senator Joe McCarthy. He advocated that Nixon
"burn the tapes" during Watergate, and he criticized Reagan for
failing to pardon Oliver North over Iran-contra.

Buchanan, shortly before he announced he was running for president
in 1995: "You just wait until 1996, then you'll see a real right-
wing tyrant." (The Nation, 6/26/95)

                                  ***

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© 1996 Peter Langston