In search of anti-semitism: what Christians provoke what Jews? Why? By doing what? - And vice versa

I faced the problem that a half-dozen respectable names from the conservative movement were still associated with the Mercury, as "consultants" or "contributing editors," and that some of those names appeared also on the masthead of NATIONAL REVIEW. After reading a particularly blatant issue of the Mercury (this was about 1958), I thought the time had come to act decisively, and accordingly addressed a note to the writers on the masthead Of NATIONAL REVIEW and told them that those of them who were also on the masthead of the Mercury would need to choose from which masthead to retire. In almost all cases (there was only one exception), they stayed with us.

Two or three years later, the Mercury was mortally stricken with advanced nativism. For a while, the wild General Edwin Walker, who had been dismissed from his command in Europe for verbal irresponsibility, was made its editor. General Walker was supremely illiterate, which under the circumstances was a blessing. Some will remember that Lee Harvey Oswald, practicing for his big day on Dealey Plaza, aimed his rifle at General Walker one night, firing through a windowpane. (On that occasion, ironically, he missed.)

How Does One Block Anti-Semitism?

FORTY-FIVE YEARS after the death of Hitler, the penal code of Germany still forbids the advocacy of Nazi ideas, but not the distribution of Nazi literature, which presumably survives in Germany in the same sense that toxic cultures survive in laboratories. My understanding is that no serious observer of the German scene believes there is anything like a clear or remote danger of any serious rebirth of a Nazi movement, though there is concern, in my judgment primarily moral rather than political, over suppurations here and there of neo-Nazism. Probably (this is my guess, at any rate) the incidental wigwam of a Nazi witch doctor would be ignored by the German government, rather than being destroyed and its owner prosecuted. If so, this is defensible civic conduct, taken by responsible men and women who while aware of the hideousness of what happened yesterday-more accurately, the day before yesterday-are confident that there is no prospect of its happening again; or else that the threat of any such thing is so remote as to fail to justify the kind of proscriptive vigilance thought to be appropriate in 1945.

On the question whether an anti-Semite should be given a forum in respectable company, David Frum has highly developed opinions, which he ventilated in that American Spectator article (July 1991). About Pat Buchanan he summarizes: "His real message is inseparable from his sly Jew-baiting and his not-so-sly queerbashing, from his old record as a segregationist and his current maunderings about immigrants and the Japanese. And it's not a message that can be accommodated in any conservatism-big Government or Small-that seriously hopes to govern a great and diverse country; in fact, it's exactly the kind of message that William F. Buckley thought he had purged from American conservatism back in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he chased Gerald L. K. Smith and the John Birchers away from NATIONAL REVIEW."