printAt View from the Right, Lawrence Auster observes that “Patrick Buchanan comes out 100 percent against the European papers that published the cartoons of Muhammad, seeing the act as an anti-religious provocation by secular modernists.” Auster notes that Buchanan’s piece was published by “the anarchist libertarian website lewrockwell.com.”
This is not to say that the website endorses Buchanan’s view, but it’s important to note that lewrockwell.com is highly selective about content, usually posting perspectives—and people—that comport with its mission. “Patrick J. Buchanan on tweaking the Muslims” is how the column was billed on the site, clearly saddling the “tweakers” with the blame.
Libertarians are supposed to be committed to absolute freedom of speech on private property: newspapers. In fact, some libertarians will even defend speech that incites murder, which is a far more congruent position than countenancing the aggressive, murderous, uncivilized assailants of innocent Danes.
Auster, who obviously doesn’t expect much from libertarians, told me he thinks the incongruity is a further example of a phenomenon he’s long noted on the activist Left: “the various left factions—feminists, blacks, labor, homosexualists—will quickly give up their supposed ideals for some other, overriding purpose that they all have in common. What is that overriding purpose? The destruction of the West. Once people are motivated primarily by resentment and hate, all the positions are only taken because they advance that agenda of resentment.”
If this is true, it must be occurring on a subconscious, cock-a-snook-at-the-Empire level, since libertarians who find Buchanan’s piece valid can’t have thought through what the West’s dhimitude would mean to their endeavor. (Do libertarian homosexuals for Islam believe they’ll be spared a stoning?) Yet Auster has a point: these particular libertarians do invariably come out on the side of the Noble Savage, however savage his actions. Since condemning the invasion of Iraq doesn’t preclude castigating Muslim reaction to the cartoons, I’m not sure how to explain their unvarying, single-minded commitment to The Barbarians.