Joe Sobran -- 1946-2010 RIP

[Cowlesy]

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2010/09/30/joseph-sobran-1946-2010/

Joseph Sobran, 1946-2010
Posted on September 30th, 2010 by Daniel McCarthy

The 20th century produced many great conservative writers, but none brought together wit, erudition, and humanity on a single page so well as Joseph Sobran. He was a remarkable man: even seeming quite frail at a gathering in his honor last December, he had a mind as accurate as precision clockwork, able to recall Shakespearean verses he had memorized decades earlier. He lived T.S. Eliot’s dictum that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes, and he hated cant and injustice. News of his death today is a terrible shock, despite his long illness. He will be missed.

 

[Cowlesy]

My favorite Sobran article.

http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml

 

[Sola_Fide]

Wow.


Much respect to Sobran.

 

[BuddyRey]

"Since outright slavery has been discredited, democracy is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept. Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves." - Joseph Sobran

He seemed to have a lot on the ball. Rest in peace, Mr. Sobran!

 

[Anti Federalist]

Joe Sobran dead at 64. RIP

Joseph Sobran, RIP

Posted by Lew Rockwell on September 30, 2010 07:38 PM

The great American writer Joe Sobran died today in Arlington, Virginia, from complications of diabetes. He was just 64. There is much more to say about this extraordinary man, but for now I just want to mention his sacrificing his lucrative career at National Review on the altar of truth. When Joe opposed the first US war on Iraq, ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley first ordered him to submit to the warfare state, and when he wouldn’t, fired him, even calling Joe an anti-Semite. But unlike Buckley and the other neocons who attacked him, Joe was no hater. He simply loved the Prince of Peace. Requiescat in pace.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Thanks for the merge.

Sad news.

 

[LibertyEagle]

Joseph Sobran, RIP

Posted by Lew Rockwell on September 30, 2010 07:38 PM

The great American writer Joe Sobran died today in Arlington, Virginia, from complications of diabetes. He was just 64. There is much more to say about this extraordinary man, but for now I just want to mention his sacrificing his lucrative career at National Review on the altar of truth. When Joe opposed the first US war on Iraq, ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley first ordered him to submit to the warfare state, and when he wouldn’t, fired him, even calling Joe an anti-Semite. But unlike Buckley and the other neocons who attacked him, Joe was no hater. He simply loved the Prince of Peace. Requiescat in pace.

Yeah well, he was better than I am. I hope Buckley is burning in HELL.

Joseph Sobran was a patriot.

 

[Sola_Fide]

I have been reading Joe Sobran since college. He was one of those Christian libertarians that I really looked up to and help shape my worldview.

 

[TheTyke]

Most unfortunate....

 

[Sola_Fide]

Through much of his career, Sobran identified as a paleoconservative and supported strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. In 2002 Sobran announced his philosophical and political shift to libertarianism ( paleolibertarian anarcho- capitalism) citing inspiration by theorists Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.[ 8] He has He has referred to himself as a "theo-anarchist."[ 9] Sobran said Catholic teachings are consistent with his opposition to abortion and the Iraq War. He also argued that the 9/11 attacks were a result of the U.S. government's policies regarding the Middle East. He claimed those policies are formed by the"Jewish-Zionist powers that be in the United States."[ 10] States."

He was a visionary.

 

[Pericles]

We will miss his well reasoned and eloquently expressed prose.

 

[Kýrie eléison]

Requiescat in pace.

 

[Cowlesy]

Saw Jack Hunter posted this remembrance.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/248437/joe-sobran-rip-jack-fowler

 

[Lucille]

Check out how the First Things editor "honored" Sobran:

Joseph Sobran, 1946–2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010, 10:59 PM
Joseph Bottum

Joe Sobran has slipped away, dying at age sixty-four. What can one say? He was a polymath, a genius, and a sometimes brilliant writer of enormous speed and fluidity. And he drove himself nearly mad, embracing conspiracy theories and the crankiest of ways to reject consensus—from the authorship of Shakespeare’s works on down.

His life was filled with unhappy incidents, which may have what pushed him to the battles he constantly forced on his friends, but he remained constant in his faith.

May he be taken home to God, where all those battles cease and every tear is wiped away.

Lovely. You stay klassy, Bottum. (The comments are worth perusing. My RT.)

Christians in this country have a lot of soul-searching to do over their unqualified support of preemptive, perpetual war.

 

[Sola_Fide]

Check out how the First Things editor "honored" Sobran:



Lovely. You stay klassy, Bottum. (The comments are worth perusing. My RT.)

Christians in this country have a lot of soul-searching to do over their unqualified support of preemptive, perpetual war.

+10000000000000000


Totally agree. Isn't it interesting that the people who are opposed to tyranny and violence are the first ones to be labeled "kooks"?

Anyway, you are right...Christians better start pouring over their libertarian forbears and see that Statism is evil. Christians used to be the true anarchists and the true opposition to tyranny in this country...now look at us. We have been co-opted by the State....

 

[Lucille]

+10000000000000000


Totally agree. Isn't it interesting that the people who are opposed to tyranny and violence are the first ones to be labeled "kooks"?

Anyway, you are right...Christians better start pouring over their libertarian forbears and see that Statism is evil. Christians used to be the true anarchists and the true opposition to tyranny in this country...now look at us. We have been co-opted by the State....

So true. I've said before that during his tenure, GWB led more Christians astray than the devil himself.

Also, I should have included torture.

 

[Cowlesy]

Check out how the First Things editor "honored" Sobran:



Lovely. You stay klassy, Bottum. (The comments are worth perusing. My RT.)

Christians in this country have a lot of soul-searching to do over their unqualified support of preemptive, perpetual war.

They really already are dancing on his grave and his body isn't even cold yet.

 

[Sola_Fide]

My favorite Sobran article.

http://www.sobran.com/reluctant.shtml

...

My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations.

In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label “anarcho-capitalists” — and even met Rothbard himself. They were a brilliant, combative lot, full of challenging ideas and surprising arguments. Rothbard himself combined a profound theoretical intelligence with a deep knowledge of history. His magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, had received the most unqualified praise of the usually reserved Henry Hazlitt — in National Review!

Murray’s view of politics was shockingly blunt: the state was nothing but a criminal gang writ large. Much as I agreed with him in general, and fascinating though I found his arguments, I resisted this conclusion. I still wanted to believe in constitutional government.

Murray would have none of this. He insisted that the Philadelphia convention at which the Constitution had been drafted was nothing but a “coup d’etat,” centralizing power and destroying the far more tolerable arrangements of the Articles of Confederation. This was a direct denial of everything I’d been taught. I’d never heard anyone suggest that the Articles had been preferable to the Constitution! But Murray didn’t care what anyone thought — or what everyone thought. (He’d been too radical for Ayn Rand.)

For most people, anarchy is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism — things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term state, despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible right to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what legitimacy means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.

“But what would you replace the state with?” The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”

Christians, and especially Americans, have long been misled about all this by their good fortune. Since the conversion of Rome, most Western rulers have been more or less inhibited by Christian morality (though, often enough, not so’s you’d notice), and even warfare became somewhat civilized for centuries; and this has bred the assumption that the state isn’t necessarily an evil at all. But as that morality loses its cultural grip, as it is rapidly doing, this confusion will dissipate. More and more we can expect the state to show its nature nakedly.

For me this is anything but a happy conclusion. I miss the serenity of believing I lived under a good government, wisely designed and benevolent in its operation. But, as St. Paul says, there comes a time to put away childish things.

 

[Thurston Howell III]

How Tyranny Came to America

Joseph Sobran altered, forever, the way I look at government and the Constitution:

http://www.sobran.com/articles/tyranny.shtml

 

[Cowlesy]

http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/953-john-f-mcmanus/4762-the-passing-of-joseph-sobran

John McManus's thoughts.

The Passing of Joseph Sobran | Print | E-mail
Written by John F. McManus
Friday, 01 October 2010 12:19
0A more elegant wielder of the pen than Joe Sobran was always hard to find. After devouring something he had written, most of his readers would summarize, “How nicely that was phrased,” or “I wish I could write like that.”
M. Joseph Sobran, Jr. passed away peacefully at age 64 on September 30th. The diabetes he had fought for many years won out. Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on February 23, 1946, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Eastern Michigan University where he specialized in Shakespearean studies and later taught English and lectured on Shakespeare. Always a great lover of the bard’s works (he could recite from memory many passages from the plays and sonnets), he later wrote Alias Shakespeare: Solving the Greatest Literary Mystery of All Time in which he claimed that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real Shakespeare.

While busy with graduate work at Eastern Michigan in 1971, Joe attracted the attention of William F. Buckley, Jr., as a result of a letter he’d written to the school newspaper defending the National Review editor’s campus speaking appearance. Buckley saw the letter, invited Joe to New York for an interview, and hired him in 1972. There began 21 years of close association with the man many still consider conservatism’s intellectual leader. That the relationship of the two friends and colleagues ended contentiously has to be considered a defining moment in Sobran’s career.

In addition to his regular contributions to National Review, Joe wrote columns syndicated nationally by Universal Press Syndicate. His thoughts appeared regularly in Chronicles and Catholic Family News. Many will recall hearing some of his radio commentaries on the CBS “Spectrum” series. In later years, his columns were published monthly in the Sobran’s newsletter. Always a Catholic, he was a regular columnist for many years in The Wanderer, a Catholic newsweekly. Joe also wrote for The New American, the magazine affiliated with The John Birch Society.

Other than his book about Shakespeare’s identity, Joe authored Single Issues: Essays on the Crucial Social Questions (Human Life Press, 1983) and Hustler: The Clinton Legacy (Griffin Communications, 2000). Many of his articles and speech texts appeared in The Church Today: Less Catholic Than the Pope? (1979), Power and Betrayal (1998), and Anything Called a Program is Unconstitutional (2001). His last major writing effort, never completed, was a book about Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and its relation to the United States Constitution.

After years of being William Buckley’s valued associate and close friend, Joe’s fallout with his boss started in the mid-1980s when he questioned the Reagan-authorized attack on Libya, an incident roundly championed by National Review. The gulf between the two grew when Joe criticized the New York Times and the leaders of Israel for downplaying the harm done by Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. intelligence specialist sent to prison after pleading guilty in 1985 to spying for Israel. Joe didn’t realize it at the time, but Buckley had become extremely friendly with the pro-Israel New Yorkers who published the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine. Leading promoters of socialist and internationalist neoconservatism, Commentary’s leaders were also members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the world-government-promoting group Buckley had joyously affiliated with as far back as 1974.

Then, in the December 30, 1991 issue of National Review, Buckley wrote a five-part essay entitled In Search of Anti-Semitism that featured attacks on Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan, and several others. Never explicitly aiming the actual charge at any of his subjects, Buckley cleverly stated that it had become increasingly difficult to defend them from the suspicion that it was merited. For many, the mention of a man’s name in an article about anti-Semitism constituted sufficient proof that the he was guilty of harboring the odious view. What Buckley had done proved harmful to Joe down the road.

Even more, Sobran’s consistent objections to George H. W. Bush’s building of an imperial presidency rankled his former friend. The matter came to a head when Sobran opposed the Bush-initiated 1990 plan to attack Iraq known as Desert Storm (later to become Desert Shield). Joe entitled his disagreement with Buckley, “Why National Review is Wrong.” The magazine had claimed that America absolutely had to send forces into Iraq to protect three vital interests: oil, peace and stability, and allies. Sobran responded:

Arab oil? We don’t need it. “Peace and stability”? Nobody in the Gulf region threatens us. “Allies”? Such as — Turkey! Oh, brother.

Joe also saw a grand design behind the plans for war that President Bush (the elder) kept stating had to be waged in order because it would lead to the “new world order” and enhanced power for the United Nations. Joe advised, “Let’s just remind ourselves that war always results in a bigger, stronger, more consolidated state.” After the January 1991 invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, he stated his inability to fathom the logic that said “you may oppose a bad war only until it begins.” And he added that President Bush was “the sort of politician our Founding Fathers were trying to prevent.” An increasingly perturbed Buckley later revealed, after these comments from Sobran, he composed a letter asking Joe to resign but never sent it.

The final break with Buckley did come when Joe, in a very revealing and unflattering portrayal of his boss, responded to the change that he was a latent anti-Semite in a column in The Wanderer. Buckley suggested in his defense published in the next issue of the newsweekly that Joe might even have “medical” problems. A few days later, Joe was fired in a way that amounted to a final insult: the deed was carried out not by Buckley but by his anointed successor, John O’Sullivan. Joe subsequently observed that “being fired isn’t nearly as bad as being betrayed.”

More at the link here...