I suppose you could call me a “right-wing extremist,” although I don’t consider myself an extremist by any stretch of the imagination. But that’s the way the liberals have labeled us, and since they control so much of the printed and electronic media we have no choice but to roll with their punches. I am an individualist as opposed to a collectivist. As a writer, I willingly spend a lot of time alone at my word-processor. In the old days, it was the typewriter. Today it is the much more accommodating word-processor. But in my case, individualism was the reason why I could work so well alone. I was by no means a loner, but I never minded being alone with my thoughts, or while writing, or reading a book, visiting a museum, or traveling to new cities. I’ve always had good friends, but I also enjoy my own company.
I spent seven years writing my book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy, The Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection. I had to read a lot of what others had written on the subject. I had to read all of Marlowe and all of Shakespeare. I probably could have earned a doctorate at some university on the basis of the research and writing I put into the project. Of course, I also had an economic motive in mind. I thought it would be an easy sell and earn me my retirement. That was a big mistake. It turned out to be a tough sell, so tough that when McFarland, a publisher of scholarly books in North Carolina, accepted it for publication without paying an advance, I was happy indeed.
How did I become a right-wing extremist? I was born in New York City and attended its public schools, which in my day were pretty decent. They taught everyone the basic academic skills in the traditional manner so that you learned to read, write, and calculate in a way that expanded your brain power and made you competent enough to enter the adult world and get a job. There was no attempt to indoctrinate you in anything but basic Americanism. The teachers respected your religion, your family values, and assumed that you had a soul. In fact, our principal recited the 23rd Psalm at every assembly which indeed acknowledged the existence of a higher power which most, if not all, of us believed in.
We were all aware that we were Americans, even though most of us came from immigrant families. We were first generation Americans and had no interest in or connection with the countries our parents came from. But in the late thirties a new group of students entered our schools. These were Jewish teenagers from Germany who had escaped Hitler’s persecution. They had attended German schools and were very smart and adapted themselves very quickly to American ways. The most famous of them was Henry Kissinger.
In any case, we were all very much aware of world politics and what was happening in Europe. And when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, we feared the worst. My father and mother had left behind large families in Poland, and my father tried to bring to the U.S. a brother who had migrated to Essen, Germany, with his wife and daughter. But they were expelled from Germany and returned to Poland. They were all doomed.
But all of that was in a world my parents were fortunate enough to have left behind. I was an American, in love with my country and its history, in love with the great city of New York with its majestic skyscrapers and museums and theaters. I revered George Washington as my true spiritual godfather. His picture had hung in our classrooms. He was the father of this great country and I was fortunate enough to have been born in its greatest city.
My parents had come from Poland in the 1920s and brought nothing of value from the old country. And since they had no special connections in America, I and my brothers and sisters were on our own. But I believe I had as strong a connection to my country as anyone descended from those who came to these shores on the Mayflower. Indeed, I was very patriotic, and that was probably why I eventually became a conservative or right-wing extremist.
From Stuyvesant High School I enlisted in the Army to take advantage of the ASTP, the Army Special Training Program. As a result I was sent to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), my first encounter with America beyond the environs of Metropolitan New York. As a VMI cadet, along with a group from New York, I lived the life of the cadet for one term, but we wore army uniforms. One of my classmates was the future Mel Brooks. At that time he was already interested in show biz and took part in a show put on for the benefit of the cadets. However, I was not a whiz at math and physics, and at the end of the term took regular basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after which I was assigned to an artillery unit at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The army expanded my horizons geographically and intellectually. I got to know Americans from all over the country, of all religions. It was a great experience. My outfit was sent to Italy to take part in the closing days of the war. In the eighteen months there, I got to know Italy quite well. It was also after the end of the war when we began to learn what the Germans had done to the Jews of Europe.
After discharge I enrolled in the City College of New York where I majored in English. Perhaps I should have gone to Columbia, or New York University, or even Harvard. But I had no one to advise me one way or another. My father had had a very limited education in Poland as a child, and my mother was completely illiterate. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my years at CCNY, made some lifelong friends and had some great professors. One of my professors was Hans Kohn, a German refugee, who lectured us about the need for “legal security,” which the German Jews didn’t have. The German state had been able to disenfranchise its Jewish population — its most productive, law-abiding, and intelligent citizens — take their property, their wealth, and then murder them. Our American Constitution provided Americans with the “legal security” the professor talked about. His lectures also turned me into an anti-statist, for only the State, governed by evil men, could organize the extermination of its own citizens.
Socialism provides no legal security. It gives the state unlimited power to do whatever the governing class wants done. That is why so many Americans now fear that the government will confiscate their wealth since Obama’s call for a redistribution of the wealth means exactly that. Hitler’s Germany passed laws making it legal to disenfranchise its Jewish citizens.
Today’s question is: Can American conservatives prevent a socialist regime in Washington from confiscating the wealth of the hated rich, especially when the regime is waging its class warfare?
Do Americans any longer have legal security, or are we now subject to the whims of our socialist leaders in Washington? When Nancy Pelosi was asked by a conservative reporter if Obamacare was constitutional, her answer was “Are you kidding?” In other words, who cares whether socialized medicine is constitutional or not? The Constitution has nothing to do with it. It’s the rule of the socialist Democrat majority that counts.
And that is why I want to see in Washington as small a government as possible, a government that lives within the bounds of the Constitution, which guarantees “legal security” for all. I would like to see a conservative administration that will reduce the federal government to what it was during the Coolidge administration, minus the income tax and Federal Reserve System enacted during Wilson’s left-wing regime. Am I an extremist by wanting a government in Washington incapable of harming the American people, a government incapable of depriving Americans of their God-given unalienable rights? It’s important to remember that Germany was one of the most civilized and cultured nations in the world, and that it only took a few years to descend into barbarism, in which the state itself became a mass murderer. Who would have thought that this could happen in the land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms?
There are evil forces in America who would like to turn this country into a new form of 21st century barbarism. Even though I and many of my fellow conservatives and right-wing extremists have fought with all in our power to prevent this from happening, we are at a loss to fully understand how it is happening. How could such a discredited and failed 19th century political and economic ideology suddenly assume power in Washington? Our politicians have betrayed us. And if the American people still have any common sense left in their benumbed brains, they will clean house in November 2012.
