The Great Joe Sobran
Joe Sobran was one of my greatest friends, and I often thought about him over this past week, because February 23 was the anniversary of his death. He was a man of courage and of the utmost integrity. He began writing about politics for National Review, but he broke with the editor, CIA agent William F. Buckley, Jr., over his refusal to support Israel. Additionally, his own penetrating intellect had led him to find attractive the thought of Murray Rothbard, and this too Buckley could not abide, as he hated Rothbard, a hatred that even Rothbard’s death did not end.
Because Buckley could not stomach Sobran’s dissent, he launched a smear campaign against him. He called Joe an “anti-Semite” because of his anti-Zionist views. Of course that is ridiculous. Anyone who knew Joe would realize that he was a kind person, with good will for all people, regardless of their ethnic background. As I mentioned, he admired Rothbard, and after his break with Buckley, he and Murray became fast friends. Among his other Jewish friends were Dr. Israel Shahak and the great opponent of Zionism Alfred Lilienthal, Jr. The obvious fatuity of the smear, unfortunately, did not lessen its effectiveness.
Joe was one of the finest prose stylists of his generation, and you can see this in his brilliant evisceration of Buckley: “In my 21 years at National Review, I had a front-row seat. I watched closely as Bill Buckley changed from a jaunty critic of Israel to what I can only call a servile appeaser. In its early days, the magazine published robust editorials blasting politicians who sacrificed American to Israeli interests in order to pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it was considered risqué to suggest that there was a ‘Jewish vote.’ Today Bill’s magazine supports Israel with embarrassing sycophancy, never daring to intimate that Israeli and American interests may occasionally diverge. It has forgotten its own principles; today it would never dare to publish the editorials written by its great geopolitical thinker of those early days, James Burnham.”
After he became a Rothbardian, he expounded Rothbard’s thought and the thought of his great follower Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in a way that has much to teach us. As he wrote: “In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label ‘anarcho-capitalists’ — and even me
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
