The ugliness that is Justin Raimondo

I recently took Stephen Schwartz lightly to task for his antagonistic mischaracterization of Hunter S. Thompson as a writer. But now Schwartz, who is a very important writer on radical Islam, more than redeems himself with a dead-on profile of Justin Raimondo. Schwartz captures Raimondo as both person and type, and neither is pretty. That Pat Buchanan has anything to do at all with Raimondo suggests things about Pat that I don't even want to think about. A sample from Schwartz's take-down of Raimondo:

Posing as a war-hater, Raimondo defends murderous dictators like Milosevic, who unleashed the only wars in Europe over the past half century. He presents the Ba’athist party-states in Iraq and Syria as victims of the malicious West and openly wished that Japan had won the Second World War, while fiercely alleging his patriotic motivations. When it comes to America’s present wars, he revels in a repellent defeatism. The heinous attacks on America on 9/11 become for him an explanation of American “fascism.”

Taking a leaf from his comic-book canon of political wisdom, Raimondo describes fascism as a product of “the traumatic humbling of a power once considered mighty.” He cites Germany defeated in the First World War, while ignoring that Italy, where fascism originated, was a victor in that war, as was the third Axis power, Japan. Perhaps this omission can be ascribed to the fact that Raimondo idolizes Japan, which was at the height of its power when it attacked Pearl Harbor. As he wrote so eloquently, in an article titled. “Hiroshima Mon Amour: Why Americans Are Barbarians,” posted to his site on August 8, 2001, “the idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled.” By contrast, imperialist Japan, which slaughtered millions in East Asia, is his idea of paradise. He believes “the wrong side won the war in the Pacific.” It is, by the way, extremely doubtful that Raimondo has ever set foot on Japanese soil.