Gore Vidal: Don’t believe the rosy obituaries — he was a racist and an elitist.

[salvorhardin]

The Heartland conservatism that became these men’s philosophy—and Gore Vidal, we should recall, described himself as a conservative—aimed to insulate America from the corrupting cosmopolitan influences of Europe and beyond. Its most vile exponents, such as the Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, opposed World War II on the grounds that Hitler’s war was none of America’s concern. Others followed the spirit of Jefferson’s famous warning to avoid “entangling alliances.” Some, notably Lindbergh, blamed American Jews for railroading the nation into war. Others saw dark conspiracies in Pearl Harbor, which they said was Roosevelt’s connivance, foisted on a peace-loving nation.

Vidal himself espoused both of these views. In an interview with Bob Edwards several years ago, he sputtered that Philip Roth, whose Plot Against America describes a dystopian wartime United States under a President Lindbergh, was unfair to the isolationist aviator. Later, in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere, he effectively laid blame for Pearl Harbor at Roosevelt’s feet.

In the demonology of Vidal and his not-so-progressive Progressive forbears, Jews in particular loomed large. Vidal’s anti-Semitic rants frequently insinuated that Jews were un-American, more loyal to Israel than the United States. The most notorious of these pieces, “The Empire Lovers Strike Back,” ran in the The Nation on March 22, 1986, and achieved what many would have thought impossible: arousing sympathy for Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. It was the kind of piece that should give pause to those who ritually deny that anti-Zionism is rooted in anti-Semitism; it should be read in full. Describing the Podhoretzs as propagandists for Israel (“in its never-ending wars against just about everyone … a predatory people”), he cast Podhoretz, who was born in the United States, as someone who would never become “an ‘assimilated American,’ to use the old-fashioned terminology.” Addressing Decter, he declared, “I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.”

But Jews were hardly the only target of Vidal’s ire. The same piece in The Nation that slandered the first couple of neoconservatism included an astonishing pair of sentences about what Vidal, again channeling Henry or Brooks Adams, saw as the decline of the West. “For America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity,” he wrote. “After all, the white race is the minority race and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don't band together, we are going to end up as farmers—or, worse, mere entertainment—for more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.” The sheer number of racist assumptions of that statement, from the notion of a white “race” that would survive only through an exclusive solidarity to the crude stereotype of Asian hypercompetence, renders implausible any effort to explain it away as irony.

Full article: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history_lesson/2012/08/gore_vidal_don_t_believe_the_rosy_obituaries_he_was_a_racist_and_an_elitist_.single.html

[Behind the Aegis]

1. Hidden history.

[salvorhardin]

2. I don't know enough about Gore Vidal's work...

I don't know enough about Gore Vidal's work to know if the charges of anti-semitism are accurate or just cherry-picking. I'm not sure we should be surprised at a white man of Vidal's age and class having unsavory views though. It sort of came with the whole patrician package. But yes, it's good to consider to the whole man and not just the hagiographies.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. I was a bit cryptic with saying "hidden history."

What I meant was there was much more to him than most people know. The charges of anti-Semitism are quite legit and long standing. As I recall, it doesn't really make an appearance in his works though, for the most part. There are some that lionize him and know little about him, that's what I meant by "hidden history." (I was downstairs on the laptop and hate typing on it, so I am usually very short-winded, unlike normal.)