CounterPunch Gives Platform to White Nationalism

March 17, 2009 by Eric Ward
Filed under: Politics 
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I’ve argued publicly that the issue of immigration would someday reconfigure political movements in the United States. It is already becoming apparent that segments of the political left in cynicism and desperation are stumbling onto the twisted road of white nationalism. What remains to be seen is if they have the political will to find their way home again.

Sadly one of the greatest political newsletters and websites of our time CounterPunch seems to be caught in this web and unwilling to save itself or its reputation. Counterpunch, a bi-weekly newsletter with a web edition, is rightfully part of the historic tradition of muckraking journalism that takes to task both the Republican and Democratic parties.

While I celebrate CounterPunch for uncovering hypocrisy that exists in society and offering solutions that would rather be ignored by mainstream media, it is time for CounterPunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair to do some self-reflection and ask themselves why they choose to give voice to a supporter of white nationalism.

The Center for New Community is reporting that CounterPunch continues to allow Paul Craig Roberts to write for its newsletter. While Paul Craig Roberts is listed simply as “Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Ronald Reagan administration” his biography is a little more disturbing. What CounterPunch irresponsibly fails to inform its readers of is that Paul Craig Roberts is part of the editorial collective of a website known as VDARE.

VDARE, named for Virginia Dare allegedly the “first white child born in America,” publishes the works of numerous white nationalists including Jared Taylor and the late Sam Francis. VDARE also features the anti-Semitic Kevin MacDonald a Long Beach, CA professor who accuses the Jewish community of conspiring to destroy the United States through immigration.

Joining Paul Craig Roberts on the editorial collective is Brenda Walker who wrote in a column on VDARE that Hmongs in America are “drug-addicted polygamists.” Another editorial collective member Steve Sailer argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that blacks rioted in New Orleans because of lower IQ scores.

Paul Craig Roberts’ bio stretches further into the world of white nationalism. His writings appear in Chronicles: The Magazine of American Culture. The magazine is tied closely to the racist League of the South. Besides articles appearing in the white nationalist magazine Chronicles, Roberts writings appear in the weekly newspaper American Free Press run by Willis Carto. Before the name American Free Press the newspaper was known as Spotlight and was the flagship newspaper of the white supremacist movement until the late 1990s.

Why is Roberts writing for a man who has founded or was active in over a dozen far right organizations and once said “If Satan himself, with all of his super-human genius and diabolical ingenuity at his command, had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”? More importantly why is CounterPunch allowing Roberts to write for them?

There is a shallow belief in segments of the left that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Sometimes however the enemy of your enemy is nothing more than a bigot. If anti-racism is a principle of the American left then Roberts is not our friend. It’s time for Cockburn and St. Clair to dump Roberts from CounterPunch.

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