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Love and Treason table of contents
Neo-conservatism and Stephen Schwartz: the further adventures of an obituary writer
San Francisco, CA
May 1, 2003
My 1993 article, "Left Communism
or State Department Surrealism," exposed neo-conservative pundit Stephen
Schwartz as a chronic liar, opportunist and comically self-abasing buffoon.
Schwartz's recent ravings against conservative writer Justin Raimondo for posting
links to this article on his antiwar.com
web site indicate that my analysis of Schwartz is on target. The word is out
about what Steve Schwartz is all about, and Schwartz is in a panic about it;
his ability to function effectively as an ideological prostitute is being compromised.
I have never met Justin Raimondo. I don't agree with almost any aspect of his
politics, aside from his ardent opposition to recent acts of mass murder committed
by the United States government. Raimondo's posting of links to my article about
Schwartz doesn't imply any political connection between us, any more than my
citing an article from the New York Times would imply agreement with the editorial
opinions of the Times. Schwartz's attempt to link Raimondo and I, and somehow
mysteriously discredit Raimondo with this, is an example of the Stalinist amalgam
method, where all opponents are deceitfully compressed into a homogenous mass.
This is an example of a totalitarian mindset at work, and the use of this transparently
bogus tactic by Steve Schwartz proves that with the neo-conservative Schwartz
you can take an intellectual mediocrity out of the Stalinist milieu that spawned
him -- but you cannot take the Stalinist milieu out of the intellectual mediocrity.
A former obituary columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, author or co-author
of several undistinguished books, and practitioner of a soporific prose style,
Steve Schwartz continually reminds readers of The Weekly Standard and the National
Review that he was once an armchair leftist. He has managed to dine out on this
fact for almost 20 years, using his credentials as the former leading member
of a one-man Trotskyist organization to pursue a lucrative career as a cheerleader
for violence by the US government against civilians in Central America, Serbia
and Iraq.
The neo-conservative milieu is a strange and cynical scene, but few of its
militants have a personal history as bizarre as Steve Schwartz. Schwartz first
tried to call attention to himself in the punk rock subculture of San Francisco's
North Beach, way back at the end of the 1970's. In those days Schwartz, the
son of a pro-Moscow Stalinist bookseller, produced a self-proclaimed "ultra-left
communist" fanzine, The Alarm, and wrote in it under the names "Comrade Sandalio"
and "S. Solsona," attempting to surround himself with a dashing air of mystery
and adventure otherwise out of reach for an obnoxious loudmouth cafe habitué
who couldn't get dates with hot young punk rock chicks. One person who knew
him then, anarchist writer Bob Black, derided Schwartz as an "after-hours militant
with nothing to say in six languages." Another acquaintance, John Zerzan, has
said of Schwartz: "...he always struck me as a pretty ridiculous character.
He went from Stalinist to Trot to `Surrealist Trot' to what he called `very
close to classical anarchist,' and given his flakiness it didn't seem to matter
nor did it seem like it would surprise me whatever turn he would take. Now I
know this sounds like a claim to omniscience, but he always struck me as an
unstable case who could end up anywhere!...he made himself a joke by trying
to recruit San Francisco punks - who all laughed at him while spending his money..."
Reviled by bohemians when not altogether ignored by them, by 1983 "Comrade
Sandalio" was getting tired of making a nuisance of himself in bars and driving
a cab for a living. Then a new hope appeared on his horizon, when Schwartz met
someone gullible enough to offer him a job based on his superficial intellectual
merits. That person was a Yale graduate, advocate of up-by-their-bootstraps
ideology and trust fund beneficiary named A. Lawrence "Lawrie" Chickering. Chickering
headed a Reagan Administration-connected San Francisco-based think tank called
the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and the encounter between Schwartz and
Chickering was a true meeting of minds.
Schwartz read some of his wannabe-Surrealist poetry to Chickering, and Chickering
offered Schwartz a job as a senior editor at the Institute. Schwartz offered
to tell Chickering everything he knew about the Spanish Civil War, and Chickering
offered to introduce Schwartz to the leading personalities of the Israel Lobby.
For Schwartz, the world had changed, and he had now seen the light; he became
a passionate believer in government-assisted free market economic policies.
He stopped trying to sell kids in black leather jackets on the virtues of Leon
Trotsky and anarcho-syndicalism, and instead wrote editorials demanding increased
congressional funding for the Nicaraguan Contras. Chickering even allowed Schwartz
to visit the White House and shake hands with Oliver North.
The Institute for Contemporary Studies worked to create a favorable public
relations climate for US-backed counterinsurgency efforts in Central America
in the 1980's. They fought to defend the sacred right of private property, to
make this world a better place for the hacienda-owning class, and keep the infant
mortality rate in Nicaragua high enough to satisfy the publishers of the Wall
Street Journal. All this offered Steve Schwartz an opportunity to not merely
read about history, but take a small part in making it. Schwartz took to the
crusade as a hog to the wallow, even publicly indulging in a Walter-Mitty-style
fantasy when he bragged on KRON-4 TV in November 1987 about spying on opponents
of US policies in Central America, and feeding the information he'd uncovered
to the Feds. Schwartz is, of course, a pathological liar, so it's possible he
didn't really do this, and was just ass-licking his way into his employers'
continued good graces when he boasted about snitching on TV.
Schwartz's tenure with the ICS hinged on his ability to pontificate soulfully
and at stupefying length about the evils of Communism. But after the collapse
of the Soviet Union this extremely narrow field of specialization was no longer
in demand. Stalinism was historically spent, as dead as Pharaoh, and Schwartz's
ideological shelf-life was past its expiration date. His employers were probably
tired of Steve running around the ICS office hollering at the top of his voice
about the latest developments in the feud between Trotsky and Stalin, anyway,
so they unloaded him on the SF Chronicle. There he was assigned to toil on the
obituary page, a sarcastic tribute to Schwartz's earlier journalistic efforts
to keep the graveyards of Nicaragua plentifully supplied with the corpses of
impoverished peasants and wage workers.
The years rolled by, and after the Reagan-Bush foreign policy triumph in Central
America the former Yugoslavia became a focus of US national security concerns.
Growing weary of his sinecure at the Chron, and drawn once again to the smell
of human blood being shed in copious quantities, Steve Schwartz remade himself
as an "expert" on the Balkans. He simultaneously transformed his public persona,
growing a very long beard, sporting a skull-cap, converting to Islam, and changing
his name for the duration of US military action in the Balkans to Suleyman Ahmad
Stephen Schwartz. He even relocated to Sarajevo for some sordid reason, no doubt
savoring the new lease on life provided by going to a part of the world where
few knew him firsthand, or had seen what he is all about.
They probably found out soon enough. In less than two years "Suleyman Ahmad"
had scurried back to the US, losing his new Islamic-sounding brace of names
and moving to Washington DC in search of his next personality makeover. Today
the former "Suleyman Ahmad" pays his rent penning pompous pronunciamentos for
various neo-con journals. Back when Schwartz claimed to be an enemy of capitalism,
people as dissimilar as John Zerzan, Franklin Rosemont and the late Grandizo
Munis all ended up despising him; whatever you think about their politics they
are individuals with strong principles, and any one of them could smell a rat.
But among the neo-conservative set a porcine prostitute can always find a place
at the table! The intellectual and ethical standards of certain former Trots
and Stalinists are ultra-liberal when compared to those of housepainters, bass
players, and ultra-left Marxists in France. If the neo-cons are so hard up that
they must tolerate Schwartz in their ranks they will obviously tolerate anything.
Occasionally the former "Comrade Sandalio" lets his old sentiments show through,
as when he described the Spanish CNT as "... the anarcho-syndicalist mass movement
that was the greatest labor organization in history" in an article in the defrocked
Stalinist David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine.com
of April 29th. Posting his nostalgia for Spanish anarchism on a far-right website
is the political equivalent of Tourette's Syndrome and typical of his grotesque
cluelessness. Schwartz's vicarious identification with long-gone enemies of
bosses and capitalism is a comic non sequitur as well, since Schwartz himself
is a craven, servile, fawning employee, a toady and sycophant who will do anything
to grovel his way into jobs as a hack propagandist. Schwartz claims to admire
rebels like Durutti and Joe Hill, but Schwartz himself is a model of conformist
psychopathology. This brings me back to where I began. With Schwartz, as with
other ex-leftists slithering around the neo-conservative scene, you have an
example of a totalitarian personality, like that of a loyal apparatchik in the
Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but in the service of a different pack of killers;
an individual whose fundamental values are completely malleable, based solely
around the requirements of the men who hold power, and who makes his living
pedaling the big lie of the day.
Nietzsche called beings of this sort "men of ressentiment;" without Stalinism,
Schwartz and his fellow neo-cons are left without anything to not believe in.
A character like Schwartz has to go through life hiding behind a huge portrait
of Stalin, hoping all attention will be focused on the image of the tyrant and
no one will notice the foul smell coming from behind the picture.
It's been said that you become a better writer the longer you work at it, but
Schwartz's career contradicts this. A recent Schwartz rant, "Two Faces of Fascism?"
(FrontPageMagazine.com, April 23rd) is a good example of bad writing. Here the
former "Suleyman Ahmad" unsheathes his polemical scimitar to get revenge on
antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, takes an awfully long time to do it, and loses
his way in the process. When it becomes obvious that he knows nothing about
his subject he compensates by hurling discombobulated data at the reader, like
custard pies in a Three Stooges movie. His argument isn't organized in an even
minimally coherent manner, and apparently he thinks that since he takes himself
too seriously his readers will have to take him seriously, too. Schwartz has
now gone from being a graceless pedant with a flatulent bovine prose style to
being a drooling, gibbering, unintelligible pedant.
My guess is that Steve Schwartz's days as a paid liar for neo-conservative
publications may be drawing to a close. Neo-conservatives have nothing against
lying, of course, but a liar no one believes isn't useful and he will backfire
on his employers; he compromises the effectiveness of all the other lies they
must tell, and calls attention to the rottenness of their politics. Schwartz's
increasingly frantic response to critical examinations of his life and deeds
indicate that the news is getting around about Sleaze Schwartz. His credibility
is shot, and Schwartz's reputation for slimeball opportunism and clownish antics
clings to him like a phantom limb. How much longer will the prats at National
Review pay for his foamy effusions? Who else would be impressed with his sophomoric
erudition? It would be against his bosses' moral principles to allow an unemployable
Schwartz to go on welfare, so they should help him move on to something he is
suited for. They should get him a job as a reporter with FOX News.
My article from Anarchy magazine examining the specimen of repellent dark humor
that is Stephen Schwartz, "Left Communism or State Department Surrealism," is
available on line at:
FROM MUNIS TO MEESE: Left
Communism or State Department Surrealism?
And I also recommend readers check out the new article, "Between Iraq and a
hard place," on the internet, at:
http://war.linefeed.org
for the abolition of wage labor,
Kevin Keating
Additional reading
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