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03/20/2005 Archived Entry: "Antiwar.com to be sued for hyperlinking?"

I received the following note from Matt Barganier of antiwar.com -- one of my all-time favortie sites. Friends, Stephen Schwartz has threatened to sue Antiwar.com over hyperlinks before. Now he's at it again. While this is the sort of thing one might laugh off in a saner time and place, current realities demand that we nip this in the bud. Please help us spread the word about Schwartz's ridiculous legal thuggery: click here and here. Thanks to Clark Stooksbury and anyone else who has already addressed this. Here's some tidbits that my snooping about has revealed...

Schwartz refers to Raimondo as Dennis rather than Justin, which is the only name I've known Raimondo by either professionally or personally, because Raimondo apparently took the first name of Justin when he was a teenager. I'm not sure why openly changing your name is scandalous, especially when the act occurred decades ago, but it is one of the indications of "deceit" that Schwartz hurls at Justin in (what to my mind is) a slanderous piece published by FrontPageMagazine. Some of Schwartz's accusations are just bizarre. For example, "Now past 50, he [Raimondo] features a photo of himself on his website [see antiwar.com, Justin's editorial page] with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, in a fey (and failed) pose as an homme fatale. He is flamboyantly gay, but promotes himself as a Buchananite conservative." Ummm...so what? It is a flamboyant photo to be sure but I always thought Justin was aiming at the hard-boiled, hard-assed journalist look myself. And what's his age got to do with anything? It's like jeering at the color of Justin's hair; all it means is that his critics have just run out of ammunition.

More seriously, tho' with no more justification, Schwaretz writes, "The movement that Raimondo has cobbled out of opponents of the Iraq war, who are drawn into his site, is unabashedly fascist. Justin Raimondo personifies an American “red-brown” alliance, like the one that surfaced briefly in the 1930s when Communists and Nazis combined forces to bring down the Weimar Republic. This alliance was revived after the fall of Russian Communism, when Stalinists and fascists around the world united on an old platform – war against the Jews – of which more will be said further on." His evidence that Raimondo is a fascist? Schwartz explains, "He has always wanted to be considered an author and journalist, no less than a political figure. At about 13 or so, he seems to have imagined himself as a science fictioneer. But he never had the discipline or stamina to apply himself to any profession aside from that of absurdist publicity hound. He has failed as a journalist and political commentator, exactly as Hitler failed as a painter, as Mussolini failed as a socialist leader, and as the most notorious fascist of the left, Fidel Castro, failed as a lawyer. " The article is a jaw-dropping blast of innuendo, smears and 1/4-truths. As someone who knows a great many of the contributors to antiwar.com, I've neve met a fascist among them. Amazing.