Pennsylvania
I’m sure everyone has heard the news that Lawrence Auster of View From The Right lost his battle with cancer on Good Friday.
There isn’t much left for me to say that hasn’t already been covered in the tributes that have been posted at VDARE and Amerika. When I was in college at Auburn, I stumbled across his book The Path To National Suicide, and it was a formative influence on my views about immigration and multiculturalism.
I would prefer to remember the Auster that I encountered in that insightful book rather than the blogger that I came to know in later years. Like Alex Linder, it would be the understatement of the century to say that Larry Auster clashed with other bloggers and far too often allowed ideological disputes to devolve into personal feuds.
As death approached, I had considered reaching out to Auster to thank him for his life’s work and to wish him luck in the next life (future historians trying to figure out what happened to America in the first decade of the 21st century will find VFR a nearly unparalleled resource), but he made it plainly clear toward the end that he didn’t want any “anti-Semites” among his well wishers.
Larry went to the grave fighting anti-Semitism. After all these years, I had come to believe that he was sincere in his desire to preserve Western civilization (no one who was faking it would blog to his deathbed), but for whatever reason (choose your explanation), he could never really bring himself to acknowledge the starring role that Jews had played in undermining that civilization. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the thought that the Jews aren’t going to take “will you knock it off, pretty please” for an answer.
Anyway, I will miss Larry’s unique take on “the passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the traditionalist politically incorrect Right.” Although I didn’t always agree with him, I still enjoyed reading his thought provoking website.
Every time I take a look at Lawrence Auster, I find some crackpot going on about things like the Jews undermining Western Civilization. There are a disproportionate number of real sickos among his followers. I guess that comes with the whole “realist” package.