In 1995, on a whim, I answered a help-wanted ad in the back of The Economist and landed a job as an editor with a start-up newspaper in Bangkok consecrated to the goal of countering the White Man’s neo-imperialist journalism. The newspaper was the original Asia Times, and thus I have always been privy to the secret identity of its pseudonymous columnist Spengler, who happened to be a white male neo-imperialist and the only journalist there capable of writing anything interesting — or even grammatical.
In 2009, Spengler publicly revealed himself in the pages of First Things as David P. Goldman, a classically trained pianist who had enjoyed a storied career in the New York financial industry. Among the more bizarre details of his autobiography was his confession of a long association with Lyndon LaRouche. “We were all about thirty,” he wrote, “and most of us were Jewish. The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.” A good question indeed, particularly since that anti-Semitic streak was about as thinly disguised as a Kiev pogrom. His answer is not entirely satisfying: “We were all long-in-the-tooth student radicals. LaRouche’s organization was the flotsam washed up by the wave of the collective madness that had swept through the youth of the world in 1968 and left many of its participants maladapted to ordinary life for years afterward.”
Comments