Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz- The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 1, 2, 3, 4

306 Pages·2016·1.49 MB·English

by  Horowitz

Table of Contents

Title Page
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
PART I - Reflections From My Life

Chapter 1 - Left Illusions
Chapter 2 - Why I Am No Longer a Leftist
Chapter 3 - Reality and Dream
Chapter 4 - My Conservatism
Chapter 5 - Black Murder Inc.
Chapter 6 - Treason of the Heart
Chapter 7 - A Political Romance
Chapter 8 - Reflections on the Road Taken and Not
Chapter 9 - Letter to the Past
Chapter 10 - Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home
Chapter 11 - The End of Time
Chapter 12 - Getting This Conservative Wrong
Chapter 13 - What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion
Chapter 14 - Something We Did
Chapter 15 - Who I Am
Chapter 16 - Peter and Me
PART II - Reflections on the Left

Chapter 1 - Goodbye to All That
Chapter 2 - My Vietnam Lessons
Chapter 3 - Semper Fidel
Chapter 4 - A Decade Overrated and Unmourned
Chapter 5 - Keepers of the Flame
Chapter 6 - Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem & Mine
Chapter 7 - Political Cross-Dresser: Michael Lind Perpetrates a Hoax
Chapter 8 - Still Lying After All These Years
Chapter 9 - Repressed Memory Syndrome
Chapter 10 - Fidel, Pinochet & Me
Chapter 11 - Marginalizing Conservative Ideas
Chapter 12 - Can There Be a Decent Left?
Chapter 13 - The Left and the Constitution
Chapter 14 - Neo-Communism
Chapter 15 - Neo-Communism II
Chapter 16 - Neo-Communism III
Chapter 17 - Discover the Networks
Chapter 18 - Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat
PART III - Slander As Political Discourse

Chapter 1 - Paul Berman’s Demented Lunacy
Chapter 2 - In Defense of Matt Drudge
Chapter 3 - Target of a Witch-Hunt
Chapter 4 - The Serial Distortions of Sid Vicious
Chapter 5 - The Surreal World of the Progressive Left
PART IV - Two Talks on Autobiographical Themes

Chapter 1 - Plus Ça Change: Fifty Years Gone By
Chapter 2 - Reflections of a Diaspora Jew on Zionism, Israel and America
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments

The essays and articles in The Black Book of the American Left and the project
itself would not have been possible without the David Horowitz Freedom Center
and the dedicated individuals who staff it. Foremost among these are Mike
Finch, who is the operating head of the Center, its fundraiser, and an informed
counselor in all we do, and Peter Collier who has been my literary collaborator
and friend for nearly fifty years. Mike Bauer gathered and helped to edit all the
articles contained in these volumes, and John Perazzo and Elizabeth Ruiz helped
with the research on many of them. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the love and
support of my wife April through the years of writing and editing these volumes,
and to thank her for being there for me.
Preface to

The Black Book of the American Left

The idea for these volumes came about as the result of a self-inventory
undertaken to map the development of my political views over the last thirty
years. This inquiry involved a survey of all the articles and essays I had written
as a conservative—since the day Peter Collier and I published a cover story in
the Washington Post Magazine announcing our “second thoughts” about the left
and our departure from its ranks. These writings, which were assembled with the
indispensable help of Mike Bauer, added up to more than 690 articles and
essays, and a million and a half words. Some were lengthy considerations of
“big” issues, others reactions to current events, and some were polemical
responses to political opponents. But when I had looked over this body of work,
I realized that virtually everything I had written was really about one subject: the
American left.
The ancient Greek poet Archilochus was the author of a philosophical
fragment that became the focus of a famous essay by the writer Isaiah Berlin,
which he called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” In his fragment Archilochus
observed, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
For whatever reason, in the many years I have been a writer I have never been a
fox. It is true that my subjects have been varied, and I have even authored two
volumes of philosophical reflections about mortality and life. But the primary
focus of my work—even of those thoughts on mortality and existence—has
remained one big thing: the nature, deeds and fortunes of the political left.
The first part of my life was spent as a member of the “New Left” and its
Communist predecessor, in which my family had roots. After the consequences
of those commitments became clear to me in the mid-1970s, I came to know the
left as an adversary; and if sheer volume were the measure, as its principal
intellectual antagonist. Some have seen an obsession in my efforts to define the
left and analyze what it intends. In a sense that is true; I had left the left, but the
left had not left me. For better or worse, I have been condemned to spend the rest
of my days attempting to understand how it pursues the agendas from which I
have separated myself, and why.
When I was beginning this quest nearly three decades ago, I paid a visit to the
New York intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, who had had his own second
thoughts a decade earlier, though not from so radical a vantage as mine.
Podhoretz asked me why I was spending my time worrying about an isolated
community on the fringes of politics. I should focus, he said, on liberals not
leftists. This advice reflected what seemed an accurate description of the
political landscape at the time. Many would have seconded his judgment when
the walls of Communism came tumbling down shortly thereafter. But the
progressive faith is just that, a faith, and despite the exceptions of individual
cases no fact on the ground will dispel it.
When Podhoretz and I met, progressives and radicals had already escaped the
political ghettos to which my parents’ generation had been reasonably confined.
The massive defeat they suffered in the fall of the Marxist states they helped
create had the ironic, unforeseen effect of freeing them from the burden of
defending them. This allowed them in the next decade to emerge as a major
force in American life. In the wake of the Communist collapse, this left has
become a very big thing—so big that by 2008 it was the dominant force in
America’s academic and media cultures, had elected an American president, and
was in a position to shape America’s future. Because of its post-Communist
metastasis, what Norman Podhoretz once saw as a parochial interest in a fringe
cause has become an effort to understand the dominant development in
America’s political culture over the last fifty years. That is the subject of these
volumes.
The essays contained herein describe the left as I have known it; first from the
inside as one of its “theorists,” and then as a nemesis confronting it with the real-
world consequences of its actions. In all these writings I was driven by two
urgencies: a desire to persuade those still on the left of the destructive
consequences of the ideas and causes they promoted; and second, the frustration
I experienced with those conservatives who failed to understand the malignancy
of the forces mobilized against them. Most conservatives habitually referred to
leftists who were determined enemies of America’s social contract as “liberals.”
In calling them liberals, conservatives failed to appreciate the Marxist
foundations and religious dimensions of the radical faith or the hatreds it
inspired. And they failed to appreciate the left’s brutal imposture in stealing the
identity of the intellectually pragmatic, patriotic, anti-totalitarian “Cold War
liberals” whose influence in American political life they began killing off in
1972 with the McGovern coup inside the Democratic Party.1
When this syllabus of my conservative writings was finally assembled and I
had read their contents through, I realized that even though they would take up
multiple volumes they added up to a single book, which my colleague Peter
Collier quickly christened the “The Black Book of the American Left” (a
flattering allusion to The Black Book of Communism, the authoritative 1997
work by several European academics outlining the terror and catastrophe created
by communist states.) Contained in these volumes is a diary, written over more
than half a century, that describes one man’s encounters with a movement
which, in the words of its most prominent figure, Barack Obama, is seeking to
“fundamentally” transform the United States of America. The diary records the
progress of that transformation, documenting the changes of a shape-shifting
movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its abiding identity
and mission, which, as these pages will make clear, is ultimately one of
destruction.
It is almost a certainty that no other “book” will be written like this one, since
it can only have been the work of someone born into the left and condemned
Ahab-like to pursue it in an attempt to comprehend it. Yet this is not so much a
project of monomania, as my adversaries will undoubtedly suggest, but of
discovery; an attempt not only to understand a movement, but to explore its roots
in individual lives, including my own. While I hope this book may be useful to
those fighting to defend individual freedom and free markets, I do not deceive
myself into believing that I have finally set the harpoon into the leviathan, a feat
that is ultimately not possible. Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith,
which meets the same eternal human needs traditional faiths do, and for that
reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a
Gnosticism that can only be held at bay, never finally beaten back to earth.
INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME 1

My Life and Times

The essay sincluded in this, the first of nine volumes on the American left—a
tenth will feature a comprehensive bibliography and index—are shaped by a
biographical perspective, drawn directly from my life-experiences in that left.2
They contain reflections first on the political path my life took, and then on the
course pursued by others who shared that path but did not have second thoughts
that prompted them to leave it.
Because the left is a religious movement that engages an individual identity at
the deepest levels, there can never be a separation between the personal and the
political. Members of the faith know very well the implications of doubt: to
leave the progressive faith is to invite expulsion from its utopia and the
fellowship of its community, and forever after to be shunned as a person morally
unfit for decent company. This is a daunting prospect that discourages
challenges to its orthodoxy and keeps its adherents in line. This reality makes the
narrative of one who departed its ranks not only a deeply personal document but
also a political text.
Part I

In December 1974, my life was forever altered when members of the Black
Panther Party murdered a bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter whom I had
recruited to keep accounts for a Panther school I had helped to create. The
tragedy threw me into a personal crisis, creating an ideological turmoil that was
compounded five months later by the bloodbath in Southeast Asia following the
Communist victory in Vietnam. The state of distress into which I was thrown by
these events was such that for more than a decade I did not engage in any
political activities. During this period I took time to reflect on the beliefs that
had guided me and then betrayed me, and I tried to figure out how I was going to
function without them. In 1979, I had dinner in Berkeley with the leftwing
author E. L. Doctorow, whose novel about the Rosenbergs had referenced one of
my books. I told him of my concerns about the left, and he suggested I write
them up for The Nation on whose board he sat. The result was an article I called
“Left Illusions,” which The Nation retitled “A Radical’s Disenchantment.” It put
my doubts before a community with whom I still identified but was getting
ready to leave, though I was still reluctant to concede that, even to myself.
My formal departure came in 1985 with the publication of our divorce-notice
in The Washington Post. The following year I wrote “Why I Am No Longer a
Leftist,” a more personal explanation of the events behind my turn. It was
published in another progressive venue, The Village Voice, and is included as the
second chapter in this volume. The decision to write the article was a particularly
difficult one because it was the first public statement I had made about the
murder. In publishing it I was concerned first of all about the safety of my family
since the killers were still at large (as they are today). The fear was great enough
that I did not name the individuals I believed responsible. This was something I
would eventually do seven years later in a lengthy autobiographical article
“Black Murder, Inc.,” which is included as chapter five in the present text.
My intention in publishing “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist” in a leftwing
paper like the Voice was to encourage its readers to have second thoughts and to
warn them about the dangers of failing to have them. What I elicited instead was
an anathema upon myself—an excommunication from the progressive
community. The anathema was pronounced in the form of an article that