Category Archives: Reviews

Rebel With a Better Cause – By John Fonte

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[To order The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 1 – My Life and Times, click here; Volume 2: The Progressives, click here.]

This article is reprinted from Claremont Review of Books.

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A review of The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz, by David Horowitz

Volume I: My Life and Times

Volume II: Progressives

Does any conservative understand the American Left better than David Horowitz? A “red-diaper” baby raised by Communist parents, Horowitz was a founding father of the New Left by virtue of being co-editor (with Peter Collier) of its flagship journal, Ramparts. The Left’s indifference to Communist bloodbaths in Vietnam and Cambodia, and to Black Panther murders at home, led Collier and Horowitz to reconsider, embrace anti-Communism, and support President Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy. Their “Second Thoughts” project of 1987, a venue for other ex-leftists to criticize their old politics and its new champions, bequeathed Destructive Generation (1989) by Collier and Horowitz, and the establishment of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. After Collier became founding editor of Encounter Books, the Center was renamed the David Horowitz Freedom Center, whose activities include the online FrontPage Magazine.

Readers who seek a moving story of the intertwined unfolding of a life and a political sensibility should read Horowitz’s autobiographical Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1997). The author’s “fearless capacity for self-examination,” Christopher Caldwell wrote when it was published, allowed Horowitz “to forge a new career as the kind of person his parents had no doubt warned him against.” Now, The Black Book of the American Left offers, as the subtitle says, the Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz—articles, essays, and speeches on a wide range of political figures and topics, gathered together for the first time. Projected to fill ten volumes, two have been published: My Life and Times, and Progressives. Volume III, on America’s response to 9/11 and jihad, is scheduled for publication later this year. Continue reading Rebel With a Better Cause – By John Fonte →

Review: The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II by Janice Flamengo, PJ Media

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The first volume of David Horowitz’s nine-volume The Black Book of the American Left focused on the author’s personal journey out of the leftist faith and its community of adherents — a courageous, disorienting rejection of all he had once believed — and into a reasoned and pragmatic conservatism that has been his creed ever since. Analyzing the various forms of delusion, bad faith, and pathological self-hatred that leftism inspires and demands, the essays in that volume chronicled Horowitz’s decades-long crusade to unmask progressive fantasies to reveal their devastating real-world consequences. In documenting the monumental failures of leftist regimes and the illogic of leftist ideology, Horowitz’s writings have made a vital contribution to the conservative movement in America.

In the second volume of his oeuvre, Horowitz turns his attention to individual progressive, showcasing the destructive extremism and Communist roots of their so-called liberal beliefs (actually the opposite of “liberal” in both philosophy and political tactics) and revealing the deep anti-Americanism that has become a part of the Democratic agenda. Here, Horowitz documents the historical falsifications and distortions of purpose necessary to the left’s salvationist program. In essay after essay, his acute understanding of the leftist passions he once shared is arrestingly on display. Continue reading Review: The Black Book of the American Left, Volume II by Janice Flamengo, PJ Media →

On Horowitz’s New Book: Progressives – Paul Hollander

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David Horowitz is one of the rare human beings, and handful of former Sixties radicals, who made an unequivocal break with his longstanding political beliefs and commitments. Unlike many former radicals who renounced some of the questionable means used in the pursuit of their political agenda but refused to distance themselves from the purported ideals, Horowitz rejected the ideals as well. In the meantime, most of the former Sixties radicals, or even some Sixties moderates, have continued to cling nostalgically to what they consider to be admirable goals embedded in their youthful idealism and legitimated by the irresistible appeal of good intentions.

Horowitz can claim further distinction on account of being an exceptionally knowledgeable guide to all varieties of the American left and his understanding of these movements and the mentalities of their adherents. It helps that he has been familiar with many individuals representing or associated with the same movements. Also unusual, even among the fully disillusioned, that ever since his break with his political past, Horowitz has devoted his life to renouncing and combating his former political illusions, commitments and affiliations. In doing so he was willing to risk the over-politicization of his own life, and the weakening of the boundaries between the personal and the political realm. He has also made it easier for his many critics to claim that his crusading spirit bears some resemblance to those of his former comrades and adversaries.

For reasons not obvious, more of the former supporters of the Soviet Union (of The God That Failed variety) and of Western communist movements of the past were willing and able to reexamine and publicly discard their previous convictions and illusions than those of the Sixties generation. The latter, while distancing themselves from the Soviet model, idealized Third World communist systems such as those of China, Cuba and North Vietnam. I am not sure why that has been the case but I surmise that since the Sixties radicals had more widespread and enduring subcultural or group support (especially on the campuses) than their predecessors of the 1930s, they had a lesser need to reexamine and reevaluate their beliefs. It is always easier to persist in convictions, even in wrongheaded ones, if they are widely shared. Moreover, the agenda of the Sixties radicals was broader, encompassing not only sympathy for the idealized and misperceived communist systems noted above, but also popular domestic causes such as the anti-Vietnam war protest, civil rights and women’s liberation. The presence of this large, supportive, quasi-communal subculture made it easier to squelch the impulse to engage in political soul-searching or “second thoughts.” As Horowitz puts it,

[T]he secret of the left’s longevity, its ability to withstand the discrediting of its idea, to ignore the millions of its victims, and thus to renew itself in the next generation…is the creation of a culture…and of a living community that perpetuates its myths…In 2003, the Rosenberg grandchildren can take pride in their heritage a being the heirs of Communists and spies, and receive encouragement and praise from “an international community of support.” [267-268]

Continue reading On Horowitz’s New Book: Progressives – Paul Hollander →

The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The Progressives – Barbara Kay

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The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times dwelt heavily on author David Horowitz’s personal journey from the hard left as a “red diaper” child of Communists to leadership in the New Left movement. We followed the anguished transitional trajectory that began with Horowitz’s reflections on the New Left’s role in America’s Vietnam defeat, and his visceral recoil from the criminal excesses of the Black Panther Party. These attacks on his settled convictions provoked profound self-interrogation, leading to an intellectual pivot away from the theories, antipathies and loyalties that had for so long defined his identity.

Volume II surveys the wreckage blotting the landscape of “progressivism,” a barrier island to Communism’s landmass. Here we find the unbroken bridge linking Communism to the received wisdom of the vast majority of academics in the West, who download them into vulnerable students en masse. The Marxist vision that sustained Stalin’s supporters in the 1940s and 1950s is alive and well in the post-colonialist and identity obsessions of postmodern theorists. Utopians then, utopians still, Horowitz finds their vision of social justice is still attended by the same suppression of “incorrect” thought and speech, the same self-righteousness, the same illiberalism in dealing with critics and apostates that were – are – the hallmarks of Communism.

Progressives may refer to themselves as “liberals,” but that is a misnomer Horowitz strenuously proscribes. Classical liberalism in our culture was largely vanquished in the counter-cultural revolution, though the odd grey-haired academic adherent pops into view now and then, seeming baffled by what has become of the noble assumptions of his youth.  Referring to leftists as liberals launders their intellectual and political lineage. Real liberals – especially liberal scholars – don’t excommunicate their peers for deviating from the party line. Communists did; New Leftists did (as Horowitz learned first hand when he left the movement and his entire circle of “friends” renounced him); and progressives still do.

Take the case of feminist scholar Aileen Kraditor, Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. Aileen who? Precisely Horowitz’s point.  Even though much of my journalistic effort is spent in exposing the misandry and other cultural crimes springing directly from feminist theories, I had never heard of Aileen Kraditor prior to seeing her name in Volume I of The Black Book (she is mentioned again in Volume II).

According to Horowitz, Kraditor, a feminist historian in good – even iconic – standing during the years she was a card-carrying Communist,  was virtually “disappeared” from the feminist movement when she renounced Communism. Horowitz provided a mere thumbnail sketch, praising her work, and explaining why this once-admired scholar of the suffragette movement now languishes in near-obscurity, but it was enough to pique my curiosity.

Continue reading The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The Progressives – Barbara Kay →

David Horowitz Exposes Why Progressives Must Lie: Spyridon Mitsotakis

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Originally published at www.breitbart.com.

In his book Disinformation, Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking Soviet Bloc official ever to defect to the United States, describes the Soviet intelligence practice called “framing” – changing someone’s or something’s past to suit present political needs.

The Soviets perfected this into a science. Jamie Glazov, editor of FrontPageMag.com, detailed a personal encounter with this Marxist science when he described a 1971 document KGB chairman Yuri Andropov wrote about Jamie’s father, Soviet dissident Yuri Glazov:

Yuri Andropov is discussing the operation to put the drugs and the documents into the apartment and then five pages later is discussing my father being a drug trafficker and a spy. You see, there’s a self-intoxication here. You create the lie and then somewhere along the process you begin to believe that lie that you yourself have created, and this is a very fascinating phenomenon.

Jamie’s boss, David Horowitz, lived this lie for many years. He knows that without lies, the ideology of the left would cease to exist. This is the central truth Horowitz relentlessly reinforces in Progressives, Volume II of The Black Book of the American Left.

Continue reading David Horowitz Exposes Why Progressives Must Lie: Spyridon Mitsotakis →

WSJ: Notable and Quotable – “What it Means to be a Conservative”

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Reposted from WSJ.com

Jan. 13, 2014 7:36 p.m. ET

From “The Black Book of the American Left” (2013), by David Horowitz:

To be a conservative is first to understand that there is no solution to the dilemmas of the human condition. Second, it is to understand that to escape these dilemmas, human beings will inevitably embark on desperate quests for redemptions in this life. These redemptions, in turn, will require holy wars to purge the world of demons—of those who do not share their faith, and who stand in their way. In this regard, totalitarian Islam is really no different in its heart from totalitarian socialism or progressivism, even though the latter are secular and the former is pursued in the name of a vengeful and malignant God. Both seek to cleanse mankind of its irreparable imperfections.

To remain free beings, we are continually forced to defend ourselves and our breathing space, against the efforts of the redeemers to perfect us—against the armies of the saints who are determined to make the world a better place than it can ever be. That is how I see the political wars we face, and why they will never end.

The Weekly Standard: “A Good Fight”

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Reposted from http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/good-fight_771511.html

David Horowitz is a political thinker and cultural critic who enjoys challenging leftist shibboleths. His main contribution to contemporary political discourse is a passionate commitment to an outspoken, unabashed, myth-breaking version of conservatism. If communism was the triumph of mendaciousness, he argues in this poignant collection of writings, conservatism cannot accept the proliferation of self-serving legends and half-truths.

This makes his public interventions refreshingly unpredictable, iconoclastic, and engaging. He is a former insider, and his views have the veracity of the firsthand witness. Horowitz knows better than anybody else the hypocrisies of the left, the unacknowledged skeletons in its closet, and its fear to come to terms with past ignominies. He is an apostate who sees no reason to mince his words to please the religion of political and historical correctness. His masters are other critics of totalitarian delusions, from George Orwell to Leszek Kolakowski; in fact, Horowitz’s awakening from his leftist dreams was decisively catalyzed by the illuminating effect of Kolakowski’s devastating critique of socialist ideas. Unlike his former comrades, however, Horowitz believes in the healing value of second thoughts.

Vilified by enemies as a right-wing crusader, Horowitz is, in fact, a lucid thinker for whom ideas matter and words have consequences. His break with the left in the late 1970s was a response to what he perceived to be its rampant sense of self-righteousness, combined with its readiness to endorse obsolete and pernicious utopian ideals. Born to a Communist family in Queens, Horowitz flirted with the Leninist creed as a teenager but found out early that the Communist sect was insufferably obtuse and irretrievably sclerotic. He attended Columbia, where he discovered Western Marxism and other non-Bolshevik revolutionary doctrines. From the very beginning, he had an appetite for heresy.

He joined the emerging New Left and went to England, where he became a disciple and close associate of the socialist historian Isaac Deutscher, author of once-celebrated biographies of Stalin and Trotsky. Thanks to Deutscher, Horowitz met other British leftists, including the sociologist Ralph Miliband (father of the current leader of the Labour party). Consumed by revolutionary pathos, he wrote books, pamphlets, and manifestoes, denounced Western imperialism, and condemned the Vietnam war.

Once back in the United States, he became the editor, with Peter Collier, of Ramparts, the New Left’s most influential publication. In later books, Horowitz engages in soul-searching analyses of his attraction to the extreme radicalism of the Black Panthers and other far-left groups. Under tragic circumstances—a friend of his was murdered by the Panthers—he discovered that these celebrated antiestablishment fighters were fundamentally sociopaths. What followed was an itinerary of self-scrutiny, self-understanding, and moral epiphany. He reinvented himself as an anti-Marxist, antitotalitarian, anti-utopian thinker.

Obviously, David Horowitz is not the first to have deplored the spellbinding effects of what Raymond Aron called the opium of the intellectuals. Before him, social and cultural critics (Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, to name only the most famous ones) took the same path; Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist mentor, Karl Korsch, broke with his revolutionary past in the 1950s. Even Max Horkheimer, one of the Frankfurt School’s luminaries, ended as a conservative thinker. As Ignazio Silone, himself a former Leninist, put it: The ultimate struggle would be between Communists and ex-Communists.

In Horowitz’s case, however, it is a struggle waged by an ex-leftist ideologue against political mythologies that have made whole generations run amok. Like Kolakowski and Václav Havel, Horowitz identifies ideological blindness as the source of radical zealotry. He knows that ideologies are coercive structures with immense enthralling effects—indeed, what Kenneth Minogue called “alien powers.” Putting together his fervid writings is, for him, a duty of conscience. He does not claim to be nonpartisan and proudly recognizes his attachment to a conservative vision of politics. But he is a pluralist: He refuses the idea of infallible ideological revelation, admits that human beings can err, and invites his readers to exercise their critical faculties. He does not pontificate.

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WND: “A Life Transformed”

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Reprinted from WND.com.

David Horowitz’s “The Black Book of the American Left: Collected Conservative Writings” should be read by every American who loves his country. This book is a unique wake-up call to the truth that America is being infected by the bubonic plague of Marxism, which once contaminated the author himself.

In the 1970s, David climbed to the very top of the American leftist movements. Later he understood that Marxism was a lie – the first step toward stealing and killing – and after that he dedicated the rest of his life to warning others that Marxism was endangering American freedom and democracy. A Rasmussen Reports poll shows, indeed, that nowonly 53 percent of Americans prefer capitalism to socialism.

One of the most popular night clubs in New York City is the Soviet-themed KGB Bar. The place, adorned with the Soviet flag and a picture of “Comrade Lenin,” is jammed by a new generation of Marxist writers who read from their work. Just weeks ago this giant city overwhelmingly elected (73 percent of the votes) an openly Marxist mayor, and Seattle got a new council member who proudly stated that she wore “the badge of socialist with honor.” Russia’s post-Soviet newspaper Pravda, which knew that socialism was just a smiling mask for Marxism, chafed: “It must be said that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.”

America is still not really aware that Marxism is infecting the country because our main media have gone to great lengths to hide this truism, and because neither the Republican Party nor the tea party has called attention to the looming dangers of Marxism. Our main media are also deep-sixing the fact that the only thing Marxism ever left behind it is countries that ended up looking like trailer camps hit by a hurricane, and Marxist leaders roasting in Dante’s Inferno – all of them, from Trotsky to Stalin, from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, from Tito to Enver Hoxha, along with Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou Touré, Nyeree, Ceausescu and Hugo Chavez.

David Horowitz was born into a family of devoted Marxists, had Marxism in his blood and pursued a successful career as a Marxist activist, writer and journalist. In 1974, some of his Marxist comrades – leaders of the Black Panther Party – murdered a bookkeeper whom David had recruited to keep the accounts of a Panther school he had helped create. That horrible crime hit home and persuaded David to forsake his highly successful leftist career and to move over onto the other side of America’s political barricade.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center and its FrontPage Magazine, created by David in 1988, marked the beginning of his anti-Marxist crusade, which has never stopped. His book “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” (2006) and his Academic Bill of Rights (ABR) marked another milestone in his life: the beginning of his still-vigorous campaign against Marxist indoctrination at American universities. (Full disclosure: Although I have never met David, I do collaborate with his FrontPage Magazine, and I have repeatedly expressed my admiration for his break with Marxism. David had also publicly praised my split with communism.)

In the preface to “The Black Book of the American Left,” the first of a nine-volume memoir, David Horowitz wrote that “for better or worse, I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days” fighting Marxism, “from which I have separated myself.” In May 1989, he and two other former prominent Marxists, Ronald Radosh and Peter Collier, went to Poland to attend a conference calling for the end of Communism. There, David told the Polish dissidents: “For myself, my family tradition of socialist dreams is over. Socialism is no longer a dream of a revolutionary future. It is only a nightmare of the past. But for you, the nightmare is not a dream. It is a reality that it is still happening. My dream for the people of socialist Poland is that someday you will wake up from your nightmare and be free.” A few months later, the Roundtable talks between the Polish government and the Solidarity-led Polish dissidents led to the first semi-free elections in the Soviet bloc.

On Nov. 9, 1989, when I watched on television as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, my eyes were misty. I was so incredibly proud to be an American. The whole world was expressing its gratitude to the United States for its 45 years of successful Cold War against the Soviet evil. “Communism is dead!” I heard people shout. Indeed, Communism was dead as a form of government. But it soon proved that Marxism, which had just celebrated its 141st birthday, had survived.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who once claimed he had broken with Marxism but confessed to still being choked with emotion whenever he heard the Internationale, reminded us that the first noun in Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” is specter: “A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.” According to Derrida, Marx began “The Communist Manifesto” with specter, because a specter never dies. David Horowitz concurred. “After Stalin’s death,” he writes in his memoirs, his parents – who had dedicated their whole lives to Marxism – learned that “they served a gang of cynical despots who had slaughtered more peasants, caused more hunger and human misery, and killed more leftists like themselves than all the capitalist governments since the beginning of time. … I was 17 at that time, and at the funeral of the Old Left I swore to myself I would not repeat my parent’s fate. … But my youth prevented me from comprehending what the catastrophe had revealed. I continued my fantasy of the socialist future. When a New Left began to emerge a few years later, I was ready to believe that it was a fresh beginning and eager to assist at its birth.”

David Horowitz now documents that a new generation of Americans, one that is not being taught history anymore and knows little if anything about our country’s long fight against Marxism, is giving this heresy – which killed over 90 million people – another lease on life. In 2008, the Democratic Party portrayed the United States as a “decaying, racist, capitalist realm,” unable to provide medical care for the poor, to rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or to replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race,” and it pledged to change it by drastically increasing taxes on the American rich, American businesses and their owners, in order to finance programs for the poor. This is Marxism at its best. In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx painted capitalism as “a decaying, racist realm,” and pledged to eradicate it by advocating 10 “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” which became known as the “Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto.” Among them: a heavy progressive or graduated income tax; abolition of all rights of inheritance; abolition of property.

If you know the “Manifesto,” as David does, you will think Marx himself wrote the Democratic Party’s economic program, which contains all of the above planks of Marxism. If you don’t know the “Manifesto,” glance through “The Black Book of the American Left.” Young people, as David was when he ignored Stalin’s unprecedented crimes, believe in free lunches. No wonder that during the 2008 election campaign, the U.S. Democratic Party easily filled entire stadiums with young people who demanded that the wealth of the United States be redistributed. Some of those electoral gatherings looked to me like Ceausescu’s revival meetings – over 80,000 young people were gathered in front of the now-famous Greek temple resembling the White House that had been erected in Denver, to demand that America’s wealth be redistributed. The Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress.

People have come to look kindly upon the “redistribution of wealth,” but David Horowitz convincingly demonstrates that this is the quintessence of Marxism, and that Marxism always ended in economic collapse. I concur. “Stealing from capitalism is moral, Comrades,” I heard Khrushchev say during the 1959 “six-day vacation” he spent in Romania. “Don’t raise your eyebrows, Comrades. I intentionally used the word steal. Stealing from our enemy is moral, Comrades.” “Stealing from capitalists is a Marxist duty,” Romania’s president, Nicolae Ceausescu, sermonized during the years I was his national security adviser. “Capitalists are the mortal enemies of Marxism,” I heard Fidel Castro preach in 1972, when I spent a vacation in Cuba as guest of his brother, Raul. “Killing them is moral, comrades!”

In my other life I rose to the top of a Marxist entity – the Soviet empire – which was created by redistributing the wealth of its people, and I had to start my life from scratch, as David did, to escape its tyranny. Redistribution of wealth is disguised stealing – the next step toward killing – and stealing and killing became national policies on the day Soviet Marxism was born. Immediately after the revolution of November 1917, the Soviet Marxists confiscated the imperial family’s wealth, seized the land owned by the rich Russians, nationalized Russian industry and banking, and killed most of the property owners. In 1929, by forcing the peasants into collective farms, the Soviet Marxists stole away their land, along with their animals and agricultural tools. Within a few years, virtually the entire Soviet economy was running on stolen property. When people began protesting the theft, the Marxists transformed the Soviet Empire into a tyrannical police state. Over 20 million people were killed to keep that gulag empire quiet. In the long run, however, theft and crime do not pay even when they are committed by a superpower. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union is strong proof to that.

On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: “We Are All Socialists Now.” That was also what Ceausescu’s newspaper Scînteia proclaimed when he changed Romania into a monument to Marxism. Two years after seizing power, the U.S. Democratic Party’s Marxism produced the same results as the Ceausescu’s Marxism did – at a U.S. scale. Over 14 million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on food stamps. GDP growth dipped from 3-4 percent to 1.6 percent. The national debt rose to an unprecedented $17 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18 trillion by 2019. Scînteia went bankrupt. Newsweek was sold for one dollar.

So, let call a spade a spade: it is Marxism we are talking about. Marxism in America!

“The Black Book of the American Left” could not have come to life at a better time. Understanding that Marxism is a lie, and that lying is the first step toward stealing and killing, is what America needs right now.

Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking Soviet bloc official ever to defect to the West. In 1989 Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose main accusations came out of Pacepa’s book “Red Horizons,” republished in 27 countries. His latest book, “Disinformation,” co-authored with professor Ronald Rychlak, was published last June by WND.

The Blaze: “The Horrific Story That Prompted David Horowitz’s Conservative Transformation

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Reposted from TheBlaze.com:

David Horowitz, author of The Black Book of the American Left and the founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has spoken at length about how he was raised by “card-carrying communists” who always “described themselves as progressives.” He followed in their footsteps, becoming one of the founders of the New Left in 1960′s, which he described as an organization “formed by children of communists who wanted to get away from the taint that Stalin had put on (communism), and revive the vision.”

So what made the born-and-raised communist become the staunch conservative and defender of American liberties that he is today? Among other things, he explained on the Glenn Beck Program Tuesday, it was a deadly encounter with the Black Panthers.

It began in the early 1970s, Horowitz explained, when he was introduced to the leader of the Black Panther Party by “a Hollywood producer.” In short order, he helped raise the money to buy a white Baptist church that had been “overtaken by the inner city” in Oakland, and gave it to the Panthers for a school.

“I was editing the largest magazine of the left, and I recruited my bookkeeper to do the books of the school,” he said slowly. “In December, 1974, Betty Van Patter disappeared, and by the time police fished her body out of San Francisco Bay five weeks later, I knew the Panthers had killed her.”

Horowitz has written at length about the topic, explaining how “the press made nothing of it” and how “the existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American Left is something the Left really doesn’t want to know or think about. Such knowledge would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs. It would undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial starting point of a progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on which the attitude depends.”

Horowitz proceeded to explain on the Glenn Beck Program how, in the wake of Van Patter’s murder, he realized that “all my friends were a menace to me and my family, because I knew if I said I thought they killed her they would’ve called me a racist and a CIA agent, and the Panthers were capable of killing me.”

“It took me about ten years to recover somewhat from this and to become a conservative,” he continued. “I voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and when I came out of the closet as a conservative, of course I knew that the left would be gunning for me, so the rest of my life has been spent fighting the left and defending this great country of ours which we are rapidly losing.”

Horowitz warned that while there are horrifically violent elements to the left, like the Black Panther Party, “you should not think that the bad forces are going to appear with black hats and it’ll be obvious who they are.”

Many, like his parents, he said, are “well-meaninged people” who will “speak with humanitarian tones,” but just believe “the ends justify the means.”

“When Lenin set out to transform, fundamentally transform Russia, he didn’t say he was going to kill 40 million people, create famines and concentration camps called gulags,” Horowitz remarked. “He said he was going to give them bread, land, and peace.”

Horowitz also warned that “you can’t understand what’s going on” in American politics today without realizing the history behind it – the world he was raised in.

“It’s the same people and the same vision. Barack Obama, Valerie Jarret, who’s his key advisor, and David Axelrod, who’s his political strategist — all of them were born into the same communist left that I was. They grew up in it; they were trained in it; they were trained to what I call the neo-communist new left, and they’ve never left it.”

Horowitz said he knows they still maintain such a worldview because “if you understand that you belong to a movement that has agendas which are evil and destructive … the first thing you want to do if you’re still political is to repudiate it and to warn others against it. And of course, Obama, Jarrett, and David Axelrod are comfortable parts of this left … They’ve carried on the agendas. That’s why the country is suffering the way it is.”

The full episode of The Glenn Beck Program, along with many other live streaming shows and thousands of hours of on-demand content, is available on just about any digital device. Get it all with a FREE TRIAL.

 

Daily Caller: “How the American Left Lost Its Nerve”

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Reposted from DailyCaller.com:

They were Communists. Not liberals or progressives. They wanted the Russians to win the Cold War, and the Vietcong to defeat America in Vietnam. They didn’t even like liberals. The radicals of the 1960s were Communists. And today they continue to lie about it.

That’s the major takeaway from The Black Book of the American Left, a new book by David Horowitz. Horowitz, the son of two American Communists — with a capital C, meaning party members — was a radical student leader and the editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. He began to turn politically in 1974, when he sent his friend Betty Van Patter to help the Black Panther Party only to have her turn up murdered soon after. For Horowitz it’s caused a crisis, then a conversion to conservatism.

Horowitz has been a well-known conservative activist for decades, but it’s quite bracing to have a lot of his internet writings compiled into one hardback volume.

And again and again in The Black Book of the American Left, he hits his main point: the “activists” of the 1960s, like the “progressives” of earlier eras, were Communists. They wanted to topple the government of the United States. Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground were not interested in mainstream Democrats like Hubert Humphrey or any liberal solution to any of America’s problems. They wanted to blow things, and people, up. They wanted a revolution.

I would argue that there is an important difference between the radicals of the early 20th century and those of the 1960s and today, and that Horowitz doesn’t capture this, but I’ll get to that shortly. For now it’s worthwhile just to sit back and listen while Horowitz, a compelling writer and honorable man, remind us that the people he rioted with in the 1960s were, yes, Communists.

Tom Hayden. Angela Davis. Bill Ayers. Noam Chomsky. Todd Gitlin. The Black Panthers. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. The Weathermen. Reds, all. Some more violent than others, but all of them called for a revolution.

A few years ago Horowitz was on a panel at Georgetown University with Michael Kazin, who had been a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society, an influential leftist group in the 1960s. All the left wanted to do in the 1960s, Kazin said, “was give peace a chance.” Horowitz reminds readers that during the Vietnam era Kazin was a left-wing revolutionary who embraced the motto “bring the war home” — i.e., cause as much violence on American streets as possible. Kazin could care less about peace. At a 1969 rally he led the following cheer: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is Gonna Win!” Give peace a chance? Kazin wanted nothing to do with it — or even with liberalism. Horowitz: “It had been liberalism that guided America to power in the postwar world. It was liberalism that had gotten America into Vietnam. Centrist liberalism was the balance wheel giving synchronicity to the entire political system. But now radicals assaulted the center; if it could not hold, America would fall.”

Ask yourself: why did left-wing demonstrators attack the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago? It wasn’t because they hated Republicans, although that was also true. They hated liberals because liberals at the time represented authority in America. Student radical Todd Gitlin, who now, like so many of his left-wing friends, is a professor, didn’t vote in 1964, even though Barry Goldwater was against the war in Vietnam, which was supposedly Gitlin’s top issue. So why didn’t Gitlin vote for Goldwater? In later years Gitlin would give a weak excuse, but the answer is obvious: he was a left-wing revolutionary who wanted to collapse the American system of government. These people were in no way, as Horowitz puts it, “mooning for Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” as they would later claim. They wanted to bring the war home, and topple the United States.

Horowitz connects the left of the 1930s and 1960s with the left of today. This is accurate as far as a lot of academics go, but I think that is different than the modern left in the media and popular culture. As historians such as Christopher Lasch and James Hitchcock have observed, there has been not just a political but psychological transformation in the United States over the last 40 or 50 years. Once communist radicals like Whittaker Chambers and the editors of The Nation believed in communism as a kind of mathematical religion; there were going to occur certain things as history marched towards its resolution, and the role of the revolutionary was to aid in that process. But this meant that when that system broke down, there was the chance that reason could  break through the cracks. Horowitz’s own Communist parents saw their worldview collapse in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev made a speech denouncing the crimes of Stalin and the “cult of personality” that surrounded Stalin. Whittaker Chambers, as he chillingly put it, “heard the screams” and saw the lie that was communism.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/06/how-the-american-left-lost-its-nerve/#ixzz2rcfjHvnr