Leftist Support of Islamist Terror
Dana
David Horowitz
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
How to identify the political left? Current usage refers to everyone left of
center as "liberal." Yet what are currently identified liberals liberal
about except hard drugs and sex? In regard to everything else, they are
determined to intervene, regulate and control your life, or redistribute
your income. Obviously, when terror-hugging radicals like Ramsey Clark and
Communist hacks like Angela Davis are referred to as "liberals" - as they
routinely are - the obfuscation works to their advantage and against the
interests of veracity and democracy. The term "liberal" should be reserved
for those who occupy the center of the political spectrum; those to the left
should be referred to as leftists, which is what they are.
This is the easy part of rectifying the political lexicon. There is another
more difficult aspect, however, which is how to identify the "hard" left,
which is to say, those who are dedicated enemies of America and its
purposes? In practice, it easy to identify such leftists and it is not
difficult to describe them. They are people who identify with hostile
regimes like North Korea, Cuba, and China, or - more commonly -- believe the
United States to be the imperialist guardian of a world system that radicals
must defeat before they can establish "social justice" on the planet.
Adherents of this anti-American creed variously describe themselves as
"Marxists," "anti-globalists," "anti-war activists" or, more generally,
"progressives." Their secular worldview holds claims that America is
responsible for reaction, oppression, and exploitation across the globe and
causes them to regard this country as the moral equivalent of militant
Islam's "Great Satan." This explains the otherwise incomprehensible
practical alliances that individuals who claim to be avatars of social
justice make with Islamo-fascists like Saddam Hussein.
Among the intellectual leaders of this left are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn,
Gore Vidal, Edward Said and Cornel West; among its figureheads, Angela Davis
and Ramsey Clark; among its cultural icons, Tim Robbins, Barbara Kingsolver,
Arundhhti Roy and Michael Moore; among its political leaders, Ralph Nader
and the heads of the three major "peace" organizations (Leslie Cagan, Brian
Becker and Clark Kissinger); among its electoral organizations, the Green
Party and the Peace and Freedom Party; among its elected officials
Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-California) and Congressman Dennis Kucinch
(D-Ohio); among its organizations, the misnamed Center for Constitutional
Rights and the National Lawyers Guild; among its publications and media
institutions, The Nation, Z Magazine, The Progressive, Counterpunch,
Pacifica radio, Indymedia.org and commondreams.org. Like the Communist Party
in the heyday of the Soviet empire, the influence of the hard
left -intellectually and organizationally - extends far beyond the
institutions, organizations and publications it controls.
Yet what to call them? One of the hard left's survival secrets has been its
ability to embargo attempts to identify it by labeling those who do
"red-baiters" and "witch-hunters," as though even to name it is to persecute
it. These same people, on the other hand, think nothing of labeling their
opponents "racists" and "fascists," or calling the President of the United
States a "Nazi" puppet of the oil cartel. Yet their defense strategy is
highly effective in the tolerant democracy they are determined to destroy. I
myself have been called a "red-baiter" and "McCarthyite" for pointing out
that the current "peace" organizations like International ANSWER and Not In
Our Name are fronts for the Workers World Party - a Marxist-Leninist
vanguard that identifies with North Korea -- and the Revolutionary Communist
Party, a Maoist sect. The facts are obvious and unarguable, but their
implications are unpleasant and therefore suspect.
Nothwithstanding this difficulty, a more significant concern is that the
term "Communist" in the context of the contemporary left can be misleading.
While the Communist Party still exists and is even growing, it is a minor
player and enjoys nothing approaching its former influence or power in the
left. Even in the hard left, the Communist Party USA is only a constituent
part of the whole whereas once, along with its front groups, it dominated
progressive politics.
In these circumstances, for reasons I will soon make apparent, the best term
to describe this left is "neo-communist," or "neo-coms" for short.
The place to begin an understanding of the neo-coms is the period following
1956, when the left sloughed off its Communist shell and became first a "new
left" and then what might be called a "post-new left." In my own writings,
particularly Radical Son and The Politics of Bad Faith I have shown that the
"new left," was in reality no such thing. While starting out as a rejection
of Stalinism, by the end of the Sixties the "new left" had devolved into a
movement virtually indistinguishable from the Communist predecessor it had
claimed to reject. This was as true of its Marxist underpinnings, as its
anti-Americanism or its indiscriminate embrace of totalitarian revolutions
and revolutionaries abroad.
The new left imploded at the end of the Sixties a victim of its own
revolutionary enthusiasms, which led it to pursue a violent politics it
could not sustain. America's withdrawal from Vietnam in the early Seventies,
deprived the left of the immediate pretext for its radical agendas. Many of
its cadre retired from the "revolution in the streets" they had tried to
launch and entered the Democratic Party. Others turned to careers in
journalism and teaching, the professions of choice for secular missionaries.
Still others took up local agitations and discrete campaigns in behalf of
saving the environment, feminist issues and gay rights -- without giving up
their radical illusions. In the 1980s, spurred by the Soviet-sponsored
"nuclear freeze" campaign and by the "solidarity" movements for Communist
forces in Central America, the left began to regroup without formally
announcing its re-emergence or proclaiming a new collective identity as its
Sixties predecessor had done.
At the end of the decade, the collapse of the Soviet empire ushered in an
interregnum of confusion for the left, calling a temporary halt to this
radical progress. In the Soviet debacle "revolutionary" leftists confronted
the catastrophic failure of everything they had believed and fought for
during the previous 70 years. Even those radicals who recognized the
political failures of the Soviet regime, believe in what Trotksy had called
"the gains of October" - the superior forces of socialist production. But
the leftist faith proved impervious to this rebuttal by historical events.
Insulated by its religious devotion to the progressive idea, the left
survived the refutation of its socialist dreams. Instead of acknowledging
their wrongheaded commitment to the socialist cause, they looked on the
demise of what they had once hailed as "the first socialist state," as no
more than an albatross that providence had lifted from their shoulders.
In short, having defended the indefensible for 70 years, they were suddenly
relieved that they would no longer have to defend it. Turning their backs on
their own past, they pretended it was someone else's. They said, "The
collapse of socialism doesn't prove anything because it wasn't real
socialism. Real socialism hasn't been tried." This subterfuge rescued them
from having to make apologies for abetting regimes that had killed tens of
millions and enslaved tens of millions more. Broken eggs with no omelet to
show for it -- not a workable socialist result. Better yet, there was no
need to acknowledge that the country whose efforts they had opposed and
whose actions they had condemned had liberated a billion people from the
most oppressive empire the world had ever seen. They had no need for second
thoughts about what they had done. They just went on to the next
destruction, the newest incarnation of the radical cause.
This act of cosmic bad faith was the foundation of the left's revival in the
decade that followed. It was the necessary premise of its re-emergence as
leader of the anti-globalization and "antiwar" movements that came at the
end of the Nineties and the beginning of the millennium. The hard left was
now ready to resurrect its internal war against America at home and abroad.
If one looks at almost any aspect of this left - its self-identified
intellectual lineage (Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Fanon, Gramsci --
in sum, the totalitarian tradition), its analytic model (hierarchy and
oppression), its redemptive agenda (social justice as state-enforced
leveling) and its enemies - imperialist America and the American "ruling
class" -- one would be hard put to find a scintilla of difference with the
Communist past. Of course leftists themselves will have none of this. Most
of them will proclaim their anti-Stalinism (even as they embrace its
practices); and will not defend the Communist systems that have in any case
collapsed. But so what? The Soviet rulers denounced Stalin. Were they any
less Communists for that?
It seems appropriate, therefore, to call the unreconstructed hard-liners,
"neo-communists" --a term that accurately identifies their negative assaults
on American capitalism and their anti-American "internationalist" agendas.
It may be objected that the term "neo-communist" does not describe a group,
which itself identifies with the term, but then neither does
"neo-conservative." There is, for example, no current movement calling
itself "neo-conservative," nor do the individuals so designated refer to
their own ideas as "neo-conservative." "Neo-conservative" is, in fact, a
label that was imposed by the left on a group of former Democrats, loosely
grouped around Senator "Scoop" Jackson who left the party fold at the end of
the Seventies to join and support the Reagan Administration.
It was accepted out of necessity for a while, because the left so dominates
the political culture that resisting it was futile. But it is no longer used
by neo-conservatives because, as Norman Podhoretz long ago observed,
"neo-conservatism" is indistinguishable from conservatism itself. No
"neo-conservative" that I am aware of has challenged Podhoretz's conclusion.
Yet others insist on describing conservatives - particularly those whom they
regard as "hard-line" conservatives -- with this label. If the "neo" shoe
can be made to fit conservatives, why not the hard-line left?
Leftist Support of Islamist Terror
Most shocking is the outright sympathy of many leftist-liberals for Islamic
fascism. They said little about the murder of 500 Russian civilians, many of
them children, but screamed week after week because some Arab savage at Abu
Ghirab prison wore a bag on his head. They cared nothing about the
beheadings committed by the Islamo-savages or the execution of 12 Nepalese.
David Horowitz gives an excellent discussion of who this "Left" really is.
He calls the neo-communist, I call them Leftist-Liberals. I'm a classical
Liberal myself and I feel it's time to remove this irrational element that
has been allowed to poison our good name.
--
The fundamental principle of our Constitution . . . enjoins [requires] that
the will of the majority shall prevail.
George Washington
--------------------------------------------------------------
The will of the majority [is] the natural law of every society [and] is the
only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes
err. But its errors are honest, solitary and short-lived
Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be
rightful must be reasonable - the minority possess their equal rights which
equal law must protect
Thomas Jefferson
Server 13
> Taking On The Neo-Coms Part 1
> David Horowitz
> http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com
>
> How to identify the political left? Current usage refers to everyone left of
> center as "liberal." Yet what are currently identified liberals liberal
> about except hard drugs and sex?
roflmao