Editorial
Who are you, dam-ned fiend, and what have you done with my David?!
(Is it something I ate, or is it something about the times in which we live? This is my second editorial today that might be a little splenetic -- see the Hollingworth diatribe below. Oh well, I'm on a roll so here come da spleen!)
I was a great admirer of David Horowitz from about the mid-1980s. That was about the time the former Ramparts editor was copping a lot of flak from the Left for having the balls to criticize Marxist-Leninist regimes such as Nicaragua and the USSR. I recall his seminal article, A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left (Commentary, June ’86 -- not on the WWW as far as I can see); having been saying most of those things all through the Cold War (and all the flak I copped!) I was relieved to see them being said by a prominent New Left activist.
I read with rapt attention a couple of his books, including his memoir, Radical Son. Horowiz was a red diaper baby and his anecdotes about a childhood with Communist parents make fascinating reading. I especially loved the bit where he recounted his parents picketing (like most of the Left, whether Leninist or not) with signs saying "The Rosenbergs Are Innocent": Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were family friends, fellow Communists who the Horowitz family and all their comrades knew were as guilty as hell of passing nuke secrets to their beloved Soviet Union, which Horowitz now correctly identifies as the most murderous regime ever to exist, along with Communist China.
Destructive generation, co-authored with Peter Collier, gives important insights into people and movements that Horowitz knew well while editor of the world's most influential New Left magazine. What he experienced with the yippies and hippies, and the murderous Black Panthers, is gripping reading. (It was what he knew about the Panthers that sowed the seeds of his break with the Left, but it took him some years to put the pieces together in his own mind.)
Unfortunately, since Horowitz's now rather celebrated disconfirmation with his commitments and those of his erstwhile comrades, he has drifted to the US Empire Right with an exponentially increasing momentum. He now seems to want to out-NeoCon the NeoCons. His FrontPage magazine/Center for the Study of Popular Culture, five or six years ago, seemed to me to hold some hope for intelligent discussion of the Culture Wars and politics. I used to recommend them to everyone, not because I agreed with everything Horowitz was spouting -- not by a long chalk -- but because I had confidence that he was doing what I try to do: grok the whole Left/Right thing and, eclectically perhaps, propose new paradigms. Now I'm linking Horowitz as an example of how the mighty are fallen, and how silly things can get. Horowitz is now just slightly to the left of Heinrich Himmler. Somewhere on the Damascus Freeway, the Great Man dropped his torch along with the denims and guarachi sandals. In order to distance himself from the scum of the New Left (and hooray for that), he's adopted the economic rationalism that is destroying the globe and which cares not one whit for human beings, especially if they are tinted and/or poor. Vale Jerry Rubin, John Lennon, Che Guevara and Bobby Seale. Welcome Francis Fukuyama, George W Bush and Milton Friedman.
Horowitz has a column in Jewish World Review, and another at Salon.com. In these, as well as in FrontPage magazine, a lot of his commentary makes sense, as he criticizes the 'acceptability' of the likes of Angela Davis and many unreconstructed Communists. It is hard to fault much of Horowitz's critique of anti-anti-Communism, and he has a good grasp of the role of ideology in culture. I often nod my head when reading him -- and then, whammo!, he comes out with a statement like "The Mideast blood bath is not about land -- it's about religion. The Israelis' great crime? They're Jews." Or he gets incredibly Puritan about modern culture. Or he condemns progressive ideas as neo-Communist. One cannot deny the influence of Marxism on contemporary Left politics, and one cannot decry Horowitz's condemnation of the Left for its interminable silence on its own crimes, but Horowitz seems to be stuck in that old groove of "If you are not with us, you're agin us". He still wears long hair and a beard, but one suspects most accoutrements of even slightly alternative thought or culture are anathema to St David of Tarsus.
How could such a thing happen? It must be a complex matter, but I'm reminded of a psychology study many years ago. The researchers wondered why people who had had a major disconfirmation in their belief system (such as people who predict the end of the world, or a UFO invasion -- things that don't happen to their schedule) seemed not to stop believing, but to believe twice as hard, and to redouble their efforts at proselytising. Perhaps you know the study and can point me to it online.*
After studying many such subjects, the researchers concluded that the people who had suffered the disconfirmation probably tried to convert everyone else so that they didn't look so silly. It's an embarrassment thing. That is, if the whole world believed what they did, they wouldn't look like fools. Such unconscious motivations were imputed by the researchers to cults such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Millerites (Seventh Day Adventists), both of which had predicted certain dates for the return of Jesus Christ. When Jesus didn't show up on time, the cults actually grew.
Your almanackist was ever a poor judge of character, and an even worse mind reader. However, I think there might well be something in this hypothesis to partly explain the strange transmogrification of the radical son, David Horowitz, into Donald Rumsfeld's doppelganger. Strange, huh?
*(I think it might be Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. "The Logic of Salvation," International Journal of Social Psychiatry 16, 1969: 45-53, but I can't find it online to confirm -- see http://www.mille.org/scholarship/bibliography/bibliosubjects/413.html.)
More:
Flak Magazine: David Horowitz interview, 03-21-01 Notes from the Provocateur
An interview with David Horowitz
By Julia Lipman
Who are you, dam-ned fiend, and what have you done with my David?!
(Is it something I ate, or is it something about the times in which we live? This is my second editorial today that might be a little splenetic -- see the Hollingworth diatribe below. Oh well, I'm on a roll so here come da spleen!)
I was a great admirer of David Horowitz from about the mid-1980s. That was about the time the former Ramparts editor was copping a lot of flak from the Left for having the balls to criticize Marxist-Leninist regimes such as Nicaragua and the USSR. I recall his seminal article, A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left (Commentary, June ’86 -- not on the WWW as far as I can see); having been saying most of those things all through the Cold War (and all the flak I copped!) I was relieved to see them being said by a prominent New Left activist.
I read with rapt attention a couple of his books, including his memoir, Radical Son. Horowiz was a red diaper baby and his anecdotes about a childhood with Communist parents make fascinating reading. I especially loved the bit where he recounted his parents picketing (like most of the Left, whether Leninist or not) with signs saying "The Rosenbergs Are Innocent": Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were family friends, fellow Communists who the Horowitz family and all their comrades knew were as guilty as hell of passing nuke secrets to their beloved Soviet Union, which Horowitz now correctly identifies as the most murderous regime ever to exist, along with Communist China.
Destructive generation, co-authored with Peter Collier, gives important insights into people and movements that Horowitz knew well while editor of the world's most influential New Left magazine. What he experienced with the yippies and hippies, and the murderous Black Panthers, is gripping reading. (It was what he knew about the Panthers that sowed the seeds of his break with the Left, but it took him some years to put the pieces together in his own mind.)
Unfortunately, since Horowitz's now rather celebrated disconfirmation with his commitments and those of his erstwhile comrades, he has drifted to the US Empire Right with an exponentially increasing momentum. He now seems to want to out-NeoCon the NeoCons. His FrontPage magazine/Center for the Study of Popular Culture, five or six years ago, seemed to me to hold some hope for intelligent discussion of the Culture Wars and politics. I used to recommend them to everyone, not because I agreed with everything Horowitz was spouting -- not by a long chalk -- but because I had confidence that he was doing what I try to do: grok the whole Left/Right thing and, eclectically perhaps, propose new paradigms. Now I'm linking Horowitz as an example of how the mighty are fallen, and how silly things can get. Horowitz is now just slightly to the left of Heinrich Himmler. Somewhere on the Damascus Freeway, the Great Man dropped his torch along with the denims and guarachi sandals. In order to distance himself from the scum of the New Left (and hooray for that), he's adopted the economic rationalism that is destroying the globe and which cares not one whit for human beings, especially if they are tinted and/or poor. Vale Jerry Rubin, John Lennon, Che Guevara and Bobby Seale. Welcome Francis Fukuyama, George W Bush and Milton Friedman.
Horowitz has a column in Jewish World Review, and another at Salon.com. In these, as well as in FrontPage magazine, a lot of his commentary makes sense, as he criticizes the 'acceptability' of the likes of Angela Davis and many unreconstructed Communists. It is hard to fault much of Horowitz's critique of anti-anti-Communism, and he has a good grasp of the role of ideology in culture. I often nod my head when reading him -- and then, whammo!, he comes out with a statement like "The Mideast blood bath is not about land -- it's about religion. The Israelis' great crime? They're Jews." Or he gets incredibly Puritan about modern culture. Or he condemns progressive ideas as neo-Communist. One cannot deny the influence of Marxism on contemporary Left politics, and one cannot decry Horowitz's condemnation of the Left for its interminable silence on its own crimes, but Horowitz seems to be stuck in that old groove of "If you are not with us, you're agin us". He still wears long hair and a beard, but one suspects most accoutrements of even slightly alternative thought or culture are anathema to St David of Tarsus.
How could such a thing happen? It must be a complex matter, but I'm reminded of a psychology study many years ago. The researchers wondered why people who had had a major disconfirmation in their belief system (such as people who predict the end of the world, or a UFO invasion -- things that don't happen to their schedule) seemed not to stop believing, but to believe twice as hard, and to redouble their efforts at proselytising. Perhaps you know the study and can point me to it online.*
After studying many such subjects, the researchers concluded that the people who had suffered the disconfirmation probably tried to convert everyone else so that they didn't look so silly. It's an embarrassment thing. That is, if the whole world believed what they did, they wouldn't look like fools. Such unconscious motivations were imputed by the researchers to cults such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Millerites (Seventh Day Adventists), both of which had predicted certain dates for the return of Jesus Christ. When Jesus didn't show up on time, the cults actually grew.
Your almanackist was ever a poor judge of character, and an even worse mind reader. However, I think there might well be something in this hypothesis to partly explain the strange transmogrification of the radical son, David Horowitz, into Donald Rumsfeld's doppelganger. Strange, huh?
*(I think it might be Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. "The Logic of Salvation," International Journal of Social Psychiatry 16, 1969: 45-53, but I can't find it online to confirm -- see http://www.mille.org/scholarship/bibliography/bibliosubjects/413.html.)
More:
Flak Magazine: David Horowitz interview, 03-21-01 Notes from the Provocateur
An interview with David Horowitz
By Julia Lipman
Pip Wilson posted item above at 8:30 PM | Permalink
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home