Posted on 10/15/2002 10:03:35 PM PDT by quidnunc
Envy and resentment are the driving passions of the left and evidently of the copy-cat right which, in the war that is upon us, can be seen joining hands in an attack on their own country. Consider the email this blog received from Justin Raimondo, the psychologically tormented, intellectually confused and fact-free editor of www.antiwar.com. Raimondo is a contributor to Buchanan's American Conservative. and his email was inspired by our lead stories, "Useful Idiots I and II," which reviewed the first issue of the magazine.
justin@antiwar.com wrote:
"Wow, David! Does this mean you're going to turn us into the FBI? Waaaay cool! David Horowitz has gone from being a Commie who wanted to jail everyone who disagreed with him, to a (neo)-conservative" who wants to jail everyone who disagrees with him. What progress! Of course, this isn't surprising, coming from someone who, in his autobiography, declared that the authorities were RIGHT to persecute his OWN PARENTS and fire them from their jobs as teachers. Gee, David, one can only wonder how you would've survived, and even gone on to become the bloviating fraud you are today. No college at Berkeley, no New Left "celebrity," no fellow-traveling with gun-toting Black Panthers and Commies — and no Second Thoughts, no career as a professional turncoat, and no grants from big neocon foundations! Why, it would've been TERRIBLE."
First to the facts. To begin with I was never technically a "Commie." I was a New Left Marxist, critical of the Communist Party from my very first book, Student, published in 1962. Second I have never supported sending anyone to jail for advocacy, let alone for "disagreeing" with me. Fighting straw men is always a sign of a weak (or non-existent) argument. Third, I am not a "neo-conservative," whatever that means, other than Jew. Fourth, not only have I never said that my parents should have been fired from their jobs during the McCarthy era, I wrote exactly the opposite as any casual reader of my autobiography Radical Son knows.
In Radical Son, I discussed my father's case (pp. 65 et seq) and examined the grounds given for firing him, and rejected them. I explicitly defended my father against the charge that he in any way misused his classroom which would have been the only legitimate reason for firing him. I did so by seeking out and interviewing a well-known anti-Communist, Arnold Beichman, who had been my father's student in the Thirties. According to Beichman, my father exerted a profound influence on him, encouraging him — a poor kid from the lower East Side to be come a writer. "Phil Horowitz changed my life," is what Beichman told me. "He had a journalism class that he taught on his own time after school. I was the only student who showed up, but he taught the class anyway. He taught me how to write and told me I could become a journalist if I wanted to. If it hadn't been for him I never would have had the confidence to try."
I also asked Beichman the following question: "Did my father ever try to indoctrinate you in his politics?" Beichman replied, "No, he never said anything about politics. He just taught me how to write."
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
He left out....irrelevant.
Clearly, he's going to stick to the high road in his rebuttal.
I would expect nothing less, of course.
LOL. I have always wondered what the pitchfork people meant when they talk of the dreaded "neo-cons". When asked they usually just give examples of Kristol, Pearle and Wolfowitz. Now I get it.
Raimondo was Buchanan's press secretary during his Y2K presidential campaign and, I believe, the one in 1996 as well.
In Raimondo's world, "Neoconservative" means "Jew" or "Zionist Dupe."
Sway?
In any case, I'm delighted he pinpoints for all who are paying attention the differences between the communism of his parents and his own affinity for the New Left which landed him -- in the end -- looking for a leader under which he could strategize his way toward Erehwon.
Helps explain how this former radical found his true home.
To begin with, the New Left is not so very new and it is not genuinely left either. Its existence, however, cannot be understood without a knowledge of the leftish soil in which the new plant started to grow. Furthermore, this newcomer on our ideological scene must be viewed as a reaction against our present profoundly left-influenced culture and civilization.Here we also have to face the fact that much of the New Left's critique of our way of life is-unknowingly rather than knowingly-copied from conservative sources. Finally, one can only fully comprehend the New Left if one realizes that it happens to be tied in with the student movement, the "academic unrest," [1] as well as with the worldwide disillusionment with the Classic Left, which by now is morally bankrupt. (Moral bankruptcy, unfortunately, causes physical decline only in the very long run.)
In its refusal to yield to the right, the New Left, moreover, shows us its profile against the background of all the many gruesome failures of the leftist movements, the leftist establishments which have accumulated in the last 200 years. Yet it is equally certain that the New Left cannot take over the receivership, the inheritance of the Great Leftist Drive because it offers no real alternatives: Unlike genuine leftism it has produced neither a coherent ideology nor a concrete utopia.
It offers criticisms but no real answers. ...
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