The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz
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It was not even so much the feeling that the left would not be able to change society; it was rather the sense that, in crucial ways, the left could not change itself.
Above all, the left seems trapped in its romantic vision. In spite of the defeats to its radical expectations, it is unable to summon the dispassion to look at itself critically. Despite the disasters of 20th-century revolutions, the viability of the revolutionary goals remains largely unexamined and unquestioned. Even worse, radical commitments to justice and other social values continue to be dominated by a moral and political double standard. The left’s indignation seems exclusively reserved for outrages that confirm the Marxist diagnosis of capitalist society. Thus there is protest against murder and repression in Nicaragua but not Cambodia, in Chile but not Tibet, South Africa but not Uganda, Israel but not Libya or Iraq. Political support is mustered for oppressed minorities in Western countries but not in Russia or the People’s Republic of China, while a Third World country that declares itself “Marxist” puts itself—by the very act—beyond reproach. In the same vein, almost any “liberation movement” is embraced as just that, though it may be as unmistakably atavistic and clerically fascist on first sight as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s in Iran.22
The Nation’s Richard Falk was one of the outspoken promoters of the idea that the Ayatollah’s revolution would be a “liberation” for Iran.
This moral and political myopia is compounded by the left’s inability to accept responsibility for its own acts and commitments. Unpalatable results like the outcome of the Revolution in Russia are regarded as “irrelevant”—and dismissed—as though the left in America and elsewhere played no role in them, and as though they have had no impact on the world the left set out to change. Or they are analyzed as anomalies—and dismissed—as though there were in fact a standard of achieved revolution by which the left could have confidence in its program and in its understanding of the historical process.
Recently the shock of events in Indochina—mass murder committed by Cambodia’s Communists, the invasion and unacknowledged occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam, the invasion of Vietnam by China—has produced new and promising responses among radicals still committed to the socialist cause.33 Paul Sweezy, the dean of America’s independent Marxists, wrote in Monthly Review this June of “a deep crisis in Marxian theory” because not one of the existing “socialist” societies behaves the way Marx and “most Marxists . . . until quite recently . . . thought they would.” Classes haven’t been eliminated; nor, he observes, is there any visible intention to eliminate them. The state, far from disappearing, has grown more powerful, and Marxist regimes “go to war not only in self-defense but to impose their will on other countries—even ones that are also assumed to be socialist.”
This was obviously wishful thinking.
The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.44 Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its political stance, Chomsky refuses to devote his tenacious intelligence to a systematic scrutiny of “socialist” regimes or even anti-Western regimes of the Third World.
Chomsky’s extreme adverse reaction to this reference, which is described in Radical Son (he wrote me two six-page single-spaced, vituperative and personally abusive letters in response), caused me to begin a reassessment of his character. For my second thoughts on Chomsky, see the articles in Volume Two of this series, Progressives.
Thus, in a passage from his new book Language and Responsibility, Chomsky criticizes the absence of socialist journalists in the mass media and comments: “In a sense, we have over here the ‘mirror image’ of the Soviet Union, where all the people who write in Pravda represent the position they call ‘socialism’—in fact, a certain variety of highly authoritarian state socialism.” Chomsky attributes this conformity to “ideological homogeneity” among the U.S. intelligentsia and to the fact that the mass media are capitalist institutions. Chomsky then offers examples of press conformity in connection with the Vietnam War and concludes: “It is notable that despite the extensive and well-known record of Government lies during the period of the Vietnam War, the press, with fair consistency, remained remarkably obedient, and quite willing to accept the Government’s assumptions, framework of thinking, and interpretation of what was happening.”
The questions I find myself asking, when I read these words just now, are: By what standard does Chomsky judge the obedience of the American press remarkable? Is there a national press that is not obedient in the sense described? Does Chomsky mean that the American press was remarkably more obedient to its government during the Vietnam War than other national presses would have been in similar circumstances? Looking back at those events from the present historical juncture, one would be inclined to say exactly the reverse. Not only did the American press provide much of the documentation on which the antiwar movement’s indictment of the American war effort was based—including the My Lai atrocities—but in defiance of its government and at the risk of prosecution for espionage and treason, it published the classified documents known as the “Pentagon Papers,” which provided a good deal of the tangible record of official lies to which Chomsky refers.55
Chomsky ignored this obvious criticism and went on to elaborate the same preposterous thesis in his most famous book, Manufactured Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman.
This is not to say that Chomsky’s characterization of press subservience is wrong but rather to put the criticism in perspective. Within the framework of ideological conformity and institutional obedience that Chomsky rightly deplores, a body of dissent developed during the 1960s which has continued to influence the conduct of America foreign policy and the structure of international relations in the present decade. Who would have thought ten years ago that the anti-American revolution in Iran, the linchpin of America’s imperial interests in the Middle East, would not trigger an immediate American military intervention? Who would have believed that the 25,000 military “advisors” in Africa’s civil conflicts in the 1970s would be Cubans rather than Americans?
Consider, too, for a moment, Chomsky’s misleading comparison of the Soviet and American presses as “mirror images.” In fact, the ignorance imposed on the Soviet public by government-controlled media and official censorship is mind-boggling by Western standards. At a bare minimum, the information necessary to carry on a public debate over government policies in areas such as foreign policy and defense is not available to the Soviet citizen (who would be forbidden to use it, if it were). Censorship is carried to such an extreme that the Soviet citizen may be uninformed about such noncontroversial threats to his wellbeing as natural disasters, man-made catastrophes or even military provocations by the United States. When Washington mined Haiphong Harbor and dared Russian vessels to challenge the blockade, a crisis—compared at the time to the 1962 confrontation over Cuban missiles—ensued. For twenty days during this crisis, the Soviet people were not informed that the mining had taken place. (The purpose of the blackout was to allow the Soviet leadership to capitulate to the American threat without domestic consequences.)
Why bring this up? Why dwell on the negative features of the Soviet system (or of other Communist states) which in any case are widely reported in the American media? What is the relevance? These are questions the apologists of the left raise when they are confronted by the Soviet case. Unfortunately, the consequences of ignoring the flaws of practical Communism are far-ranging and real. To begin with, the credibility of the left’s critique is gravely undermined. Chomsky’s article is a good example. The American press does not look inordinately servile when compared with its real-world counterparts—and especially its socialist opposites. Only when measured against its own standards and the ideals of a democratic society does it seem so. Yet it is Chomsky who raises the Soviet comparison, precisely because the United States and the Soviet Union are in an adversary relationship—a political fact of prime importance that the left often prefers to ignore, when it suits their purposes—and he does so in a misleading way. The result