The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz
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parents and would avoid their radical fate. But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to the generation that had been silent during the years of Stalin’s slaughters. The Stalinists and the Panthers may have operated on stages vastly different in scale, but ultimately their achievements were the same. Stalin and the Panthers were ruthless exploiters of the radical dream; just like our forbears, my comrades and I were credulous idealists who had served a criminal lie.
Through this microcosm I saw what I had failed to see 18 years before, at the time of “de-Stalinization,” when the New Left was born. The problem of the left was not Stalin or “Stalinism.” The problem was the left itself.
Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small, its leaders were able to rob and kill without incurring the penalty of law. They were able to do so because the left had made the Panthers a law unto themselves—the same way the left had made Stalin a law unto himself—the same way the left makes Fidel Castro and the Sandinista comandantes laws unto themselves.
By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.
The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.
*This article appeared in The Village Voice, September 30, 1986.
1Years later Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, came to the conclusion that the Panthers had murdered her mother. With the help of friends, she hired a private detective who had worked regularly for leftwing defense attorneys to investigate the case. His report concluded that the Panthers were responsible for the murder of Betty Van Patter.
I was born fifty years ago in 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This is my first trip to your country, and it has been inspiring to me to see that although you have been occupied for half a century you have not been defeated.
The members of my family were socialists for more than a hundred years, first in Moravia and the Ukraine, then in New York and Berkeley; first as socialists; then as Communists; and then as New-Left Marxists. My grandparents came to New York to escape persecution as Jews in the Pale of Settlement. My grandfather was a tailor. He lived with other Jews in poverty on the Lower East Side and earned three dollars a week. He was so poor that sometimes he had to sleep under his sewing-machine in the factory where he worked. Compared to czarist Russia from which he had fled, America was a new world. He was still poor, but he had arrived in a land of opportunities provided by its free-market economy and political democracy; a land where people could grow rich beyond their wildest dreams.
That was my grandfather’s reality. Like many others who arrived in America, my grandfather also had a dream. His dream, however, was not a dream of riches. It was a dream he shared with other members of the international left: the dream of a socialist future, a world of planned economy and economic equality, of material abundance and social justice. In 1917, my grandfather thought he saw his dream become reality in Bolshevik Russia. By this time he also had a son. Like the children of other immigrant families, his son studied and worked hard to take advantage of the opportunities provided by America’s freedom. He became a high-school teacher and married a colleague and also had a son.
By this time my father was no longer poor like his father but middle-class. He and my mother could afford culture, travel, an automobile, and a grand piano. In 1949, with their schoolteachers’ salaries, they bought a six-room house on credit for $18,000. In 1986, when my father died, the house belonged to him as his property. It was worth $200,000. That was my father’s reality: riches and freedom beyond his father’s wildest dreams.
But like his father, my father had his heart set on a dream beyond the freedom and wealth that America had made possible for him. Just as his father had been a socialist, my father was a Communist. He supported the “social experiment” that Lenin and Stalin had begun in Soviet Russia. All his life he dreamed the Communist future, and he transmitted that dream to his son.
In 1956, events occurred in Moscow and in Eastern Europe that almost made me give up the dream I had inherited as a birthright. In 1956 the head of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his secret speech on the crimes of Stalin and thus drew aside a veil that had concealed from the faithful the grim reality of the socialist future. Soviet tanks thundered across the border to crush the brave forces of the Hungarian revolution and to discourage the hopeful beginnings of the Polish October.
Instead of being awakened by these events, I joined a new generation that hoped to revive the humanist spirit of the dream itself. I was inspired to join the New Left by a Polish Marxist named Isaac Deutscher, who was my teacher. It was Deutscher who devised the theory out of which we hoped to revive the socialist dream.
According to Deutscher, the Stalinist state that had murdered millions and erected an edifice of totalitarian lies was a deformation of the socialist ideal that socialists themselves would overcome. The socialist revolution had taken place in the backward environment of czarist Russia. Stalinism was a form of “primitive socialist accumulation” produced by the cultural backwardness of that environment and the political necessities of building an industrial economic base.
In 1956, when Khrushchev launched the process of de-Stalinization, Deutscher saw it as a prelude to the humanist future of which we all had dreamed. The socialist “economic base”—infinitely superior in rationality and productive potential to its capitalist competitor—had already been created. Socialist accumulation had been completed; the socialist superstructure would follow in due course. Socialist abundance would produce socialist democracy.
When we heard words like these, New Leftists all over the world became new believers in the socialist cause. Stalinism had been terrible, but the terror was over. The socialist economic base had been built in Russia. To complete the dream, all that was required was political democracy. In the New Left in the Sixties, we had a saying: “The first socialist revolution will take place in the Soviet Union.” Some leftists are still saying it today.
For 17 years, I waited in vain for the democratic revolution to come to Soviet Russia to complete the socialist dream. But it did not come. Oh, there was a spring in Prague. But Soviet tanks again rolled across the border to crush it. Five years later, another Polish Marxist—now ex-Marxist—stepped forward to explain why socialism would never be realized except in a totalitarian state. In 1956, Leszek Kolakowski had been a leader of the Polish October. In 1968, Kolakowski had been a defender of the Prague spring. Now, in 1973, at a conference in England, he summed up a hundred years of critiques of socialism that history had repeatedly confirmed. The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state.
Deutscher had been wrong. There would never be a socialist political democracy erected on a socialist economic base. Socialism was an impossible—and therefore destructive—dream.
But if Kolakowski was right, the future of peoples who lived under socialism was dark indeed. The totalitarian empire could not reform, but it could expand. Aided by dreamers all over the world, the expansion of that empire seemed likely, even inevitable—until now, the era of glasnost. Now, instead of a continuing expansion, we see Communism everywhere in retreat. Now its believers are fewer and fewer, and the terrain itself is beginning to shrink. Who among us expected this? A year and a half ago, I participated in an international panel in Paris that discussed