Neo-Communism

Neo-Communism

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By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com
April 22, 2003

Wars are a test of citizens’ loyalty, commitment and political understanding; in providing this test the end of a war can be as illuminating as its beginning. It was a striking fact of the “anti-war” demonstrations against Operation Iraqi Freedom that the left was able to mobilize more protesters in three months – from the UN deadline of November 7 to the launch of the war in March – than the new left was able to mobilize in the first six years of the war in Vietnam. (The first of these anti-Vietnam demonstrations, which I helped to organize, took place in June 1962 at the University of California, Berkeley with less than a hundred students.) The same was true of the world wide protests against the war to topple the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Both the rapidity and size of the anti-Iraq mobilization indicate that it was not merely – and not mainly – a response to the particular war or the issues that defined it, but the expression of an attitude towards American power itself. Moreover, the same rapid growth of the protests in advance of suitable facts (e.g., the “quagmire” of the Vietnam War, the mounting loss of life without apparent result) indicates that the attitude towards American power is relatively unaffected by the uses to which the power is put. One could see this phenomenon in the demonstrations after 9/11, which mobilized tens of thousands of American college students before America lifted a finger in response. The purpose of the demonstrations was to protest any military response America might consider to the unprovoked terrorist attack.

The same attitude was manifest in an event that took place when the military phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom had been concluded, that is, after the regime in Bagdhad had been swiftly toppled with limited casualties and no significant reaction from the “Arab street.” In April, 2003, less than a week after United States and British forces had liberated Iraq, and after the victors had opened Saddam’s prisons, dismantled the torture chambers, shipped vast quantities of food and medicine to the Iraqi population and had begun to assemble the first Iraq regime in history that would not be a monarchy or military junta, or a fascist dictatorship and chamber of horrors – at this very moment -- the faculty senate of the University of California, Los Angeles voted to “condemn” the “United States invasion of Iraq.” The extraordinary session was convened just for the purpose of expressing the condemnation. The vote was 180-7 in favor, as though in the university such an extremist view was merely conventional wisdom.

The professors also voted to “deplore the doctrine of preventive war the President has used to justify the invasion”[1][1] and to “oppose the establishment of the American protectorate in Iraq,” even though the President actually justified Iraq’s liberation under U.N. Resolution 1441 (which had called on the regime to disarm immediately) and no American “protectorate” was ever contemplated.

In other words, 95% of the faculty senate of one of America’s most prestigious academic institutions are of the view – without any visible evidence to support that view -- that their own country is a dangerous, imperialistic aggressor, bent on acquiring control of a sovereign nation. They did this in the face of many contrary facts. This was a war that had already demonstrated that not even the Iraqi army or its elite Republican Guard had the will to defend its dictator and that the Iraqi people who warmly welcomed the “invading” troops, considered the Americans and the British to be their liberators.

The co-author of the UCLA resolution, Professor Maurice Zeitlin, is a leftist I happen to have known for forty years since the moment we both arrived at the University of California to pursue graduate studies at the beginning of the Sixties. Zeitlin was a Marxist (like myself) and in 1961 published one of the first books hailing the triumph of the Communist revolution in Cuba.[2][2] In October 1997, Zeitlin spoke at a UCLA symposium on 20^th Century utopias invoking the dead guerrilla Che Guevara, who had once attempted to incite an international civil war, calling for the creation of “Two, three, … many Vietnams.” Zeitlin declared his continuing faith in the cause that Guevara symbolized: “Che [Guevara] was above all a revolutionary socialist and a leader of the first socialist revolution in this hemisphere. His legacy is embodied in the fact that Cuban revolution is alive today despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc… No social justice is possible without a vision like Che’s.”[3][3]

In other words, for forty years, the co-author of UCLA’s anti-Iraq resolution has remained a small “c” communist, or -- as I prefer -- a “Neo-communist,” by which I mean a political radical and a determined opponent of America and its capitalist democracy. The UCLA resolution is an expression of those commitments rather than a reaction to a particular policy or war.

The faculty resolution at UCLA echoed an equally illuminating event weeks earlier at a Columbia University “teach-in” (a mode of protest invented in the Sixties). During this anti-war protest led by 30 members of the Columbia faculty, one of the professors, Nicholas DeGenova declared that every honest opponent of the Iraq War should want America to lose, and that for his own part he wished for “a million Mogadishus.” (DeGenova was referring to a 1993 incident in which 18 American soldiers were killed in an al-Qaeda ambush in Somalia.[4][4]) The negative reaction to DeGenova’s statement was so strong that the Columbia organizers, led by Eric Foner, the leftist chairman of Columbia’s leftist History Department, immediately distanced themselves from DeGenova’s image. In Foner’s words, “We do not desire the deaths of American soldiers.”

The immediate effect of Foner’s gesture was to obscure how universally DeGenova’s actual view of the war – which led to the impolitic remark -- was shared by those present, including Foner himself.

This was made apparent when DeGenova subsequently attempted to explain himself in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.[5][5] In the interview, DeGenova categorically denied that he wanted American soldiers to die, and explained why he had referred to Mogadishu in the context of Iraq: “I was referring to what Mogadishu symbolizes politically. The U.S. invasion of Somalia was humiliated [sic] in an excruciating way by the Somali people. And Mogadishu was the premier symbol of that.”

DeGenova’s comment is virtually identical to the reaction of Noam Chomsky to the attacks of 9/11.[6][6] Chomsky is an intellectual leader of the anti-war left who has written a book with these reflections that has sold over 200,000 copies. In Chomsky’s view, the World Trade Center deaths were regrettable but the unprecedented humiliation of the imperialist power – America -- was an historic victory for social justice and human progress.[7][7]

In the Chronicle interview, DeGenova explained that at Columbia he had also drawn an analogy between Mogadishu and the “historical lesson” of Vietnam. “What I was intent to emphasize was that the importance of Vietnam [was] that it was a defeat for the U.S. war machine and a victory for the cause of human self-determination.”

DeGenova did not explain how the slaughter of two-and-a-half million Cambodians and a hundred thousand Vietnamese by the Communist victors after America’s defeat, let alone the colonization of South Vietnam and Cambodia by the Hanoi regime was a triumph of self-determination. But he did elaborate on the present relevance of the historical distortion. “The analogy between Mogadishu and Vietnam is that they were defeats for U.S. imperialism…. The analogy between Mogadishu and Iraq is simply that there was an invasion of Somalia and there was an invasion of Iraq.”

Of course, there was no invasion of Somalia – U.S. troops were not sent to Mogadishu on a military mission but to feed starving Somali Muslims. The military engagement was triggered because a local al-Qaeda warlord, named Aidid, was stealing the food before it reached the Somali people and the Americans were sent to try to capture the thief.

It is safe to say that not a single protester at the Columbia event nor a single signer of the UCLA resolution nor many of the 14,000 professors who signed a protest petition against the war would disagree with DeGenova’s reading of this history of Vietnam, Mogadishu and Iraq.

This is confirmed in a representative anti-war declaration by Michael T. Klare, Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire and four other schools,[8][8] and a signer of the leftwing professors’ petition. Klare is also a regular contributor to The Nation where he was an apologist for Soviet expansion and a staunch opponent of American policy during the Cold War.

More than a month before the hostilities began in Iraq, Klare wrote an article for The Nation titled, “Resist War and Empire.” While the UN inspectors were conducting their searches, while the world was waiting to see if Saddam Hussein would disarm, while the Russians were attempting to get Saddam to step down, and before a single shot had been fired or troop deployed, Klare issued this clarion call: “The peace movement must prepare itself to conduct a long-term struggle against the Administration’s imperial designs in the gulf. These plans must be exposed for what they are: a classic appropriation of political power and material goods (especially petroleum) by material force masquerading as a campaign for democracy.” Vladimir Lenin could not have chosen his words more appropriately.

What the prologue to the war and its aftermath reveal is that the facts of the war are not the issue for the “anti-war” left and neither is the war itself. The so-called “anti-war” left is a Neo-communist movement that was launched forty years ago under the pretense of being a “new left,” and it has been at war with the “American empire” ever since. During these years of struggle with Communists in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America, and in the aftermath of America’s liberation of a billion inhabitants of the Communist empire, this left has been impervious to every good deed America has done and every bad deed its Marxist and now Islamo-fascist enemies have committed. Instead, this “antiwar” left relentlessly attributes the bad deeds of America’s enemies to America itself – hence the search for “root causes” every time America is attacked.

The Neo-communist left opposes America’s efforts to promote freedom and supports (sometimes “critically”) America’s declared enemies not because of what America does, but because of what they think America is. The Neo-communist left is impervious to facts because it is a political messianism, in essence a religious movement. Its delusions of social redemption are fed on a rich diet of anti-American myths. These myths were once generated in institutions funded by the Communist Party and other marginal radical sects. But that has all changed with the long march of the left during the last thirty years through America’s institutions of higher learning. The Neo-communist left is now entrenched on the faculties of America’s elite universities, where it is a “hegemonic” force. It has converted America’s elite universities into a political base for its radical and anti-American agendas. In the present war with radical Islam, this poses a problem Americans can continue to ignore only at their own peril, and which sooner or later they must address.

[1] See War Room #10, “Pre-Emption: Taking the Battle To The Enemy Camp.”

[2] Cuba: Tragedy In Our Hemipshere. It was co-authored with LA Times columnist and USC Professor Robert Scheer.

[3] Argiris Malapanis, UCLA Symposium, “LA Symposium Debates Che and the Cuban Revolution,” The Militant, November 24, 1997

[4] The War Room #8, “Moment of Truth (For the Anti-American Left)”

[5] Thomas Bartlett, “The Most Hated Professor In America,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18, 2003

[6] Noam Chomsky, 9-11, Boston, 2001

[7] Cf. David Horowitz, The Ayatollah of Anti-American Hate, a pamphlet of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, Los Angeles 2001

[8] Klare teaches in rotation at Hampshire, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts (Amherst).

Cultural Communists

By Joseph Yeager
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 9, 2003

In two provocative and convincing articles recently published on Frontpage Magazine, David Horowitz offers a new conception of the anti-American Left, and indeed, a new appellation as well: neo-communism, or neo-coms for short. Aside from identifying and naming this increasingly dangerous political force, the most important aspect of Horowitz's essays is his explanaiton of how anarchists--a powerful element within the neo-com set--are also essentially Communists.

For the purposes of review, Horowitz's argument is as follows. He asserts that the primary goal of the anarchist neo-coms is to destroy the United States, which they regard as the guarantor of an oppressive and inequitable status quo. The anarchists see America as the magneto of capitalist globalization, and as an imperial slum-lord perpetually pursuing its own avaricious ends. They also believe, perforce, that the annihilation of the United States will liberate the wretched of the earth and produce a new economic order that will be superior to current conditions. And although the anarchists have no real bluepring for what their brave new world would look like, their radical egalitarianism, smoking-hot hatred for capitalism, and collectivist proclivities guarantee that it would look much more like the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin than the United States of George W. Bush. Hence, Horowitz's identification of anarchists with communists is fundamentally correct.

This, in short, is Horowitz's explication of the anarcho-com subset within neo-communism, and it is persuasive. In this piece, however, I would like to isolate and identify another and equally important element of the neo-com phenomenon, the cultural communists, or cult-coms.

The theoretical and historical foundation of cultural Communism is known as the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School was not an institution, but rather, a school of thought within Marxism. In the context of contemporary cult-com, its most significant figures were Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. Raymond Williams, who shared much with the Frankfurt School, and whose influence is great among today's cult-coms, may be considered an honorary member.

The Frankfurt School coalesced in the mid twentieth century, largely in response to the discontent that many Marxist intellectuals felt toward orthodox Marxism, and to the growing realization that the much desiderated class war in the capitalist West was unlikely to occur. Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Williams et. al., then began to speculate on how best to subvert the capitalist society they hated so much. Willy-nilly, they concluded that capitalism was far more vulnerable at the cultural than the economic level and that, therefore, the cultural norms of capitalist society should be attacked. The obliteration of capitalism's cultural infrastructure would bring down capitalism and make possible the construction of a Communist society in the West.

To a large degree (and as noted by Paul Weyrich among others), this cultural Communism is the program of today's anti-American Left. And although its goals--the destruction fo America and the ushering in of a communist Utopia--are identical to those of the anarcho-communism that Horowitz exposed, its methodology is quite different.

Whereas the anarcho-coms urge violence, terrorism, mass vandalism, civil disobedience, and syndicalist strikes to bring down the system, the cult-coms deploy the slightly subtler weapons of multiculturalism and political correctness to achieve identical aims. Where the anarcho-coms envisage a dramatic and cataclysmic revolution, the cult-coms seek to gradually mold the United States into an entity that all neo-coms could embrace, but that would resemble the United States in name only.

Because the cult-coms regard culture and race as virtually synonymous, their critiques of America are racialist, and, in some instances, baldly racist. These critiques are two-fold. The first contends that historical racism and oppression in America, beginning with slavery and attacks on Indians and continuing through Jim Crow, have created an ipso facto racial hierarchy and class structure that persists even in the absence of clear manifestations of white racism. Whites, of course, sit atop this hierarchy while blacks languish at its base. Such a race/class hierarchy is termed institutional racism. The second critique simply declares that the United States is a flagrantly and irredeemably racist polity little different from Nazi Germany.

Both positions insist that because white/black inequality is so deeply entrenched, the simple eradication of overt white racism and the maintenance of race-based set-asides in the form of "affirmative action" will not solve the problem. Rather, something more essential and radical is necessary. In short, in order to eliminate white racism and the capitalist class structure upon which it battens, it is necessary to reconfigure white consciousness, to impugn the history and culture of whites, and to exalt black history and culture. Only after this colossal reengineering of consciousness and redistribution of historya nd culture have taken place, will American capitalism collapse, and the neo-coms be able to achieve their country.

Political correctness, which stems directly from Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse's views on language and rhetoric, is cultural communism's primary tool for altering white consciousness. The cult-coms believe that the very words we use serve to legitimize and buttress the power of the dominant class and to suppress the "subaltern" elements of society. Moreover--and as David Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate have pointed out--they believe that free speech reinforces hierarchies because elites have access to organs of communication while the disadvantaged do not. The elites use this advantage to cement their high status and to seal the pitiable fate of the less fortunate. The solution, therefore, is to gain control over society's cultural, educational and media spheres (a veritable fait accompli), and to use these redoubts as bases from which to regulate "hurtful" language and suppress the speech of the so-called elite class. Over time, the enfor ced usage of "benevolent" language and outlawry of "hate speech" will reconfigure white consciousness along progressive non-racist lines.

The multicultural program is every bit as sinister and Orwellian as its politically correct adjunct. It is a massive effort in deception, mendacity and reeducation designed to bring haughty white society down a peg, and to elevate non-white (but especially black) history and culture to its rightful position of high honor. In realized form, this means denigrating and covering up the accomplishments of Western civilization while usurping and inventing achievements for non-Western societies. It means focusing monomaniacally on atrocities committed by Westerners while sweeping non-Western abominations under the rug. It means claiming that the philosophical, scientific and literray heritage of ancient Greece was in fact stolen from "black" Egypt. It means pretending that slavery and wars of conquest are uniquely American, while eliding the successes of America's democratic government, its economy, its breakthroughs in science and industry, its struggl es on behalf of human rights, and the courage and decency of its soldiers. And, of course, it means asserting that the United States got just what it deserved on 9-11, and that any punitive American responses were unjust.

Indeed, 9-11 and its aftermath are the perfect examples of cultural communism in crisis response mode. To put it in its own bizarre phraseology, "9-11 ruptured the cult-com master narrative of non-white santliness and uniquely white malevolence." Everything the cult-coms had been claiming about the evils of America and the harmlessness of Moslem/non-white societies was given the lie before the American public. Instead, we witnessed with our own eyes the existence of barbarism within those societies and the reality of America as an innocent victim.

Initially--but not for long--the cult-coms were thrown off their stride. They were simply unprepared to deal with an event so monstrous and which so completely confuted their most cherished items of dogma. Eventually, however, a coherent and predictable message began to emerge from the academic, pop-culture, and media lairs of the cult-coms. To subtract from the ominously swelling righteous indignation of "Euro-Americans," we were reminded incessantly of the European crusades against Islam, while Noam Chomsky raved about a U.S. missile attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, which he portrayed as killing millions. To revive the lamentably deflated Islamic ego, we were all force-fed the ostensible glories of medieval Islam and made to swallow the bilge of continued Palestinian victimization at the hands of America and Israel. To reign in a white consciousness that threatened to burst the dykes of political correctness, the cult-coms forbade flying the American flag where they could, and threatened "hate crime" prosecution against anybody who so much as glanced with less than benign eyes upon Moslems. And, of course, they reprised this disgusting performance with heightened shrillness in the run-up to the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

As long as America exists as a predominantly white, free-market state, it can expect to meet with anti-American multiculturalism and eviscerating political correctness from the cult-coms. And the sooner Americans begin acknowleding that these people are the reactionary descendants of Lenin and Stalin, the sooner we can dismiss their disarming pretensions to pacifism, and the more quickly we can consign them to obscurity and irrelevance on the margins of a decent socity.