David Horowitz
The Delusions of David Horowitz
by Kurt Nimmo
CounterPunch, October 31, 2002
Behold, David Horowitz, former Marxist
gone neoconservative in his autumn years. In the world Horowitz
occupies all of the clocks have lurched backward to a more paranoid
and suspicious time, let us say somewhere mid-stride of the McCarthy
inquisition. In the world Horowitz inhabits there are communists
under beds and Grand Conspiracies on the tapis. For instance,
last weekend's march in Washington against the proposed madness
of war is simply and conclusively explained away by Horowitz as
"a regrouping of the Communist left, the same left that supported
Stalin and Mao and Ho." Granted, in the 60s -- an era David
is apparently unable to escape -- there was much talk of Mao and
Ho, yet very little of Stalin beyond the blather of discredited
old school Communists which Horowitz inexplicably adds to his
toxic brew of condemnation. Nonetheless, any serious talk of Ho
and Mao was generally limited to strict Marxist ideologues, of
which Mr. Horowitz was one (he remains a strident ideologue, though
no longer Marxist). Most folks in opposition to the Vietnam war
didn't buy into Mao, Ho, Che, or Stalin. Of course, as Horowitz
likely remembers it, anybody opposed to the Vietnam war was marching
around spewing irrelevancies from Mao's Little Red Book -- a text,
it must be remembered, essentially introduced by the Black Panthers
as a way to make a quick buck. No doubt David, back in the day,
helped the BP sell more than a few copies.
The Horowitz glass is distorted, blackened.
When he ganders therein, David observes Ramsey Clark lending a
helping hand to Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. It does
not matter, of course, that Clark has denounced Saddam Hussein;
what irks David is the fact Clark has called the sanctions against
Iraq immoral and barbaric, not the stuff of a civilized people.
Or maybe Horowitz is angered by Clark's insistence that Bush Senior
is a war criminal for bombing helpless Iraqi innocents into pre-industrial
hellishness over a decade ago. David, in his devious way, makes
no mention of these things, preferring instead stark generalities.
David Horowitz cannot be bothered with particulars or fair play.
There is no time, or luxury, because the Clarks of the world dream
of a "Communist revolution in America," the "immediate
agenda" of which is to "force America's defeat in the
war with terror we are now in." Clark and the "100,000
Communists" in Washington last weekend "are not pacifists
and they are not peaceniks," they are "a movement of
by and for America's enemies within." You, who are now reading
this, and who may disagree with Bush's cataclysmic plans for Iraq
-- you are seditious fellow travelers on the move with Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
David Horowitz has also revealed a fondness
for historical revisionism, or possibly historical omission. "The
Communist left," explains neocon guru David, "also opposed
'American militarism' in the 1930s to prevent the West from stopping
Hitler." Never mind that well before the US even pondered
going to war with Germany (which, prior to Pearl Harbor, most
Americans did not support) -- back when Henry Ford was accepting
awards from the Nazis and happy as a clam to have slave laborers
toiling in his German factories -- more than a few American communists
and plain folk of principle were sailing off for Spain to fight
the Franco version of fascism. Moreover, David may wish to tell
us about the Nazi émigrés who assumed prominent
positions in the Republican Party after the war. I wonder, does
the name Reinhard Gehlen ring a bell with David Horowitz? Or possibly
Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Nazi war collaborator, who served
as adviser to Republican Paul Weyrich? David should exercise more
caution when he decides to become a history teacher.
Here's another historical doozie from
Horowitz: "The success of the anti-Vietnam left resulted
in the deaths of two and a half million people in Indo-China who
were slaughtered by the Marxists after the 'peace movement' forced
America's withdrawal." No doubt Horowitz read the flawed
study authored by Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson, which
attempted to demonstrate how a major bloodbath went down in South
Vietnam following the Communist victory of 1975. This myth was
pretty much put to rest by Gareth Porter and James Roberts in
"Creating a Bloodbath by Statistical Manipulation."
At any rate, if David is sincerely interested in learning about
murder in Southeast Asia, he may begin with Zbigniew Brzezinski.
"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged
the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge]," Brzezinski has proudly
admitted. In November 1980, Ray Cline, former Deputy Director
of the CIA, visited a Khmer Rouge enclave inside Cambodia in his
capacity as senior foreign-policy adviser to President-elect Ronald
Reagan. Good old Reagan, undoubtedly a hero for Horowitz and like-minded
far right demagogues, made sure Pol Pot and his genocidal and
obsequious followers received $85 million from 1980 to 1986. All
of this was revealed years later in correspondence between congressional
lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of
America Foundation. Horowitz, to his discredit, is careless with
the facts -- but then, as a propagandist, he is not in the business
of truth or accuracy. David is after the "internal threat,"
those who would "weaken America's defenses from within,"
which is to say anybody who disagrees with him or US foreign policy,
anybody who may elect to exercise his or her constitutional right
to petition the government.
David Horowitz believes the "size
of [the Washington] demonstrations is a reflection of the growth
of a treacherous anti-American radicalism in this country that
has no Communist Party per se, but is just as dedicated to America's
destruction... [America is] the Great Satan and we deserve to
be attacked. This is the real message of the so-called peace movement,
often covertly and disingenuously expressed... Their agenda is
to weaken America's defenses from within. The question is: will
we let them?" If anybody is disingenuous here, it is Horowitz.
As a former antiwar leftist he knows damn well the vast majority
of the people who oppose Bush's impending war do not want to destroy
America -- or are they dedicated to aiding and abetting al-Qaeda
-- but rather they are sincerely interested in preventing an unnecessary
and potentially disastrous war. Because David Horowitz wanted
to destroy his country when he was a Marxist some thirty odd years
ago does not mean all progressives desire to do the same now.
Chances are very few of them are Marxists or conniving black flag
anarchists bent on throwing bombs, as Horowitz would likely have
it. Chances are, as well, they are unanimous in their disapproval
and loathing of the mass murder perpetuated on September 11. Horowitz
simply reveals his cynical, paranoid, and -- yes, unfortunately
-- misanthropic nature by churning out such sweeping and absurd
comments about the good intentions of people he knows absolutely
nothing about. Like a many former Marxists gone to neocon seed,
he is a master at shuffling people off into neat red pencil categories
of disapprobation.
Finally, Horowitz is with John Ashcroft,
the son of a preacher who agrees wholeheartedly about the "internal
threat" (i.e., those with the temerity to dissent insane
and destructive policies) and a man bestowed with the power to
do something about it. "The hatred of John Ashcroft reflects
the demonstrators' hatred for the American government and for
the ordinary Americans whom our government protects," opines
David. How, exactly, this protection will arrive in the guise
of the Patriot Act -- with its draconian provisions for internet
snooping, roving wiretaps, domestic detours around FISA limitations,
and "sneak-and-peek" warrants -- is not explained. Obviously,
Horowitz agrees with Ashcroft and Bush that good old fashion government,
as envisioned by the founders of this nation, is no longer relevant,
desirable, or applicable. If Thomas Jefferson were around today,
no doubt he would have something to say about Bush's wholesale
trashing of governmental checks and balances, the creation of
a secret and unanswerable executive branch, throwing habeas corpus
out the window, snooping on the reading habits of library patrons,
holding American citizens incommunicado, and eventual military
tribunals for the same conducted in secret star chambers. But
then, I imagine, Horowitz would characterize Jefferson as an America-hating
communist as well, mostly because he sincerely believed in the
"eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws,
and trials by jury," which Ashcroft and his apologist Horowitz,
in their eminent arrogance and contempt for those who disagree
with them, believe is no longer necessary.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia
developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
David Horowitz watch - http://horowitzwatch.blogspot.com/
**********
David Horowitz's Enemies List
by Amy Schiller, Brandeis University_
www.campusprogress.org/, February
14, 2006
David Horowitz's book was released
February 13. The full list of his "101 most dangerous academics".
David Horowitz, self-appointed watchdog
of "liberal totalitarian" campuses across America, has
returned with his most McCarthyesque work yet: The Professors:
The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. Horowitz claims that
colleges and universities are sanctuaries for all kinds of terrorist-loving,
freedom-hating quacks. There are several contradictory layers
to this critique, for reasons I'll explain later. These include
the arguments that many prominent professors are uncredentialed
or underqualified, hold political beliefs far outside the mainstream,
create undeservedly cushy bases for themselves in disciplines
like queer studies or post-colonial studies (just to name two)
and impose their political beliefs on their classes by presenting
biased material and grading subjectively. In short, Horowitz argues
that colleges have become indoctrination camps for radical anti-American-Communist-feminist-terrorist-moral
relativism.
Yes, you read that right. Apparently any
academic who studies non-capitalist economies, women, racial minorities,
GLBT people, or even history or philosophy that deviates from
traditional beliefs hates America, and, of course, wants every
student to agree with them. Horowitz lists his grievances with
these 101 professors at the top of each profile, with derogatory
bulletpoints like "Rock musician and Marxist" (Prof.
Mark Levine, UC Irvine) or apparently outrageous quotes like "most
aspects of life are shaped by the racism that is integral to the
foundation of the United States" (Prof. Joe Feagin, Texas
A&M, who also focuses on America's " alleged hostility
to women," emphasis added). The Who's Who format subsequently
seems like a bitter high school outcast's yearbook, with each
photo scrawled with damning epithets. Just replace the image of
"slut" and "jerkface," with Horowitz's insults,
like "civil liberties activist" and "feminist."
Full disclosure: your reviewer is everything
that Horowitz hates. When I met him, researching this article
last summer, and told him where I went to school, he rolled his
eyes in disgust. One of Brandeis' founding principles is the "pursuit
of social justice" which is anathema to Horowitz' deceptive
ideal of an academy separate from politics, teaching only the
so-called facts. I am also a Women's and Gender Studies major
and I have dated or befriended many a gender-queer anarchist radical,
both of which apparently means I question authority, and therefore
hate America and embrace supporters of terrorism. Plus, I knew
before I even opened the book who from my school would appear
in its pages. Sure enough, there on page 171, was Prof. Gordon
Fellman, with a writeup taken almost verbatim from the biography
that appears on Horowitz's own online magazine, FrontPage. And,
boy, does Horowitz tear him to bits, with critiques like "Apparently
Professor Fellman views masculinity as an undesirable trait."
Oooh, burn. In fact, Gordie (as he is known to students) researches
and teaches about conflict and war as one of several potential
ways of organizing human relations that could include a greater
emphasis on nurturing and cooperation. Only someone hell-bent
on winning a made-up war of ideas (sound familiar?) would take
such strong objection to Gordie's philosophy.
The most striking irony here is that Horowitz
claims that "these professors are capable of making disturbingly
shallow political arguments and alarmingly crude political opinions"
(xxxi) but Horowitz's criteria for inclusion in his book seem
to be the crudest of all. If Horowitz were writing about the twentieth
century he would put anarchist writer and lefty activist Emma
Goldman next to assassin Sirhan Sirhan. He claims that academic
misbehavior runs the gamut from highly respected scholars like
Eric Foner of Columbia (a guy liked even by Karl Rove) to crackpots
like Ward Churchill, who called 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns"
who deserved their fate. Horowitz uses Churchill as his opening
gambit both because his published beliefs are so repulsive and
because his former position in the bosom of the college lecture
circuit demonstrates the degree of conflation that can occur between
liberal critiques and hateful screeds. Yet Horowitz tries to capitalize
on the Churchill example and expand on it to tar not just a few
scattered charlatans but entire disciplines that question capitalism,
male dominance, white privilege, and so on.
His grounds for doing so are often flimsy,
such as with Prof. Michael Berube from Penn State, about whom
Horowitz claims "[he] believes that teaching literature should
be aimed at bringing about economic transformations." That
description is disingenuous at best, since, as Berube himself
points out, Horowitz takes an essay where Berube writes "the
important question for cultural critics, then, is also an old
question - how to correlate developments in culture and the arts
with large-scale economic transformations" and distorts it
to imply that Berube uses books and movies as his hammer and sickle.
But beyond the gaps in Horowitz's research,
frankly, it's rather circular logic to attack departments that
question power relationships, whether on the basis of race, gender,
or nationality, on the grounds that they are too political. That
would be their raison d'etre, their entire purpose. And how can
it be possible to, say, be a feminist and support terrorist groups
that are rigidly hierarchical and misogynistic? Horowitz's book
falls apart when a cultural studies professor and a Louis Farrakhan
proselytizer are labeled equally subversive, equally "Left"
in their political orientation. Horowitz's book is little more
than a clumsy attempt to expose nonexistent ties between legitimate
academics who probe at issues of racism, sexism, jingoism and
militarism and terrorists who would forbid the opportunity to
ask critical questions at all. In the end, Horowitz's criticisms
of crude moral equivalence and limited debate are merely projections
of his own weaknesses.
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