Paul Schnee: A Review of “RADICALS” by David Horowitz see note please
this review by my e-pal Paul Schnee is posted on Amazon
“A map of the world that did not show Utopia”, said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” In this regard Wilde foreshadowed the preference of most of the characters described in “Radicals, Portraits Of A Destructive Passion” a new book by David Horowitz.
Horowitz has written over 20 books, numerous articles and has appeared on countless television programs. It is fair to say that he possesses a keen perception and an unusually incisive mind. As a radical during the 1960s, whose parents were staunch members of the communist party, he was the editor of Ramparts magazine and was involved in almost every cause dear to the heart of the Left. In his new book he reveals the tune the Devil is whistling and does so with a precision that comes from whistling it so long and so well himself.
The second paragraph of his introduction gives a hint of what is to come: “The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes.”
To illustrate this Horowitz describes his dealings with, and knowledge of, a cast of characters some of whom had “second thoughts” but could never quite discard the squalid sort of romantic idealism that so often led to evil confirming Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “inclination is too strong for reason.”
Front and center on stage is Christopher Hitchens the brilliant and engaging public intellectual who had started out as a Trotskyite at Oxford University but whose second thoughts moved him closer to the center and then, after 9/11, to the right on some issues much to the chagrin of his old comrades. He is followed by Bettina Aptheker the intellectually confused feminist, Marxist, and eventual devotee of the Dalai Lama. Cornel West, a man who never met a paranoid racial fantasy unworthy of his time or energy and whose intellectual flatulence and undeserved success, comes next. Horowitz not only skewers West’s imposture as a genuine intellectual sustained by his own delusions and the left-wing, liberal glitterati but also describes West’s admiration for hate-mongers like Louis Farrakhan. The criminals, pardoned criminals, subversives and traitors like Linda Evans, Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn, Susan Rosenberg and Angela Davis are described in gruesome detail but what is most disturbing is how these vicious scum are able to be forgiven and even awarded celebrity status by a morally derelict academia and some of society’s elites which have come to see things not in terms of right and wrong but through the clouded and perverted prism of victim and oppressor. Horowitz’s tale about his old comrade-in-arms at Ramparts magazine, Susan Lydon, is a sad but an affectionate retrospective for a woman who according to the Guardian was “a feminist writer who launched the debate on the female orgasm”. Lydon’s intellect was acute but she led a chaotic and checkered life including serious drug addiction but according to Horowitz she eventually achieved a “modest liberation” through “honesty, accountability and caring for others.” The last radical to appear in Horowitz’s crosshairs is Saul Alinsky, a morally bankrupt, clever, corrupt, power-hungry and ruthless revolutionary who in his career of public mischief viewed people as mere utensils of his will.
Amongst the dramatis personae Horowitz reveals a real affection for Christopher Hitchens whose moral compass is far more finely tuned than any of his fellow travelers but then you could say the same thing about your mailman.
Some resentments in life spring from a yearning for fairness but this book goes far beyond the yearning experienced by so many young idealistic radicals, who exist in a state of idiotic bliss, to describe the crass falsifications, the calcified cynicism and the eternal crusade for power of the radical left-wing. It is an essential primer on how radicals think, the utopian schemes which animate them, the ugly destruction, violence and murder to which these schemes so often lead and the void of moral relativism where the truth has been outlawed and where the end always justifies the means. Their advertising is seductive but in the end they really have nothing to sell unlike David Horowitz whose books are worth twice the price.
Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion by David Horowitz (Sep 25, 2012)
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