Dark Agenda is about an embattled religion, but most of all, it is about our imperiled nation. Tackling a broad range of issues from prayer in the schools to the globalist mindset, Horowitz traces the anti-Christian movement to its roots in communism.
When the communist empire fell, progressives did not want to give up their utopian anti-God illusions, so instead they merely changed the name of their dream. Instead of “communism,” progressives have re-branded their movement as “social justice.”
Dark Agenda shows how the progressives are prepared to use any means necessary to stifle their opponents who support the concepts of religious liberty that America was founded on, and how the battle to destroy Christianity is really the battle to destroy America.
Dark Agenda – Introduction
Dark Agenda
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Religion Must Die 1
Roots of the War 13
Radical Faith 27
Christian America 37
Prayer in the Schools 47
The War Begins 63
Moving the World 75
Battle Lines 93
A Radical Epidemic 109
Obama’s Arc 127
Religious Liberty 137
Civil War 159
Endnotes 173
Index 185
Chapter 1: Religion Must Die
On Sunday morning, November 5, 2017, a gunman walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
He wore tactical gear and a black face mask marked with a white skull, and he carried a semiautomatic rifle. He shot and killed two people outside the church, then went inside, walking up and down the aisle, cursing and shooting people in the pews. He reloaded again and again, emptying fifteen magazines of ammunition.
When the gunman emerged from the church, he found an armed citizen facing him from across the street—a former NRA firearms instructor named Stephen Willeford. The two men exchanged fire, and Willeford hit the gunman in the leg and upper body. The wounded shooter limped to his car and sped away. He was later found at the wheel of his crashed car, killed by a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
The attack killed twenty-six people, ages five to seventy-two, and wounded twenty. The killer had been courtmartialed in the Air Force for domestic violence (he had beaten his wife and cracked the skull of his infant stepson).
The Air Force failed to report his conviction to the FBI’s crime information database.
The slaughter of unarmed Christians in a church sanctuary was a cowardly attack on one church. But what happened after the church shooting was part of a wider war by the political left against Christians and Christianity.
As news of the shooting broke, prominent Christians took to Twitter and urged fellow believers to pray. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a devout Roman Catholic, tweeted, “Reports out of Texas are devastating. The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now.”
From Hollywood to New York and Washington, the left responded with a chorus of jeers and insults.
Former MSNBC political commentator Keith Olbermann suggested in a tweet that Speaker Ryan should proctologize himself with his prayers.
Seattle Democrat, Representative Pramila Jayapal, tweeted,
“They were praying when it happened. They don’t need our prayers. They need us to address gun violence . . . .”
Comedian Paula Poundstone sneered: “If prayers were the answer” to mass shootings, “wouldn’t people at a church service be safe?”
Actor Wil Wheaton tweeted, “The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive, you worthless sack of . . . .”
These and other comments from the secular left displayed not only a smug disdain for Christians but an amazing ignorance of how religious Christians view prayer. Christians don’t view prayer as a magic incantation to make themselves bulletproof. Christians believe in the teachings of Christ who warned them: “In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane Christ prayed to be delivered from the agony of the cross, but he ended his prayer, “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
The answer to Christ’s prayer was silence—and he was later crucified on a Roman cross.
In her commentary on the church shooting, MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid tweeted that “when Jesus of Nazareth came upon thousands of hungry people,” he didn’t pray; he fed the people. She’s simply wrong.
Matthew 14:19 records that, before Jesus fed the people, he looked heavenward and prayed. Jesus prayed and he acted. That’s how his followers still view prayer. They pray and they act.
At around the same time JoyAnn Reid was tweeting, the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team was already in action, rolling into Sutherland Springs with sixteen chaplains to comfort grieving families and help meet their material needs. Two days after the shooting, the Southern Baptist Convention announced it would pay all funeral expenses for the twenty-six slain churchgoers. Because this is a world made by flawed human beings, it will continue to be a world of tribulations. There will be more shootings, attacks, fires, floods, earthquakes, and other tragedies. Christians will call for prayer, and leftists will mock them for it, imagining there are solutions that can perfect this life, and regarding Christians as the enemies of that perfection.
The War
Since its birth in the fires of the French Revolution, the political left has been at war with religion, and with the Christian religion in particular. In a symbolic revolutionary act, the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution changed the name of the Cathedral of Notre Dame to the “Temple of Reason.” Then, in the name of “reason,” they proceeded to massacre the inhabitants of the Vendée region of west central France because its citizens were Catholics.
This has been called the first modern genocide, but it was far from the last. Karl Marx famously described religion as “the opium of the people” and “the sigh of the oppressed.”
Inspired by his hatred ever since, revolutionaries have regarded religion as the enemy of progress and the mask of oppression.
In Russia, Marx’s disciples removed religious teaching from the schools, outlawed criticism of atheists and agnostics, and burned 100,000 churches. When priests demanded freedom of religion, they were sentenced to death. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested, 95,000 of whom were executed by firing squad.Radicals in America today don’t have the political power to execute religious people and destroy their houses of worship.
___
The Noahide Laws and the Genocide Treaty
NOAHIDE LAWS PASSED BY CONGRESS 1991 - Death by Guillotine.Religion Must Die 1
Roots of the War 13
Radical Faith 27
Christian America 37
Prayer in the Schools 47
The War Begins 63
Moving the World 75
Battle Lines 93
A Radical Epidemic 109
Obama’s Arc 127
Religious Liberty 137
Civil War 159
Endnotes 173
Index 185
Chapter 1: Religion Must Die
He wore tactical gear and a black face mask marked with a white skull, and he carried a semiautomatic rifle. He shot and killed two people outside the church, then went inside, walking up and down the aisle, cursing and shooting people in the pews. He reloaded again and again, emptying fifteen magazines of ammunition.
The Air Force failed to report his conviction to the FBI’s crime information database.
The slaughter of unarmed Christians in a church sanctuary was a cowardly attack on one church. But what happened after the church shooting was part of a wider war by the political left against Christians and Christianity.
As news of the shooting broke, prominent Christians took to Twitter and urged fellow believers to pray. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a devout Roman Catholic, tweeted, “Reports out of Texas are devastating. The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now.”
From Hollywood to New York and Washington, the left responded with a chorus of jeers and insults.
“They were praying when it happened. They don’t need our prayers. They need us to address gun violence . . . .”
These and other comments from the secular left displayed not only a smug disdain for Christians but an amazing ignorance of how religious Christians view prayer. Christians don’t view prayer as a magic incantation to make themselves bulletproof. Christians believe in the teachings of Christ who warned them: “In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane Christ prayed to be delivered from the agony of the cross, but he ended his prayer, “nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.”
The answer to Christ’s prayer was silence—and he was later crucified on a Roman cross.
In her commentary on the church shooting, MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid tweeted that “when Jesus of Nazareth came upon thousands of hungry people,” he didn’t pray; he fed the people. She’s simply wrong.
Matthew 14:19 records that, before Jesus fed the people, he looked heavenward and prayed. Jesus prayed and he acted. That’s how his followers still view prayer. They pray and they act.
At around the same time JoyAnn Reid was tweeting, the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team was already in action, rolling into Sutherland Springs with sixteen chaplains to comfort grieving families and help meet their material needs. Two days after the shooting, the Southern Baptist Convention announced it would pay all funeral expenses for the twenty-six slain churchgoers. Because this is a world made by flawed human beings, it will continue to be a world of tribulations. There will be more shootings, attacks, fires, floods, earthquakes, and other tragedies. Christians will call for prayer, and leftists will mock them for it, imagining there are solutions that can perfect this life, and regarding Christians as the enemies of that perfection.
Inspired by his hatred ever since, revolutionaries have regarded religion as the enemy of progress and the mask of oppression.
In Russia, Marx’s disciples removed religious teaching from the schools, outlawed criticism of atheists and agnostics, and burned 100,000 churches. When priests demanded freedom of religion, they were sentenced to death. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested, 95,000 of whom were executed by firing squad.Radicals in America today don’t have the political power to execute religious people and destroy their houses of worship.
___
The Noahide Laws and the Genocide Treaty
NOAHIDE LAWS AND DECAPITATION FOR CONFESSING JESUS IS LORD.
A Gentile observing the Sabbath deserves death
(San0h. 58b)
“…and it speaks words against the Most High, and it wears out the set-apart ones of the Most High, and it intends to change appointed times (Feast Days) and law (Torah), and they are given into its hand for a time and times and half a time.” (Daniel 7:25) - New King James Version
"He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time."https://graviolateam.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-noahide-laws-and-genocide-treaty.html
___
Yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion. In their own minds, their intentions are noble—they want to save the human race from the social injustice and oppression that religion allegedly inflicts on humanity.
“Religion must die in order for mankind to live,” proclaimed left-wing commentator and comedian Bill Maher in Religulous, the most-watched documentary feature of 2008.
Both title and script were transparent attempts to stigmatize religious people as dangerous morons whose views could not be taken seriously. Throughout the film, Maher travels to Jerusalem, the Vatican, and Salt Lake City, as well as other centers of religion, interviewing believers and making them appear foolish. How did he gain interviews with his victims? He lied to them, saying he was making a film called A Spiritual Journey.
According to Maher, “The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end.”
He predicts the destruction of the human race as a result of “religion-inspired nuclear terrorism.”
Hence the need for religion to die if mankind is to live. Maher’s views accurately reflect the attitudes of a movement called the “New Atheism,” whose leaders are prominent scientists and best-selling authors, far superior in intellect to Maher but equally contemptuous of religion and religious believers. Like Maher’s film, the New Atheism movement seeks to discredit all religious belief by caricaturing its adherents as simpletons, and worse. The stated goal of the New Atheism is to delegitimize and extinguish the religious point of view.
Maher’s suggestion that religion—and evidently religion alone—threatens the existence of the human race is simply malicious. Both he and the New Atheists are blind to all the positive influences religion has had on human behavior, and they ignore all the atheist inspired genocides of the last 250 years. In the twentieth century alone, Communist atheists slaughtered more than 100 million people in Russia, China, and Indochina. Not even the bloodthirsty jihadists of radical Islam have killed innocents on anything close to such a scale.
It’s striking that Maher and the New Atheists ignore the appalling body count of Marxism—an ideology that is explicitly atheistic, whose atrocities were committed in the name of social justice. According to Maher it is religious people who are “irrationalists,” and dangerous because they “steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken.” Yet civilization was built and improved by such irrationalists—believers like Locke, Newton, Washington, Wilberforce, Sojourner Truth, and Abraham Lincoln. For the five millennia of recorded history, with few exceptions the most rational, compassionate, and successful decision makers, both military and civilian, have
been people guided by a belief in God, including some whose spiritual compass took the form of reading the entrails of a chicken.
Near the end of Maher’s rant, he pauses to address any religionist who may have unwittingly strayed into the cinema where Religulous was playing: “Look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest.”
How myopic! And the crimes and horrors committed by atheism? From the French Revolution to the Bolshevik, from the Vendée to Vietnam, the bigotries and atrocities committed by the forces of godlessness match and even outweigh those committed by the forces of godliness. If a history of violence, persecution, and murder serves to discredit an ideology, why hasn’t Maher resigned in protest from the party of atheism?
The New Atheists
The New Atheism arose in response to the attacks of 9/11, when "Islamist jihadists", crying “Allah is great,” murdered 3,000 innocents in the World Trade Center.
The 9/11 attacks were indeed a case of religious fanaticism leading to heinous results. In their wake, the New Atheists to their credit, and virtually alone among progressives, did not shrink from connecting the attacks to Islamic beliefs.
They did not, however, limit their attacks to Islamic fanaticism, but maliciously included modern Christianity and Judaism in their screeds about religious terrorism.
They did so despite the fact that Jews and Christians are the primary targets and victims of the Islamic jihadists. Moreover, Judaism and Christianity have undergone reformations and, as a result, have not prosecuted religious wars since the time of the Crusades.
The principal manifesto of the New Atheist movement was published in 2006. Written by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion maintains that post-Darwinian scientific advances have rendered any belief in God irrational and unnecessary. To make the case, Dawkins’s argument drastically narrows the compass of religious teachings, viewing them as crude and fallacy-ridden attempts to provide nonscientific accounts of natural forces and phenomena.
But how many Jews and Christians today actually cling to a literal reading of the Bible? How many go to church or synagogue to challenge the knowledge that science has provided of the workings of the universe?
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is a devout Christian and the senior astrophysicist (with degrees from MIT and Harvard) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She said, “You have to look at biblical literature from the perspective of when it was written, the original audiences, the original languages, the original purposes . . . the message that was meant to be conveyed by it. The Bible’s not a science text.”
In attacking religious people for their ignorance of science, Richard Dawkins fails to account for the many scientists who, like Wiseman, are religious, who believe in a Divinity, and who see no conflict between faith and science.
He also dismisses the spiritual and moral dimensions of religion—perhaps its most important features. Do the profound moral lessons of Genesis depend on thinking the world was created 6,000 years ago, in six 24-hour days? If Genesis were a work of fiction, it would still provide believers and nonbelievers with guides to a better life.
The most telling aspect of Dawkins’s argument is the unscientific animus with which it is pursued. The vitriol that infuses his book suggests an agenda that is not wholly, or even primarily, intellectual: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving controlfreak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully.”
Only a fool would worship such a God. But consider, for a moment, the particulars of Dawkins’s indictment. “Megalomaniacal” means to have delusions of grandeur. If God is God, then His grandeur is hardly a delusion.
“Control freak”? If God is the Author of everything, then isn’t “control” implicit in His job description? And how can “control freak” be applied to Him except by a comedian in search of a laugh line? “Pestilential”? Can Dawkins be referring to the locusts, which Exodus describes as a plague designed to free His people from slavery in Egypt? Is Dawkins siding with the Egyptian slave masters? Or is he misreading a story that might be metaphorical or that actually contains some historical facts?
Dawkins’s writing oozes contempt for people of faith:
Do we know of any . . . examples where stupid ideas have been known to spread like an epidemic? Yes, by God! Religion. Religious ideas are irrational. Religious beliefs are dumb and dumber: super dumb. Religion drives otherwise sensible people into celibate monasteries, or crashing into New York skyscrapers. Religion motivates people to whip their own backs, to set fire to themselves or their daughters, to denounce their own grandmothers as witches, or, in less extreme cases, simply to stand or kneel, week after week, through ceremonies of stupefying boredom.
The idea that all religious people are stupid is, well, stupid. Of course there are dumb religious people, just as there are dumb nonreligious people. However, both Isaac Newton and Galileo were devout Christians, as were virtually all the geniuses who created the scientific revolutions we associate with the Enlightenment, from Galileo to Pascal. In fact, they were inspired to look for order in the universe precisely because they believed it was the work of a Divine designer.
A Dialogue Between Science and Faith
A contemporary example of a devoutly believing scientist is Dr. Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project from 1993 to 2008 and is currently the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
He once wrote, “I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.”
Dr. Collins is not only a believer, but a former atheist who converted to Christianity as an adult. In 2006, the same year Dawkins’s book appeared, Collins published The Language of God: A Scientist’s Evidence for Belief, which explains the compatibility of science and religious conviction. To mark the publication of both men’s works, Time International organized a debate between them.
In their discussion, Collins maintained that if God is a being outside nature, then God—along with the questions pertaining to God—is outside the scope of science as well, including the question of whether God exists or not.
Collins pointed out that believers have varying views on the Genesis account of creation:
“There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe’s age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.”
Dawkins and Collins did agree that science is the only valid way to explain the processes, laws, and phenomena of the natural world. “The difference,” Collins said, “is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.”
Another difference between the two scientists was Dawkins’s ill-concealed contempt for religious people. In response to Collins’s comments about those who interpret Genesis literally, Dawkins remarked that Collins would “save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?”
“Richard,” Collins replied, “I think we don’t do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. . . . Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.”
So why do Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists demonstrate such hatred and loathing toward religious people? It’s because they have a faith of their own. They see themselves as liberators—pioneers of a new millennium for the human race. They envision a future in which religion has been vanquished and rationality prevails. They want a world in which humanity is finally free from myths and superstitions. They believe in a vision of a world of “new men and women,” liberated from the chains of the past. Science will usher in a utopian age of reason, enlightenment, and social justice.
This is the vision of an earthly redemption. It’s a fantasy in which human beings aspire to act as gods and create new worlds—and it is nothing new. It is the faith of Marxists and Communists who set out to transform the world from the one we know into one that is entirely different—liberated. It is the essence of the original sin recorded in Genesis, when Satan tempted the first man and woman, saying, “Then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods.”
And it is the source of the monstrous catastrophes of the twentieth century, which were engineered by socialists in Germany and the Communist bloc.
http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/dark-agenda-introduction/
“…and it speaks words against the Most High, and it wears out the set-apart ones of the Most High, and it intends to change appointed times (Feast Days) and law (Torah), and they are given into its hand for a time and times and half a time.” (Daniel 7:25) - New King James Version
"He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time."https://graviolateam.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-noahide-laws-and-genocide-treaty.html
"He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time."https://graviolateam.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-noahide-laws-and-genocide-treaty.html
___
Yet they openly declare their desire to obliterate religion. In their own minds, their intentions are noble—they want to save the human race from the social injustice and oppression that religion allegedly inflicts on humanity.
Both title and script were transparent attempts to stigmatize religious people as dangerous morons whose views could not be taken seriously. Throughout the film, Maher travels to Jerusalem, the Vatican, and Salt Lake City, as well as other centers of religion, interviewing believers and making them appear foolish. How did he gain interviews with his victims? He lied to them, saying he was making a film called A Spiritual Journey.
He predicts the destruction of the human race as a result of “religion-inspired nuclear terrorism.”
Hence the need for religion to die if mankind is to live. Maher’s views accurately reflect the attitudes of a movement called the “New Atheism,” whose leaders are prominent scientists and best-selling authors, far superior in intellect to Maher but equally contemptuous of religion and religious believers. Like Maher’s film, the New Atheism movement seeks to discredit all religious belief by caricaturing its adherents as simpletons, and worse. The stated goal of the New Atheism is to delegitimize and extinguish the religious point of view.
been people guided by a belief in God, including some whose spiritual compass took the form of reading the entrails of a chicken.
The New Atheism arose in response to the attacks of 9/11, when "Islamist jihadists", crying “Allah is great,” murdered 3,000 innocents in the World Trade Center.
The 9/11 attacks were indeed a case of religious fanaticism leading to heinous results. In their wake, the New Atheists to their credit, and virtually alone among progressives, did not shrink from connecting the attacks to Islamic beliefs.
They did not, however, limit their attacks to Islamic fanaticism, but maliciously included modern Christianity and Judaism in their screeds about religious terrorism.
They did so despite the fact that Jews and Christians are the primary targets and victims of the Islamic jihadists. Moreover, Judaism and Christianity have undergone reformations and, as a result, have not prosecuted religious wars since the time of the Crusades.
Dr. Jennifer Wiseman is a devout Christian and the senior astrophysicist (with degrees from MIT and Harvard) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She said, “You have to look at biblical literature from the perspective of when it was written, the original audiences, the original languages, the original purposes . . . the message that was meant to be conveyed by it. The Bible’s not a science text.”
He also dismisses the spiritual and moral dimensions of religion—perhaps its most important features. Do the profound moral lessons of Genesis depend on thinking the world was created 6,000 years ago, in six 24-hour days? If Genesis were a work of fiction, it would still provide believers and nonbelievers with guides to a better life.
malevolent bully.”
“Control freak”? If God is the Author of everything, then isn’t “control” implicit in His job description? And how can “control freak” be applied to Him except by a comedian in search of a laugh line? “Pestilential”? Can Dawkins be referring to the locusts, which Exodus describes as a plague designed to free His people from slavery in Egypt? Is Dawkins siding with the Egyptian slave masters? Or is he misreading a story that might be metaphorical or that actually contains some historical facts?
He once wrote, “I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. God can be found in the cathedral or in the laboratory. By investigating God’s majestic and awesome creation, science can actually be a means of worship.”
And it is the source of the monstrous catastrophes of the twentieth century, which were engineered by socialists in Germany and the Communist bloc.
http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/dark-agenda-introduction/
___
___
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KARL MARX. YOU WERE WRONG - AND WORSE
A response to the Marxist poison in our media.
May 1, 2018
117
Editor's note: The following essay is an excerpt from of David Horowitz's "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. V: Culture Wars" and is intended as an answer to the April 30, 2018, publication of the article "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!" in The New York Times.
With its ninth and final volume now complete, "The Black Book of the American Left," a collection of Horowitz's conservative writings, stands as the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features Horowitz’s introductions to volumes 1-9 of this series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190223191913/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
Karl Marx and the Los Angeles Times.
“The opening statement of Marx’s famous Manifesto, that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle, is really the essence and sum of its message. This message is above all a call to arms. According to Marx, democratic societies are not really different in kind from the aristocratic and slave societies that preceded them. Like their predecessors, liberal societies are divided into classes that are oppressed and those that oppress them. The solution to social problems lies in a civil war that will tear society asunder and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins. This idea of Marx has proven to be as wrong as any idea ever conceived, more destructive in its consequences then any intellectual fallacy in history. Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago, more than a hundred million people have been killed in its name. Between ten and twenty times that number have been condemned to lives of unnecessary misery and human squalor, deprived of the life-chances afforded the most humble citizens of the industrial democracies that Marxists set out to destroy. Marx was a brilliant mind and a seductive stylist, and many of his insights look reasonable enough on paper. But the evil they have wrought, on those who fell under their practical sway, far outweighs any possible intellectual gain. It would be a healthy development for everyone, rich and poor alike, if future generations put Karl Marx’s manifesto on the same sinister shelf as Mein Kampf and other destructive products of the human soul.”
The above paragraph was written for the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto in response to a request by Steve Wasserman, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Wasserman was an old radical friend from Berkeley who had been a political protégé of Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer, two comrades who at the time were quoting Mao and Kim Il Sung, and attempting to organize guerrilla fronts in American cities, with which they hoped to launch a “war of liberation” in America. Inspired by texts like the Manifesto, Hayden’s troops practiced with weapons at local firing ranges and planned for the day when they would seize power, abolish private property and take over the means of production. It was therefore of some interest to me how Wasserman would treat the Manifesto now that he was an editor of one of the largest metropolitan newspapers in America. After the failure of the revolutionary hopes the 60s had encouraged, Wasserman had entered the literary world to become the editor of Times Books, and then of the L.A. Times Book Review. I kept in touch with him from a distance over the years, and knew him to be of the same mind as many other radicals, chastened by the failures of that revolutionary and destructive left but not willing to give up the intellectual traditions and political ambitions that had given it birth. So I was both curious and ready to respond when he called me to this task.
Wasserman requested a piece assessing the Manifesto and its impact in 250 words. “Yours will be one of six such statements,” he explained. “Well that’s a challenge, Steve,” I said to him halfjokingly. The article I actually wrote and submitted was 255 words, just five over his specification. But in the meantime Was ser man had changed his mind and cut the first 126 words of the piece, so that that the finished copy available to one million Times readers began with the sentence in the middle paragraph that reads, “Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago, a hundred million people have been killed in its name.” The first part of the paragraph, which described the sinister message of the Manifesto as a call to war, and therefore why so many people had been killed, did not appear.
When the actual newspaper copy appeared, however, I saw the extent of Wasserman’s betrayal of our friendship, such as it was, and also of his readers. The “symposium” of the six mini-pieces, of which mine was one, was actually appended to a two-page spread with a picture of Marx, a poem by the German Communist Bertolt Brecht, and a fatuous 3,000-word lead essay by the unreconstructed Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, a man who had joined the British Communist Party in the 1920s and remained a member through the 1960s and all the slaughter of innocents along the way. This was the impression of the Marx’s Manifesto the Times editor really wanted to make on his readers.
For leftists like Hobsbawm, my comments about the hundred million people the Communists killed were beside the point, even though Marxists like Hobsbawm did the killing or justified it to fellow travelers and credulous audiences in the West. For Hobsbawm, the Manifesto was not a historical document nor a wrongheaded and destructive one. It was a living prophecy. According to him, it correctly analyzed the dynamics of industrial capitalist societies and provided a vision of the social future. The one concession he was willing to make to what actually had transpired in the last 150years was that it did not correctly predict that the proletariat would be the carrier of its revolutionary truth: “However, if at the end of the millennium we must be struck by the acuteness of the Manifesto’s vision of the then remote future of a massively globalized capitalism ... it is now evident that the bourgeoisie has not produced ‘above all, its own gravediggers’ in the proletariat.”
But for Hobsbawm this error was of no consequence since the Manifesto’s central theme is correct: democratic capitalism must be destroyed or it will destroy us. According to Hobsbawm, even Communism’s failure only strengthens this Marxist idea: “The manifesto, it is not the least of its remarkable qualities, is a document that envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be ‘a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative ‘common ruin.’ Many years later another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the 21st century must be left to answer.” In this Marxian fantasy the democratic postindustrial society we inhabit, with living standards higher and living conditions better for the mass of its citizens than available to any other people since the beginning of time, is no more than “barbarity,” a “common ruin.” And the only alternative is the socialism that Marx envisioned.
This, in 1998, is what for the Timeseditor—and in fact the academic establishment that has showered Hobsbawm with its highest honors—is the epitome of progressive thought. Of course the slogan “socialism or barbarism” was coined by Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the First World War, when Communists like Hobsbawm set out to destroy the liberal societies of the West and to create a Marxist utopia in the ruins of the Russian empire. Seventy years and 100 million deaths later, Eric Hobsbawm and Steve Wasserman have learned little from the experience. Steve Wasserman may not be ready to mount the barricades tomorrow and attempt to implement the vision laid out in this intellectual trash. But many, younger than he, will.
I did not call Wasserman when the Times symposium appeared; I wrote him a note instead.
February 16, 1998
Dear Steve,
The 75th anniversary of Mein Kampf is coming up. It’s too bad that Heidegger and Paul de Man are dead, but I’m sure you could get David Irving or David Duke to come up with a 3,000-word spread telling us why, even though it was written so long ago and has resulted in nothing but human misery ever since, it is still one of the most prescient and indispensable works for understanding western civilization and the Jews. You might also try that French Holocaust denier whom Chomsky likes so much. For my part, I’ll be glad to provide you with 250 words of balance again. Of course, if you should need more room for the fascists, feel free to cut whatever I send you in half.
How embarrassing, my friend.
Letters to the Publisher of the Los Angeles Times
[The letter that follows wasn’t merely revenge for the treatment my review of Marx’s Manifesto received. When Wasserman was first hired to edit the Book Review,he had asked me to write a letter defending his appointment, since an interview I had given which mentioned his youthful radicalism caused him some trouble. I did so and we then had a lunch at which I expressed my concerns about the virtual exclusion of conservative viewpoints from the Times. I hoped I had persuaded him of the merits of a pluralism of views, particularly in an institution like the Book Review. I was sorely disappointed in these hopes, and was not really prepared for the degree to which Wasserman actually turned the Review into an ideological journal of the left. The Manifesto episode was the final straw, prompting me to take my concerns to the Times’new publisher, Mark Willes, a former CEO of the Kellogg Corporation. As a very infrequent Timesop-ed page contributor, I had been invited to a Christmas Party at the op-ed editor’s house where I was one of only two conservatives present. I cornered Willes and told him my concerns and said that I would write to him. The futility of this exercise became evident when Willes turned my letter over to Wasserman for a reply]
Dear Mark Willes,
I would like to share with you my recent experience with the Sunday Book Review section of your paper. I am writing this in the spirit of our earlier conversation, and my understanding that the Times aspires to be the voice of the entire Los Angeles community, including those of us who are politically conservative. I am taking the liberty of copying this letter to Michael Parks and Leo Wolinsky, with whom I have shared my concerns on this or parallel matters.
On this particular Sunday, I open my Book Review and typically find four of the six major reviews identified on its cover to be written by leftists: Scheer, Davidson, Breines and Langer. For the purposes of this discussion, I will define “leftist” as someone who either writes regularly, or could write comfortably, for The Nation, the Village Voice or the LA Weekly. The same person probably is suspicious of the economic market and believes that real socialism hasn’t yet been tried, and that, while Bill Clinton should be defended against Republicans, he generally has “sold out” to the “corporate ruling class.” Thus, in this Sunday’s Book Review, Bob Scheer claims that the professional journalists of the Times itself have “career needs and class ambitions” that “coincide with the moneyed interests of the conglomerates and privileged families who pay their salaries.” I’m sure this will come as news to you (and to Michael and Leo). And I wonder how the Times can have such confidence in an insider [Scheer was a national correspondent for the Times] who should know better, yet who can write such stuff with a straight face. A conservative writer, by contrast, would be someone who writes regularly (or comfortably) for National Review, The American Spectator or The Weekly Standard.
The first thing I note is that there are no reviews by conservatives in today’s issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Nor are there likely to be any such reviews on any given Sunday. Last December, the Review ran a feature on the 100 best books of the Times for the year. It was a selection from actual reviews that had appeared in the Times during 1997. There were 87 Times reviewers represented in the feature, some having reviewed more than one book on the list. There were many, many left-wing reviewers represented, including far-left propagandists like Saul Landau, a lifetime flack for Fidel Castro. On the same list, however, I was only able to locate one reviewer, Walter Laqueur, who could reasonably be defined as conservative, although he is an academic writer rather than a political author in the sense I defined above. Laqueur writes for The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, rather than the three conservative publications, but also, if I’m not mistaken, has written on occasion for Commentary. Though I should probably know better, I find this virtual exclusion of political conservatives shocking and, if not calculated, inexplicable. At the same time, this exclusion is very much the policy, conscious or otherwise, of the Times Book Review, which is currently being edited as though it were The Nation, rather than one of America’s most important journalistic institutions.
I had my own unhappy experience with the Book Review in February, when its editor Steve Wasserman asked me to write 250 words as part of a seven-article symposium on the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto. As edited by Wasserman, my piece and two others that were harshly critical of the Manifesto became mini-appendages to the 3,000-word feature by Eric Hobsbawm, a lifelong Communist and unreconstructed Marxist. Hobsbawm, who joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and stayed for nearly half a century, celebrated Marx’s text as a brilliant and prescient analysis not only of 19th-century capitalism (which would have been bad enough) but of contemporary society as well. His preposterous thesis was supported by another 500-word contribution Wasserman solicited from an East German Marxist, who made similar claims. In his feature essay, Hobsbawm exempted Marx from responsibility for the epic crimes that Marxists had committed, and that he had dedicated his own intellectual life to defending. Hobsbawm concluded his article by proposing that the choice facing Americans now—a choice, in his view, foreseen by Marx—was ‘barbarism or socialism.’ This is exactly how Lenin sold Bolshevism in 1917. How embarrassing for the Times to have featured such a claim. How odd that the Times, a product of American capitalism and its First Amendment freedoms, should construct a symposium not just to include this point of view but to promote it.
I am enclosing a correspondence between Wasserman and myself about this symposium. I think it is clear from this exchange that Wasserman has an agenda in defending Marx, and does not have much respect for a perspective that regards these views as bankrupt, and that is pretty much accepted not only among conservatives but across the spectrum outside the left. I have known Steve for thirty years and our relationship has been perfectly cordial. But my experience with the symposium and our letter-exchange leaves me with the strong feeling that people with views like mine are not really part of the Times’ community—certainly not in the sense that the school of neo-Marxists like Hobsbawm, Scheer, Landau, Davidson, Breines, Langer, Christopher Hitchens, and a host of others who appear regularly in its book pages, are. Nor would it be reasonable for conservatives like me to expect that except on rare and idiosyncratic occasions the Book Review would either include our views in its ongoing dialogue or treat them with the regard they deserve. This is regrettable and hardly in keeping with what ought to be the standards of a great metropolitan paper.
Sincerely, David Horowitz
[Instead of answering my first letter, Mark Willes washed his hands of the problem and turned the letter over to Wasserman about whose editorial policies I was complaining. I should have washed my hands of the matter, too, but instead made another futile stab at opening a discussion.]
[Second Letter]
Dear Mark Willes,
I have received a response from Steve Wasserman to my letter, which he wrote at your request. I have already had a correspondence with Steve that makes clear his unwillingness to acknowledge the problem. It is hardly surprising then that his response is not really a reply to the issue I raised. Moreover, its central argument is incomprehensible.
What can it mean to say, as he does, that the “categories of Left and Right have been rendered hollow and meaningless by the human experience of the recent past?” If that is so, why does the Times print a “Column Left” and a “Column Right” on its op-ed page? Does he really think that the views expressed in The Nation and National Review—my specific points of reference for the terms “left” and “right”—are wildly unpredictable, or indistinguishable from one another? Are there not generally recognizable “left” and “right” views of the role of government in the economy, of affirmative action, of school choice, in fact of virtually every issue the Times treats daily? Of course there are, and the Times editors not only know it but report it that way. Why does the Times print polls categorizing respondents as “liberal” and “conservative” if these categories are meaningless? Why, then, is it so difficult to recognize these divisions in the editing of the Times Book Review?
My issue, of course, was not “to weigh up the anti-Communist credentials of our occasional contributors as the chief criterion of their right to be published,” as Wasserman disingenuously suggests. Such a position would indeed be “vile and shameful,” but it has nothing to do with anything I wrote to you, to Wasserman, or at any time in my long public career. In fact, I raised no objection to any particular author being published, not even Eric Hobsbawm. I have not proposed any political litmus to be applied to contributors to the Review, as Wasserman implies. On the contrary. I am objecting to the political litmus that is presently being applied by Wasserman himself.
Nor is it “bean counting” or asking for “quotas,” as Wasserman suggests, to point out that only one writer for the Review out of eighty-seven represented in the year-end issue can reasonably be called conservative. I have not asked for absolute balance or strict equality of representation, or anything remotely resembling that. The issue I have raised is the overwhelming weight given to one side of the political argument in the selection of contributors and the presentation of points of view. I am concerned about the systematic bias in the editing of the Book Review, which minimizes one side of the national debate, and makes the Review a merely partisan publication—uninteresting to those outside the choir, and unworthy of the Times and its ambition to serve the entire community. In his letter, Wasserman does not respond to the issue I raised, nor does he explain the policy of the Book Review that would lead to the kind of imbalance I pointed out (or the Review’s embarrassing celebration of Marxism in the year 1998). Nor does he provide an intelligible explanation for ignoring this problem. I hope, therefore, that this is not the end of the dialogue. I would be happy to discuss this further with you or with your editors at your convenience.
Sincerely, David Horowitz
May 1, 2018
117
Editor's note: The following essay is an excerpt from of David Horowitz's "The Black Book of the American Left, Vol. V: Culture Wars" and is intended as an answer to the April 30, 2018, publication of the article "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!" in The New York Times.
With its ninth and final volume now complete, "The Black Book of the American Left," a collection of Horowitz's conservative writings, stands as the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to define the Left and its agenda. (Order HERE.) We encourage our readers to visit BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features Horowitz’s introductions to volumes 1-9 of this series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.
Karl Marx and the Los Angeles Times.
“The opening statement of Marx’s famous Manifesto, that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle, is really the essence and sum of its message. This message is above all a call to arms. According to Marx, democratic societies are not really different in kind from the aristocratic and slave societies that preceded them. Like their predecessors, liberal societies are divided into classes that are oppressed and those that oppress them. The solution to social problems lies in a civil war that will tear society asunder and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins. This idea of Marx has proven to be as wrong as any idea ever conceived, more destructive in its consequences then any intellectual fallacy in history. Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago, more than a hundred million people have been killed in its name. Between ten and twenty times that number have been condemned to lives of unnecessary misery and human squalor, deprived of the life-chances afforded the most humble citizens of the industrial democracies that Marxists set out to destroy. Marx was a brilliant mind and a seductive stylist, and many of his insights look reasonable enough on paper. But the evil they have wrought, on those who fell under their practical sway, far outweighs any possible intellectual gain. It would be a healthy development for everyone, rich and poor alike, if future generations put Karl Marx’s manifesto on the same sinister shelf as Mein Kampf and other destructive products of the human soul.”
The above paragraph was written for the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto in response to a request by Steve Wasserman, the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Wasserman was an old radical friend from Berkeley who had been a political protégé of Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer, two comrades who at the time were quoting Mao and Kim Il Sung, and attempting to organize guerrilla fronts in American cities, with which they hoped to launch a “war of liberation” in America. Inspired by texts like the Manifesto, Hayden’s troops practiced with weapons at local firing ranges and planned for the day when they would seize power, abolish private property and take over the means of production. It was therefore of some interest to me how Wasserman would treat the Manifesto now that he was an editor of one of the largest metropolitan newspapers in America. After the failure of the revolutionary hopes the 60s had encouraged, Wasserman had entered the literary world to become the editor of Times Books, and then of the L.A. Times Book Review. I kept in touch with him from a distance over the years, and knew him to be of the same mind as many other radicals, chastened by the failures of that revolutionary and destructive left but not willing to give up the intellectual traditions and political ambitions that had given it birth. So I was both curious and ready to respond when he called me to this task.
Wasserman requested a piece assessing the Manifesto and its impact in 250 words. “Yours will be one of six such statements,” he explained. “Well that’s a challenge, Steve,” I said to him halfjokingly. The article I actually wrote and submitted was 255 words, just five over his specification. But in the meantime Was ser man had changed his mind and cut the first 126 words of the piece, so that that the finished copy available to one million Times readers began with the sentence in the middle paragraph that reads, “Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago, a hundred million people have been killed in its name.” The first part of the paragraph, which described the sinister message of the Manifesto as a call to war, and therefore why so many people had been killed, did not appear.
When the actual newspaper copy appeared, however, I saw the extent of Wasserman’s betrayal of our friendship, such as it was, and also of his readers. The “symposium” of the six mini-pieces, of which mine was one, was actually appended to a two-page spread with a picture of Marx, a poem by the German Communist Bertolt Brecht, and a fatuous 3,000-word lead essay by the unreconstructed Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, a man who had joined the British Communist Party in the 1920s and remained a member through the 1960s and all the slaughter of innocents along the way. This was the impression of the Marx’s Manifesto the Times editor really wanted to make on his readers.
For leftists like Hobsbawm, my comments about the hundred million people the Communists killed were beside the point, even though Marxists like Hobsbawm did the killing or justified it to fellow travelers and credulous audiences in the West. For Hobsbawm, the Manifesto was not a historical document nor a wrongheaded and destructive one. It was a living prophecy. According to him, it correctly analyzed the dynamics of industrial capitalist societies and provided a vision of the social future. The one concession he was willing to make to what actually had transpired in the last 150years was that it did not correctly predict that the proletariat would be the carrier of its revolutionary truth: “However, if at the end of the millennium we must be struck by the acuteness of the Manifesto’s vision of the then remote future of a massively globalized capitalism ... it is now evident that the bourgeoisie has not produced ‘above all, its own gravediggers’ in the proletariat.”
But for Hobsbawm this error was of no consequence since the Manifesto’s central theme is correct: democratic capitalism must be destroyed or it will destroy us. According to Hobsbawm, even Communism’s failure only strengthens this Marxist idea: “The manifesto, it is not the least of its remarkable qualities, is a document that envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be ‘a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative ‘common ruin.’ Many years later another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the 21st century must be left to answer.” In this Marxian fantasy the democratic postindustrial society we inhabit, with living standards higher and living conditions better for the mass of its citizens than available to any other people since the beginning of time, is no more than “barbarity,” a “common ruin.” And the only alternative is the socialism that Marx envisioned.
This, in 1998, is what for the Timeseditor—and in fact the academic establishment that has showered Hobsbawm with its highest honors—is the epitome of progressive thought. Of course the slogan “socialism or barbarism” was coined by Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the First World War, when Communists like Hobsbawm set out to destroy the liberal societies of the West and to create a Marxist utopia in the ruins of the Russian empire. Seventy years and 100 million deaths later, Eric Hobsbawm and Steve Wasserman have learned little from the experience. Steve Wasserman may not be ready to mount the barricades tomorrow and attempt to implement the vision laid out in this intellectual trash. But many, younger than he, will.
I did not call Wasserman when the Times symposium appeared; I wrote him a note instead.
February 16, 1998Dear Steve,The 75th anniversary of Mein Kampf is coming up. It’s too bad that Heidegger and Paul de Man are dead, but I’m sure you could get David Irving or David Duke to come up with a 3,000-word spread telling us why, even though it was written so long ago and has resulted in nothing but human misery ever since, it is still one of the most prescient and indispensable works for understanding western civilization and the Jews. You might also try that French Holocaust denier whom Chomsky likes so much. For my part, I’ll be glad to provide you with 250 words of balance again. Of course, if you should need more room for the fascists, feel free to cut whatever I send you in half.How embarrassing, my friend.
Letters to the Publisher of the Los Angeles Times
[The letter that follows wasn’t merely revenge for the treatment my review of Marx’s Manifesto received. When Wasserman was first hired to edit the Book Review,he had asked me to write a letter defending his appointment, since an interview I had given which mentioned his youthful radicalism caused him some trouble. I did so and we then had a lunch at which I expressed my concerns about the virtual exclusion of conservative viewpoints from the Times. I hoped I had persuaded him of the merits of a pluralism of views, particularly in an institution like the Book Review. I was sorely disappointed in these hopes, and was not really prepared for the degree to which Wasserman actually turned the Review into an ideological journal of the left. The Manifesto episode was the final straw, prompting me to take my concerns to the Times’new publisher, Mark Willes, a former CEO of the Kellogg Corporation. As a very infrequent Timesop-ed page contributor, I had been invited to a Christmas Party at the op-ed editor’s house where I was one of only two conservatives present. I cornered Willes and told him my concerns and said that I would write to him. The futility of this exercise became evident when Willes turned my letter over to Wasserman for a reply]
Dear Mark Willes,I would like to share with you my recent experience with the Sunday Book Review section of your paper. I am writing this in the spirit of our earlier conversation, and my understanding that the Times aspires to be the voice of the entire Los Angeles community, including those of us who are politically conservative. I am taking the liberty of copying this letter to Michael Parks and Leo Wolinsky, with whom I have shared my concerns on this or parallel matters.On this particular Sunday, I open my Book Review and typically find four of the six major reviews identified on its cover to be written by leftists: Scheer, Davidson, Breines and Langer. For the purposes of this discussion, I will define “leftist” as someone who either writes regularly, or could write comfortably, for The Nation, the Village Voice or the LA Weekly. The same person probably is suspicious of the economic market and believes that real socialism hasn’t yet been tried, and that, while Bill Clinton should be defended against Republicans, he generally has “sold out” to the “corporate ruling class.” Thus, in this Sunday’s Book Review, Bob Scheer claims that the professional journalists of the Times itself have “career needs and class ambitions” that “coincide with the moneyed interests of the conglomerates and privileged families who pay their salaries.” I’m sure this will come as news to you (and to Michael and Leo). And I wonder how the Times can have such confidence in an insider [Scheer was a national correspondent for the Times] who should know better, yet who can write such stuff with a straight face. A conservative writer, by contrast, would be someone who writes regularly (or comfortably) for National Review, The American Spectator or The Weekly Standard.The first thing I note is that there are no reviews by conservatives in today’s issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Nor are there likely to be any such reviews on any given Sunday. Last December, the Review ran a feature on the 100 best books of the Times for the year. It was a selection from actual reviews that had appeared in the Times during 1997. There were 87 Times reviewers represented in the feature, some having reviewed more than one book on the list. There were many, many left-wing reviewers represented, including far-left propagandists like Saul Landau, a lifetime flack for Fidel Castro. On the same list, however, I was only able to locate one reviewer, Walter Laqueur, who could reasonably be defined as conservative, although he is an academic writer rather than a political author in the sense I defined above. Laqueur writes for The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, rather than the three conservative publications, but also, if I’m not mistaken, has written on occasion for Commentary. Though I should probably know better, I find this virtual exclusion of political conservatives shocking and, if not calculated, inexplicable. At the same time, this exclusion is very much the policy, conscious or otherwise, of the Times Book Review, which is currently being edited as though it were The Nation, rather than one of America’s most important journalistic institutions.I had my own unhappy experience with the Book Review in February, when its editor Steve Wasserman asked me to write 250 words as part of a seven-article symposium on the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto. As edited by Wasserman, my piece and two others that were harshly critical of the Manifesto became mini-appendages to the 3,000-word feature by Eric Hobsbawm, a lifelong Communist and unreconstructed Marxist. Hobsbawm, who joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and stayed for nearly half a century, celebrated Marx’s text as a brilliant and prescient analysis not only of 19th-century capitalism (which would have been bad enough) but of contemporary society as well. His preposterous thesis was supported by another 500-word contribution Wasserman solicited from an East German Marxist, who made similar claims. In his feature essay, Hobsbawm exempted Marx from responsibility for the epic crimes that Marxists had committed, and that he had dedicated his own intellectual life to defending. Hobsbawm concluded his article by proposing that the choice facing Americans now—a choice, in his view, foreseen by Marx—was ‘barbarism or socialism.’ This is exactly how Lenin sold Bolshevism in 1917. How embarrassing for the Times to have featured such a claim. How odd that the Times, a product of American capitalism and its First Amendment freedoms, should construct a symposium not just to include this point of view but to promote it.
I am enclosing a correspondence between Wasserman and myself about this symposium. I think it is clear from this exchange that Wasserman has an agenda in defending Marx, and does not have much respect for a perspective that regards these views as bankrupt, and that is pretty much accepted not only among conservatives but across the spectrum outside the left. I have known Steve for thirty years and our relationship has been perfectly cordial. But my experience with the symposium and our letter-exchange leaves me with the strong feeling that people with views like mine are not really part of the Times’ community—certainly not in the sense that the school of neo-Marxists like Hobsbawm, Scheer, Landau, Davidson, Breines, Langer, Christopher Hitchens, and a host of others who appear regularly in its book pages, are. Nor would it be reasonable for conservatives like me to expect that except on rare and idiosyncratic occasions the Book Review would either include our views in its ongoing dialogue or treat them with the regard they deserve. This is regrettable and hardly in keeping with what ought to be the standards of a great metropolitan paper.Sincerely, David Horowitz
[Instead of answering my first letter, Mark Willes washed his hands of the problem and turned the letter over to Wasserman about whose editorial policies I was complaining. I should have washed my hands of the matter, too, but instead made another futile stab at opening a discussion.]
[Second Letter]
Dear Mark Willes,I have received a response from Steve Wasserman to my letter, which he wrote at your request. I have already had a correspondence with Steve that makes clear his unwillingness to acknowledge the problem. It is hardly surprising then that his response is not really a reply to the issue I raised. Moreover, its central argument is incomprehensible.What can it mean to say, as he does, that the “categories of Left and Right have been rendered hollow and meaningless by the human experience of the recent past?” If that is so, why does the Times print a “Column Left” and a “Column Right” on its op-ed page? Does he really think that the views expressed in The Nation and National Review—my specific points of reference for the terms “left” and “right”—are wildly unpredictable, or indistinguishable from one another? Are there not generally recognizable “left” and “right” views of the role of government in the economy, of affirmative action, of school choice, in fact of virtually every issue the Times treats daily? Of course there are, and the Times editors not only know it but report it that way. Why does the Times print polls categorizing respondents as “liberal” and “conservative” if these categories are meaningless? Why, then, is it so difficult to recognize these divisions in the editing of the Times Book Review?My issue, of course, was not “to weigh up the anti-Communist credentials of our occasional contributors as the chief criterion of their right to be published,” as Wasserman disingenuously suggests. Such a position would indeed be “vile and shameful,” but it has nothing to do with anything I wrote to you, to Wasserman, or at any time in my long public career. In fact, I raised no objection to any particular author being published, not even Eric Hobsbawm. I have not proposed any political litmus to be applied to contributors to the Review, as Wasserman implies. On the contrary. I am objecting to the political litmus that is presently being applied by Wasserman himself.Nor is it “bean counting” or asking for “quotas,” as Wasserman suggests, to point out that only one writer for the Review out of eighty-seven represented in the year-end issue can reasonably be called conservative. I have not asked for absolute balance or strict equality of representation, or anything remotely resembling that. The issue I have raised is the overwhelming weight given to one side of the political argument in the selection of contributors and the presentation of points of view. I am concerned about the systematic bias in the editing of the Book Review, which minimizes one side of the national debate, and makes the Review a merely partisan publication—uninteresting to those outside the choir, and unworthy of the Times and its ambition to serve the entire community. In his letter, Wasserman does not respond to the issue I raised, nor does he explain the policy of the Book Review that would lead to the kind of imbalance I pointed out (or the Review’s embarrassing celebration of Marxism in the year 1998). Nor does he provide an intelligible explanation for ignoring this problem. I hope, therefore, that this is not the end of the dialogue. I would be happy to discuss this further with you or with your editors at your convenience.Sincerely, David Horowitz
