Radicals

Left Illusions

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Overview

The great American novelist F.Scott Fitzgerald once observed that American lives had no second acts. The odyssey of David Horowitz refutes Fitzgerald’s claim. Born into a Communist family, Horowitz became one of the founders and intellectual leaders of the New Left in the 1960s. Then, as the result of a tragedy that was both personal and political, he became profoundly disillusioned with the radical movement and its social vision. In the 1980s he began a second career as a conservative intellectual, establishing an educational center in Los Angeles, writing a series of books and launching several magazines that played an influential role in the culture wars the Sixties had spawned.

Destructive Generation

by David Horowitz

Overview

As leading New Leftists in the Sixties, Peter Collier and David Horowitz were intimately involved in the radicalism of the day. Later on, they became the first of their generation to publicly reject the objectives of that revolutionary era and point out the cultural chaos it had left behind. Part memoir, part political analysis, part social history, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION is the compelling story of their intellectual journey into and out of the radical trenches. Telling stories of the New Left’s most famous (and infamous) personalities and events, Collier and Horowitz reveal the destructive legacy of the Sixties and the way in which that decade continues to cast a long shadow over politics and culture today. When it was first published more than a decade ago, DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION was a controversial bestseller that some critics compared to Whittaker Chambers’ powerful political testament, WITNESS. This new edition contains new material which makes this classic work more relevant than ever in our own divided time.

The Shadow Party

by David Horowitz

Overview

America is under attack. Its institutions and values are under daily assault. But the principal culprits are not foreign terrorists. They are influential and powerful Americans secretly stirring up disunion and disloyalty in the shifting shadows of the Democratic Party.

Radical infiltrators have been quietly transforming America’s societal, cultural, and political institutions for more than a generation. Now, backed by George Soros, they are ready to make their move. These “progressive” extremists have gained control over a once-respectable but now desperate and dangerous political party. From their perches in the Democratic hierarchy, they seek to undermine the war on terror, destabilize the nation, and effect radical “regime change” in America.

With startling new evidence, New York Times best-selling authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe shine the light on the Shadow Party, exposing its methods, tactics, and ultimate agenda.

Review of the Party of Defeat

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A Careful, Exacting Indictment

By Jon Kyl
NationalLedger.com | Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The following is one of the first reviews of the new book Party of Defeat, a meticulously footnoted tour de force examining how “Radicals Undermined America’s War on Terror Before and After 9/11.” Its author could hardly be more qualified. Sen. Jon Kyl, the junior senator from Arizona, serves as Senate Minority Whip, the second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate. Among his many assignments, Sen. Kyl sits on the subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security; and the subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. He previously joined 17 other prominent members of Congress in stating, “Every American concerned about the future of their country in the war on terror should consider the arguments in this book.” — The Editors, FrontPageMag.com.

As the president’s term comes to an end, his critics are out to define his legacy in their terms, particularly with regard to Iraq. Of late, their efforts to rebuke the war effort in Iraq seem to have intensified, and no doubt they will continue in the months ahead. The latest rehashes all repeat the same charges we have heard for years now—President Bush and his administration distorted the facts and in doing so initiated the war in Iraq on “false pretenses.”

The charges have no empirical support, but it seems critics hope that, with enough repetition, their attempt to rewrite history will one day be accepted as the truth. This is a cynical political calculation that has severe consequences for the United States. The antiwar Left’s myth-making surrounding the war in Iraq has undermined the commander-in-chief’s prerogative to lead the nation in wartime and fractured the unity that has traditionally bound our nation in times of conflict.

Fortunately, a recent book provides a necessary antidote and essential companion to the tendentious reports and narratives about the case for the Iraq war and the war effort itself.

In their book, Party of Defeat, David Horowitz and Ben Johnson have published an historical guide that examines the war we have waged against the terrorists and the concurrent fight that antiwar activists have waged against the administration. In careful fashion, Horowitz and Johnson present a chronology of the war effort and the criticism it has encountered every step of the way.

As the book reminds us, terrorists had threatened the United States long before the attacks of 9/11. It also reminds us that Saddam Hussein did have ties to terrorists and did pose a threat to our country. And it emphasizes the oft-forgotten fact the United States offered Saddam Hussein, even after his decade-long refusals to comply UN resolutions and weapons inspections, a way to avoid going to war—he and his sons could leave the country. As Horowitz and Johnson write, “If Saddam had complied with this eleventh-hour request, there would not have been a war with Iraq.”

The United States liberated Iraq amid opposition to the mission. “In all previous wars, America’s troops could go into battle secure in the knowledge that their country was behind them,” Horowitz and Johnson relate. “But in the war to remove an oppressive tyrant…America’s soldiers would have no such support.”

Liberal activist groups, like MoveOn.org, shamelessly attacked the president and even the troops. MoveOn even impugned the integrity of General Petraeus in a full-page ad in the New York Times.

The media have abetted antiwar activists. Major newspapers have used leaks of sensitive, classified information to publish stories that could do harm to our national security.

This “war against the war,” as Horowitz and Johnson call it, has taken its toll on the war effort. “To destroy the credibility of the commander-in-chief as his troops are in battle is to cripple his ability to support them and to win the war they are fighting.”

In times of war, the question a nation should ask is “How do we win?” not, “Did the President lie?” (He did not.) Because of the success of the surge, the answer is by allowing our troops to complete their mission. Our troops and our military leaders have done their duty, despite discouraging news from home. We cannot fail them by failing in our duty to support them.

U.S. Senator Jon Kyl is the Assistant Republican Leader and serves on the Senate Finance and Judiciary committees. You can visit his website here.

Jon Kyl is a Republican Senator from Arizona.

Party of Defeat

by David Horowitz

Overview

A nation divided in wartime invites its own defeat. Yet that is precisely how America is facing the global war on terror. In a brutally honest assessment , David Horowitz and Ben Johnson show that the American left, led by the Democratic Party, is waging a ferocious political war against its own government that has left our country more seriously divided than at any other time since the Civil War. And the consequences could be dangerous.

In the fight against Islamic terrorists, America faces perennial questions that have become suddenly urgent: What is legitimate criticism of military policy in wartime? When does criticism cross the line and undermine the national interest? Democrats now routinely cross that line, Horowitz and Johnson show. Their candid and explosive book forces us to confront the consequences of these unprecendented attacks on the US war effort.

Review of The Politics of Bad Faith

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The Politics of Bad Faith
Reviewed by Delbert H. Meyer, MD

David Horowitz, one of the radical leftists of the Sixties, spoke at the 56th annual meeting of the AAPS in October 1999. His message had many medical references. His book, The Politics of Bad Faith, traces society’s political conflict from the French Revolution, when radicals sat to the left in the National Assembly and their opponents sat to the right. Today, he feels, the Left has become all but invisible, and this has made them dangerous. The Right does not fully comprehend that we are at war with the Left. Physicians became a part of this conflict with the AIDS epidemic and are guilty of mass murder for not using conventional public health measures to stop AIDS in its tracks.

Although this book has six distinct essays, it is in the fifth, “A radical holocaust,” that Horowitz takes on the last refuge of the discredited Marxist Left. It is the specter of “queer theory,” the latest version of the radical “identity politics” that has replaced economic struggles. For the new revolutionaries, the enemy is no longer a ruling class but the sexual order of nature itself.

Horowitz lays the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic at the source. Who but a sexual radical would have failed to realize in 1969, the year of “Gay Liberation,” that promiscuous anal sex, conducted with strangers, was unsanitary and dangerous and a threat to public health? Yet, gay liberation was so defined, that sex was transformative and challenged the heterosexual and monogamous norms of the Judaeo-Christian culture. Gay activists rejected the idea of integration into a normal functioning civil order, and instead maintained a defiant promiscuity in order to overthrow bourgeois morals and sexual restraints and, consequently, bourgeois standards of public hygiene.

The effect of this radical agenda was immediate and unmistakable. “One effect of gay liberation,” a prominent gay doctor noted, “is that sex has been institutionalized and franchised. Twenty years ago, there may have been a thousand men on any one night having sex in New York. Now there are ten or twenty thousand…” These establishments were not viewed by gay activists as threats to community morals and health, but as homosexual “liberated zones.”

The gay male community lacked the restraint normally imposed on heterosexual encounters by the less sexually-promiscuous female gender. In 1978, a survey revealed that only 14 percent of gay males were in a monogamous relationship, while 43 percent had 500 lifetime sex partners and 33 percent had 1,000. By the early Eighties, when AIDS was first identified, the prevalence of syphilis and gonorrhea among gay men was several hundred times that among comparable groups of heterosexuals. Easy treatment for these diseases, as well as the cooperation of public health officials, imbued the gay men with a cavalier attitude toward venereal diseases. Gay men made up about 80 percent of the visits to San Francisco’s VD clinics where they could get a shot, and a date.

Edmund White, coauthor of The Joy of Gay Sex, proposed that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society.” When Michael Callen heard White’s triumphant defiance of nature’s law, he thought, “Every time I get the clap I’m striking a blow for the sexual revolution.” In his book Surviving AIDS, Callen, (who died in 1996) recounts his medical history. He talks of his 3000 different sex partners and his various sexual infections including hepatitis, herpes, warts, syphilis, gonorrhea, cytomegalovirus and, eventually, cryptosporidiosis.

Where were the public health officials? Don Francis of the Centers for Disease Control, a leading figure in the battle against AIDS, admitted: “We didn’t intervene because we felt that it would be interfering with an alternative lifestyle.” Although AIDS must be reported in all fifty states, most states do not even classify HIV as a “sexually transmitted disease” to avoid reporting HIV infections.

The gay liberationists not only thwarted measures to control the epidemic in their community, where 95 percent of the AIDS was found, but denounced the screening of blood for blood banks as infringing on the “right” of gays. Thus AIDS was allowed to spread among hemophiliacs and drug-using heterosexuals, and the black and Hispanic populations soon accounted for more than 50 percent of the infected.

We need to expose our entire profession to this message and guard against becoming part of the medical Left. Horowitz makes it clear that the AIDS epidemic is due to our profession forsaking our basic medical principles. We must understand the forces that are changing medicine and health care — changes that are neither in the interest of our patients nor our profession. We must have the courage to not forsake our medical obligation.

Reviewed by Delbert H. Meyer, MD
Carmichael, CA

Dr. Meyer, a pulmonologist practicing in Sacramento, is on the Clinical Faculty of the University of California Davis School of Medicine, and serves on the editorial boards of Sacramento Medicine, and theMedical Sentinel. E-Mail: delmeyer@healthcarecom.net.