The Rise and Fall of David Horowitz:
From Marxist Activist to Right-Wing Shock Writer
David Horowitz was born in 1939 to a middle-class Jewish family in Queens, New York. His parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party and were activists dedicated to social change. They saw poverty, pain and suffering around them and searched like other activists today for an alternative to the status-quo, for a way towards human liberation. True to their beliefs his parents used their considerable intelect not for personal gain, but rather to serve others, working as public school teachers in Queens.
David himself was a very bright child. He excelled in the humanities and attended Columbia University for his undergraduate degree and later the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a master’s degree in English literature. David like his parents was cognisant of the plight around him and studied and identified with Marxism. Correctly along with many members of the New Left he saw the State-Capitalist Soviet Union for what it truly was, autocratic and an example of a state that did not, and had not since the rise of Stalin, represent the interest of the Russian people.
David was at the time a close friend of Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher and Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. It was then that David Horowitz saw the crimes done by a so-called “Communist” regime in Cambodia (even though it took Communist Vietnam, against U.S. wishes to remove Pol Pot and free the Cambodian people from his reign of terror). He saw other contradictions by some people within the Left and decided to “come out the closet” as a conservative.
This is were his logic befuddles me. If he had a problem with people on the Left, why did he not use his influence to try to reform the progressive movement? What about the great social gains the Left accomplished in the 1960s is he not proud of? Why does he shun the less racist and less sexist society that emerged due to the work of the New Left in the 1960s? What of the economic conditions that pushed his parents and himself as a young man to fight for change in the world? Do they not still exist? Has neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas helped combat these conditions? Haven’t they only made them worse, Mr. Horowitz?
Last week David Horowitz came to my school as a part of his “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” and yelled at a Muslim girl asking him a question to “Renounce Hamas”.
By the way David Horowitz, lets not forget which side of the Left-Right divide have fought Fascism from the beginning! It was the Left. It was the Left that defended bravely against Franco’s forces in Spain for years against all odds. It was the Left that fought for a more free America during the 1960s. It is the Left today that continues to fight for the meeting of human needs and the freedom for all to creatively express themselves!
Which side of the Left-Right divide saw Hitler as a good man capable of stomping out German Socialism and Communism? Which side has a history of anti-semetism, homophobia, and regressive gender relations?
The alternative for Arabs today seem to be either Bin Ladin’s “Islamo-Fascism” or Bush’s neo-liberal, Washington Concensus, “Corporate-Fascism”, new alternatives like free and fair Social Democracy on the road to a Democratic Socialist society should be presented. Only these ideas of common human brotherhood can help liberate the people of the Middle East and help conquer the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and all other regressive movements.
