FACES AND PLACES: Radical son of the sixties (06/08/97)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Radical son of the sixties

During the 1960s I often wondered what it was that motivated the so-called New Left, people like Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Ron Dellum, Bella Abzug and other anti-anti-Communists. Did they really believe in their cause or were they simply liberals doing what liberals do best: remaking the world into their own image at someone else's expense?

Given their privileged existence and elitist stature in the U.S., why was it that they were so ready to condemn millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian men, women and children to the Communist scourge? Were they no more than Lenin's "useful fools" or were they so enamored with their "virtue" ("humanity's moral vanguard") that they honestly believed they were ordained to determine the fate of others so that the world "would be a better place?"

I wondered why it was that so many of the radicals of the 1960s were Jewish? Were some of them offspring of the many Jews who helped found the American Communist Party (along with Ukrainians, Russians, Latvians and other East Europeans), continuing the family tradition, or were they different somehow, a new breed?

The question regarding Jewish attachment to communism was answered for me a few years ago by Vivian Gornick in her book "The Romance of American Communism." "One of the deepest strains in Jewish life is the moral injunction 'to become,' " she wrote. "This strain runs with subterranean force through most Jewish lives regardless of what other aspects of experience and personality separate them. Thus Jews 'became' through an intensity of religious or intellectual or political life. In the highly political 20th century they became, in overwhelming numbers, socialists, anarchists, Zionists and Communists. The idea of socialist revolution was a dominating strand woven through the rich tapestry of unassimilated Jewish life."

As for the New Left radicals, I recently discovered that while some could trace their roots to the Old Left, they were not knee-jerk Stalinists. Some of the leaders were "red diaper babies," sons and daughters of Communists, carrying their parents' torch of leftist radicalism. At the same time, however, they believed that the Soviet Union was an aberration, a blemish on their movement because it wasn't "truly socialist."

Much of this information came to me while reading an autobiography titled "Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey" by David Horowitz. The grandson of a Ukrainian Jew, Mr. Horowitz was born to Communist parents. His engrossing and very readable book is the story of his political pilgrimage from a '60s radical to a Reagan conservative. As a radical, Mr. Horowitz had impeccable credentials. A Berkeley "free speech" activist, a former editor of Ramparts (the flagship publication of the New Left), an anti-war activist, an early and enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro, an active ally of the Black Panthers, and a longtime true believer in the moral superiority of socialism, Mr. Horowitz was in the forefront of American radicalism. The story of his painful conversion, therefore, makes for fascinating reading. "I had come to the end of everything I had ever worked for in my life, and I had no idea how to disentangle myself from my fate," he writes halfway through his narrative.

With great care and meticulous attention to detail, which only an insider possesses, Mr. Horowitz demolishes the Potemkin villages that the Left erected to conceal its revolutionary motives. The Left, he points out, has a genius for re-inventing itself through sloganeering.

The corrosive effects of the '60s cultural revolution are still being felt, especially in the media and among academics.

"During the '80s," writes Mr. Horowitz, "PBS had run a series of propaganda documentaries promoting Castro and his disciples as the wave of the future in Latin America. These cinematic tracts were produced by radical filmmakers who in the '60s had made promotional films for the Vietcong and the Black Panthers."

The situation on university campuses today is appalling. "The Marxists and socialists who had been refuted by historical events were not the tenured establishment of the academic world," writes Mr. Horowitz. "Marxism has produced the bloodiest and most oppressive regimes in human history - but after the fall, as one wit commented, more Marxists could be found on the faculties of American colleges than in the entire former Communist bloc." The result? Political correctness, multiculturalism, Afrocentrism and radical feminism. Comparing his university education at Columbia in the '50s with today, Mr. Horowitz says that though he wrote papers from a Marxist point of view, he "had never been graded politically by my anti-Communist professors." Visiting campuses recently, he found that "many left-wing professors gave one-sided presentations of subjects, expecting their views to be parroted on papers and exams. Students were graded politically, and frequently intimidated from expressing their own views."

The American Historical Association (AHA) was run by Marxists," Mr. Horowitz contends. Am I surprised? No. The only negative review of my book, "The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspira-tions," was found in The American Historical Review, an AHA publication, in 1992. Dr. June Granatir Alexander, the reviewer, criticized me for my "decidedly nationalist perspective." She explained: "By referring simply to 'Ukraine' without the definite article 'the,' Kuropas confers a sovereignty on the region. Celebrating expressions of Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian American ethnonationalism, the author expends tremendous energy countering criticism leveled against Ukrainian American organizations, especially in the 1930s and 1940s." What she failed to mention, of course, was that criticism of Ukrainian nationalists came almost exclusively from the Communists, their Popular Front allies and the ADL, notorious for its left-leaning Ukrainophobia. Nor does she mention the documentation I presented exposing the defamation of Ukrainian nationalists as nothing more than Stalinist diatribe.

The '60s generation was influenced by many factors, but one of the most powerful, Mr. Horowitz notes, was the "promise of eternal youth, a state of being that would never require a balance sheet of one's prior acts." Communists, socialists, radical liberals are "special," it seems. Since their "hearts are in the right place," they need never be held accountable for their sins. Not here, not in Russia, Cambodia, Vietnam or Ukraine. Citing F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation about the spoiled rich, Mr. Horowitz writes: "They break things and leave others to clean up after them." And we're still mopping up. Here and in Ukraine.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected]

| Home Page |