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Faculty Book RecommendationsPeter Collier & David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second
Thoughts About the '60's, LA: Second Thoughts Books [Imprint of the
Center for the Study of Popular Culture], 1989, 1990, 1995. 382 pp.
[New edition out in August, 1996.]
37 ...the flaw in the radical worldview: the belief that the facts of experience were inferior to its hidden 'truth'--the readiness to reshape reality to make the world correspond to an idea. 71 ...Che's dictum, which the success of his minifaction at Columbia confirmed: what the Movement needed to succeed was 'Audacity, audacity, and more audacity.' 77 The idea was not to create a perfect state operating by the clockwork principles of Marxist law but to promote a chaos that would cripple America and ultimately cast it into a receivership that would be administered by the morally superior third world. 85 [Re: Weatherpeople] Trying to push the limits in the sexual domain as well, they initiated a 'smash monogamy' campaign to destroy bourgeois sexual hang-ups in the same way that street fighting was meant to 'smash' bourgeois prohibitions against violence. 94 Criticism + Self-Criticism=Transformation [cf. W. Leonhard] 109 'While some of us were dangerously poor, they always ate good food and they always slept between clean sheets.' [cf. Animal Farm] 115 I finally understood Stalin and the Purge Trials....I learned about it in the Weather Underground. 119 The rush we got on the streets was unlike anything before or since. 143 Nonviolence was out; revolutionary violence was in. [re: Panthers' murder of Frey] 170 But there is one community whose loyalties are both undeniable and truly disquieting....This is the community of the hard-core Left, which is the real fifth column in American political life. 171 ...collaborate in their war effort by providing propaganda advice and orchestrating a political campaign to demoralize U.S. troops in the field and create disorder and disruption 172 at home. 173 We shared with the rest of the Left its most irresponsible and destructive myth: that America had become rich and powerful not through its own efforts but by making the rest of the world impotent and poor. To force America's global retreat had become for us the highest good. 174 It was a daunting lesson: more people had been killed in the first two years of the Communist peace than in the thirteen years of America's war. 179 This massive arms build-up had only one purpose: to make Cuba the forward base of a new Soviet expansionism. [10X more in 1 year by 1980 than in 1st decade of revol.] 202 [McCarthy and Old Left died in 1957, after Khru. speech disillusioned] Where 203 Old Leftists had pretended to be progressives and liberals and patriotic Americans, New Leftists insisted on being recognized as Marxists and revolutionaries... 210 McCarthyism means anti-Communism itself....not an abusive political method but an abusive political objective. 223 ...the radicals had been given their victory when eighteen-year-olds were given the vote: 238 [re: Berkeley] In the pseudo-environment, international issues dominate, while the problems of daily life are ignored. 239 The pseudo-environment is strong because it is but- 240 tressed by a constant supply of new plans and proposals designed to exhaust and finally overwhelm the proponents of reality. 242 Not only have we failed to create the New Man in Berkeley. We haven't even created the New Dog. 244 The current revival will not bring a revolutionary army into the streets, as in the Sixties. It will involve an offensive of 'progressivism' whose targets are the Democratic Party, the church, the universities, and various liberal institutions. 245 The manufacture of innocence out of guilt: it is the eternal work of the Left....The future perfect is the only tense in their political grammar....246 The utopianism of the Left is a secular religion (as the vogue of 'liberation theology' attests), its promise of an earthly kingdom of heaven. [cf. M. Buber-Neumann] 247 But once we leave the extremes, there is this tangible difference: the Right seeks to conserve (and the Left to undermine) workaday democracy; the Left seeks to defend (and the Right to defeat) the destructive fantasy of a heaven on earth....It is this religious confusion and moral corruption that defines the utopianism of the Left. It insists on imposing the idea of salvation on a temporal reality that is by its nature flawed; in so doing, it exploits mankind's faith, as well as its hope and charity. 248 It is the need to bridge the chasm between the socialist dream and the socialist reality that produces the totalitarian state. 249 Truth is the first casualty of revolution. [e.g. Ukraine] 250 In fact, the tragedy of socialist revolutions are not of unintended consequences but of malign intention. 253 [3rd world terror, 'the devil made them do it'] This devil theory of history is the fallback position of the radical argument when it is impossible to claim that it didn't happen, and lies at the heart of the current revival of Leftism. 263 The socialist 'good example' doesn't exist in the U.S.S.R. or anywhere else in the world. Socialism has provided the world with nothing more than famine, fear, and chronic backwardness. 265 [Noam}Chomsky's first service to the Left may have been in providing a Weltanschauung in which socialist totalitarians are always innocent and American democrats are always guilty. 267 The real problem for Hayden and others who would rehabilitate the Sixties and themselves is explaining how a Movement that had begun supporting the American Dream of equal opportunity could end up worshiping American Mayhem,... 273 Ludwig Von Mises: 'Socialism is the grandiose rationalization of petty resentments." This why the nihilism of the Left toward the liberal societies of democratic West is always stronger than any secret doubts about the socialist utopia it professes to believe in but whose opposite it creates. 274 Their agenda is that of the destructive generation whose target was--and is--America. 288 The Republicans and conservatives were not our enemy; they were irrelevant. It was the liberals we were after-- 290 We hated the war, but we loved it too. Vietnam mad us special, a generation with a mission. Vietnam gave the semblance of moral shape to what was actually a formless hatred of 'the system.' The war justified every excess, every violent thought and deed. 299 My generation had been given a more comfortable fate than my father's, but we hated our lives, despite all the talk of 'love.' We had projected that hatred onto everything around us. The excuses we gave--that America had alienated us with its post-scarcity plenty--were shallow and puerile. 313 Totalitarianism is the possession of reality by a political Idea--the Idea of the socialist kingdom of heaven on earth, the redemption of humanity by political force. To radical believers, this Idea is so beautiful it is like God Himself. 314 Compassion is not what motivates the Left, which is oblivious to the human suffering its generations have caused. What motivates the Left is the totalitarian Idea: the Idea that is more important than reality itself. 318 For most New Left radicals who were impatient to 'bring the System down,' Marxism provided the convenient ax. Even if Marx was wrong, he was right. If Marxism promoted the desired result, what did it matter if the theory was false. 320 ...the most basic tenet of our radical faith: Reality was defined by politics and could be changed by political ideas. 321 [Re: Panthers] For the Left, the facts were not what mattered. What mattered was the revolutionary Idea. 328 Life without the Idea of the socialist future felt to me like life without meaning. It was then that I realized that the reason the Idea is so hard to give up is that a radical faith is like any other faith: It is a matter not of politics but of self. [Cf. M. Buber-Neumann] 330 Clarity entered my father's life through the Communist Party and the socialist Idea. The moment he joined the Party, he felt himself touch the shore of a landmass that circled the globe and extended into the future itself. 332 [DH to former comrade] Take a careful look at what you still believe, because it is a mirror of the dark center of the radical heart: not compassion but resentment--the envious whine of have not and want; not the longing for justice but the desire for revenge; not a quest for peace but a call to arms. It is a war that feeds the true radical passions, which are not altruism and love but nihilism and hate. 344 [Ref. to Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey, novel about breaking with the radical Left] 345 If one beginning didn't work out, there would always be others that might. This, we eventually came to realize, is the pathology at the heart of Leftism, the desire that makes it truly an infantile disorder. 346 Like Trilling's John Laskell, we realized that one cannot live the 'life of promises' without remaining a child. Life is about imperfection. It is about limits--imposed by time and opportunity and the inherited materials of genetics. We understood that it was simply impossible to live any longer like figures in a socialist romance,... 348 But there was a ferocious reaction from our old friends on the Left. Relationships of twenty years were severed overnight....defections regarded not as political acts but as moral transgressions. [Cf. Buber-Neumann] 352 [Re: SE Asia after war]...the Left's casual reaction to the catastrophe in which it had been so deeply implicated. This turned out to be something like an archetypal trauma. 359 [Ref. to book about Castro gulag, Armando Valladares, Against All Hope] 361 ...the radical future is an illusion and that the American present is worth defending; and that we were part of a destructive generation whose work is not over yet....Why, despite its monstrous record of criminality and failure, should the revolutionary cause continue to prosper? Chambers's answer was that the Left, whose real enemy was liberal society, had nonetheless succeeded in the industrial democracies in making itself appear to be the ally of liberal progress. This was partly because the secular society the Enlightenment created could not satisfy the human longing for belief, which had previously been satisfied by established religion. The Left had stepped in with a creed that could. The resilience of the Left is primarily a result of the fact that it has built its political religion on liberal precepts; its luminous promise--equality, fraternity, and social justice--is in fact preeminently the promise of the progressive Idea. If the bloodstained reality of the Left is indefensible within the framework provided by liberal principle, its ideals nonetheless seem beyond challenge. [Again cf. Buber-Neumann] |
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