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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Barbara Kay</title>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The Progressives</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/barbara-kay/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/barbara-kay/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-2-the-progressives-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Apr 2014 04:45:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black Book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[volume 2]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=223056</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What is the nature of progressives and why are conservatives so surprised by how radical, un-American and bigoted they are? Horowitz's second volume provides the answers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong> <a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-223469" alt="bb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bb.jpg" width="188" height="269" /></a>[To order <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 &#8212; The Progressives</i>, <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/volume-ii/">click here</a>. </strong></p>
<p><strong>We encourage our readers to visit our new website &#8211;  <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com</a> – which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]</strong></p>
<p><i>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times</i> dwelt heavily on author David Horowitz’s personal journey from the hard left as a “red diaper” child of Communists to leadership in the New Left movement. We followed the anguished transitional trajectory that began with Horowitz’s reflections on the New Left’s role in America’s Vietnam defeat, and his visceral recoil from the criminal excesses of the Black Panther Party. These attacks on his settled convictions provoked profound self-interrogation, leading to an intellectual pivot away from the theories, antipathies and loyalties that had for so long defined his identity.</p>
<p>Volume II surveys the wreckage blotting the landscape of “progressivism,” a barrier island to Communism’s landmass. Here we find the unbroken bridge linking Communism to the received wisdom of the vast majority of academics in the West, who download them into vulnerable students en masse. The Marxist vision that sustained Stalin’s supporters in the 1940s and 1950s is alive and well in the post-colonialist and identity obsessions of postmodern theorists. Utopians then, utopians still, Horowitz finds their vision of social justice is still attended by the same suppression of “incorrect” thought and speech, the same self-righteousness, the same illiberalism in dealing with critics and apostates that were – are &#8211; the hallmarks of Communism.</p>
<p>Progressives may refer to themselves as “liberals,” but that is a misnomer Horowitz strenuously proscribes. Classical liberalism in our culture was largely vanquished in the counter-cultural revolution, though the odd grey-haired academic adherent pops into view now and then, seeming baffled by what has become of the noble assumptions of his youth.  Referring to leftists as liberals launders their intellectual and political lineage. Real liberals – especially liberal scholars &#8211; don’t excommunicate their peers for deviating from the party line. Communists did; New Leftists did (as Horowitz learned first hand when he left the movement and his entire circle of “friends” renounced him); and progressives still do.</p>
<p>Take the case of feminist scholar Aileen Kraditor, Professor Emerita of History at Boston University. Aileen who? Precisely Horowitz’s point.  Even though much of my journalistic effort is spent in exposing the misandry and other cultural crimes springing directly from feminist theories, I had never heard of Aileen Kraditor prior to seeing her name in Volume I of <em>The Black Book</em> (she is mentioned again in Volume II).</p>
<p>According to Horowitz, Kraditor, a feminist historian in good – even iconic – standing during the years she was a card-carrying Communist,  was virtually &#8220;disappeared&#8221; from the feminist movement when she renounced Communism. Horowitz provided a mere thumbnail sketch, praising her work, and explaining why this once-admired scholar of the suffragette movement now languishes in near-obscurity, but it was enough to pique my curiosity.</p>
<p>I ordered Kraditor’s fascinating 1988 book,  <i>“Jimmy Higgins”: The Mental World of the American Rank-and-File Communist, 1930-1958, </i>paying a hefty price for one of what seems to be a dwindling pile of remainders, but it was worth it. In the book’s foreword, Kraditor notes how difficult it was to get it published at all, acknowledging Horowitz as one of a handful of people who helped her bring the book to the world’s attention. (Interestingly, <i>Jimmy Higgins</i> is not cited amongst her writing achievements on her <a href="http://www.bu.edu/history/people/emeritus-faculty/aileen-kraditor/" target="_blank">Boston U blurb</a>.)</p>
<p>That’s the effect Horowitz’s writing has on me – to long to know more, that is &#8211; and I am sure I speak for many others of his readers. Horowitz knows the Left from the inside out. He recalls people and incidents everyone else has forgotten and recalls their words and deeds whole. Every essay is an intellectual assessment, but always contains a story, a plot, a human drama illuminating the eternal conflict between ideology and the individual conscience.</p>
<p>One of Horowitz’s special skills is to offers links, not only of beliefs handed down from previous incarnations of Marxist ideology, but precise little details that nail the object of his scorn to the wall, like the fact, adduced in the essay “The Peace Movement” in Volume II, that the fringe Workers World Party, the animating force behind the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East’s 1990 march on Washington, was the same party that in the 1960s was “the only Trotskyite splinter to endorse the Soviet invasion of Hungary.” A palpable hit, one of hundreds.</p>
<p>The reprinted articles and speeches covering the 1990s and early 2000s in Volume II of <i>The Black Book</i> are broken down into four parts. In Part 1, introduced by an eponymous essay, “The Mind of the Left,” Horowitz elaborates on a theme he has raised many times: the Left’s belief in a perfect future necessarily results in hatred of the imperfect present. He joins post-9/11 apologism for terror to the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Left’s antecedents. Post 9/11 progressives seeking “root causes” for our enemies’ hatred in American sins were following the same nihilist and utopian agendas as their political forebears.</p>
<p>Here Horowitz makes the pithy observation that old-style traitors like Benedict Arnold considered themselves true American patriots, acting in the interest of preserving and strengthening American honor, while modern traitors believe the higher form of patriotism is to shame and subvert America, an existential difference.</p>
<p>Modern traitors inculpate themselves. Speaking for his ideological peers, former president of SDS Todd Gitlin said: “The most painfully public emotion in our lives was <i>rejecting</i> patriotism.” Unregenerate Communist Eric Hobsbaum &#8211; he died in 2012 &#8211; admitted: “To this day I notice myself treating the memory and traditions of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.” He was a frequent guest on the campus circuit. Anarchist guru Noam Chomsky, a hero to countless leftists, cheerfully identifies America as “the greatest terrorist state.” Horowitz’s portrait of Howard Zinn, a Stalinist in youth, whose recent death has not halted the indoctrination of millions of young Americans into national shame through his wildly popular <i>A People’s History of the United States</i>, reveals Zinn as an unscrupulous ideologue, unabashedly open about his intention to expose American history as a litany of evils by white euro-centrists visited on “the people”: Indians, blacks, women and workers.</p>
<p>Horowitz concludes of the modern traitors: “In sum, America can do no right; even the right America does is wrong; and the wrongs are monstrous. This syllogism captures the entire logic of the anti-American mind.”</p>
<p>In Part II, “After the Sixties,” Horowitz takes on the 1970s radicals’ “long march through the institutions.” Particularly noteworthy is the entry, “Angela Davis at Dartmouth,” a 1988 speech Horowitz gave at Dartmouth College, both for the lurid story of Davis’ adventures with little-remembered multiple-murderer lover George Jackson (she was indicted as an accomplice to murder, but never convicted) and for the liveliness of the writing. (Horowitz’s writing is never less than elegant, but his spoken-word pieces bring him into unusually intimate connection with the reader.)</p>
<p>For Elaine Brown a day without the possibility of somebody being punished was a day without sunshine (even if it was herself: “by her own account, [Brown] was bull-whipped for missing an editorial deadline”). She too became a regular on the blame-America campus circuit – not in spite of her anti-Americanism and engagement with revolutionary criminals, but because of them.</p>
<p>Progressives have done their best to cast negative memories of the Black Panthers into the historical oubliette, and have largely succeeded; but Horowitz is their nemesis on the subject. He circles back to the Panthers constantly in his writings, unearthing all the forgotten names, all the forgotten sins.</p>
<p>His essay, “Progressive Education, Panther Style (1997)” rebukes the media for their political amnesia, recounting as evidence the story of Geronimo Pratt, a cold-blooded killer who was viewed by the left as an “American Nelson Mandela.” When Pratt was released from prison on a technicality, not a single reporter checked the court records proving beyond any doubt that Pratt had murdered an elementary-school teacher on a tennis court three decades previously (that factoid – “on a tennis court” is typical Horowitz, the little narrative detail that humanizes), or interviewed the prosecutor. Instead they hung on and publicized the words of defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran who babbled police conspiracy theories. This essay sets <i>that</i> record straight.</p>
<p>In spite of his loathing of the Panthers, Horowitz is not implacable where redemption is sought. He shows his softer side in acknowledging the humanity of Panthers criminal Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver, Horowitz writes in the essay, “Eldridge Cleaver’s Last Gift (1998),” “won my respect” when, in 1997, during a “60 Minutes” interview, he quietly condemned his past deeds, conceding that he had not appreciated in youth that America had been remarkably good to its minorities. He added, “If people had listened to Huey Newton and me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country.” The interviewer didn’t respond to this remark, but Horowitz did: “In a world where it is so difficult to get a purchase on the truth, we can be thankful to [Cleaver] for providing us with one.”</p>
<p>Being thankful even to people we consider our ideological enemies when they step away from their errors is a human trait. And reacting more in sorrow than anger toward our ideological friends when we consider their speech or actions wrong is also a human trait (see Horowitz’s graciously firm criticism of Ann Coulter in his essay, “The Trouble with Treason”). But ideologues on the left are by definition incapable of common humanity when party lines are crossed.</p>
<p>In “The Secret Power of the Leftist Faith,” Horowitz explores the ruthless shunning – and worse – of “apostates” who deviate from the party line, a strategy that “keeps the faithful in line.” The most famous victim of progressive wrath was alpha pundit Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ crimes were his castigation of Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for the purpose of “distract[ing] attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake [Monica Lewinsky]” and his exposure of Sidney Blumenthal as the willing agent of a corrupt regime, both captured in his 1999 book, <i>No One Left to Lie To</i>.</p>
<p>Blowback against this erstwhile icon of the Left was swift and harsh. One senses in it the kind of gut revulsion from the “unclean” we see in fundamentalist religions. Comrade after comrade blasted him in print. Longtime colleague at <i>The Nation</i> Alexander Cockburn denounced him as a “Judas.” He also accused him of being a closet gay and a sexual pervert. Todd Gitlin called Hitchens a “poison” who was no longer welcome to cross Gitlin’s threshold. Nobody stepped up to defend him. Horowitz concludes, “In blurting out the truth, Christopher has slammed the left up against its hypocrisies and threatened to unmask its sanctimonious pretensions.”</p>
<p>Hitchens resurfaces in a Part Three (“Loyalties”) essay, “The Destructive Romance of the Intellectuals,” in which Horowitz reviews novelist Martin Amis’ book about Soviet Communism, <i>Koba the Dread</i>. Hitchens was Amis’ best friend, yet Amis had the courage to challenge his friend’s tolerance and even support for ideas that produced such havoc on a grand scale. Addressing him directly – “Comrade Hitchens!” – Amis asks why, knowing what he knows, Hitchens doesn’t disavow his youthful regard for Trotsky and Lenin, as “These two men did not just precede Stalin. They created a fully functioning police state for his later use.”</p>
<p>There are some wonderful essays in this book that resist summary because it is the cumulative effect of the narratives in which the richness lies. I recommend “Three political Romances,” which unpacks “the Stalin school of falsification,” according to which historical data may be tortured in the interests of a more important historical “truth.” In this essay Horowitz strips the mendacious veneers from the self-serving personal myths propagated by “Guatemalan terrorist” Roberta Menchú (who won a Nobel prize for her lies); Stalinist propagandist and feminist doyenne Betty Friedan; and PLO apologist and bio-fictionalist Edward Said.</p>
<p>I also recommend a short essay, “A Question for the Millennium,” in which the still-functioning leftist magazine <i>The Nation</i> is reduced to moral rubble through a litany of the causes it has editorially supported: Stalinist collectivization, the purge-trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, Pol Pot’s genocidal Cambodian campaign – and those causes it opposed: the formation of NATO, the security policies of Truman, Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan. As late as 2000, <i>The Nation</i> was still defending the innocence of Alger Hiss! With such a history, any self-respecting magazine would have thrown in the towel long ago. But to leftists the past is always “in another country”; and besides, its bloody wenches are always dead.</p>
<p>Far-left Journalist Robert Scheer is taken to the woodshed for a well-deserved drubbing in “Scheer lunacy at the Los Angeles Times (2001)”; the same for Noam Chomsky in “Guru of the Anti-American Left (2001)” (who else but Chomsky could write a history of World War II “without mentioning Hitler or noticing that the actions of the Axis powers so much as influenced its events[?]”) Ditto Tom Hayden and the SDS (“Even in 1962, [the late Irving] Howe understood that Hayden and his comrades were totalitarians in the making”).</p>
<p>In “The Left on Trial,” Horowitz eviscerates the disgusting leftist lawyer Lynne Stewart, who defended Omar Abdul Rahman (the “Blind Sheik” convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trace Center bombing and plotting to kill 100,000 people in New York tunnels), and was herself convicted of aiding Rahman in furthering his terrorist agenda. Horowitz rightly sees her apologism for terror as emblematic of the Left’s mindset. Stewart assessed the 9/11 jihadists as “basically forces of national liberation.” In 2004, at a National Lawyers Guild annual convention, she attacked America as having “a poisonous government that spreads its venom to the body politic in all corners of the globe,” raising a glass to her heroes “Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel&#8230;.” With the ashes of 3000 World Trade Center American victims barely cool, such are the people the National Lawyers Guild chooses to honor.</p>
<p>I was raised in the same era as Horowitz, but in a typically bourgeois Jewish home awash in Jewish values, but without ideology. So I really have no idea of what it is like to be indoctrinated with ideology every waking moment of one’s youth. I have always admired Horowitz for the intellectual independence that fueled his break with the Left, but didn’t appreciate how extraordinary his action was until I read his account of Robert Meeropol in “Guilt of the Son (2003),” which for memorability, psychological impact and illumination of the left’s imperviousness to moral clarity I think I must rate my favorite of this collection.</p>
<p>Meeropol was the younger of two sons orphaned by the execution of their infamous parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for treason (the boys kept the name of their adoptive parents, also diehard Stalinists). Robert and his brother Michael bore the unenviable burden of their Communist parents’ crimes of passing state secrets to the Soviets.  For many years the sons denied their parents’ guilt, but newly-opened Soviet archives in the 1990s left no further room for doubt of it.</p>
<p>Horowitz describes meeting Robert Meeropol decades ago when he himself was having his famous “second thoughts” about the Left. He asked Robert with some trepidation if he could imagine that his parents were actually guilty, and Robert said that he could, an admission that touched Horowitz’s heart. Yet in 2003 Robert published a memoir, <i>An Execution in the Family</i>, in which the Rosenbergs are presented as heroes of an American “resistance,” and courageously loyal to a higher principle than a mere state. The memoir is, in Horowitz’s judgment “the story of a man whose adult life began as an effort to rehabilitate his parents for a crime he believed they did not commit, and ended as a crusade to justify the crimes they did commit.”</p>
<p>In Horowitz’s summary of Robert’s book, Meeropol comes off as a fragile and confused man, unable to find a comfortable career niche that would accommodate his leftist views. He is worthy of some sympathy, and yet both he and his more hardened brother consciously decided to make the crusade to clear their parents’ names their life’s work, in 1974 publishing the book <i>We are Your Sons</i>, and assuming the role of chief spokesmen and fundraisers in the Rosenbergs’ defence.</p>
<p>Not defense of their literal innocence, but defense of their Communist cause. It didn’t matter to them that the Rosenbergs stole the plans for American jet fighters or the trigger of the atomic bomb: What mattered was that they were demonstrating “resistance to the dominant forces of our society.” In other words, neither their parents’ crimes nor the Soviets’ crimes nor the fact that their parents put love of an ideology ahead of their love for their children have shaken their loyalty to the belief system that formed them.</p>
<p>Robert Meeropol found true happiness when he created the Rosenberg Fund for Children, a support group for the children of “political prisoners.” The fund’s first beneficiaries were the children of the “Ohio Seven,” a group of revolutionaries who robbed banks and carried out bombings against multinational corporations investing in apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and ‘80s. Another group of beneficiaries were the children of the Stalinist Communist Workers’ Party, whose leaders fomented suicidal incitement against the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, and were subsequently killed by them, becoming martyrs to the Left, remaining arrogant fools to the rest of us.</p>
<p>In 1997, a documentary filmmaker interviewed Robert’s children. They too are leftists who take pride in their heritage. Horowitz writes: “This is the secret of the left’s longevity, its ability to withstand the discrediting of its idea, to ignore the millions of its victims and thus to renew itself in the next generation. It is the creation of a culture, a historical narrative, and of a living community that perpetuates its myths, and sustains its progressive faith.”</p>
<p>In <i>Jimmy Higgins</i>, Aileen Kraditor tells us that</p>
<blockquote><p>The process of ideological self-delusion takes place below the level of consciousness where &#8220;free and deliberate choice&#8221; occurs…Those who have never been ideologically self-brainwashed will never comprehend the nature of ideology until they understand how millions of intelligent and generally decent people – including themselves – can fall prey to it…In people possessed by an ideology, the need for what the ideology offers is so strong that it determines what they accept as evidence. Facts and logic can never make them change their fundamental worldview so long as the need for it remains as the organizing principle of their personalities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Reading <i>Jimmy Higgins</i>, I see what it was that evoked Horowitz’s empathy for Kraitor. Not only does she nail the quintessential mindset of the ordinary Communist loyalist, arriving at the same conclusions as Horowitz, but one sees in her lavishly-detailed rendition of the fictional composite Jimmy Higgins an ideological portrait of Horowitz’s parents as he described them in his 1996 memoir, <i>Radical Son</i>.</p>
<p>It saddens me that Kraditor’s scholarly and profoundly insightful book, clearly a labor driven by the kind of prophetic zeal only former victims can really understand, has been lost to the mists of time. It is a comfort to know, however, that her name and mission live on in David Horowitz’s <em>The</em> <i>Black Book of the Left</i> series. There should be an honorific form of the normally pejorative “fellow travelers” to describe those who escaped from the ideological gulag. We may never really understand what it is like to live there, or what it takes to make the break away from its confines, but harkening attentively to those who’ve known slavery and freedom both is our duty, and in the case of David Horowitz’s <i>The Black of the Left </i>series, a richly rewarding pleasure, enhanced by the knowledge that there are many more volumes in the series to come.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></strong></p>
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		<title>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume I: My Life and Times</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/barbara-kay/the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-i-my-life-and-times/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-black-book-of-the-american-left-volume-i-my-life-and-times</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:56:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz’s new collection unveils the carnage hidden under the Left’s humanitarian mask.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-213426" alt="tbb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/tbb-231x350.jpg" width="231" height="350" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s &#8220;<em>The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,&#8221; </em><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In <i>The Gulag Archipelago</i>, Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed that Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are content to murder only a handful of people. They stop killing, he explained, because “they have no ideology.”</p>
<p>One instantly comprehends the truth of this insight, and even anticipates its ramifications. There exists a quantum leap in evil between the MacBeths of this world on the one hand, and the Hitlers, Stalins, Mao Tse Tungs, Che Guevaras and Osama bin Ladens on the other.</p>
<p>But Solzhenitsyn does not explain how it is that so many intellectuals can apply exquisitely sensitive moral calipers to the character flaws in Shakespearean murderers, turning them this way and that in the light cast by civilized codes of behavior, while ideological massacrists inspire in the same minds a paralysis of the critical thinking process so impervious to reason as to amount to a pathology.</p>
<p>One need not have experienced such cognitive dissonance to analyze it: Lifelong anti-leftist historian Jamie Glazov’s 2009 book, <i>United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror</i>, for example, ably parses the phenomenon.</p>
<p>But actual converts from the ideology that produces the paralysis not only know where the bodies are buried, in the old cliché; they have seen for themselves the very graves being dug.</p>
<p>Thus, personal narratives written by former left-wing activists, tales of gradual, sorrowful awakening and trenchant self-examination, are significant value added to any serious student earnestly seeking to understand the source of the strange ecstasy binding otherwise normal people to their culturally self-loathing wheel of fire.</p>
<p>And for these students, the writings of former New Left leader David Horowitz have, for the past 30 years, amounted to the most compelling vivisection of the American left since Whittaker Chambers’ majestic 1952 apologia for his six years in the Communist underworld, <i>Witness</i>.</p>
<p>Were it not already spoken for<i>, Witness</i> would have served very well as the title for Horowitz’s new book, <i>The Black Book of the American Left: Volume I: My Life and Times</i>, the first of a projected nine volumes of Horowitz’s collected conservative writings. For, as Horowitz writes, regarding his motivation for a life of polemical combat in one of the book’s essays, “The End of Time,” (also the title of his 2005 personal memoir),</p>
<blockquote><p>“I was a witness. I needed not to forget what I had learned through pain, and to pay my debt. I needed to warn whom I could and to protect whom I might. If I had a mission to name, it was about wrestling with the most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle truth in the name of hope.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz was, like so many other Jewish sons and daughters of his generation, a “red diaper” baby. His parents were staunch communists to the end of their days, undeterred even by Khruschev’s 1956 unveiling of Stalin’s paranoiac purges and wholesale decimations. Clinging to the post-Stalin wreckage rather than swimming away altogether, Horowitz championed the resurgent New Left’s neo-communist shibboleths at Berkeley, ground zero of the counter-cultural 1960s, for several years co-editing <i>Ramparts</i>, the left’s most important student literary and political magazine.</p>
<p>The pivotal moment in Horowitz’s ultimate break with the left was the 1974 murder by the Black Panthers of Betty Van Patter, a fellow activist personally recruited by Horowitz for administrative work at an Oakland, California community center, understood by Horowitz to be wholly devoted to disadvantaged black children, but in fact a shell for laundering criminal Panther activity.</p>
<p>Van Patter’s dawning comprehension of that truth marked her, as a potential witness, for doom. She was murdered on orders from Elaine Brown (now a darling of academe) under the direction of then-exiled Panther leader Huey Newton (chronicled in the essay “Black Murder Inc”).</p>
<p>Although technically blameless, Horowitz never got over the shock or his sense of guilt for enabling her involvement with the Panthers. The event scarred his soul, but also jump-started his liberation from illusion, and fired the forge of his “Ahab-like” resolve for the great crusade that was to occupy his remaining time on earth. In “Reflections on the Road Taken and Not,” he writes, “The pain said:</p>
<p>‘You cannot stay in this place. If you don’t move, you will die.’”</p>
<p>Betty’s murder is one of two recurring tropes that haunt the collection’s essays. The other is a cover of <i>Ramparts</i> magazine, described in the essay “Repressed Memory Syndrome” and elsewhere, featuring a seven-year old boy holding aloft the flag of the Vietcong, America’s enemy in Vietnam. The cover line read: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.” Horowitz authored those words, and for lasting shame, that fact rivals his unwitting enablement of Van Patter’s murder.</p>
<p>Van Patter, though, has greater importance as the existential bright line between innocence and knowledge. Not just knowledge of evil itself, but the knowledge that good people are prepared to ignore evil in the name of ideology. Horowitz was stunned that Betty’s murder and other acts of thuggery by the Panthers could be glossed over by his friends – and even, passively, by her own daughter &#8211; on any grounds, let alone those of historical racism. But they were. “I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.” When he began to judge the left publicly, (see his 1985 article, written with Peter Collier, “Goodbye to All That”), Horowitz lost virtually every friend he ever had.</p>
<p>The considerable value of <i>The Black Book of the Left</i> – this volume and the ones to come – does not lie in the originality of the material, obviously. All the essays and articles herein are reprints; the events and themes they reprise have been exhaustively mined elsewhere in Horowitz’s capacious oeuvre.</p>
<p>But easy accessibility to the highlights of Horowitz’s 30 years of battle with the left, and their distillation into 400 pages of accrued wisdom, grouped under the headings “Reflections From my Life,” “Reflections on the Left,” “Slander as Political Discourse,” and “Two Talks on Autobiographical Themes,” makes it a worthy addition to any critical thinker’s bookshelf.</p>
<p>The full value of the collection, however, will only be realized with the tenth volume, an index to the whole. As a fleshed-out companion to the comprehensive database of bare facts contained in <a href="http://discoverthenetworks.org" target="_blank">discoverthenetworks.org</a> (the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s “most significant achievement,” in Horowitz’s claim), It will then be a non-pareil, holistic reference guide to the crimes, the criminals and their enabling fellow-travellers (especially in the academy) of the American left’s last five decades, and of particular value to university students struggling to maintain their intellectual integrity in forensically corrupted environments.</p>
<p>Horowitz is incapable of writing a dull essay on any facet of his personal and polemical adventures, and I would hesitate to recommend some over others for the first-time reader of Horowitz’s work. But for those, like me, who are well acquainted with his work already, certain essays will resonate more than others. Because of changes in my own life – notably a late-life entry into journalism &#8211; my appreciation was sharpened for episodes I seem to have missed or given short shrift to years ago, in particular those dealing with media bias.</p>
<p>“A Political Romance” is a good introduction to the neophyte unfamiliar with Horowitz’s personal story, but that is not why I single it out. The “romance” of the title is leftist utopianism, and the essay, finely crafted as one would expect, describes Horowitz’s awakening to the realities behind the dream. In format and tone it is exactly the kind of reflection one frequently sees on the “Lives” end page of the New York Times Sunday magazine.</p>
<p>That’s because it was <i>commissioned</i> for the “Lives” page. But once delivered, it was rejected. A few weeks later, however, a similar reflection was published in “Lives,” this one written by a leftist who had faltered in her loyalty to leftism but in the end renewed her faith in what she still believed was a noble cause (see the Introductory essay, “My Life and Times”). That was the left-affirming angle the NYT wanted, and here is proof, if proof were needed, that the New York Times shills for the left, even unto the very last page of the Sunday magazine.</p>
<p>Overstatement, a skeptic would say. One ideological editor does not a conspiracy make. Which is why, for those interested in media bias, I would also recommend the 1998 piece,  “Political Cross-Dresser: Michael Lind Perpetuates a Hoax.” Here the left-leaning bias of the elite mainstream media is laid bare in all its systemic dishonor.</p>
<p>Michael Lind used to be a conservative, although as a newly-minted leftist, he claimed never really to have been a conservative, but was in his heart always a liberal. So let us rather say it was in conservative rhetorical vineyards that he labored in relative obscurity as a mediocre thinker and writer of whom Horowitz was only vaguely aware. His interest quickened at news of Lind’s defection to the left; here, ostensibly, was a <i>Doppelgänger</i> in reverse.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s own 1985 public defection (“Goodbye to All That”) had provoked retribution in the media that was “swift and without limit.” Formerly widely published and laureled as a leftist, he was shunned and vilified as a conservative. His and Collier’s writings were now unwelcome at the previously open-armed <i>The</i> <i>New York Times</i>, <i>The Atlantic</i>, <i>Harper’s</i>, <i>The New York Review of Books</i> and <i>The New Republic</i>. So he was keen to see the media’s response to a counter-defector.</p>
<p>Within months, cover stories and lead articles by Lind appeared in the same publications that had snubbed Horowitz. He became a senior editor at, successively, <i>Harper’s</i>, <i>The New Republic</i> and <i>The New Yorker</i>. He signed three lucrative book deals, including an account of his damascene conversion, <i>Up from Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong</i>, whose flap copy described Lind as “a former rising star of the Right” (which he was not), and which was gushed over by Gore Vidal, who compared Lind to Alexis de Toqueville!</p>
<p>According to Horowitz’s numerous quoted outtakes, Lind paints the conservative community as a roiling sea of misogynist, trigger-happy white supremacists and blood-sucking corporate oligarchs, with America’s top conservative writers – Charles Murray, no less! – limned as latter-day Manchurian candidates issuing propagandist tracts dictated by monies-dispensing conservative foundations. In lengthy, eye-opening detail and with returnless logic, Horowitz handily rebuts the worst excesses of Lind’s calumnies. But to ignorant, credulous readers, the book must have appeared as a damning indictment of conservatism.</p>
<p>The article ends on a rueful note with a quoted warning to Horowitz from former <i>Commentary Magazine</i> editor Norman Podhoretz, who – even though he was never as far down the leftist rabbit hole as Horowitz, and did not pay nearly as high a price for his rightward shift – knows a thing or two about the media: “When you were on the left, you got away with everything. Now that you’re on the right, you’d better be careful because they won’t let you get away with anything.” <i>Q.E.D.</i></p>
<p>For the general reader, my recommendation for special attention is the essay, “My Conservatism,” first published in 1993. I think many conservatives have no problem speaking out <i>instinctively</i> for or against government policies, but they often have difficulty in <i>articulating</i> what exactly it is about their worldview that distinguishes them from leftists.</p>
<p>This essay is crammed with succinctly enunciated insights that clear away the cobwebs and provide excellent talking points for conservatives in debate.</p>
<p>Horowitz reminds us that conservatism is first of all <i>not</i> an ideology, but rather a mental and temperamental disposition, so to speak. Conservatives accept the fact that human nature in its fundamentals does not change. So there are limitations to the changes any society will accept without coercion. They do not theorize about what their societies would look like in a perfect world; they ask and try to answer the obvious question, “What makes a society work?” (see the essay, “Can There be a Decent Left?”).</p>
<p>They want to make the world a better place, but are guided by the knowledge that it cannot be made perfect, and hastening improvement artificially rather than organically is not wise. As Horowitz notes in his essay, “Keepers of the Flame,” [L]ife is made better only incrementally and with great difficulty, but it is made worse – much worse – very easily.”</p>
<p>Conservativism is “rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future.” Ideology is about the future. And herein lies the unbridgeable chasm between the two. “Since ideologues of the left are committed to an imagined future, one that re-establishes the Eden of our mythic beginnings, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: <i>Are you for or against the equality of human beings</i>? To dissent from the progressive viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but to an unwillingness to embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to <i>will</i> the imperfections and injustices of the present order.”</p>
<p>I must append to that a pithy remark from the essay “Neo-Communism III,” “A key to understanding the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, while judging its opponents – America chief among them – by their worst deeds.” Just so.</p>
<p>Conservatism is not a religion, though most religious Americans are conservative. But since leftism is so fixated on a future utopia, it <i>is</i> a kind of religion, whose god is “social justice,” in pursuit of which all is permitted. As in other fundamentalist religions, a member who renounces belief in any part of the belief system is a danger to the whole left community. As Betty Van Patter’s murderer, Elaine Brown, once put it:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Faith was all there was. If I did not believe in the ultimate rightness of our goals and our party, then what we did, what Huey [Newton] was doing, what he was, what I was, was horrible.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Well, she <i>was</i> horrible. And since she has never publicly recanted or repented of her complicity, she still <i>is</i> horrible, yet the honors and the emoluments roll on for her. And not just for her. The universities and the government, homes to the best and the brightest, are full of horrible people like her, or people who hobnob with horrible people.</p>
<p>It is worthwhile remembering at this juncture that it was the best and the brightest in the government and the universities who supported the communist government infiltrator, Alger Hiss, against all evidence of his perfidy. In <i>Witness</i>, Whittaker Chambers writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>“It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Plus ça change&#8230;</p>
<p>Horowitz’s writings reveal that today many of America’s  political and academic elites, including the president of the United States, are similarly blind to the moral treachery of those close to them, associates who in the past have committed terrible crimes or who dream of committing them in the future, yet they choose to honor and protect them.</p>
<p>All of them, though – plotters and enablers alike &#8211; insist that it is conservatives &#8211; people who never murdered anyone, never covered up for murderers, never kept silent about murder at home and abroad, whether committed in the name of ideology, ethnic nationalism or religious triumphalism &#8211; who are the horrible ones.</p>
<p>The <i>Black Book</i> project was conceived of as a dual challenge: to persuade leftists of the destructive consequences of their ideas; and to persuade conservatives of the malignancy of the forces mobilized against them.</p>
<p>Horowitz is a born fighter, but even lifelong happy warriors can experience moments of frustration, when all their labors seem to have been in vain. When he defected, Whittaker Chambers told his wife, “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side,” but that it was “better to die on the losing side than to live under communism.”</p>
<p>Horowitz has acknowledged that while conservatives like his message and his writing, they don’t act on his advice. All Cassandras may be forgiven if they believe they are on the losing side of history.</p>
<p>But then, nobody predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Horowitz has pointed out on several occasions. In a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeN2K6romr8" target="_blank">recent interview</a>, Horowitz said he believes “Obama has awakened [conservatives].</p>
<p>They’re getting it.” He also said, “I am an optimistic person.” A lucky thing for us all, and may his tribe increase.</p>
<p><i>Barbara Kay is a columnist with Canada’s National Post.</i></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=DBERMFBVMXYH">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for </strong><em><b>The Glazov Gang</b></em><strong>: </strong><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Click here</b></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A Memorial to the Victims of Communism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/barbara-kay/a-memorial-to-the-victims-of-communism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-memorial-to-the-victims-of-communism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/barbara-kay/a-memorial-to-the-victims-of-communism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:04:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A long-sought monument in Canada will thankfully soon be completed.]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/gulagwire.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54922" title="gulagwire" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/gulagwire.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="313" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[This article is reprinted from the <a href="http://www.nationalpost.com/">National Post</a>]</strong></p>
<p>In 1968, naive anti-establishment American and Canadian students considered  themselves courageous for locking supine university presidents in their offices,  throwing computers out of windows and even burning out-of-favour academics’  research work. They knew that in the free, indulgent West, their childish parody  of a revolution would result in nothing more than a suspension from their  studies.</p>
<p>In the same year truly courageous Moscow academic <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/11/remembering-a-dissident/">Yuri Glazo</a>v signed the  famous “letter of the twelve,” protesting illegal arrests and trials of  dissidents, knowing full well that this real act of revolution would result in a  suspension of his human rights.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/dad2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54936" title="dad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/dad2.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="281" /></a></p>
<p>Glazov was predictably fired, meaning he was henceforth unemployable and  deemed a “parasite” on the state. Warned by a friend, he narrowly avoided  imprisonment on a trumped-up narcotics-dealing charge. Finally, through a stroke  of luck, Glazov came with his family to the West, and in 1975 took up residence  in Halifax as chair of the Russian Studies department at Dalhousie University, a  position he held until shortly before his death in 1998.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/leaving21.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-54937" title="leaving2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/leaving21.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="288" /></a></p>
<p><strong>[Yuri Glazov's family shortly before departure from Russia. From left to right: son Greg, Yuri, daughter Elena, wife Marina and son Jamie.]</strong></p>
<p>An outstanding Canadian, Glazov deserves recognition, and so do many other  brave dissidents for whom Canada has been a refuge. Nine million Canadians —  that’s almost a third of us according to the 2006 census — came to these shores  from communist-ruled countries. Many are now dead or very old. Their descendants  deserve to see their sacrifices acknowledged and Canadians exposed to the full  panoply of communist atrocities.</p>
<p>Prospects for educating Canadians about the human toll exacted by communism  through their stories will brighten when a long-sought Ottawa Memorial to the  Victims of Totalitarian Communism is completed, a project singled out for  endorsement in the recent Throne Speech.</p>
<p>This memorial isn’t just a good idea, like an also-promised national  Holocaust memorial, it is a necessary idea.</p>
<p>The exhaustively researched Holocaust is in no danger of being forgotten. The  highest term of opprobrium in Western culture, whether from leftists or  rightists (rightly or wrongly) is “Nazi,” not “communist.” That’s not because  Nazis and communists have been compared and Nazis found to be worse. It’s  because people don’t know how bad communism was and is.</p>
<p>In 2006 the Swedish Ministry of Education initiated programs teaching the  crimes of communism because a poll had revealed only 10% of Swedish youth could  identify the Gulag. Canadian youth would not fare better. All educated Canadians  associate the word “Auschwitz” with “genocide.” The equally horrific “Holodomor”  is more likely to draw a blank stare.</p>
<p>Why has communism escaped the moral condemnation Nazism attracts in such  exuberant degree? In recent years several scholars have addressed the question  and provided a litany of reasons, amongst them:</p>
<p>z  Stalin was a war ally and therefore escaped the postwar censure he  deserved;</p>
<p>z  Only since the fall of the Berlin Wall has the most damaging data emerged;  by then witnesses were aging and focused on economic priorities;</p>
<p>z  There was no Nuremburg, no Truth and Reconciliation moment for communism  as there was for other genocidal regimes;</p>
<p>z  Communist propaganda machines are extremely efficient at positive branding  (Trudeau bought in; his fawning patronage of Fidel Castro was beyond  contemptible).</p>
<p>But all reasons pale beside the glaring failure of left-wing intellectuals to  admit — and to teach — that communism isn’t simply an unfortunate contingency of  socialist passion but an ideology as immoral and implacably ruthless and  dramatically consequential as Nazism.</p>
<p>Actually it is more than intellectuals’ failure, which suggests passivity; it  was, and is, active avoidance. Yuri Glazov was proud to become a Canadian  citizen, but was shocked and chagrined at the ignorance and even denial of  communism’s crimes he found amongst his fellow academics. As his son Jamie  Glazov noted in his 2009 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071076">United in Hate: the Left’s Romance with Tyranny  and Terror</a>, “[W]hile we were cherishing our newfound freedom, we encountered &#8230;  intellectuals in the universities who hated my parents for the story they had to  tell &#8230;”</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Left-wing intellectuals’ laundering of the truth about communism has  translated into a vast lacuna in the teaching of 20th century history in our  schools — one we can only hope the new memorial will help to fill.</p>
<p>The word “memorial” is somewhat misleading, though, suggesting that communism  is a closed historical chapter. The fall of the Berlin Wall notwithstanding,  communism in one guise or another still determines the fate of millions of  hapless people around the globe. Victims in communist regimes are still starved,  imprisoned, tortured and denied the most basic of human rights.</p>
<p>“Centre”? “Testament”? It is not too late to find a word to remind  communism’s ongoing victims that right-thinking Canadians know the truth and  will not abandon them.</p>
<p><strong>To learn more about Yuri Glazov and the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/03/11/remembering-a-dissident/">click here.</a></strong></p>
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		<title>Sarah’s Story &#8211; by Barbara Kay</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/barbara-kay/sarah%e2%80%99s-story-by-barbara-kay/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sarah%25e2%2580%2599s-story-by-barbara-kay</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:06:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Barbara Kay]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[David Horowitz's heartbreaking tribute to his late daughter Sarah.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41668" title="sarah" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/sarah1.jpg" alt="sarah" width="450" height="387" /></p>
<p>There is        one subject no writer in the world, even the most talented and eclectic,        would hope to have as a book project, and that is the death of his own        child.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Heart-David-Horowitz/dp/1596981032/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1260746203&amp;sr=1-1"><em>A        Cracking of the Heart</em></a> by former Marxist, but        long-time conservative public intellectual and best-selling author David        Horowitz, takes as its starting point the moment he was informed that        “something terrible has happened.” The police had discovered the body of        Horowitz’s 44-year old daughter Sarah, alone in her apartment, when she        failed to show up for her job at a school teaching autistic children.</p>
<p>The book’s        title refers to the process of atonement associated with the Jewish high        holy days. For in addition to natural grief, the shock of his daughter’s        death opened a floodgate of remorse:<em> “I should have spent more time        with you when there was time to spend. I should have told you how much I        love you, or told you more often. I should have been less contentious when        we had our disputes.”</em></p>
<p>Mere days        before dying, Sarah, for whom literature and writing were foremost amongst        her cultural passions, had been interviewed for a literary website on the        subject of life and death. Horowitz recalls the intensity with which he        studied the dialogue. “Her thoughts were guiding me towards the future, as        though she were my parent rather than hers.” In particular he was struck        by a lesson Sarah took to heart from her rabbi, an important spiritual        mentor and second father in her life: “Pay attention to the ways in which        your relationship continues.”</p>
<p>These two        thoughts – “as though she were my parent” and “the ways in which your        relationship continues” -are the inspiration and guiding themes for the        rest of the book. <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em> is not so much the story of        Sarah, but the story of a relationship, imperfect in life, that has not        been cut short by her death. And, through his explorations of Sarah’s        past, her friendships and work and activities and beliefs, Horowitz        experiences a posthumous spiritual reversal of their filial        roles.</p>
<p>Sarah        Horowitz’s life is a study in deliberately hidden heroism. She was born        with a condition called Turner’s Syndrome, caused by missing cells in one        of her two X chromosomes. This resulted in a litany of afflictions that        governed her corporal existence, but never her mind or spirit.</p>
<p>Sarah was        extremely short, with a wide and webbed neck and a low hairline. She was        infertile. She had high blood pressure due to a kinked aorta (a medical        indicator for early death). She was near-sighted and hard of hearing;        eventually she became almost deaf as a result of deformed eustachian        tubes, which meant frequent ear infections. She also suffered from        diminished spatial perception and a propensity to get lost easily. Even        reduced mobility was painful due to an arthritic hip.</p>
<p>None of        these disabilities deterred her from walking two miles to synagogue and        home on Shabbat in fair weather and foul, from making her way across town        to cook and serve meals to the homeless, or from traversing oceans and        enduring physical hardship in remote and primitive communities. Bivouacked        in a Ugandan mud hut, she taught school to impoverished children of the        Abayudayu tribe of African Jews; desperately dehydrated in the slums of        Mumbai, she gave aid and comfort to sexually abused Hindu girls.</p>
<p>Determined        to live autonomously, Sarah eked out a frugal existence through menial        jobs, ate excruciatingly boring, but cheap vegetarian meals and settled        for the meagre delights of free neighbourhood entertainment.</p>
<p>Determined        as well to fulfil her educational ambitions – and refusing all financial        help (after her death Horowitz found an uncashed $500 cheque he had sent        to ease her Spartan existence) – she managed to earn two Masters degrees,        one in fine arts and one in special needs education for children, all the        while holding down a menial 8-hour a day job, and spending hours shuttling        to classes on three different buses each way at night.</p>
<p>Included        in the book is the eulogy Horowitz delivered at the funeral (it was posted        on the Internet and garnered warm feedback), which he wrote through a        “hail of tears.” He describes Sarah as an unusually temperate and        undemanding child: “I don’t ever remember losing my temper with her.”        Once, he recalls, in an absurd bid to educate her childish palate,        Horowitz urged her to choose a sour-apple flavoured ice cream instead of        her preferred staples. An obedient child, she acquiesced at once. Only        fifteen minutes later did he notice that she was not eating the ice cream.        He tasted it. It was terrible, but “In all the time that had elapsed she        had uttered no word of reproach, and she never did.”</p>
<p>She showed        early promise as a writer, and Horowitz cites with pride her greatest        public success, a ground-breaking article on hermaphrodites whose gender        was arbitrarily chosen for them by surgeons. In one of the passages from        her writing Horowitz includes, she says of one of her subjects: “I can’t        get this woman out of my head though. It is the irrevocability that haunts        me. What was done to her cannot be undone. Private pleasure has been        sacrificed for public normalcy.” Hermaphrodites’ pitiable condition – a        genetic accident leaving them stranded between one defining identity and        another – obviously struck a resonant chord with someone who was herself a        victim of physical and intellectual inheritance realities that held a        mirror up to her limitations rather than her achievements.</p>
<p>In a way,        although she was clearly talented and deeply intelligent, as several        included nuanced and polished examples of her prose and poetry attest, it        was unfortunate for a young woman already so disadvantaged to take up her        formidably credentialed and prolific father’s craft, virtually        guaranteeing herself additional torment on that account.</p>
<p>Horowitz        is a seasoned and combative professional polemicist who, motivated by        ambition for political influence and worldly success, writes powerfully        and fast. Sarah was a self-effacing, pacifistic amateur writer who,        motivated by the need for aesthetic self-expression and her father’s        approval, wrote delicately and slow. Her writing inevitably became the        locus of unresolved emotional and psychological contentions between them        that had nothing to do with writing.</p>
<p>Horowitz        recounts a telling moment in their “collegial” relationship. Sarah had        sent him a dozen pages of a novel she was writing. He was pleased by the        quality of her prose. His mind leaped ahead to publication, leading to a        teaching post perhaps or a secure literary job that would include health        benefits, a continuing anxiety for him on Sarah’s behalf, and with reason,        given her multiple fragilities. So instead of being content with praising        her writing – his validation was what she’d hoped for in sending the pages        – he asked her how long it would take to finish the novel, emphasizing the        need for a professional writer to get “product” on the market. “You write        well,” Horowitz said, fatally adding, “but you need to write        faster.”</p>
<p>Reliving        the morbid silence with which his “helpful” advice was greeted, Horowitz        takes full responsibility for the estrangement that followed it: “Now that        so many years have gone by and it is too late to retrieve my words, I        realize how far removed from her reality they were.”</p>
<p>Another        teaching moment came during a family dinner at an        East        Bay        restaurant when Sarah was in her early twenties. The conversation had        turned to political themes. Even though he knew Sarah was an active        peacenik, Horowitz admits to indulging in “near ferocious” indignation at        the anti-war movement which, he believed, gave comfort to        America’s enemies and undermined democracies.</p>
<p>Giving        free rein to his passion, Horowitz reports he was at first oblivious to        the effect of his rant on Sarah, who had remained silent. “But all of a        sudden her features came into my view with an excruciating clarity. I saw        that her eyes had grown red and liquid, and her face was convulsed as        though an immense weight was pressing inexorably down on her. Her        expression in that instant was one of such mute and irremediable suffering        that the distress of it has never left me.”</p>
<p>Overcome        with remorse, Horowitz wondered to himself, “Who is this angry person?        What sort of individual could do this to his child?” From that day on, “I        never did another thing to reduce her to tears or inflict such pain. Yet I        cannot forget that I did.”</p>
<p>As both        anecdotes imply, while her father’s reality was political, public and        aggressively ideological, Sarah’s “reality” was essentially spiritual,        private and task-oriented. During her last decade, it was her commitment        to the disciplines and rituals and social justice causes of a synagogue        community led by a charismatic rabbi trained in eastern mysticism that led        to inner peace and transcendance of her physical trammels.</p>
<p>In Sarah’s        writings and in conversations with her friends, Horowitz discovered some        happy surprises amidst reminders of his mistakes. Although chary of saying        so, Sarah appreciated who and what her father was, and the training in        coherent thinking he had gifted her with. Thus, even though she        instinctively leaned toward leftist causes, she could not be bamboozled by        mindless political correctness. She says in one of her essays, “This habit        of arguing both sides of issues is a legacy from my father&#8230;” Elsewhere        she writes that Horowitz’s early Marxism and later embitterment “left me        with a twofold legacy. I have always felt driven to pursue justice, but am        wary of ideology and partisan politics.”</p>
<p>In the        hands of a sentimentalist or a lesser writer, <em>A Cracking of the        Heart</em> could have been a maudlin exercise in hagiography and        self-flagellation. Instead, it is a loving tribute and a profound        meditation, with universal appeal, on the bond Horowitz and his daughter        shared in their common passion to effect “tikkun olam” – to repair the        world. They disagreed about the ways in which such a redemption might be        accomplished, but they were as one in believing that making the world a        better place was something which one had to do with all one’s heart, with        all one’s soul and with all one’s might. Sarah did what she could – a        great deal – in the straitened circumstances that were her portion. Part        of what she achieved was to help her father become a better man. The        relationship continues.</p>
<p>Jews say        of the departed, “May her memory be for a blessing.” Sarah Horowitz’s        “blessing” is this book. Read it, and your heart will crack a little too.</p>
<p><strong>[To order <em>A Cracking of the Heart</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Heart-David-Horowitz/dp/1596981032/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1260746203&amp;sr=1-1">click here</a>]</strong></p>
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