A SINGLE STATE SOLUTION
Behind David Horowitz's Crusade to Defund Progressives
by Danny Schechter Monday, 01 January 2007 http://www.ziopedia.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2861
Comparing today's Busheviks to yesterday's Bolsheviks started out as a joke that began to take on an appearance of truth. Many of the most strident neo-con ideologues and others shaping the ideology of the Bush crusade were one time leftists turned rightists. They found a new God when their old ones failed--and brought the authoritarianism, certainty of conviction and righteous fervor once associated with Marxism to their own often self-serving Marketism.
Many members of the Administration made the long march from left to right. Today's World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz first marched on Washington with Dr. King in 1963 to change the world, only to end up orchestrating the march on Baghdad in 2003. Eliot Abrams ran with SDS at Harvard before enlisting as a patron of the contras in Nicaragua and running Middle East Policy at the State Department Today. The list of converts to conservatism is long, predictable and depressing.
But no one in government has the chutzpah and cantankerousness of former Ramparts editor and New Left booster David Horowitz, who slid from one side of the spectrum to the other with an entrepreneurial energy and zeal matched by few. He has turned his conversion into a crusade, then a business and now a brand. His publications have gone from skeptical heterodoxy to his own orthodoxy. He formed "research" Centers that once aimed at countering counter-cultures, promoting a conservative world view and taking refuge in his own cult of personality. His work increasingly became self referential with memoirs that make him sound like the martyr of Freedom.
Scott Sherman wrote in The Nation: "By 1989 Horowitz was comparing himself to Gifford Maxim, the Whittaker Chambers character in Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey, an ex-Communist who confronted the radical tendencies of his time 'with what he knew, from his experience, of the reality which lay behind the luminous words of the great promise.'" Horowitz had arrived at the final destination of his journey.
His latest ploy has been to come front and center, naming his latest incarnation after himself. May we all genuflect to the The David Horowitz Freedom Center! The name testifies to his ambitions--or is it pretensions? The anti-Stalinist has adopted one hallmark of Stalinism, the great leader syndrome.
When he is not busy advising Republicans, or trying to cleanse campuses of the Red and the radical, he is quietly assisting the Administration in its defunding of terrorists strategy. As a one time investigative reporter, Horowitz, like the rest of us, "followed the money." He now follows other people's money while busily gobbling up as much of it as he can.
(Disclosure: I once worked with the "former" David at Ramparts Magazine in the 60's and early 70's. When I first met him in London he was an acolyte of Trotsky historian Isaac Deutscher whose main subject--the ex-Bolshevik taking on the Bosheviks--has been his role model ever since. At that time he worked for the Bertand Russell War Crimes Tribunal. Today, he would have been tried before it as a penultimate Bushevik. We have tangled occasionally ever since with him at one point attempting, but failing, to suppress the South Africa Now TV series I founded because of its favorable coverage of Mandela who he deemed "the Marxist." He repeatedly insists he saw me wearing a T-shirt backing Pol Pot. I think he was smoking too much pot.)
For over a quarter of century this former Berkley radical has worked tirelessly, if always self-promotionally to purge the left which in an earlier life rejected his theories and willingness to become its theoretician, savior and messiah. From trying to revive the credibility of the Black Panthers after most activists abandoned them, to offering a manifesto for a new socialist movement that no one took seriously, he moved steadily rightwards where his recantation was welcomed the way fundamentalist churches encourage the redemption of sinners.
What a romance with Trotsky began ended in an embrace of Reagan. At that point dollars started dropping into his many ventures, $15 million or more of them. As he found, there's more gold in them thar hills than Beverley Hills.
Wikipedia picks up the story:
"In 2004, Horowitz launched Discover the Networks, a conservative watchdog project that monitors funding for, and various ties among, individuals and organizations of the left. Part of the motivation for Discover the Networks is Horowitz's view that leftist individuals and groups support, whether consciously or not, Islamic terrorism, and thus require ongoing scrutiny. This theme is explored in Horowitz's 2004 book, Unholy Alliance.
It aims to "expose" and undermine "the individuals and organizations that make up the left and also the institutions that fund and sustain it." The project also seeks to "define the left's...programmatic agendas," which it contends are often concealed. The project's contributors contend that the political left in the United States commonly applies a "deceptive public presentation" of itself that conceals a network of affiliations and shared political views with "radical agendas". It views these as communist, socialist, environmentalist, "anti-capitalist", and "anti-American" causes. Discover the Network is associated with the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and FrontPageMag.com, which have received numerous grants from right-wing foundations."
Their latest target are organizations and foundations that support peace movements. The charge: they are covertly supporting terrorism. A one-time promising intellectual had now joined the forces he had once feared and despised. He's retrofitted himself for a new role. A one-time provocateur for the left now plays that same role on the right and is being paid well to do so. When once he was baited for his unpopular stances, he now baits others.
I watched him recently on CSPAN debate the polemical Native American radical Ward Churchill. What struck me about him was his shiny new suit and pathetic attempt to deny any censorious intent, cloaking his arguments with a reasonableness they did not merit. He seems to love attention more than anything. It was a performance piece, not a serious discussion. One blog noted: "Churchill and Horowitz both belong in the Shameless Self Promoters Hall of Fame."
In many ways, his binary--with us or against us- Bushian worldview has won converts in the once liberal intelligentsia, as Tony Judt observes: "They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people's expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide."
The real problem is that in this climate of fear, many progressive funders, when under attack, may just back away from controversy or cancel support for new foreign policy initiatives because they don't want to be dragged into the mud or targeted by the annoyingly persistent righteous renegades of the right.
As a word, Horowitz is going from a noun to a verb. To be Horowitzed is like getting that piece of gum on your shoe that you can never somehow scrape off. When he went after Bill Moyers some years back, Moyers felt he had to take out a full page magazine ad to refute his errors, and defend his honor and good works. Being Horowitzed is like having cat pee sprayed on a new couch. It leaves a stain and smell that never quite goes away. He delights in poking, prodding and delivering pain. He's having fun and with a healthy budget to draw on. He has, taking a page from the Bolshie handbook and built a cadre organization of acolytes and admirers. He runs the cell as his delusional attitude hardens into cellulite.
The big question: will his targets prove tough enough to fight back or, to use another unfortunate phrase associated with his latest political hero, "stay the course?"
News Dissector Danny Schechter spent eight years working for ABC News. He now edits Mediachannel.org. Info on his latest film at InDebtWeTrust.com. Comments to Dissector @ mediachannel.org
Posted by: "World View" ummyakoub@yahoo.com ummyakoub
Mon Jan 15, 2007 3:53 pm (PST)