On Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s
Gitlin, Todd
DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT THE '60s, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz. New York: Summit Books. 352 pp. $19.95. The struggle which the Bolsheviks began more than half a...
...There is no enrage like a revolutionary betrayed...
...In 338 pages, I count a grand total of five (to be generous) that touch on the events of the years between November 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and November 1967, when Huey Newton killed an Oakland policeman...
...A number of Panthers were dead from a combination of their own provocations and police ambushes...
...What motivates the Left is the Idea of the future in which everything is changed, everything transcended...
...He convinced a bookkeeper to go to work for them...
...David Horowitz, "Letter to a Political Friend," in Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation, 1989 The point is not that Horowitz thought badly twenty years ago...
...When they step away from the Stender and Weatherman stories, professional skepticism is still not doing well under the weight of the idee fixe...
...Instead, they start with three chilling cautionary tales and then start ranting...
...Careers are still available in instant expertise...
...Collier and Horowitz are right about this much: There is, among other tendencies on the left, a need not to know—a refusal to recognize that people declared to be agents of history by some Leninist version of the Marxist metaphysic commit crimes...
...Their cartoon view of "the sixties" comes in part (but only in part) from their lofty vantage point...
...To comprehend how a potential becomes actual, you have to look at history as it is lived, on the ground—have to turn it over, weigh factors, look at not only ideas but social situations and the whole cultural gestalt of a time...
...The struggle which the Bolsheviks began more than half a century ago is still in its early stages—indeed, in a sense, is just beginning...
...But what put the Panthers on the national map was Ramparts, the San Francisco-based magazine that Collier worked for starting in 1967 and which Horowitz joined on returning to the United States in January 1968 after four years in England...
...The world divides niftily between the saved and the unsaved, the blind and the all-seeing...
...The Panthers played white radicals like violins...
...The crimes have been bloody and frequent enough to require that the metaphysic be given the most withering scrutiny...
...We didn't check facts very energetically," Collier writes of his days at Ramparts, "and paranoia and ideology always overcame professional skepticism...
...There is no fiscal crisis, no race tension, no bureaucratic blindness...
...they have to be made...
...There are enemies everywhere...
...Berkeley featured a cut-loose recklessness whose political form on the white left was what later came to be known to its critics as Third Worldism— a fixation on revolutionary white hats placed on nonwhite heads...
...If you don't, you're fronting for the enemy...
...No one might rationally have concluded that the Saigon government the U.S...
...The escalation of a horrendous war, the assassination of Malcolm X, the liberal betrayal and the deepening liberalradical divide, the growing estrangement of millions of American youth who lacked any tutelage in "the radical Idea" —these things rate barely a mention...
...Sign up...
...That is not what Collier and Horowitz do...
...No one could rationally have concluded that there was no political aim that could justify mass slaughter in Vietnam...
...No, "the sixties" really begin for Collier and Horowitz when things get exciting, when "the radical Idea" sashays into town and buckles on its guns...
...Christopher Hitchens is guilty of "moral epilepsy...
...One is the horrifying story of Fay Stender, a white radical lawyer who was shot in 1979 and left paralyzed by a black ex-prisoner who accused her of having "betrayed" George Jackson, whom she had defended...
...Parachute tours of the Third World are still available for drop-in (counter)revolutionaries, this time in Nicaragua...
...And so the bête noire of the Collier and Horowitz of 1989 is the Horowitz of 1969—and of 1973-74, when Horowitz went to the aid of the party that the Idea had evidently chosen to carry out Its labors...
...Such arguments rage about Lenin and Stalin, for example, and legitimately so...
...This is news that even as late as 1981, when the authors first published the Fay Stender story, many in the Bay Area left didn't want to hear...
...Ideas they detest are really disease: "In the inchoate attack against authority, we had weakened our culture's immune system, making it vulnerable to opportunistic diseases...
...In racial, abortion, and other decisions, the Supreme Court turns the screw toward cultural civil war...
...The Panthers set themselves up to exploit this indiscriminate fancy— Panther co-founders Huey Newton and Bobby Seale raised the money to buy shotguns by selling copies of Mao's Little Red Book, which they hadn't yet read, on the Berkeley campus—and so did vicious imprisoned desperadoes the likes of George Jackson...
...The country was tilted, and everything loose rolled to California—there was Cara...
...Here and there in their fragmented diatribe, Collier and Horowitz do succeed in evoking the frequently phantasmagorical political atmosphere of Berkeley, California...
...If the point is that there is evil in the world, and that some of it is lodged in a black criminal subculture, fine...
...The origins of metaphorical epidemics of crime and drugs could be traced to the Sixties, as could literal ones such as AIDS...
...In this phantasmagorical light, potholes in the Berkeley streets and some other dubious policies are the result of the city government's knack for establishing sister-city arrangements in the Third World...
...As they fling accusations around, factual botches abound (for some, see Paul Berman's review in the New Republic [April 24], his subsequent exchange with Collier and Horowitz [June 26], Hendrik Hertzberg's review in Washington Monthly [May] and his letter in the New Republic [July 10...
...It is even easier to argue that early events or bad ideas create conditions for later events or worse ideas...
...The world is still a faceoff between America and communism, only this time the jerseys have been switched...
...Victimhood was taken to confer the mantle of revolutionary leadership...
...But these arguments cannot be presupposed...
...People caught "moral scurvy...
...Horowitz assigned me the book and published the review...
...Some of what is wrong arguably has roots in the sixties...
...What motivates the Left is an Idea whose true consciousness is this: Everything human is alien...
...So this is a particularly opportune, indeed necessary time to think carefully about what the sixties and the left were good and bad for...
...We have heard enough of the familiar structure of alibi: As some wag once put it about the Stalinist gulag, "It didn't happen, it was necessary, and they're not doing it anymore...
...The Martin Luther King whom Collier and Horowitz trot out to discredit black radicals is a 570 • DISSENT stick figure—not the King who denounced the Vietnam war and American materialism...
...Instead, they grab the reader by the lapels and start yelling...
...Nineteen hundred and sixty-nine was a bad year for political sense...
...There is no tragedy, only barbarism, Fifth Columns, left-wing McCarthyism...
...On the other side, communism...
...Now in principle it is possible to argue that late events condemn early ideas...
...There is also the tale of an apolitical black criminal Vietnam vet...
...Poverty and wealth grow, race festers, cities rot...
...Collier writes about his post-Mississippi conversion to antiwar work: "Like others, I passed through the early stages of the foreign policy debate painlessly: It was necessary to support the NLF [Vietnamese National Liberation Front] and work against the U.S...
...There is just original sin: insufficient love of America, which seems to mean the American executive branch, especially its most brutal wing...
...It was Ramparts that promoted paroled rapist Eldridge Cleaver to the status of major writer and sage...
...There are always people to whom these facts are news, and so careful documentation and analysis are always welcome...
...David Horowitz, Empire and Revolution, 1969 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...
...On one side, capitalism...
...My point is rather that the same style of thought that drove the Horowitz book of 1969 drives the juicier, jazzier, nastier Collier-Horowitz book of 1989...
...There was no mass youth upheaval—just "the radical Idea" and its larky high jinks...
...But I won't blame him for my errors...
...This was the Black Panther party...
...The style is fanatical, apocalyptic, harsh, Manichaean, frantic...
...Their motto might as well be: Everything hideous comes from aliens...
...Instead, bellowing as if they were the only veterans of the sixties to wrestle with the meaning of the revolutionary idea or socialism or the United States, Collier and Horowitz give second thoughts a bad name...
...For many others, including this reviewer, the passage through foreign policy positions was not painless, and it didn't settle with quite so much sang froid on the NLF...
...But you can't make a counterrevolution without breaking eggs, right...
...In the view from Collier and Horowitz, the New Left consisted of Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bob Scheer, Noam Chomsky (at his worst), Tom Hayden (at his worst), this reviewer, the Weathermen, Ron Dellums, and a few other names—well, that is what the world looked like from the Ramparts office, headquarters of radical chic...
...There follows the go-for-broke sexual nihilism and political insanity of the Weathermen, founded in 1969...
...The women's movement is invisible...
...The American situation today deserves the overworked word "crisis...
...The war lowered our resistance to the intellectual toxins in the air...
...Had Collier and Horowitz chosen to give us more in that vein, they would have given us something of great value...
...Horowitz, overriding what he calls "surface betrayals of character that provided warnings to others but were dismissed by me as the legacies of an oppression that radical politics would overcome," concluded that the Panthers had gone straight and decided to help them...
...Naiveté, stupidity, ignorance, cowardice, bad ideas, malice, and communism are the same...
...In 1974, she found out they were cooking their books, and they murdered her...
...The civil rights movement barely existed, and no one on the left gets credit for it...
...Let's see, then: How shall we account for potholes in New York...
...The Revolution is Dead, Long Live the Revolution—still absolute, still simple-minded, still global...
...The socialist revolution" is on the march...
...By 1973, Cleaver, having fled abroad to avoid criminal charges he later admitted were justified, was raving about Kim Il Sung...
...Never mind that the cold war is clearly superannuated, both political parties refuse to whisper the secret aloud...
...I, for example, wrote a favorable review of Empire and Revolution in Ramparts, the New Left monthly of which Horowitz was an editor...
...Y6Y • S69 sociological truth in the late sixties wisecrack...
...But not enough...
...Some white radicals in the Bay Area had belatedly disabused themselves of their guilty, gullible, fearful, and finally racist attachments to the Panthers...
...But notice: this version of "the sixties" begins circa late 1967 and—like the worst of the late sixties' iconography—walks only on the wild side...
...The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution...
...installed was a fraud...
...America since the sixties is a disappointment, to put it mildly...
...Ed Koch's counterrevolutionary tourism in Nicaragua...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
