Defective Defectors
Landau, Saul
BOOKS Defective Defectors DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier and David Horowitz Summit Books. 352 pp. $19.95. by Saul Landau Destructive Generation offers...
...As a student leader, he was dwarfed by Mario Savio and the other Berkeley free-speechers, but he was a more-Marxist-than-thou theorist, and eventually a more devoted follower of the cause of the Black Panthers and their leader, Huey P. Newton, than any other white radical...
...Stender struggled with all of the social and political questions that the '60s generation confronted without scapegoating when she herself suffered horribly from bullet wounds inflicted by a former convict who allegedly was avenging the late George Jackson...
...Twenty years ago, he was assuring his readers that "the American revolution is the key to the liberation of mankind"— and he may have been right...
...Horowitz reprints a scurrilous attack on Fay Stender, a courageous woman who never blamed others for the consequences of her political decisions...
...aggression—only the tired notion that U.S...
...I met Horowitz just as the Age of Aquarius was ushering in the good-time vibes of the 1960s...
...To Collier and Horowitz, this is a problem and a threat...
...Collier writes that "our interest in the Panthers (David's always far greater than mine) continued even when Huey fled to Cuba after being charged with the murder of an Oakland prostitute...
...Some who saw it as license also internalized it as necessity...
...They did, after all, attack the robber barons before finding fame, wealth, and happiness in extolling capitalist virtues...
...As former members of that Left, they claim to have seen the light...
...power would promote liberty and virtue if only the cowardly liberals and the obstreperous Left could be silenced...
...Today, he is still a missionary—that seems to be part of his character—but he now preaches without a moral framework...
...Less than a decade later, in The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, Horowitz and Collier had the Rockefellers surrounded by an aura of decency and humane philanthropy...
...Government's noble efforts in Vietnam and Central America from coming to fruition...
...What they've seen, it seems to me, is a chance to turn a handsome profit on their change of heart...
...In their concluding chapter, these converts to Reaganism, writing in the third person, "saw that they had not been powerless—as their theory had once predicted—but had been able to accomplish tremendous damage (much of it still unrepaired) to America's values and institutions...
...They are out of sync with themselves and with the times...
...Freedom took on many meanings in the 1960s...
...In August 1969, Horowitz approvingly quoted Eldridge Cleaver: "What we need is not a war on poverty, but a war on the rich...
...Those the authors blame for destroying America actually pushed part of a generation to a greater understanding of democracy...
...And it was this insight that motivated them now...
...Horowitz and Collier, like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swag-gart, travel the circuit, writing and preaching right-wing gospel, assuring the sinners of the 1960s who have not renounced their evil ways that they will burn in the hottest of political hells...
...Do they think of themselves as reformed traitors...
...by Saul Landau Destructive Generation offers more insight into the mentality of the two defectors who wrote the book than into the generation they purport to analyze...
...They offer no theory, no behavior standards, no just-war rationale for U.S...
...The authors blame an abstraction—the intellectual ambiance of a decade—for ruining America, shredding the fabric of patriotism, and preventing the U.S...
...But one who read Horowitz and Collier during the period they now excoriate can only conclude they are attacking themselves...
...The rantings of Collier and Horowitz seem designed to purge the sin from their own souls...
...Horowitz reports only those "scandals" in which he was not involved, projecting onto others the sins that he cannot himself admit...
...America now possesses the means to a humane, livable, democratic future for all its citizens," Horowitz exhorted in 1969, "but only if they are ready to seize the means of production and overthrow the system which dominates their lives just as surely as it dominates the lives of those in the Third World who suffer under its aggression and its rule...
...In the 1980s, however, Horowitz and Collier voted for Ronald Reagan and catered to Jerry Falwell's flock, assuring the faithful that if it had not been for the wimpy liberals and traitorous Left, the Saul Landau is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C people of Vietnam would today be lounging around their back-yard pools...
...Which Horowitz, which Collier should we believe...
...Since their prose lacks cohesion, one is tempted to ask whether Peter Collier and David Horowitz are merely playing a game of literary mischief, pretending to denounce others while planting clues that will let readers conclude that the attacks are really aimed at their own past lives...
...This collection of disconnected and bilious essays about individuals (like the prison reform leader Fay Stender), groups (like the Weatherman faction of the 1960s), and places (like Berkeley, which merits an entire fusillade for its 1970s politics), ends with diatribes against the Sandinistas and ruminations on the authors' reasons for quitting the rotten Left and joining the wonderful Right...
...Are the books and articles they wrote in the 1960s treasonous...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s, Collier and Horowitz told other people what to think and do—how to live their lives so they could better make a revolution...
Vol. 53 • August 1989 • No. 8
