| A continuation, actually, of the excerpt entitled The Present is Largely Leftist Inspired ...
If we now ask why the New Left has not developed a constructive program, a blueprint, a utopia all its own, we find several reasons.
We already alluded to the fact that mankind today is not "futuristic" [as evidenced primarily by their aversion to having children] and that the typical New Lefter lacks all family sense, all generational vistas.
Also, curiously enough, a certain rather anti-ideological substatrum can be observed in the New Left and, consequently, a real aversion to produce a precise program. Any program already smacks of "prescription" in the Kirkian sense.
Whenever I asked young New Lefters about their New Order the answer was that this problem is to be settled by discussion after "victory". Debate and discussion – they are the delight of the ill-prepared, inexperienced, unread theoretician.
Talking to a group of Catholic Bolivian students of the New Left persuasion about their vision of a "New Bolivia," I found that their only immediate aim was the destruction of the entire old order. Unpleasantly winking, they told me that it would not be difficult to occupy the waterworks of the city of La Paz, as well as the electric plants, and thus force the surrender of the capital.
And what if the government was not going to yield? What about the 400,000 inhabitants? Would they not have to leave the city? What would happen to the hospitals? The insane asylums? The homes for the aged?
They could not have cared less. Liberation always has a high price.
And the new order? That would be debated, discussed.
The whole student movement from Tierra del Fuego to Tokyo and Berlin is characterized by the shortsightedness and the cruelty of youth. [16]
To be sure, certain external reasons made this large-scale rebellion altogether possible. In many parts of the world a degree of prosperity reigns which most of us have not become used to. Before World War II students had to study very hard and frequently also to work. Today they have parents willing to shell it out for them.
And this all the more so, as these have abdicated morally and intellectually Whatever their conviction, they frequently see in the Left the "Wave of the Future" and thus are afraid, unprepared, and unwilling to criticize the views of their enthusiastic progeny. Not only have they, without any true religious convictions, parroted the precepts of Christian ethics, often paying mere lip service without living up to them, they have also failed politically.
In America the generation of parents and grandparents died on battlefields all over the world only to usher in an age of deadly fear of an atomic World War III. In Germany, one grandfather has betrayed the Kaiser, the other the Weimar Republic , the father Adolph Hitler. The young men in Germany have become, in the words of Armin Mohler, die Richterknaben, the "boy-judges" who sit in judgment over their fathers. [17]
An analogous situation exists in Italy, Spain, France, Japan and Austria.
And now these rather despised but prosperous fathers tend to buy the affection of their offspring with permissiveness and hard cash. Thus the young generation of the middle and upper classes is given "freedom" when they are most in need of guidance and authority, and the means of enabling them to loaf, demonstrate, and smoke pot rather than study and work.
Without strong ideals (religious or other) young men and women of considerable vitality will almost automatically become "rebels without a cause" and, if imbued with purely negative and critical ideas lacking a concrete aim, they will surrender to purely destructive instincts. [18]
Vandalism and nihilism of a physical or intellectual order will be the result. This goes hand in hand with a process of depersonalization. Eros is replaced by mere sex and the debasement of sex assumes a cardinal role in the New Left "philosophy"; by destroying "taboos" it strikes at the very roots of life. [19]
The negation of all ties ends in promiscuity, in a flight from life through drugs, and in a consuming hatred for every form of organic existence. [20] Nihilism is diabolism since everything created by God or man has a positive value. Satan thrives on nothingness, on not-being. [21]
Old classic leftism likes to destroy but only in order to replace the memories of the past with a vision of the future. It aims at the establishment of a cast-iron order, at symmetry, at monolithic sameness: The young New Left, on the contrary, delights in disorder and chaos. An "authoritarian person" might be neatly dressed and scrupulously clean >[22], whereas the typical representative of the New Left loves sloppiness, informality and the reflection of his mental disorderliness on his appearance, in his entire way of life.
His parents worshipped the Golden Calf. He venerates the Golden Swine. [23]
The New Left represents the left's suicidal conquest of the children of the so-called exploiters. It is suicidal because the young bourgeois who turns to the New Left is no more a genuine leftist than an albino in the Central Congo is a "white man." The authentic left might occasionally use the destructivism of the New Left as an aid in the struggle against the forces of "reaction," but it will always be highly suspicious of its progeny because it retains a live memory or anarchism, its old competitor from the days of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Ravachol, and Dieudonne.
The New Left has shown that it can successfully disrupt, that it can gravely upset, if not all by paralyze the public order. In May 1968 the revolutionary efforts of the New Left made a strong bid for the cooperation of the French working class, but failed – except in a few isolated cases. However, the fact remains that France, as in May 1958, was again within inches of a military dictatorship, the army having been ready to act if the near-revolutionary riots had not stopped. [24]
The communist party was put on the spot. Neither daring to disavow "the young" completely not to side with them openly since they subscribe to a law and order program of their own, the communists found themselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. And, at the same time, there arose among the masses a feeling of silent but furious opposition against this new menace, and it was not long before the right triumphed at the elections.
The same reaction could be observed in other countries. During the grave Frankfurt riots wives of the workers were seen hitting the demonstrating students with heavy umbrellas and shouting: "Go back to your university and study. After all, we're paying for it!" [25] They knew that almost none of these students were the sons and daughters of working men who, if they made the grade, study very hard, and do not want to endanger their scholastic progress. Alfred von Thadden, leader of Germany's national-authoritarian NDP [26] declared that he knows how to deal with rioting students: he would send two brigades of hard-working, tax-paying factory hands to the respective universities to clean them up. [27]
A significant thing happened in Italy: Pier Paolo Pasolini, a leading Communist poet and movie director wrote a piece of poetry which almost might be called an "Ode to the Police" in which the author sides with the Forces of Order (sons of the workers and peasants, after all) against the songs of the fat bourgeoisie who attacked and vilified them. [28] In other words, the "Student Revolt" of dirty, bearded, well-heeled quarter-intellectuals [29] might evoke – and is in the process of evoking – something very close to a Fascist reaction in the lower classes.
Over in Vietnam, among the young men in the armed forces, one can already observe the steady rise of such sentiments. They fell literally betrayed by those young men and women whose parents can afford to send them to colleges, to graduate and post-graduate schools to escape conscription; but, instead of keeping mum and laying low, these draft-dodgers imprudently try to play the role of real saviors of humaneness and humanity.
Once they have seen the ghastly horrors Vietcong atrocities [30], the American soldiers in Southeast Asia, certainly a rough and sometimes even brutal crowd, know the political scores on this globe infinitely better than the screaming and shouting bearded spooks back home, who display their heroic virtues only in the face of defenseless college administrators or nearly defenseless policemen. They may yet achieve their immediate aim, i.e., to bring down American (or European) universities to the level of the Latin American ones which started so much of the trouble. [31]
But oddly enough, our "saviors" forget that man is a dialectic creature and that their actions provoke reactions. These reactions might be made much worse that whatever caused them. Many countries today are dangerously near to the same spot Germany was in 1932; in spite of a lack of well-organized nationalistic mass movement, the similarities are ominous, to say the least.
It is touching to see how the New Left, a romantic movement so unlike the one that "carried" young Marx, is engaged in a cult of heroes. These may only be lugubrious assassins or hairbrained intellectuals such as Castro, Guevara, Debray, Torres, Dutschke, Tuefel, Cohn-Bendit, Mao, Ho Chi Minh or Trich Tri Quan [33], but they are literally worshipped.
The New Leftists want leaders. Still, in summing up the situation, we must not forget that the New Left expresses certain truths and truisms and provides us with not a few straws in the wind. However, immature, destructive, sterile and confused, it is a cry of anguish and protest against a mechanized, profoundly leftish age. It is, in a sense, leftism to end all leftism.
[16]In this pagan and youth-worshipping age, any criticism of the young seems to be taboo. Most refreshing therefore, it the clever book by Robert Poulet Cnotre la jeunesse (Paris: Denoël, 1963). In this connection, however, we have to bear in mind that the rebellious "kids" are rarely the offsprings of staid conservatives, but of moderately left parents (New Dealers, for instance), children who think and act consistently. This is well brought out by the novel of J. Anthony Lukas, Don't Shoot – We Are Your Children (New York, Random House, 1971).
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[17]Cf. Armin Mohler, Armin Mohler, Was die Duetschen Fürchten (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1965), pp. 129 sq. Return to text
[18]Sadistic drive against inanimate objects do exist. Vandalism directed against schools (including universities) seems to be a good preparation for the New Left way of life. At the same time, it is a blow against authority. In the United States, the damaged done annually to schools is estimated to be between 15 and 20 million dollars. (Neither, we must add, should one force adolescents without any talents or intellectual curiosity to attend school until the age of 18). Return to text
[19]Of the many scandalous New Left "performances" one of the worst took place in Vienna's university.l The theme was "Art and Revolution". Four "artists" undressed and showed – to use a circumlocution – all the varieties of their physical secretions. In a German university, the rector magnificus was bound and gagged in his office and a young couple cohabited before him: "We begetting a little revolutionary." These tales could be repeated ad nauseum.
On the profound reasons for the present "sexual revolution" cf Professor Viktor Frankl cited by C. Harlin, "Sexualitat und Sinnenentleering" in Rheinischer Merkur, March 27, 2970, pp. 18-19. Frankl believes in the frequent exercise of a "Noögenous neurosis," a neurosis rooted in the failure to make sense out of life. A morbid sex-centeredness is often the result. Frankl says:
As opposed to the beasts, instincts do tell man what he must do; traditions no longer tell him what he ought to do; often he therefore no longers knows what he really wants to do. As a result he merely wills what the others do, or does what the others want. This leads either to conformism or totalitarianism. Return to text
[20]New Left art is opposed to the beautiful. It represents all creation in hateful distortion, and especially so the human figure … an indirect form of atheism.
In its artistic aspects we see a decided connection between Dadaism (of the 1918-1922 period) and the New Left. Dadaism, however, was not only an artistic movement but also had deep political and social implications. It was at the same time libertine and antitheistic. Cf. Richard Huelsenbeck, En avant Dada (Hanover, 1920). Here we hear that Dadaism is an international, revolutionary league of all creative persons on the basis of a radical communism, that progressive unemployment should be introduced, that Dadaist poems (of a "brutish" nature) ought to be read in churches, that all sexual relations ought to be organized by a sex center, etc. Dadaism, finally, influenced surrealism and former Dadaists acted in that movement (Aragon, Breton, Eluard). A pamphlet of that group issued in May 1931, applauded the burning of churches in Spain and made an appeal to the French to do likewise: "Only the proletariat has the power to sweep God from the surface of the earth." (Aragon later became a leading communist.) Return to text
[21]On Satan and Non-Being, Cf my The Timeless Christian, pp. 173-174. Return to text
[22]One of the accusations leveled by the antiauthoritarian school against "conservatives" is to the effect that they are overly clean and dress too neatly. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York, Harper & Row, 1950), p. 448. Return to text
[23]There is obviously a sizeable amount of money which can be made by pornography. "Permissiveness" has its own vested interests. Return to text
[24]On the Paris revolt cf. Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville, The French Revolution, 1968 (A Penguin Special, 1968). This book is amusing to read because it is written for young Catholic leftists. Well observed is Raymond Aron's La Revolucion introuvable (Paris, A. Fayard, 1968). Marcuse cited the Communist daily Humanité (Paris) on the riots which wrote: "Every barricade, every car burned gave tens of thousands of votes to the De Gaullist party." Then Marcuse added: "This is perfectly correct – yet this risk of defeat must be taken." Cf. H. Marcuse, An Essay of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 68. Return to text
[25]German students pay roughly forty dollars for a semester, Austrian students about 12 dollars. In other words, the universities in Europe exist almost wholly on public support. There are Sorbonne professors who think that the evil of rebellion could be alleviated by organizing private universities with very high tuition fees (while letting the public universities go to the dogs). This, I'm afraid, might be another miscalculation. Columbia University with a tuition fee of roughly $2,200 per annum had just as bad riots as may a nearly gratuitous state university. As one can easily imagine, the leftist guerillas and leading Communists in Latin America are mostly the sons and daughters of the upper-bourgeoisie and the oligarchs of those nations. Cf., Alphons Max, Guerillas in Lateinamerika (Zürich: Schweizerische Handelszeitung, 1971), also my Amerika-Leitbild im Zwielicht (Einseideln: Johannes Verlag, 1971), pp. 107, 143. Return to text
[26]Cf. F. R. Allemann, "Adolf und die Bengel," in Die Weltwoche, February 28, 1969, p. 5. It is, however, not wholly correct to call the National Democratic Party "neo-Nazi". Obviously, there are many ex-Nazis in it, but this is equally true of the other German parties. Adolf von Thadden has no Nazi record and he comes from a notoriously anti-Nazi family. (His aunt Elisabeth was beheaded.) Return to text
[27]I heard similar talks in Spain by a high government official. IN one or two years, he insinuated, workers' brigades could be sent against rioting students. A "fascist reaction", however, coming precisely from the working class, figures as a distinct possibility in the thought of Marcuse. Cf. his Psychoanalyse und Politik (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1968), p. 66. As a matter of fact, this fear of a technological work dominated by an industrial society is quite characteristic of the New Left. (There is also a suspicion that technology implies a great deal of discipline and order.) Mohler is right when he says that the enthusiasm for technology has switched from the left to the right. Cf. his "Konservativ 1969" in Formeln deutscher Politik (Munich: Bechtle, 1969), pp. 110-111. Return to text
[28]This long poem "Il PC ai giovani" was published 1969 in the Italian weekly Il Tempo and immediately created a big controversy. (There is, needless to say, the fear of the various Communist parties that they will lose theyoung generation to the New Left as Raymond Aron has stated in his Revolution introuvable) It is obvious that the leaders and most of the rank and file of the New Left in Latin America are the neating, protesting sons of the rich and the well-to-do. A brilliant analysis of that particular state of affaris can be found in Alphonse Max' "El comunismo latinoamericano como fenomeno tridimensional" in Correo de la Tarde (suplemento 3), August 26, 1969. The New Left indeed is, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, "the Great Refusal." Cf. One-Dimensional Man, p. 257: The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal."
This Great Refusal has been lived by the female Weatherman, Diana Oughton, whose frightening life has been described by Thomas Powers in Diana, The Making of a Terrorist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). The illustrations are even more eloquent than the text. Return to text
[29]It is evident that however bright these young men of the New Left be, they do lack the experience, the very groundwork of knowledge which alone gives possibility for real insights. A revealing experience for me was a grip to Huancayo, a provincial town in Peru with two universities and eleven bookstores. The latter were fully stocked with books of all sorts but mostly "timely" publications of a political, sociological and pscychological order. Missing were the great classics, basic works of lasting value. The counterpart to these books were the grafitti of the students of the National and Catholic universities. They could be found everywhere, in every nook and corner. The wild battles between Apra-supporters, Maoists, Guevarists, Castroists, Muscovistes, Trotskyites and other leftists received literary and pictorial expression here. Return to text
[30]JUSPAO, the American information office in Saigon, has mountains of Viet Cong horror photos, but these are often so obscene that they are just not fit for publication. American troops seeing such nauseating scenes might often lose their balane and not keep the rules of war. But surely they would not disembowel people, make them watch how pigs eat their entrails, bury them alive (as it happened to the Benedictine Father David Urbain) or only half-bury them so they were eaten alive by ants (as it happened to Father Jean de Compeigne). The Tet offensive and its gory details should have been an eye-opener to the most fanatical peacenik, denying that premature American withdrawal would involve the martyrdom of millions. Return to text
[31]A former rector of San Marcos, the oldest university of the Americas, declared to me more than ten years ago that he had resigned his exalted office because either the students or the professors were on strike. Regular teaching had become well-nigh impossible. Student Co-management destroyed whatever standards there were left. The military government now tries to effect a change. Return to text
[32]In certain ways, German universities (especially in the North) are worse than their American counterparts. The picture painted by Baron Caspar Schrenk-Notzing in his Zukunftsmacher. Die neue Like in Deutschland und ihre Herkunft (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1968) provides us with a terrible picture. Professor Helmut Kuhn of Munich University stated unequivocally: "Whether the Republic will survive the student rebellion in the universities as republic --- this is the alarming question." Cf. his essay "Die Studentenschaft in der Demokratie" in Stimmen der Zeit, Vol. 183, June 1969, p. 371.
As for the American scene vide the excellent article by Arthur H. Hobbs, "The SDS Trip: From Vision to Ego Shrieks," in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 5 (Spring, 1969), pp. 147-157.
Significantly, enough, the German university rebels also called themselves SDS – "Socialist German Students" (but not "Students for a Democratic Society"). Still, the German high school students (age group ten to nineteen) also have started to organize and have demanded a democratization of the schools and the parental homes. Their organization is the AUSS. (Cf. IDW, Informations-und Dokumentationszentrum West, February 23, 1968.) Such new swould have gladdened the hearts of the American (leftist) reeducators in the immediate postwar years. They have left Germany in the meantime but are now reaping a rich harvest. Return to text
[33]as one can see, so many of these new heroes come from the "Third World". They indeed are "outlandish" and underline the existence of a "Masochism of the West," a general phenomenon dominant in the ranks of the New Left. Return to text |