You Want to Understand Fanatics? Understand Julius Rosenberg and His Ilk

HNN ^ | 1-16-06 | Steven Usdin

[LS]

My view in anything has been that enough productivity will overcome racial/ideological/class/gender "bias." Funny thing about money---it still talks.

[Just mythoughts]

Especially if it is productive and not mired in a personal agenda.

Again I give you congrats for not becoming mired down and staying focused. The congrats also include your book, which I forgot to mention.

Also I think it is Biblical that those who work receive a double blessing, does not hurt to be on the right side of things.

[Casloy]

Possibly the most profound book on the subject is WITNESS by Whitaker Chambers. He is not only one of the great American writers, but he has a deep understanding of what motivated those Americans to spy for the Soviets.

[LS]

I"ll be pinging you soon about my new book, "America's Victories: Why Americans Win Wars." We just got the cover, and it looks great. The marketing/promo campaign will begin in about a month.

[Yardstick]

I don't know if you've read his memoir (Commies), but it really is fascinating to discover how he made the transition from being a Red diaper baby to a staunch anti-Communist.

I just picked up Commies at the used book store the other day. I've only skimmed it so far but it looks good. If you haven't read it, David Horowitz's Radical Son is excellent -- he and Radosh followed a similar path. Also Horowitz's Politics of Bad Faith, which includes some of his correspondance with his leftist friends around the time of his break with the Left. It's incredibly poignant stuff. The language he used to explain to them why he had abandoned "the dream" is some of the most powerful and lucid anti-communist writing I've read. It literally gave me goosebumps.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

I do have Radical Son.

Some of his other political tracts written with the collaboration of Peter Collier are also included in "Left Illusions," which is an anthology of his writings that cover his evolution from an intellectual leader of the new left-and editor of its flagship journal, Ramparts-to pragmatic neoconservatism and patriotic apologetics.

The End of Time-an exegesis on life, politics, and man's place in the world-is also a phenomenal book.

Very concise, but well worth reading, IMO.

[Yardstick]

Radical Son is great but long. Politics of Bad Faith hits a lot of the same notes but is a much quicker read. It's almost like the Cliffnotes version of Radical Son. In fact, Horowitz wrote it as a companion to Radical Son, I think to get his point across to people who didn't feel like undertaking the full-blown biography. If you haven't taken the plunge into Radical Son because of its length, Politics of Bad Faith might be just the ticket. Plus it's got those letters. Oh man, they're intense.

Left Illusions sounds interesting. I saw a copy of Free World Collossus sitting on a library shelf the other day. That was the leftist masterpiece he wrote back in the day (I think he was 25 at the time; he may have been at Ramparts then). No doubt it would be an interesting read.

I've been meaning to get hold of End of Time.

Horowitz is the man.

[CBart95]

I realize the truth can be painful. It's clear that I am not the only person who has seen that you are such an unhappy soul.
Help is out there.

Good luck.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

It's not so much the length, but the length combined with the prolixity and the memoristic format.

The End of Time touches upon a lot of the same themes-and many others that involve his extended struggle with cancer-but it's much more concise, and plays more to Horowitz's strengths

Leaving aside the best-selling modern historical biographies he and David Collier co-wrote, I've always thought that he was at his best when he relies upon the short, pointed essay/polemic style that characterizes most of his writings and speeches today.

You should also try to get your hands on The Anti-Chomsky Reader.

If I had to guess, I would say that a dozen people-give or take-bought copies of that book because of my recommendation.

It really is the most devastating, expansive critique of one this nation's greatest intellectual charlatans written to date.

I don't know how interested you are in the subject, but it's an invaluable resource to use against mindless Chomsky acolytes.

[Yardstick]

I loathe Chomsky and am always on the lookout for info and arguments that I can use to ruin his followers' day, so I'll check the Anti-Chomsky reader out if I get a chance. In fact I've been meaning to read it for a while now (along with a zillion other books -- that's the problem!).

I've always thought that he was at his best when he relies upon the short, pointed essay/polemic style that characterizes most of his writings and speeches today.

Yeah, I agree. Those written debates and roundtables he did a little while back (several were posted on FR though I haven't seen one lately) were the perfect example. He was just devastating in those.

By the way, did you know that Horowitz did a live Q&A session here on FR a few years back? The Robinsons invited him to come "talk", started a thread for him, and he answered questions for an hour or so. The thread would probably come up with a search.

[TChris]

Several notable exceptions aside (OBL, Patty Hearst, although she's kind of a special case, having been kidnapped and all), people don't blow themselves up if they've got good jobs and live stable lives.

OBL is no exception. He isn't strapping on any explosives; he's just good at talking others into doing it.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

http://encounterbooks.com/books/anch/anch.html

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

http://forum.protestwarrior.com/viewtopic.php?t=67614&highlight=

[Yardstick]

I went to the Protest Warrior's forum on Chomsky. Looks like not much is happening there. I did look up one of the Zmag debates mentioned by one of the lefty trolls, which Horowitz participated in.

http://www.zmag.org/horoalb.htm

The troll's claim that Horowitz got slapped down is silly. The other guy was good at making mountains of unreadably dry verbage, but incapable of make a concise point. Rather than get buried under an avalanche, Horowitz basically said "No thanks. Read some Mises and Hayek and get back to me."

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

Yeah, there's a troll that nests in that particular forum.

Occasionally he take a feeble stab at refuting the copious data on the anti-Chomsky database by making some ridiculous assertion, e.g. "the Guardian is a right-wing publication," "Republicans are Nazis," or some other equally absurd, irrelevant comment that quickly degenerates into an unhinged off-topic jeremiad.

[Yardstick]

Scratch my comment about not much going on there. I didn't see that there were 39 pages more recent than the one I was looking at (from March 2005). Duh!

...some ridiculous assertion, e.g. "the Guardian is a right-wing publication,"

Yeah, I noticed that someone posted a list of the sources and people that he had labelled "right wing". It included Alan Dershowitz and The Guardian. Nutty troll. Of course, a forum isn't really complete without a troll.

[Do not dub me shapka broham]

Troll(s), plural.

He's just one of the more unhinged among them.

You have to do something extraordinarily disruptive and/or offensive in order to be banned from the forums section of PW.

Democratic socialists, Council Communists, Schactmanites, DLCers, anarcho-syndicalists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, liberal Democrats, LaRouchies, etc...

They're allowed to post without any interference, as long as they abide by a few simple rules.

[Robert A Cook PE]

The fantasy version of Soviet life seemed as plausible to him as the Daily Worker’s assertions that the U.S. was run by a gang of greedy plutocrats intent on exploiting the workers. The plight of unemployed men like his father seemed to verify this explanation.

Barr’s family and those of his friends rarely traveled beyond New York’s five boroughs and adjacent areas of New Jersey. Intellectually and emotionally they were more closely connected with Moscow and Kiev than with Minneapolis or Oklahoma City. The communist literary figure Lionel Abel reflected the mood when he wrote that in the 1930s “ New York became the most interesting part of the Soviet Union.” Barr was ignorant of how the vast majority of Americans lived, of their values and traditions, but he was aware of the discrimination that religious and racial minorities experienced.

No difference now: Substitute NY Times and Washington Post for Pravada, the lies pushed daily by ABBCNNBCBS for Communist's films, and the propaganda pushed in the schools (against business, against capitalism and pro-eco-radicals). The liberal elite are now in NY, Boston, Washington and LA - and THEY control the visible culture on TV, in print, and in the movies.