[IrishMike]

The Peace Movement
By David Horowitz 1991
GULF WAR I : President George H. W. Bush

You see them every hour at the top of the local news with their signs of "No Blood for Oil" and their chants of "Hey, hey, ho, ho, George Bush has got to go." You watch their apologists, like aging New Leftist and TV pundit Todd Gitlin, squirm uncomfortably at their reckless passion in declaring America the enemy while failing to condemn the global outlaw Saddam Hussein. You observe in mounting wonder as they descend on Washington to hear their balding Sixties heroes-Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg, Ron Kovic- call for capitulation on the battlefield and the impeachment of the president.

The troops in these demonstrations are dressed for battle in the old Movement issue (jeans and down jackets, lettered t-shirts, even tie-dyes); the familiar targets are steady in their sights: "big oil," the "Pentagon war machine," and "American imperialism." As always, they claim to be sheep in wolves clothing-despite the war paint, just pilgrims for peace. To disarm their critics, they volunteer their past "mis­takes," like spitting on U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. Simultaneous with their present denunciations of U.S. "death squads" in Iraq, they maintain their heartfelt concern for the very soldiers who have volunteered to carry out the mission and whose morale they continue to undermine.

Is the glaring contradiction between the belligerence and malice they project and their claims to good intentions the result of mere pig-headedness? An inability to communi­cate? Or is it the failure of their political camouflage to con­ceal the real motives that inform their passion? As a former partisan of similar movements, I never-in 25 years of political activism-marched in a demonstration that did not have primary agendas just beneath its pacifist surface that were militant, Marxist, and anti-American. The "Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East" (which staged the January 19 march on Washington) is but another cynical at­tempt by the now discredited left to jump-start the revolu­tionary engines that have recently stalled.

Do I exaggerate? Can the current mobilization be so readily dismissed as an occasion for America-bashing by the unrepentant left? Consider the view of an unimpeachable source, a faithful keeper of the radical flame. Here is an ex­cerpt from Alexander Cockburn's column in the December 31,1990, Nation, commenting on the organizers of the Wash­ington march:

I wish people would stop writing to [sug­gest] that today leftists of principle should espouse the cause of Iraq and eschew criti­cism of Saddam Hussein. This is Marxism-Leninism-Bonkerism of a sort much savored by the Workers World Party, which seems to be the animating force behind the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, decorated by Ramsey Clark.

Most people will not have heard of the Workers World Party, which, according to Cockburn, is the organiza­tion that has put together this new "anti-war" coalition. But I remember them from the Sixties as the only Trotskyist splin­ter to endorse the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Thus, the spearhead of this season's "anti-war" demonstrations is a Marxist-Leninist party that defined itself by supporting the bloody invasion that took the lives of 30,000 Hungarians whose only crime was to want their national independence and freedom.

The anti-war coalition favored by Cockburn was the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which held its demonstration a week later on January 26 and was por­trayed by the media as the "liberal" peace contingent. But this turned out to be a distinction without a difference. Jesse Jackson, for example, addressed both demonstrations. The "liberal" coalition was organized by the pathetic remnants of the American Communist Party and its fellow travelers and fronts, like the U.S. Peace Council. Its official coordinator was Leslie Cagan, a veteran New Leftist, and-like the orga­nizations that made up the coalition-pro-Castro, pro-Sandinista, pro-FMLN, pro-PLO, and anti-American.

And it is the same story for the rank and file across the country. As a warm-up to the Washington demonstra­tions, activists held "teach-ins" from coast to coast, includ­ing one at Los Angeles' Fairfax High School featuring Clark, Ellsberg, Kovic, and Jackson. Attended by 1,500 people, the affair was described by the press as the largest "anti-war" demonstration until then. Its official spokesman, Achmed Nassef, told reporters that he had joined the Coalition through the Palestine Solidarity Committee. In other words, the official spokesman for the "peace" coalition was drawn from one of the only groups in the world supporting Saddam's rape of Kuwait.

Nassef also explained that the coalition itself had grown out of groups that had been organized to oppose U.S. intervention in Central America-that is to say, of groups that proclaimed themselves "anti-war" when it came to the struggle of Nicaraguans against the Sandinista dictatorship but pro-war when it came to the struggle of Communist guerrillas against an elected democracy in neighboring El Sal­vador. One of the headliners of the Fairfax High "teach-in" was Blase Bonpane, a defrocked priest who (like all the other speakers over 50) had for three decades supported every Communist guerrilla war in the world. Bonpane even au­thored a book with the Orwellian title Guerrillas for Peace.

In addition to Achmed Nassef's Palestine Solidarity Committee, the "anti-war" coalition sponsoring the teach-in included the Association of Palestinians for Return and the Committee for a Democratic Palestine-support groups for the PLO's terrorist war against the state of Israel. This led a reporter for The Jewish Journal to ask Bonpane whether the gathering was anti-Israel. "Why would someone say the gathering is anti-Israel?" Bonpane replied. "Because we're anti-war? We think that nothing would be worse for Israel than a war in the Middle East. We're horrified that some voices in Israel could be calling for this war." (At a Santa Cruz teach-in two months earlier, coalition members were even less careful in concealing their true animus, carrying signs that read "Zionism Kills" and "Palestinian Blood.")

These hypocrisies reminded me of the last time the left tried to launch an anti-war crusade, which was when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. It was then called a "Stop the War" movement, and its purpose was not to stop the Soviet invasion but to oppose President Jimmy Carter's call for a resumption of the military draft, which he felt might be necessary to counter the Soviet aggression. This should be remembered every time the current peace left hypo­critically criticizes the present volunteer military as "un­democratic," since it was the opposition of the left to a mili­tary draft during the Vietnam War and after that led to the creation of a volunteer Army in the first place. Of course, what the left really wanted-and what the left still wants-is that the United States should have no army at all and should therefore be vulnerable to its Marxist enemies and their Marxist friends.

The Eighties left, which opposed America's stand against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, was no more "anti-war" than the present left is. It was-like all the lefts that have sprung up since the Sixties-anti-American. As the Soviet legions poured into Afghanistan in 1980, leftist Congressman Ron Dellums (now the leader of the "anti­war" caucus in Congress) told the thousand cheering Berke­ley students who had gathered for a "Stop the War" demon­stration:

From my vantage point, as your Representa­tive, [I believe] we are at an incredibly dan­gerous moment. Washington, D.C., is a very evil place...While [the White House] pro­fesses to see the arc of crises in Southwest Asia as the Balkan tinderbox of World War III, well Ron Dellums sees the only arc of cri­ses being the one that runs between the basement of the west wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon.

America is the source of the world's crises and prob­lems. This is the cardinal axiom of the left. It was also, of course, the animating principle of the father of contemporary "anti-war" movements-the one that led to the victory in Indochina of Pol Pot and the Vietcong. In the words of a Santa Cruz student, active in the coalition:

Obviously, this current anti-war movement takes inspiration from its Vietnam predeces­sor. Siphoned through 20 years of anti-Vietnam sentiments, my generation enters its movement more cynically than our coun­terparts of the Sixties....

More cynically, indeed. For what did those "anti-Vietnam sentiments" accomplish, judged by the passage of those 20 years? A Communist-sponsored genocide in Indochina that extinguished nearly 2 million lives and oblit­erated a national culture. A decade and a half of Communist oppression in South Vietnam that killed more than a half million civilians, created nearly 1.5 million refugees (unprec­edented in Vietnam's 1,000-year history of foreign and do­mestic tyrannies), and made Communist Vietnam one of the poorest, most repressive, and-let us not forget-militaristic states on the face of the earth.

This is the real agenda of today's anti-war radicals: to reprise the Vietnam experience of the Sixties in the Nine­ties. In fact, they can hardly wait to repeat it. "Right now our movement is not as big as Vietnam was...," one student orga­nizer breathlessly told a campus recruit, "[but] I think that as soon as a shooting war starts this will be even bigger than Vietnam." Bigger than Vietnam. This is what every radical for 30 years has dreamed of: an occasion that will trigger an ex­plosion of the left bigger than the Sixties itself.

And what is this left? It is no longer a left that pledges its allegiance to Soviet power and worships at the al­tar of the Soviet state-though it was that. It is no longer a left that justifies Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe as a revolutionary beachhead of "peoples' democracies"-though it was that. It is no longer a left that celebrates Chinese Com­munism as a new dawn in humanity's long march into the socialist future or Cuba's gulag as a beacon of Latin Amer­ica's coming liberation-though it was (and for some may still be) that.

It is a left that has been disoriented by the repudia­tion of its socialist paradise by hundreds of millions of former inhabitants. But it is also a left that has not for a single moment put down its weapons in the permanent war it has been waging, since 1917, against the capitalist societies of the democratic West and, in particular, of the United States. Earlier this year, Daniel Singer-The Nation's authority on Eastern Europe-lectured leftists as to how they should react to the rejection of socialism by East Europeans liberat­ing themselves from the Soviet yoke: "Our problem is not to convince the Eastern Europeans that they can change re­gimes by Fabian [socialist] methods....Our duty, rather, is to go to the heart of the matter and to the fortress of advanced capitalism....In other words, our task is to spread the convic­tion that a radical change of society in all its aspects is on our own historical agenda."

In other words, damn the disasters our crusades have created in the East, full speed ahead with our plans to destroy the capitalist democracies of the West. The enemy is within. Or, as Time columnist and Democratic Socialists of America chair Barbara Ehrenreich put it: "As a responsible radical, I believe our first responsibility is toward the evil close to home, and stopping that. In any event, I'm more worried in the long run about the belligerence of George Bush than of Saddam Hussein" (Tikkun, January 1991).

We see this destructive left active today in America's universities, striving to discredit the very culture that created American democracy, attempting to smear America's heri­tage as the imperialist, patriarchal, racist construct of "dead white European males." And we see it in the streets, mobi­lized to oppose America's own right of self-determination and self-defense in an ongoing, relentless assault on Amer­ica's military and intelligence communities that it malicious­ly portrays as the tentacles of a sinister "national security state."

In sum, what the left has become-now that its fan­tasy of a socialist future has been exploded all over the world-is this: a nihilistic force whose goal is to deconstruct and dismantle America as a democracy and as a nation.

Revolution is a form of total war. The radical left sees itself-has always seen itself-as part of an international revolutionary army. The archenemy of this international army is today, as it has been for the last 45 years, the United States. Thus, The Nation, which is the most respected organ of the radical left, defined the terms of the current battle over the Persian Gulf in a front-page editorial called "Choose Peace" in these words:

The choice in the Persian Gulf conflict has never been between sanctions and force. It is between peace and war, between life and death. The party of death, which prefers self-descriptions that cover its thirst for con­quest with appeals to the great tradition of just wars and lesser evils, has since August 2 seen sanctions as a kind of ritualistic fore-play to the violent penetration of an entire region of the globe. President Bush manipu­lated the various United Nations sanctions votes as he sent Secretary of State Baker to bribe and buy a favorable "use of force" reso­lution, putting a specious international gloss on his deadly designs for war. (December 2, 1990)

America is the "party of death"-this is the moral calculus of the radical left. George Bush's America-not Saddam Hussein's Iraq-is the power with the "deadly de­signs for war"-this is what radicals mean when they preach about peace.

[nopardons]

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