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The New LeftErik Von Keunnelt-LeddihnChapter 19 | pp. 372-380 To begin with, the New Left is not so very new and it is not genuinely left either. Its existence, however, cannot be understood without a knowledge of the leftish soil in which the new plant started to grow. Furthermore, this newcomer on our ideological scene must be viewed as a reaction against our present profoundly left-influenced culture and civilization. Here we also have to face the fact that much of the New Left's critique of our way of life is-unknowingly rather than knowingly-copied from conservative sources. Finally, one can only fully comprehend the New Left if one realizes that it happens to be tied in with the student movement, the "academic unrest," [1] as well as with the worldwide disillusionment with the Classic Left, which by now is morally bankrupt. (Moral bankruptcy, unfortunately, causes physical decline only in the very long run.) In its refusal to yield to the right, the New Left, moreover, shows us its profile against the background of all the many gruesome failures of the leftist movements, the leftist establishments which have accumulated in the last 200 years. Yet it is equally certain that the New Left cannot take over the receivership, the inheritance of the Great Leftist Drive because it offers no real alternatives: Unlike genuine leftism it has produced neither a coherent ideology nor a concrete utopia. It offers criticisms but no real answers. Let us first look at the geographic origins of the New Left. In 1918 we have grave political disorders at the University of Córdoba in Argentina. The year 1918 was bad and Córdoba has bad memories. The Córdoba massacres in the 1820s mark a low point in Argentine history, a low point not so easily overcome. [2] After 1918 the disease spread in a northwestern direction, reaching the oldest university of the Americas, San Marcos in Peru eight years afterward. Under the leadership of young Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (later to become the leader of the leftist APRA) the students succeeded in forcing the authorities to grant them comanagement (cogobernación) [3] This thoroughly ruined the university which to this day has not overcome either ideologically or academically, this particular shock. After World War II the anarchical student unrest gripped Japan, where authority, all authority had been gravely shaken by utter defeat. The virus then crossed the Pacific again and affected the third seismic area, California. From there it was carried to the Eastern United States and then made its appearance in West Berlin, the European point of infection. This is not surprising because West Berlin has no conscription laws and thus became the haven for draft-dodgers from the Federal German Republic. The student rebellion then quickly spread to Frankfurt and from there to Paris, Rome, and Madrid. There are good reasons for this development which, so far, has spared the Nordic countries from England to Finland. In Latin America we have not only the Catholic faith with all its anarchical implications [4] but also the specific irrationalism of that part of the world which had been so cleverly described by Count Keyserling-the emphatically emotional way of life determined by gana, by "disposition" and "indisposition," by "likes" and "dislikes" rather than by logic, reason, and planning. [5] If we recall the terrible words of the deeply disappointed Simón Bolivar about his countrymen, we can well understand how the New Left came to have South American origins. [6] The Japanese student troubles (started by the Zengakuren) followed upon a total breakdown while the American disorders had a rather different character. Certainly the steady decay of authority is a natural phenomenon in a gradually democratized society when parental authority [7] (as the last stronghold) slowly vanishes, but there are also other and probably stronger factors which will be dealt with presently. The German "infection" is not at all surprising in view of the fact that Western Germany is the most "Americanized" country in Europe, the country where the experiment of (leftish) reeducation and indoctrination had been carried out with the greatest intensity. As a result the American imported New Left could quickly strike roots, and this all the more so as the three most important New Left ideologues had lived as German refugees in America: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkbeimer, and Herbert Marcuse who alone stayed on in the New World, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer returned to their native country. Viewed from a biological angle, the New Left Movement is carried largely by the young, but its original minds belong to men of an advanced age, to a European generation which has become successively disillusioned by Wilhelminian grand bourgeoise Germany, the Weimar Republic, Nazi totalitarianism, Stalinist communists, and the materialistic society of consumers. Having been formally on the left (and often still publicly professing to be so), they have seen all their gods fail, all their illusions destroyed. None of the three [Adorno, Horkheimer & Marcuse] could or would deny their original leftist outlook. Yet is was far more young Marx, the frustrated artist, the "libertarian," the Herostratic visionary, than old Marx, the inverted commercialist, who inspired them in their thinking. At the same time their vision remained riveted on freedom and this without their ever openly and directly admitting it, put them in the neighborhood of the anarchists rather than of the Communists. Their criticism of "bourgeois" society is perhaps even more savage than that of the deep Red Marxists—and it is more sincere, more to the point, because Sovietism is essentially petty bourgeois and bureaucratics, it has no affinity with the bohemian, the artist, the intellectual hungry for originality, the free peasant, the aristocrat. [8] Marx's lasting enthusiasm for the working class was due to his belief that within the framework of bourgeois society the factory hand would be condemned forever to a life of misery in eternal bondage. He never realized (as Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer did very clearly) that modern technological society, with or without exploitation, could even provide the working man with a middle class existence, with a great deal of security, a modicum of luxury, a minimum of work. Though revolutionary at heart, the New Left had to abandon its innermost hopes for a revolutionary rising of a no longer existing proletariat now integrated with all with all its material interests into the process of production. [9] In addition, no modern industrialist merely want to exploit his workers—they should be happy, well-paid consumers. The utter inanity of Marxian economics [10] is now evident and thus the person who is first and foremost a revolutionary and merely seeks for a rational excuse—an intellectual overstructure—to preach the overturn of the existing order, has to look in other directions, toward other social layers to whom to preach the revolutionary gospel. In this case the ideologies of the New Left appeal to the outcast of modern society, the eternal Lumpen-proletariat, the term to be understood not only in the sociological sense.[11] The call for destruction without any constructive or even utopian blueprint is also somehow in keeping with the spirit of our fast-living time which quickly forgets the past and shrinks from looking at the future—no longer described by the Ballamys, but by the Huxley and Orwells (hence also the reluctance to have any or many children). .[12] We have to admit that the present state of our Western civilization (and of the rest of the world as well) is worse than it has been in almost any period of history. In spite of good dentists, anesthestics, better health conditions, moon flights, television, birth control and a greatly decreased mortality, it would be easy to prove that human unhappiness has reached a very high level. Fear, loneliness, alienation, aimlessness, anguish, and melancholia are more prevalent than ever. There is not the slightest reason to believe that "progress" has made people happier. It has (above all in its technological form) an inflationary character. Technology means more regulation, the need for more controls; it increases responsibilities, makes us more dependent, more vulnerable. All this is evident to the New Left which therefore assumes the anti-technological stand of young Marx. Not only in this respect but in many other ways, the New Left repeats knowingly-unknowingly the nineteenth-century conservatives' critique of modern society. When the latter felt that they were defeated, that the immediate future belonged to "progressive" industrial society, their prophecy as to the shape of things to come was roughly this:
You think that you can establish a social, political, economic order based merely on the profit motive, that you can achieve happiness for yourselves or for the masses with the aid of technology, medicine and the provider state. You think that your "system", your establishment, will guarantee liberty for everybody, that you will be able to eliminate a feeling of inner independence by destroying the old historic estates.Indeed, if we read Marcuse carefully, we shall discover just these accusations, just this lament. Theodor Adorno has actually intimated that "reactionary" arguments should be used for the Second Enlightenment, the New Left. [13] Yet, as was to be expected, the masses, especially the working class, could not be won over to the New Left because—as its idealogues fully realize—the wage earners have at long last achieved middle-class living standards, and are not (and never will be) prepared to sacrifice them to some rather sophisticated doctrine without "practical" aims and material rewards. Marxism could be popularized, the New Left with its sophisticated intellectual somersaults cannot. The worker, as we said, has been totally assimilated by the industrial machine which might offer him extremely monotonous work but at least feeds him well. The financial interests of workers, management, and investors are, in fact, identical -- a maximum of production, an optimum of sales. The more moderate New Left had unforeseen experiences with the young generation. It was only a question of time until, thanks to the innate radicalism of the young, old sorcerer's apprentices would find themselves first isolated and then ridiculed as timid innovators lacking the courage to draw the final deductions from their daring premises. No wonder Professor Marcuse was lambasted and shouted down at an international student congress in Rome by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French-German student leader, and that Theodor Adorno was indirectly murdered by his followers. In one of his last lectures at Frankfurt University a number of female student stripped to the waist and tried to kiss the dazed scholar who fled with tears in his eyes. To the press he declared that this, indeed, was not the evolution he had hoped for, that his aims and ideas had been completely misunderstood. A few weeks later, he succumbed to a heart attack in Switzerland. The third founder of the New Left, Professor Max Horkheimer, a particularly close friend of Theodor Adorno, has since been moving in another direction. In an interview [14] he declared that man can properly be understood only by taking his transcendent character into account, and that we have to return to theology, a declaration which caused shrieks of indignation from pious agnostics and atheists. Yet, regardless of whether we look at the founders or at their undisciplined and even more confused disciples, the fact remains that the New Left is no longer basically left: It rather represent an inverted mental product of the Old Left plus a number of rightist vistas, though not enough to make it a rightist movement. It is anticonservative inasmuch as it rejects and fights the existing order, the establishment. Yet rightism is not conservative either in a strict etymological sense, since, after all, the present is largely leftist-inspired. In fact, as we shall see later, conservatives are not always bent on preserving whatever exists; they are, in a basic sense, far more evolutionary, far more nonconformist than either the Old or the New Left. [15] What the new Left has in common with the rightist outlook is only a critique – the critique of the materialist, technological "identitarian" consumer society dominated by anonymous forces. Nevertheless, mere analogies do not determine the essence of a movement or a political-social philosophy. the Nazi Third Reich was a provider state: Sweden and New Zealand, too, are typical provider states. This obviously does not mean that the Third Reich with its biological identitarianism was basically similar to and animated by the same moral and political outlook as either Sweden or New Zealand. 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.
[1] As to the Old World aspects of this phenomenon, cf. my essay "Student Revolts-European Version" in Seeds of Anarchy: A Study of Campus Revolution, F. Wilhelmsen, ed. (Dallas: Argus Academic Press, 1969), pp. 91-105. [2] Cf. Wilfred van Oven, Argentinien, Paraguay, Uruguay (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz, 1969), p. 98. [3] Cf. Fredrick B. Pike, The Modern History of Peru (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), pp. 211, 223. From the beginning on the cogobernaci6n was fought by the great conservative educator and thinker, Jos6 de la Riva-Agiiero. Cf. his Afirmaci6n del Pera (Lima: Pontificia Universidad, 1960), vol. 11, pp. 164-166. [4] On the "anarchical" character of the Catholic (and Greek-Orthodox) nations cf. my Freiheit oder Gleichheit?, pp. 285-32 1. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that the New Left is better anchored in the Catholic countries (and in those with large Catholic minorities), while hippieism pure and simple finds a greater echo in the world of the Reformation. The New Left and hippieism are naturally not identical but they do overlap. [5] Cf. Graf Hermann Keyserling, Siidamerikanische Meditationen (Berlin-Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1932), passim. [6] Here are the two famous exclamations of Bolivar shortly before his death: There is no good faith in America, whether between individuals or between nations. Treaties are mere papers, constitutions nothing but books, elections are combats, liberty is anarchy, and life a torment. The other one is not less depressing: America is ungovernable. Those who have served the Revolution have ploughed the sea. The only thing to be done in America is to emigrate. These countries will inevitably fall into the hands of an uncurbed multitude, to pass later into those of petty tyrants of all colors and races. Devoured by every crime and extinguished by ferocity, they will not be worthy of conquest by Europeans. Were it possible that a part of the world should lapse into primeval chaos, that would be the last state of America. Cf. F. Loraine Petre, op. cit., pp. 422-423. That these negative factors are not due to "Indian blood" is proved by the deep state of anarchy now prevailing in Uruguay, once Latin America's Exhibit A for "sound democratic government." Yet today chaos and terror have also affected many young Catholics including priests who are lustily greasing their rifles in the service of "Social Justice." Besides the famous Camilo Torres of Columbia we have in Uruguay the murderous Father de Silva. The result are such ghastly murders as those of the German Ambassador in Guatemala, Count Karl Spreti-and many more. Return to Top [7] Lykourgos once said to a man: "You want democracy? Then organize it first in your family." This is being done today-though not too successfully. [8] See Chapter IX, Note 65. [9] Cf. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Paperback, 1966), pp. xii-xiii, 19-25. [10] I have purposely not dealt with Marxian economics. Having been proved empirically wrong, they do not merit more than a footnote. (Nor is to the New Left disciple a homo economicus pure and simple.) [11] Cf. Herbert Marcuse, op. cit., pp. 256-257, where the author appeals to "the substratum behind the conservative popular base," the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. . . . Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period." A very good summing up of Marcuse's "Critique of Society" can be found in Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner's essay "Vorbild oder Verfiihrer?" in Wort und Wahrheit, vol. 25, 1 (January-February 1970):
This Lenin knew only too well. Cf. his famous pamphlet Shto dyelat'? (Moscow: lzdatel'stvo politicheskoy lityeratury, 1970), p. 34. Return to Top [12] The democratic age has, above all politically, no inbuilt "futurism." One lives from one election to the other. The monarchs think about their grandchildren-and remember their grandfathers. Leftism is "antifamilistic." [13] Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 243. It would be most erroneous to think that Marcuse has any love left for Sovietism. Cf. his Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). [14] Cf. Der Spiegel, January 5, 1969, p. 79sq. The "shock," however, was surprising, because in a number of publications Horkheimer had previously advertised his change of heart, thus, for instance, in Horkheimer, Rahner, von Weizsdcker, Uber die Freiheit (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verkag, 1965). [15] On "revolutionary conservatism" (f. Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Vorwerk, 1950.) Interesting materials also can be found in Otto-Ernst Schbddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960). [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). [17]Cf. Armin Mohler, Armin Mohler, Was die Duetschen Fürchten (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1965), pp. 129 sq. [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). [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. 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. [21]On Satan and Non-Being, Cf my The Timeless Christian, pp. 173-174. [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. [23]There is obviously a sizeable amount of money which can be made by pornography. "Permissiveness" has its own vested interests. [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. [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. [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.) [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. [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. [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. [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. [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. [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.
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I have always maintained that the worst mistake we made was not putting these photos on national TV and elsewhere. The consequence would have been destruction of the so-called peace movement. In not releasing this information the viciousness and atrocities of the communists became a non event. Even today in my written analysis people doubt it when I say such things happened.
My brain hurts BUMP!
I don't think reading an FR article will fly as an excuse.
Whether Miller was a Marxist or not, is a whole different matter. It is the subject of some speculation(s). It would explain some of the terminology, especially his choice of a title for Tragedy and the Common Man. Marxism has it’s own dogma as religions do.
The ‘genealogy of morals’ and the ‘birth of tragedy’ (borrowing from Nietzsche’s titles) is also alluded to by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:
An ancient tradition passed out of Egypt into Greece, that some god, who was an enemy to the repose of mankind, was the inventor of the sciences. What must the Egyptians, among whom the sciences first arose, have thought of them? And they beheld, near at hand, the sources from which they sprang. In fact, whether we turn to the annals of the world, or eke out with philosophical investigations the uncertain chronicles of history, we shall not find for human knowledge an origin answering to the idea we are pleased to entertain of it at present. Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; all, even moral philosophy, of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices; we should be less doubtful of their advantages, if they had sprung from our virtues. (Rousseau, p 15)
The philosophies of Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes are not generally considered analogous. Rousseau is actually very hostile to Hobbes, calling him ‘pernicious’ in A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences:
…Paganism, though given over to all the extravagances of human reason, has left nothing to compare with the shameful monuments which have been prepared by the art of printing,* during the reign of the gospel. The impious writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with their authors. The world, in their days, was ignorant of the art of immortalizing the errors and extravagances of the human mind. But thanks to the art of printing and the use we make of it, the pernicious reflections of Hobbes and Spinoza will last forever. Go, famous writings, of which the ignorance and rusticity of our forefathers would have been incapable. Go to our descendants, along with those still more pernicious works which reek of the corrupted manners the present age! Let them together convey to posterity a faithful history of the progress and advantages of our arts and sciences. If they are read, they will not leave a doubt about the question we are now discussing, and unless mankind should then be still more foolish than we, they will lift up their hands to Heaven and exclaim in bitterness of heart: ‘Almighty God! Thou who holdest in Thy hand the minds of men, deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back the ignorance, innocence, and poverty, which alone can make us happy and are precious in Thy sight.’ (Rousseau, p 26-27)*If we consider the frightful disorder which printing has already caused in Europe, and judge of the future by the progress of its evils from day to day, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will hereafter take as much pains to banish this dreadful art from their dominions, as they ever took to encourage it. The Sultan Achmet, yielding to the opportunities of certain pretenders to taste, consented to have a press erected at Constantinople; but it was hardly set to work before they were obliged to destroy it, and throw the plant into a well.
It is related that the Caliph Omar, being asked what should be done with the Library at Alexandria, answered in these words: ‘If the books in the library contain anything contrary to the Alcoran, they are evil and ought to be burnt; if they contain only what the Alcoran teaches, they are superflous.’ This reasoning has been cited by our men of letters as the height of absurdity; but if Gregory the Great had been in place of Omar and the Gospel in the place of the Alcoran, the library would still have been burnt, and it would have been perhaps the finest action of his life.
Rousseau, Jean-Jaques. The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G.D.H. Cole, Rev. J.H. Brumfitt and John C. Hall. London: Guernsey Press, 1973.
Hobbes, and later John Locke, are philosophers who established philosophical ideals that are the basis for Modern Western Civilization. Rousseau, it is argued, establishes a philosophical basis for Marxism - - something Miller appears to emulate with Death of a Salesman. The rhetoric of Marxists in politics often use the idea of a social contract and the term itself to promote the quasi-religious ideals they worship. Marxists, in a sense, worship the ideals of a dead Karl Marx like some Christians worship the image of a dead Jesus. The political Left often holds to the view of Rousseau, cited above. They eschew the advancement of science and of the arts. It is no wonder that in their pursuit to dominate academia, that the decline of education in the West has been a victim of the political Left. Is it any wonder that the modern Left opposes U.S. military action in the war against terrorism, hates the Jews and Israel, as well as supports the Palestinians and terrorism?
Old Horkheimer, one of the very few leftists who began to catch a glimmer of the truth, understood that it is only through the transcendent that man is even able to perceive the material. The Left, whether "Old" or "New" will not accept his insight, however, because to admit not only the existence of the transcendent but it's paramount importance to human life requires them to tacitly admit the possibility of God. And with God, there can be no "Left".
The atrocities to which our men were exposed (and in which some ended up engaging) were just another prong in the psychological destruction from within to which our men were subjected ... ... the second front was waged at home, of course, and both fronts in the psychological assault relied heavily on drugs -- the Kids Back Home in a la-la land of sensuality and Freedom from Restraint, the men overseas offered as much cheap, plentiful and pure heroin and hard drugs as they could stand to kill the Reality without killing themselves, as many did in the process.
Drugs, IMHO, being a key to the whole operation whose duplicitious nature was only underscored by the critical appeasement of China during the conflict in this essential area: Kissinger's stopping the overflights of Burmese poppy fields and the CIA's cranking the Golden Triangle out of the Yunnan Province.
In fact, given the invoking of the Third in the Noun Series -- the War on Drugs -- in the twilight of the Viet Nam War, I'm confident that it was the engagement re: drugs, not the fight against communism that governed the prosecution of the "war" in Viet Nam.
If we'd been serious about fighting communism, we'd have blown Cuba off the map instead of turning a blind eye to the Tri-Continental Conference in Havanan in '66, the construction of terrorist training camps on the island which began drawing far leftists from across Europe and the Middle East and the use of Cuba as a launchpad for Soviet and Chicom sponsored revolution throughout Latin America.
We have no problems displaying atrocities -- dead Rangers dragged through the dirts in Somalia, innocents leaping to their deaths last September 11th -- it's just that timing and the subject have to be Just Right.
(We're particularly keen on "respecting the dead" where the unborn are concerned ... feel free to use 9/11 jumpers as punctuation for your flame posts, however. Can't have enough of those images in folks' faces these days ... even if America was carefully spared the more graphic images to which the Europeans -- a bit jaded after three decades of Soviet-sponsored terror -- were treated.)
(May disagree with you in part, however, re: your first post ... =)
I'd heard the name (and a few favorite stories) for years. Some of the Societe among which I hang out were part of this underground group who'd invite him each year to come stay for a week. (Molnar's invited now and -- after eight long years -- I finally got an invitation this year! =)
Cicero's Son put me over the edge ... I've been vacuuming up his stuff at Abebooks ever since ... carefully timing my ration of chapters and notes so that I don't run out before the next one arrives!
He is a wonderful read. Just when you think he must never have slept to have read so voraciously and studied so thoroughly, it dawns on you that he was probably speaking in one of the dozen or more languages he knew as he relates this anecdote re: some head of state or that story he got from some bum in a baitshop in some remote corner of the world or another. Fascinating guy.
Here's another except from "LEFTISM". As a bonus, Dales inserted a copy of his Christianity: The Foundation and Conservator of Freedom.
Trust all is well with you, guy. I keep you (and all the Bloodhounds) in my thoughts.
As a result the American imported New Left could quickly strike roots, and this all the more so as the three most important New Left ideologues had lived as German refugees in America: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse who alone stayed on in the New World, whereas Adorno and Horkheimer returned to their native country.I thought I would enhance this discussion by bringing in some context about each of these men.
Also of interest is Horowitz' repudiation of the New Left, Destructive Generation.
I knew Herr Erik, as you probably guessed. Didn't see him that much -- he'd come over once a year from Lans, Tyrol to deliver enough lectures to keep body and soul together. Several {cough} years ago, at a private golf party, he carried my toddler son around the course on his shoulders; said son is now 40.
More recently, to my complete surprise, I bumped into him in the waiting room of a friendly foundation in Michigan. He spoke cheerfully of his great age and being past the time to die... of having out-of-body experiences in his sleep, as if his soul were getting ready to make its departure. (Malcolm Muggeridge reported the exact same phenomenon in his last year or two.) Erik did indeed pass on soon after and one supposes he's entertaining the Lord with his prodigious supply of anecdotes and wisdom.
"Shortsighted" and "new left" -- repetitious and redundant:
"The whole student movement from Tierra del Fuego to Tokyo and Berlin is characterized by the shortsightedness and the cruelty of youth."
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