Coalition against the U.S.

COALITION AGAINST THE U.S.

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, lettered T-shirts, even tie-dyes) the familiar targets are steady in their sights: "big oil," the "Pentagon war machine," and "American imperialism." To disarm their critics, they volunteer their past "mistakes," like spitting on U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam. Simultaneously with their present denunciations of U.S. "death squads" in Iraq, they maintain their heartfelt concern for the very soldiers whose morale they undermine.

Is the glaring contradiction between the belligerence and malice they project and their claims to good intentions the result of mere 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 stalled revolutionary engines.

Do I exaggerate? Consider the view of an unimpeachable source--the man George Will recently described as "the last Stalinist." Here is an excerpt from Alexander Cockburn's column in the December 31 Nation: "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 will not have heard of the Workers World Party, but I remember them from the Sixties as the only Trotskyist splinter to endorse the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. Thus the spearhead of this season's "antiwar" demonstrations is a Marxist-Leninist party that defined itself by supporting the bloody invasion that took the lives of thirty thousand Hungarians whose only crime was to want their national independence.

The Coalition favored by Cockburn was the National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which held its demonstration 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 coalitions. 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, pro-Castro, pro-Sandinista, pro-FMLN, pro-PLO, and anti-American.

And it is the same story for the parts that make up these coalitions. As a warmup to the Washington demonstrations, activists held numerous "teach-ins," including one at Los Angeles' Fairfax High School, featuring Clark, Ellsberg, Kovic, and Jackson. Its 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 few groups in the world supporting Saddam's rape of Kuwait.

Nassef also explained that the Coalition itself had grown out of groups organized to oppose U.S. intervention in Central America--that is to say, of groups that proclaimed themselves "antiwar" 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 fifty) had for three decades supported every Communist guerrilla war in the world. Bonpane even wrote a book with the Orwellian title Guerrillas for Peace.

Stop Whose War?

These hyprocrisies reminded me of the last time the Left tried to launch an antiwar crusade, which was when the Soviet Union invalid Afghanistan. It was then called a "Stop the War" movement, and its purpose was not to stop the Soviet invasion, but to oppose President Carter's call for a resumption of the military draft. This should be remembered every time the current peace Left criticizes the present volunteer military as "undemocratic," since it was the opposition of the Left to a military draft 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 U.S. should have no army at all, so that it would 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 "antiwar" than the present Left is. It was simply anti-American. As the Soviet legions poured into Afghanistan in 1980, leftist Congressman Ron Dellums (D., Calif.)--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 the Enemy

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 forerunner of contemporary "antiwar" 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 antiwar movement takes inspiration from its Vietnam predecessor. Siphoned through twenty 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 twenty years? A Communist-sponsored genocide in Indochina that extinguished nearly two million lives and obliterated a national culture. A decade and a half of Communist oppression in Vietnam that killed more than half a million civilians, caused nearly one and a half million to flee the country, and made Vietnam one of the poorest, most repressive, and--let us not forget--most militaristic states on the face of the earth.

This is the real agenda of today's antiwar radicals: to reprise the Vietnam experience of the 1960s in the 1990s. One student organizer breathlessly told a campus recruit, "I think that as soon as a shooting war starts this will be bigger than Vietnam." Bigger than Vietnam. This is what every radical for thirty 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 "people's 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 at the repudiation of its socialist paradise by hundreds of millions of former inhabitants. But it is also a Left that has not 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 Eastern 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 crusaders 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 chairman of the Democratic Socialists 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, which 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 arch-enemy 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 respectable organ of the radical Left, defined the terms of the battle over the Persian Gulf in a front-page editorial called "Choose Peace" (Dec. 24):

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 king of ritualistic foreplay 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.

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.

Mr. Horowitz is co-author with Peter Collier of Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties.