You say you want a revolution 
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
…But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right 

… You ask me for a contribution 
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait 

…But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow 

“Historian” Michael Kazin, who writes for such scholarly periodicals as The Nation, has written a book purporting to tell the story of both the successes and failures of the American Left.  It is about how the Left “Changed a Nation” but failed to ever get a majority of Americans to back an all-out socialist or communist government. Kazin completely leaves out the most important point — one crystallized by John Lennon and Paul McCartney in their 1968 song Revolution: “But when you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out…” Indeed, the author completely ignores the violence and destruction that characterized the political Left, not only in the 1960s, but throughout the century.

E.J. Dionne loves Kazin’s new book, calling it a “masterwork” that can inspire young progressives about their noble heritage.  Eric Altermann calls it a “tour de force of good scholarship.” One can’t help but wonder, however, how the victims of the American Left will embrace Kazin’s tactic of whitewashing the violence out of the history of American leftism. To be sure, what will the family of Betty Van Patter, who was murdered by the Black Panthers, think? Kazin only reports that the Panthers “advocated violence, but discusses none of the actual crimes of this criminal gang – spelled out powerfully by David Horowitz in his memoir Radical Son.

My guess is that the neither the family of Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, the San Francisco police officer who was killed by a bomb set by the Weather Underground (run by Obama mentor Bill Ayers) nor Officer Robert Fogarty, who was severely wounded in the blast, would be amused by Kazin’s affectionate recounting of the terrorist group as the “most inept terrorists on the planet,” only mentioning the members who blew themselves up while making a bomb to plant at an upcoming Fort Dix dance to take out not only soldiers, but their families as well.

The people of Poland will also probably not consider the central tragedy of the Hitler-Stalin Pact to be the crisis of conscience and bad PR it caused for the American Communist Party.

This is not even mentioning the 150 million human beings murdered in the last century by the governments supported by the Communist Party USA, which Kazin romanticizes in “American Dreamers,” and without whom we would apparently be a society of slave-holders, surfs whose women would not be allowed to vote or get a job.

Under the guise of being frank about the political failures of the Left to rule under the banner of leftism due to– he would have us believe, romantic overreach– Kazin whitewashes the violence that also undercut their cause at every turn.  He omits one historical fact after another. For instance, he discusses early unions and is open about their socialist roots, but there is no mention of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by Iron Workers Union radicals that killed 21 people that was part of a concerted conspiracy of union intimidation.

Clarence Darrow also makes an appearance as a People’s Champion.  The inconvenient truth that the labor movement united behind defending the union terrorists and that Clarence Darrow was almost disbarred for trying to bribe jurors in the case probably kept what was for a long time one of the worst terrorist incidents on American soil on Kazin’s cutting room floor.

Margaret Sanger is lauded as a pioneer who “fought for the rights of women as well as the emancipation of the working class.” The fact that prominent Nazis were allowed to write about eugenics for her publication?  The fact that she wanted to limit numbers of people of particular ethnic backgrounds? Not worthy of mention.

Alger Hiss is described by Kazin as “the former diplomat convicted for lying about his communist past.”  This is technically true, but what goes unmentioned is that Hiss’s trial occurred because he was an agent of the Soviet Union who committed treason, and declassified documents have proven this to be an undeniable historical fact.

And the list goes on… and on.

Unforgivably, for a book written in 2011 that spends a big percentage of its space on American Communism, Kazin makes no mention of newly declassified material like the famed Venona transcripts, or any or source, foreign or domestic, that proves just how active Stalin and the Comintern were in the activities of these supposed idealists.

Kazin also mentions David Horowitz in passing, as an example of a former member of the Left who is now an active opponent of his former cause—but ignores the detailed first hand accounts of the criminality of the Panthers, contained in Horowitz’s milestone book with Peter Collier, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the 60s.  Read their account of the life and times of Huey P. Newton, Baddest, and then try to reconcile that with Kazin’s benign picture of anti-racist and anti-imperialist crusaders whose rhetoric went a bit too far.

Reprinted from City Journal.

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 128 pp., $24.95)

Death is every life’s inevitable denouement, but La Rochefoucauld told us that we can no more stare it in the face than we can stare at the sun. For the most part, we continue our daily round in a state of presumed immortality, and because we are so unfamiliar nowadays with death—it having been carefully put out of our sight by a host of professionals—we treat it as an unwarranted intrusion into our affairs rather than as an existential limit to our brief earthly sojourn. For many, death has become anomalous rather than inevitable, something to protest against rather than accept. For them, the concept of a good death is entirely alien or antipathetic.

David Horowitz tries to stare his own death in the face. Now 71, he has had cancer of the prostate, and he has diabetes and angina; his diplomatic immunity from death, which we all grant ourselves, has been unmistakably withdrawn. His short new book, which it is both necessary and a pleasure to read in one sitting, is a meditation on the meaning of life, sub specie aeternitatis.

Horowitz begins by reflecting on the nature and character of his dogs, whom he takes for regular walks. Perhaps those who don’t love dogs will think this an odd way to begin a book on the meaning of life, but it seems entirely natural and fitting. Indeed, I was struck by how Horowitz’s meditations paralleled mine, occasioned by my relationship, and walks, with my own dog—a relationship intense and happy, at least on my side and, if I don’t delude myself, on his also. The dog, of course, has no intimation of his own mortality, while the owner’s pleasure in the animal’s company is increasingly tinged with a melancholy awareness of his swiftly approaching dissolution. Yet the dog maintains his passionate interest in the little world around him, his small-scale curiosity in his immediate environment. In the face of the physical immensity of the universe and the temporal vastness that both preceded and will follow his oblivion, is a man in any fundamentally different situation?

As far as we know, we are the only creatures to demand of their existence a transcendent meaning. This can be supplied by various means, most commonly religious belief. Horowitz is unable to accept belief in a personal God, but wishes he could and, unlike many in his position, does not scorn those who do. He is decidedly not the village atheist.

More than most, however, he has reason to know that politics can also give, or at any rate appear to give, transcendent meaning to life. The secular religion of Marxism was particularly adept at supplying this meaning, though nationalist struggles could do the same. To believe that one was a soldier in history’s army, marching toward the predestined final victory when mankind would become terminally happy, and that one’s participation would help bring forward that consummation, was to know that one did not live in vain. Even personal suffering can be lessened by adherence to a political cause: either such suffering is experienced as a consequence of the struggle, or it is at least ameliorated by an acceptance of its pettiness by comparison with the greater goal.

Horowitz offers brief but moving glimpses of his father, a true believer in the ability of Marxism (in what he considered its indubitably correct form) not only to interpret the world but to change it. The preposterous intellectual grandiosity of this belief contrasted comically, and sadly, with Horowitz senior’s position in the world. His son’s depiction has an elegiac quality, portraying the tragicomedy of a man who thought he had penetrated to the heart of existence’s mystery but was really quite weak. Though he embraced a doctrine that had done untold evil in the world, he himself was a gentle soul. His son writes in sorrow, not anger.

The author has reason to know better than most the religious nature of the revolutionary creed. In 1971, when still under the influence of leftism, he edited a book of essays dedicated to the life and work of the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. Like Horowitz’s father, Deutscher kept his faith in the immaculate conception of the October Revolution, a revolution that was, alas, subsequently to be corrupted—just as Rousseau thought naturally innocent mankind was corrupted by society. One of the essays in this book, by the Economist’s former Paris correspondent, Daniel Singer, contains the following passage:

Could one trust the statement of a Komintern ready to distort in such a fashion? Isaac was driven to question all authorized versions, to go back to the October revolution, to study the conflicts that followed Lenin’s death. The German heresy thus led him logically to an understanding and rejection of the Stalinist system.

The religious nature of Deutscher’s belief in revolutionary Marxism could hardly have been clearer. Authorized versions give rise to, or at least are the precondition of, heresies. Deutscher went back to the October Revolution, and to Lenin’s words, as Muslim fundamentalists go back to the Koran, for a source of undoubted and indisputable truth. Inside every heretic, it seems, a dogmatist is trying to get out.

David Horowitz’s powerful speech at UCLA last week cemented my belief that the black community in America has been devastated by left-wing policies and ideas. Horowitz spoke on a wide variety of issues including Israel, radical indoctrination at the University and the uncivil scare tactics student groups and professors use to silence him (David Swindle wrote this article about the entire event at NRB and Mark Tapson had a write-up here at FPM.) However, the most poignant moment of the night came at the question and answer period, when Horowitz engaged in a dialogue with a couple of black students from the Afrikan Students Union.

In this clip the student asks Horowitz how he can reconcile the dysfunctional school system in the inner city and low quality of life of the black community with his statements that America is the greatest country in the world for blacks.

Horowitz’s response is very illuminating, as he informs the student that to the extent that the black community is deteriorating, it is the fault of Democrats; every major inner-city in America, including Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia is exclusively run by the Democratic Party. Furthermore, he states that the Democratic Party is in collusion with the teachers unions, which have run these school districts into the ground. Horowitz explains the indisputable fact that these two entities are largely responsible for the decaying school systems in the black community because they administer these schools as a job program rather than an educational institution, and make it virtually impossible to fire poor teachers.

In the next clip below Mr. Horowitz continues his dialogue with another leftist black student, and explains how a voucher program for all students, wherein power is taken away from the teachers union and competition is introduced, would greatly improve the school system. Horowitz then lets the student know that the only political party proposing these changes is the GOP.

This back and forth between Horowitz and the students touched on the broader theme that conservatives have been emphasizing for years: the left-wing mantra of victimhood that has been ingrained in the black community is a corrosive bigotry that has greatly hindered progress. For years the Left has told black children that America is racist and oppressive. Black children have been told that the system is stacked against them, and that white people are the enemy. Racial hucksters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are the main perpetrators against the black community, but the entire Democratic Party is guilty as well. And of course, who can forget President Obama’s pastor for twenty years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who constantly proclaimed to his congregants the evil and racism inherent in America:

Think about what this type of rhetoric does to a young child. Imagine you were told your entire life that the country you lived in was intentionally set up so you would fail. Imagine you were told that the majority of the people in your country hated you because of the color of your skin. Imagine how you would react if you were taught that America was an oppressive society, no better than the days of segregation and Jim Crow. Don’t you think this would encourage you to hold your country in contempt? Wouldn’t this type of derisive rhetoric enable you to disrespect your country’s laws and institutions?

Most importantly, this type of victim mentality allows for blacks to not be accountable. It gives them a free pass. The Left sets the bar lower for blacks then for anyone else in society, which is why these ideas are a form of racism. Left wing teachings and values are the perfect recipe for dependence and dereliction. Is it any wonder that so many black communities are rife with poverty and crime?

Dennis Prager captured these sentiment exactly in his book, Think a Second Time, wherein he discussed leftists’ complete lack of moral expectations for blacks during the Los Angeles riots. He writes:

“As I was watching the local NBC television coverage of the rioting, this is the way one reporter described what he saw: ‘Here I am on the corner…and I see five black gentlemen throwing stones at cars.’ I said on my radio show, ‘Can you imagine anybody ever saying, ‘I saw five white gentlemen in hoods burning a cross.’?” And so, my motto—which I repeated in South Central Los Angeles to black listeners—became ‘If you can’t call a black thug a thug, you are a racist.’”

Prager is right on, as leftists sadly will not hold blacks to the same standards as everyone else in society.

As Prager points out, during the L.A riots, dozens of innocent people were murdered and countless shops were burned to the ground and looted. A decent society that wishes to instill virtue and responsibility in its citizenry would’ve condemned these evil acts, and insisted that the perpetrators be brought to justice and locked up, in order to send the message that indiscriminate violence is wrong. However, as Prager writes, instead of condemning the rioters, liberals tried to “understand” the rage of blacks and in some cases outright supported it: “We had a United States representative, Maxine Waters, screaming, ‘No Justice, no peace.’” Prager also cites this reaction to the riots by leftist Andrew Hacker:

“So there is the sheer strain of living in a white world, the rage that you [blacks] must suppress almost every day…The conclusion seems all but self-evident that white America has no desire for your [blacks] presence or any need for your people. Can this nations have an unstated strategy for annihilating your people?”

If it was a bunch of whites rioting in the streets and murdering people, do you think the Left would have reacted with sympathy and understanding? Of course not, and rightfully so.

Conversely, conservatives espouse a message of self-empowerment and personal responsibility. Conservatives believe blacks are just as capable as whites to thrive in America. This is why conservatives are against Affirmative Action; it sets a lower standard for blacks, which infers that they are inferior to the rest of society. This is a sick lie that has been unintentionally embedded in the black community by left wing orthodoxy.

The truth of the matter is America is the least racist country on earth and protects its citizens’  liberty and opportunities to succeed. Lives like Barack Obama’s and Oprah Winfrey’s are only possible in America. Immigrants from all over the world do everything within their power to sneak into this country for good reason. However, listening to liberal rhetoric, one would think that we are still in the 1950s with Jim Crow and segregation.

Day in and day out, my wife prayed for my health and for my continued presence on this earth. Her brother Joe and his wife Martha, who attended a Catholic church, St. John’s of Vianney, had organized thirty Hispanic men, women and children, including my nieces, to pray for me too. There were others. Every morning these relatives and strangers whispered my name in their intimate conversations with God, and implored him to spare me. I was touched and strengthened by their love and by their answered prayers. I was saved – at least for the moment– and was grateful for that. I would be able to share life with April again, to be with my children and grandchildren, to rise in the morning and greet the sea.

Was God really behind this good fortune? Had he intervened to rescue an agnostic soul as a reward to the believers? Thankful as I was for their concern, I didn’t like to think so. For if He had saved me to answer their prayers then I would also have to hold Him responsible for the others, whose prayers went unheard.

One of the patients who came regularly at my appointed time was a young woman who seemed to be in her twenties. She did not come in from the parking lot where her husband might be waiting for her as my wife did for me. She came in a wheelchair accompanied by a sad woman who appeared to be her mother and who had wheeled her to the radiation clinic from one of the recesses of the vast hospital complex we were in. She had barely begun life, but her eyes had already traveled to a distant space, displaying a vacancy that could have been equally the result of medications or resignation. For her this life had become a waiting room from which there was no exit. I could not help thinking, each time I saw her, of the many lives I had been privileged to live in my span, and those she would not.

I was acutely conscious of the inhabitants of the cancer ward whose prospects were worse than mine. Along with those who loved them they had endured multiple operations, multiple setbacks, years of a crippled existence, and a fate on hold. “Life is a hospital,” the poet Eliot wrote. I could appreciate the metaphorical truth in the image, but it still felt like a violence to the reality that confronted me. Not all life’s hospitals were equal and not all God’s children were saved.

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Cloward and Piven had chosen their target wisely. George Wiley and his welfare radicals terrorized social workers all over the country, but their greatest success came in New York. Newly elected in 1966, New York City’s liberal Mayor John Lindsay was no match for Wiley. He capitulated to every Wiley demand. New York’s welfare rolls had already been growing by twelve percent per year before Lindsay took office. The growth rate jumped to 50 percent annually in 1966. “By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city’s private economy,” wrote Sol Stern in the City Journal.

As a direct result of its reckless welfare spending, New York City – the financial capital of the world – was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. Leftist agitators reveled in their in triumph. The strategy had proved its effectiveness.

Crucial to the campaign’s success was the cooperation – indeed, the collusion – of radical elements within the federal government, who supplied Wiley with cash grants, training and logistical assistance, such as free legal aid and free office space from the famously leftwing Legal Services division of the Office of Economic Opportunity. Some readers may wonder why the federal government would have extended a helping hand to a program such as Wiley’s whose stated purpose was to bankrupt and cripple the federal government. The answer is that the War on Poverty was permeated with radicals whose goals were very much in alignment with Wiley’s. This was a reflection of the way activists involved in poverty programs had been inspired by the theories of Saul Alinsky the author of a manual called Rules for Radicals and a mentor to Hillary Clinton.

– The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Love death. This is the improbable instruction that the founder of an Egyptian sect called the Muslim Brotherhood imparted to his followers in the 1920s. A disciple named Mohammed Atta copied this instruction into his journal just before leading the attack on the World Trade Center three days before my biopsy. Was it a coincidence that this dark creed took root in a country of monuments to the human quest for life beyond the grave? The sentence Mohammed Atta actually jotted down was this: “Prepare for holy war and be lovers of death.”

How can one love death? This is a question that is incomprehensible to us unless we are overwhelmed by personal defeats. But it is the enigma at the heart of human history, which is a narrative moved by war between men. For how can men go to war unless they love death, or a cause that is worth more than life itself?

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Everybody understands that if the Palestinians were disarmed today, there would be peace in the Middle East. Everybody understands that if the Jews in Israel disarm, they will be massacred. These are simple facts that every rational person can see provided their vision isn’t impaired by religious hatred.

It was even worse than these bare facts would suggest. A philanthropic Jew in America, Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of U.S. News and World Report, fully aware that the Jews of Gaza were going to be removed forcibly to save their lives because the Palestinians are so bloodthirsty and genocidal that Israel couldn’t guarantee their safety, collected $14 million from American Jews to buy the 3,000 greenhouses and all the plumbing that went into this horticulture industry. They then gave it to the Palestinians as a gesture of peace. And on the day that Hamas took control of Gaza, the Palestinians destroyed all the greenhouses, all the plumbing, and started firing thousands of rockets into unarmed towns and schoolyards in Israel.

Every Palestinian rocket is an anti-civilian rocket because they are rockets that can’t be aimed. The Palestinians fire their rockets at random in the hopes that they will kill Jews. Israel’s rockets, by contrast, are precision weapons that are aimed solely at military targets in an effort save civilian lives.

The lesson of the Gaza Strip is that the Palestinian jihadists are so full of hate that they are willing to destroy 10% of their own gross national product because it was created and donated by Jews. Israel, the on the other hand, was forced to evacuate the people who created this wealth to save them from being massacred because they were Jews. That tells you everything you need to know about the conflict in the Middle East.

– The War Against Jews at UC San Diego

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Welfare. Democrats view taxes as contributions to charity. (Seriously. You should talk to a few Democrats if you doubt it.) Consequently, when Democrats designed a welfare system that cost taxpayers trillions, they considered it a double good deed. Welfare taxes benefited the poor and forced Americans to do the right thing.† Over the years, however, it became clear that government “charity” dollars were actually producing a social disaster—driving fathers from their children, bribing teenage girls to have children out of wedlock, subsidizing drug abuse and destroying the work ethic of entire inner city communities.

To address the problem, Republicans proposed welfare reforms that would put recipients to work and get others off the rolls. Democrats said “No,” and dug in their heels. They had to defend the vast patronage system that welfare created for government bureaucrats, social workers and other beneficiaries, who could be counted on to vote for the Democrat Party.

But Democrats also knew that the romance of the victim would work in their favor. When Republicans proposed welfare reform, Democrats attacked them as mean-spirited and heartless. They said Republicans lacked compassion. They said Republicans were attacking the poor. They were Nazis

Powerful moral images like this don’t go away. They linger beyond the battle and resonate through future conflicts. In 1996, when Dick Morris persuaded Clinton to sign the Republican welfare bill “or lose the election,” the images of Republicans—anti-poor and uncharitable—stuck. Clinton won the election and presided over the Republican welfare reform, claiming it as his own. It is now part of his “legacy,” while Republicans are still seen as mean-spirited and uncaring.

– The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

In the business of mothers dying, fate dealt me a better hand than it did Saul Bellow. My mother lived to a ripe age and was vigorous to the end. When she had her first stroke my children were already adults, and had given me two grandchildren besides. I was well into the cycle of the generations. This prepared me in a way that the young Bellow could not have been for the cold hand of mortality that a parent’s death lays on your heart. When the time arrived for my mother to go, it seemed almost natural that her life should draw to a conclusion. Even though her death was sudden and unannounced, I had time enough to prepare for it, to see the vortex coming.

On the other hand, the months before she died were not unlike the day remembered in Bellow’s story. I, too, let myself go round like a turntable, running about the business of my life while the clock on hers ticked mercilessly away. What else I could have done? Can one focus on death like a watched pot, waiting for it to boil? If we concentrated on our dying with an intensity that never let up, everything in our lives would come to a stop, until our days would seem like the grave itself. So, instead, we don’t pay attention to where we are headed but go round on the turntable and pretend we are standing still.

Here’s a tip. As you go spinning round, turn one eye to the side every now and then. Look over the edge and focus on a fixed object. Find a way to calculate your progress. Otherwise, life will pass you by before you wake up.

My father — may his memory be blessed — was right: Never forget the cells that are dying. Life is not a turntable, and one day the music will stop. 

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Like Islamic radicalism, the totalitarian doctrines of communism and fascism are fundamentalist creeds. “The fundamentalist does not believe [his] ideas have any limits or boundaries,… [therefore] the goals of fundamentalist terror are not to eliminate injustice but to eliminate opposition.”10 That is why the humanitarian nature of America’s mission to Mogadishu made no difference to America’s al-Qaeda foe. The terrorists’ goal was not to alleviate hunger. It was to eliminate America. It was to defeat “The Great Satan.”

Totalitarians and fundamentalists share a conviction that is religious and political at the same time. Their mission is social redemption through the power of the state. Using political and military power they intend to create a “new world” in their own image. This revolutionary transformation encompasses all individuals and requires the control of all aspects of human life.

– How to Beat the Democrats 

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

In this life, they can haul you off without warning. You can step onto the wrong plane, or off the wrong curb, or into the wrong conversation and be gone. A microorganism can stumble into a passage to your heart and douse the lights before you even learn its name. Or the cells of your being — those busy dying since you were born — can go berserk and betray you, metastasizing into a cancer that chokes your last thought. No matter how young you are or how far you get, you can never know if there will be hours enough to finish the page.

Some of us get yanked before our time, while others hang on longer than they should. Still others take themselves out when they think they’ve had enough. But what is enough, particularly if you wise up to master the game? It doesn’t matter. The clock is ticking and the buzzer is set.

This is an injustice that no reformer can repair and no court can redress.

– The End of Time

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions and even the Oakland business establishment. (The head of Clorox, Oakland’s largest company, for example, sat on the board of the Educational Opportunities Corp.)

On a far smaller scale, the Panther killings were an American version of the “Katyn massacre,” the infamous murder of Polish officers carried out on Stalin’s orders that the left had denied and kept hidden for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives settled the “dispute” for good. It was much harder for me to understand why the Panthers should be able to get away with these murders in democratic America, and why the nation’s press should turn such a blind eye to a group that the nation’s law enforcement had made an object of its attentions.

Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment, including the first lady and the deputy attorney general in charge of civil rights for the Clinton administration. Both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the university and stop the trial of Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley.

– Who Killed Betty Van Patter?

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

“The Cornel West Reader” is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates. The trappings of intellect are in place, the canonical names invoked, the capsule histories recalled, the theories broadly rehearsed. But behind the footnotes and the latinate prose, the vulgar mind of the activist is feverishly at work. A “discourse” is produced in which political postures invariably substitute for thought.

The intellectual ruin of West is not an isolated case. There is a whole generation of racially favored intellectual water flies — Bell Hooks, Michael Dyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Patricia Williams, to name a few — whose cultural elevation is not only unrelated to any serious intellectual achievement, but has eliminated the possibility of one.

For them, as for West, the pathos lies in what might have been. The left-wing university culture has stripped them of an educational opportunity that is given only once per individual lifetime. Meanwhile, the self-appointed social redeemers, whom West thanks for helping him along, are in reality the very people who deprived him of a chance to learn the hard, old-fashioned way, and thus helped to destroy whatever intellectual potential he may once have had.

–  No light in his attic

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

I give the leftist students credit for waiting until the end of my talk to vent their outrage over the blasphemies I had uttered. One young woman got so emotional she decided to leave the building to save herself from further contamination. Another young woman stood up and, with a tremendous urgency, sputtered, “But what about the hierarchies? You didn’t mention the hierarchies!”

She was referring of course to the hierarchies of race, gender and class that were the staples of her Bates education and that were alleged by her politicized professors to oppress people of color, women and, of course, wage-slaves in America. In 1999 America! Of course I had indeed mentioned the hierarchies (though not by name) and said they were left-wing illusions, no more substantial than the idea that somewhere behind the Hale-Bopp comet a spaceship was waiting to take the enlightened to heaven. So I tried another tack.

“Let me ask you this question,” I said. “Where do you put Oprah Winfrey in your hierarchies?” Oprah Winfrey of course was at the bottom of any oppressive hierarchy conceived by leftists, as a woman born in Mississippi to a black sharecropper, who had been sexually abused. But Oprah had risen by dint of her own intelligence, effort and talent to become a mother-confessor and authority figure to millions of people until the fortune she amassed cast her among the super-rich of America’s ruling class.

“She’s a token,” the young woman said.

“Sorry, she’s not a token,” I replied. “Cornel West is a token.”

I had chosen among many examples a middling intellect whose skin color had catapulted him into academic stardom at Harvard. Derrick Bell is another. Cornel West is a token, because the university is a feudal institution, run somewhat like the Communist Party, where the elect raise people up to the heights by exercising the same kind of arbitrary droit du seigneur that was the privilege of rulers in pre-democratic and pre-capitalist times.

-- Enemy of the People

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

Link:

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

The founders were not radical democrats or socialists like Hertzberg, but conservatives who had a healthy distrust of political passions and who devised a complex system designed to frustrate the schemes of social redeemers and others convinced of their own invincible virtue. If it were not for the undemocratic power vested in the Supreme Court, schools might still be legally segregated. If it were not for rights granted to the states, slavery might have spread throughout the nation. If it were not for the confusing, opaque and difficult to understand American framework, the descendants of Africans who were dragged to this country in English chains might not today be the freest and richest blacks in the world.

What makes these ancient issues important now is that our nation is under attack. It must confront its enemies, moreover, in a state weakened by thirty years of cultural assaults from the left that have made many Americans ambivalent about their heritage. Moral ambivalence about one’s country can lead to an uncertainty of resolve in defending it. But there is really no historical justification for Americans to be ambivalent about their history or heritage. As Michael Walzer and President Bush have both pointed out, this nation is still a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world, and its defense is important not only to us, but to them as well.

-- Left Illusions

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

In the end, a “millennium” is too big a concept for the imagination. A thousand years equals 30 generations, a duration that has no flesh and blood dimension. Half a millennium ago, Columbus had just landed in the Western hemisphere; half that again, America had not yet been born.

But a century has resonance for us, spanning the two or three lifetimes that we have touched. For example, I can trace my own grandparents’ path back to Moravia and the Ukraine, though I can’t go any further back than that. My grandparents were married just before the turn of the last century, and their children’s lives began with it. Brief as this interval is in the overall span of time, three generations is probably enough to understand ourselves as human beings.

Looking behind us, this century of ours was mostly a stage for the destructive dramas of a secular religious faith called “socialism.” It is a faith inspired by the dream of a social redemption realized through human rather than divine power, through the force of politics and the state. In its communist form, the efforts of this faith ruined whole continents and destroyed a world of human lives. Have we learned from these disasters, or will the passions of this faith follow us into the century to come?

– A Question for the Millennium

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

The other day I received an e-mail from a stranger posing two questions that have been on my mind for some time; thus his message seemed uncannily personal.

“I was curious,” the writer said, “if you have ever looked at your political ‘apostasy’ and wondered whether, if circumstances had been different — if you had not been involved with the Panthers or if your friend had not been murdered by them — you would still be a Marxist today. Was your apostasy a result of an inexorable intellectual development, or were you forced into your second thoughts?”

In one form or another, this is a question just about everyone gets around to asking. If circumstances had been different, would my life have turned out differently? It is a question as old as philosophy — the puzzle of determinism and free will.

Not everyone, of course, experiences such a dramatic turning point in their lives as I did 25 years ago when the Black Panthers murdered Betty Van Patter. But we all can identify choices or decisions that changed our lives, moments when we suddenly set out on a new course. Each time these kinds of changes occur, they raise the question: Are they essential to our being, or only secondary to who and what we are?

In my case, I simply don’t know whether the intensity of my ideological transformation would have been the same had it not been provoked by an act of criminal brutality committed by my political allies and friends.

But I am confident that the change would have come, in any case. I have many friends and acquaintances who had similar “second thoughts,” in which they found themselves rejecting the ideas and understandings that motivated them when they were young, and I have no reason to suppose it would have been different for me.

–  Don’t Look Back 

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

I arrived in Austin, Texas, one evening recently to give a speech about academic freedom at the university there. Entering the hall where I was to give my speech, I was greeted — if that’s the word — by a raucous protest organized by a professor and self-styled Bolshevik, Dana Cloud. Forty protesters hoisted placards high in the air and robotically chanted “Down With Horowitz,” “Racist Go Home,” and “No More Witch-hunts.”

Fortunately, a spokesperson for the administration was present to threaten the disrupters with arrest if they continued on this course. (The threat was administered very carefully, with three formal warnings before any action could be taken.) This quieted the crowd enough that I could begin my talk, which proceeded without further serious incident.

Even so, there were occasional heckles and demonstrative cheers from the group when I mentioned the name of Sami Al-Arian ( whose organization, Palestine Islamic Jihad, is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 innocent victims in the Middle East), Black Panther Huey Newton (convicted of killing an Oakland police officer in 1967, although he was eventually released on a technicality), or when I uttered the word “communist” — even though I did so to remind the audience that communists killed 120 million people in the last century trying to implement Marx’s ideas.

– Campus Leftists Don’t Believe in Free Speech

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

The fact is that there are 20,000 gun laws already on the books, 17 of which were violated by the Columbine killers. What would one more law accomplish that the other 20,000 could not? Especially one that would merely mandate background checks on buyers at gun shows? Is there any evidence that these shows are the sites of a significant number of criminal purchases or that such legislation would have any effect on armed crimes?

The Brady Bill has been violated on 250,000 occasions, according to police records, but not a single violator has been punished. Is there any correlation at all between stringent registration laws and low gun deaths? Apparently not. A social scientist named John Lott has just published a study that claims that communities in which citizens are armed have lower incidences of gun violence than communities where guns are relatively absent.

In places where gun violence has actually been reduced, like New York, where the murder rate has been cut by a phenomenal 60 percent, the reason appears to be aggressive police methods, which have come under fire from many of these same liberals who think gun control is the answer. Do the people who hate Chuck Heston adore Rudy Giuliani? Hardly.

I do not intend this as an argument for or against the gun legislation that was proposed and that failed in the wake of Columbine. It is merely a case for sobriety in assessing the issues that make up the dispute. The gun legislation in question may have been worthy or not. The point is that any difference it might make is so insignificant that it could not justify the foam-at-the-mouth response of its proponents or the stigma they have attached to people, like Heston, who disagree with them about it.

– What’s Gun Control Got to Do with It?

–

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)