A STIRRING CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Is this for real, or simply another line of digital dope offered up in the form of political wishful thinking? As much as we might pine for the ushering in of that new post-racial worldview that Obama promised but can hardly deliver even if he tried, which he obviously isn't when it counts the most—on the fly—the dividend bearing reality remains that "until you see the reds of their eyes" racial politics is big business and too formidable a stick of ill repute to simply fade away.

However, words will be words, and often fetch a handsome price on the information markets these days. So the knaves with their knives on all sides of the compost pile continue to line up in service to their killing fields of choice.

Former associate of the Oakland, CA of the revolutionary Black Panther Party, and now conservative agitator—David Horowitz—on the aftermath of the recent Henry Louis Gates spectacle, writes:

NOW, FOR WHITE PEOPLE the term "racist" is really tantamount to being called a "ni---er" if you're black, except that blacks are free to call whites racists while whites can't even write the word n-i-g-g-e-r without risking repercussions. Watching this show—watching this cop be not only unapologetic but demanding that Gates apologize to Crowley and his mother (for the trash-talk Yo Mama), it occurred to me that a great turn is indeed taking place as a result of the election of Obama.

First we had the spectacle of Sotomayor—a race-preference leftist—backing off entirely from race preferences, and now we have policemen who normally would just be under fire, saying enough—we're not going to take it anymore. Saying: For years we've bent over backwards to apologize for racial injustices, some of which occurred and some of which did not, we've taken so many hours of courses and training to be sensitive to minorities, and we're not going to be called racists anymore when we're not. You are a professor making five or ten times what I make. You are in state whose governor is black; you're in a city whose mayor is black. You're pretending you're a powerless victim and at the same time phoning my chief and calling me a racist, telling me I don't know who I'm messing with because your friend who is black is the president of the United States. F--- you! And that's something of a cultural revolution.

Read it all.

While we can agree with the Horowitz analysis of the racial game as it is historically played, it is far too early to presume that this president has actually achieved racial consensus and has flatlined the old racist beast by inadvertently appealing to those very same tactics in solving this social dilemma that has supposedly led to the often cited racial polarity in the first place, beer garden or no beer garden.

THE OTHER SIDE OF RACISM

DAVID HOROWITZ has commented on Facebook today concerning the continued silence of the liberals with regard to the historical peoples revolt against the totalitarian theocratic dictatorship. His remarks are as spot on...

And let us not get carried away. No one, not even the neo-cons are advocating interceding militarily in Iran, but a voice of support for those marching hordes who are not only exercising the rights of free expression in calling for free elections that we support here in the United States, but they are also voicing opposition to an unquestionably sworn enemy of ours in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

How much plainer can this opportunity to extend textbook American graciousness to an oppressed people be? But I suppose in this case, only the wistful teleprompter of our much heralded Barack Obama knows for sure.

Horowitz writes:

Here's one scene from the historic revolt in Iran. Everything liberals pretend to be concerned about is on the line in Tehran today. Basic freedom to vote and have your vote counted; basic freedom to protest and not be killed. Even the style of the revolt is something for liberals to celebrate—the Tweeter revolution, the women's revolution, the revolution of the young. But liberals are silent. They want their government, their White House, to pretend it has no stake in the outcome, that it can deal with either Iran, the Iran of the Islamo-fascists who oppress their own people and want to kill us, or the Iran of those freedom loving citizens whose blood is running in the streets. Shameful.

Props to Mr. Horowitz for pointing out what seems to be obvious to anyone not blinded by party shenanigans, those poor souls who prefer a knotty grudge match to anything remotely akin to what some of us prefer to call principles. Don't misunderstand me. I speak plainly here. As far as I'm concerned, the Left and the Right are opposing butt cheeks of the same dumb-ass political machine.

As a staunch constitutionalist I prefer a strict adherence to those founding principles that inform individual liberty with abiding responsibility and uniform and unifying justice. But why did we and why do we continue to waste the perceptions and inertia our founders left us in writing and in deed? Our nation is floundering in a mess. Both parties have contributed heavily to the burdens now foisted upon the American people. And as a result, I fear the worst is closing in upon us all. But I can appreciate the work David Horowitz and Anne Wortham is doing for America today, even though folks of our intellectual ilk will continue to be called racists and nazis by small minds.

So even as we note that the landscape is littered with false assumptions and intellectual scoundrels, let us turn to another important American voice on the issue of racial politics gone awry, Professor Wortham as she writes with a special combination of intelligence and self-awareness:

MY FELLOW AMERICANS, please know I am black. I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul’s name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a Black president to know that I am a person of worth, and that life is worth living. I do not require a Black president to love the ideal of America.

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival—all that I know about the history of the United States of America, all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the “change” that Obama asserts has come to America.

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depend. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million Blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that Blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared “progressive” whites who voted for him because he doesn’t look like them.

I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration—political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University ’s Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that “fairness” is equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that a man who asks me to “go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice” is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the “bottom up,” and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting “Yes We Can!” Finally, I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead—and no one including, especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a Black man to the office of the president of the United States, the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over—and Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmie Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a Black person.

So, toast yourselves: 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to—Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine—what little there is left—for the chance to feel good.

There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.

Dr. Anne Wortham is author of “The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness” which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues. She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality. Recently, she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after an interview in 2004, she was awarded tenure.

HOROWITZ ON HOROWITZ

What follows is an edited version of a radio interview on KKMS AM 980 with David Horowitz conducted by hosts Lee Michaels and Jeff Shell. The show opened with the one of the hosts asking the following question: Tell us a little bit about yourself, because I think it’s important for us to understand your background and how you got where you are as a context for your current views.”)

My parents were members of the American Communist Party and I was part of the progressive left, which was the communist left, and which has grown ominously large today, and has seen its candidate elected to the White House. I was the editor of the largest magazine of the New Left, which was organized by the children of communists, so-called red diaper babies like myself. We regarded America as the enemy. We began as an isolated political minority, but the hate America crowd has grown alarmingly in size since then. Today, nobody is embarrassed about slandering his own country even in time of war—and this includes our current president, who recently apologized for the actions of his country to Latin American communists, Jew-haters and self-declared enemies, such as Venezuela’s Yugo Chavez and Nicaraguan jefe Daniel Ortega, a degenerate who molested his own daughter.

In Obama’s presence Ortega went into a rant against America claiming that our government conducted a “terrorist” war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, when in fact American pressure forced an end to the Sandinista dictatorship and the re-institution of a free press and open elections. What was President Obama’s response to the Ortega attack? “Well, I was only six years old at the time.” In other words, an apology for our “terrorist” acts against the Marxist dictatorship. This is disgraceful and also dangerous.

To answer your question as to how I arrived at the views I now hold, during the early 1970s I was working with the Black Panther Party, whose leaders were the heroes of all progressives and were assumed by progressives to be the victims of American oppression and police brutality. As I soon discovered, the Panthers were, in fact, criminals and murderers and not the victims the left claimed them to be. In 1974, they killed my friend, Betty Van Patter, which brought all this home to me. The left protected the Panther murderers and made apologies for their other criminal deeds. Today, campus progressives invite the killers to their schools and give them ten-thousand-dollar speaking fees to denounce America as a “racist” country and criminal nation, which is what progressives want to hear.

The second principal cause of my change of heart was the Vietnam War. I was one of the leaders of the antiwar movement of the time. Of course, these antiwar movements of the left aren’t really antiwar movements in any meaningful sense of the word. They are anti-American movements, designed to make America lose whatever war it is engaged in. If there had been a peace movement during the lead up to the war in Iraq, for example, there would have been at least one demonstration in front of the Iraq Embassy calling on Saddam Hussein to obey the UN resolutions and the arms control agreements he had signed. But there wasn’t, not one. The so-called antiwar activists were not demonstrating for peace. They were demonstrating against America and its efforts to hold Saddam to the UN peace agreements he had signed.

During the Vietnam years, the goal of the so-called antiwar movement was to cause America to lose the war—and that includes every leader of the anti-Vietnam left: John Kerry, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and so on. The anti-Vietnam movement wanted America to lose because for the left, for progressives, we are the bad guys: America, the oppressor. America did lose the Vietnam war as a result of our protests. The anti-American antiwar movement forced America to give up the fight for freedom in Vietnam, to retreat from the field of battle, to withdraw overnight. It was the same prescription that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed and the congressional Democrats wanted for Iraq. Fortunately they failed, and consequently Iraq is not ruled by terrorists today.

But in Indo-China the ending was different. Once America quit the field of battle, the Communists proceeded to slaughter two-and a-half million poor Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants—one of the worst genocides in history. But there wasn’t a single demonstration by progressives against this atrocity. Bloodbaths are okay if they are committed by progressives of color in the name of “social justice.”

From Communism to Islamo-fascism, the left in America—as elsewhere—has had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror, which is the title of an important book that one of my FrontPage editors, Jamie Glazov, has just published. It’s called: United in Hate, the Left’s Love Affair with Tyranny and Terror. That is who they are. Progressives are adept at speaking the language of peace and love and justice; but these words are just a smokescreen for their real agendas which are search and destroy. Anybody who has ever encountered a progressive up close in any kind of political disagreement knows that this is a hate movement. They hate conservatives; they hate Republicans; they hate white males, and increasingly they hate Christians and Jews. They hated George Bush.

Read it all.