David Horowitz’s Black Book is is very good on the guerrilla movements in Latin America, which far from being the spontaneous and justified expression of a downtrodden peasantry, as was the received wisdom among western intellectuals at the time of those movements’ apogee, were the products of rapidly expanding numbers of university students led by leftist intellectuals

The Black Book of the American Left

by Theodore Dalrymple

Ever since Stéphane Courtois published his The Black Book of Communism, there has been a deluge of black books, particularly in France, where the latest is that of Vichy. David Horowitz’s Black Bookis that of the American left, which he charges – with a great deal of cumulative evidence – of equivocation towards, support for and outright complicity with the Soviet Union. 

Ignorance of the horrors of Soviet rule was not an excuse, because the horrors were known and documented from the very first, and for decades the left preferred to ignore the facts than abandon its fantasies. 

And although the American left was not responsible for much violence in America itself, there was hardly any revolutionary violence that to which it did not provide aid and comfort, repeating its original sin ad nuaseam. 

In the process it rewrote its own history as assiduously and dishonestly as Stalin wrote his.

It is against the attempt by intellectuals to disconnect the ideas that their words express and the deeds that those ideas have inspired, condoned or encouraged, that David Horowitz has written for a quarter of a century. 

He has focused his powerful guns on the American left for two reasons, the first personal and the second sociological, though in fact in his case the two reasons are inextricably linked. First he himself was a member of the left for much of his youth and early adulthood, and second leftist ideas of various stripes were and remain predominant in academia and among the intelligentsia.

He was a red diaper baby, that is to say the child of ‘orthodox’ communist parents, but by the time he came to young adulthood the Soviet Union was no longer plausibly the hope of the world. However, Horowitz did not at that stage want to throw the baby out with the diapers, and therefore helped to found the New Left. 

Unfortunately, the internal logic of its socialist beliefs led it to support or make excuses for totalitarian regimes such as Castro’s, just as the previous generation of orthodox communists had done. It also indulged in what would have been comic operetta revolutionism had it not been for the extreme criminal nastiness of the acts which it excused, condoned, concealed or perpetrated.

Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. 

Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. 

With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.

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