I grew up in Argentina, and during my my college years during the sixties and seventies we were flooded with Spanish translations of the Left-wing rhetoric of Leroy Jones, Angela Davis, Malcom X and the radical Left protests that started on May 68 in Paris and Berkeley.
The orthodox communist parties were left behind by a new wave of radical firebrand revolutionaries like Che Guevara, Mao Tse Tung and the iconic Black Panthers.
Little did we know during those days of our juvenile enthusiasm about Tom Wolfe's piece on a party at Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan apartment with a group of Black Panthers. To the surprise and horror of the mostly Jewish and well-off, well-educated intellectuals gathered there in adoration of the revolutionary young people in cool leather jackets and attitude, they received a bash of anti-Semitic rants read aloud by the guests of honor.
"Radical Chic", the article that Wolfe wrote about that evening deserves to be read again for those like me (and much younger) who didn't know the actual story of the Black Panthers movement in America.
Let me quote some scenes of it that I read 30 years late:
Let me quote some scenes of it that I read 30 years late:
"So . . . Radical Chic was already in full swing by the time the Black Panther party began a national fundraising campaign late in 1969. The Panthers’ organizers, like the grape workers’, counted on the “cause party”—to use a term for it that was current 35 years ago—not merely in order to raise money. The Panthers’ status was quite confused in the minds of many liberals, and to have the Panthers feted in the homes of a series of social and cultural leaders could make an important difference. Ideally, it would work out well for the socialites and culturati, too, for if there was ever a group that embodied the romance and excitement of which Radical Chic is made, it was the Panthers." [...]
Bernstein's dinner ended in epic disaster, and Wolfe exposed in his now legendary New Yorker piece the true and crude reality behind the Black Panthers and its adoring "Radical chic" using the same kind of "fly on the wall" acid prose that Truman Capote used on other less intellectual part of the rich and famous:
But if the Bernsteins thought their main problem at this point was a bad press, they were wrong. A controversy they were apparently oblivious of suddenly erupted around them. Namely, the bitterness between Jews and blacks over an issue that had been building for three years, ever since Black Power became important. The first inkling the Bernsteins had was when they started getting hate mail, some of it apparently from Jews of the Queens-Brooklyn Jewish Defense League variety. Then the League’s national chairman, Rabbi Meir Kahane, blasted Lenny publicly for joining a “trend in liberal and intellectual circles to lionize the Black Panthers . . . We defend the right of blacks to form defense groups, but they’ve gone beyond this to a group which hates other people. That’s not nationalism, that’s Naziism. And if Bernstein and other such intellectuals do not know this, they know nothing.”
The Jewish Defense League had been formed in 1968 for the specific purpose of defending Jews in low-rent neighborhoods, many of which are black. But even many wealthier and more cultivated Jews, who look at the Defense League as somewhat extremist, Low Rent and gauche, agreed essentially with the point Kahane was making. One of the ironies of the history of the Jews in America was that their long championship of black civil liberties had begun to backfire so badly in the late 1960s.
As Seymour Lipset has put it, “The integrationist movement was largely an alliance between Negroes and Jews (who, to a considerable extent, actually dominated it). Many of the interracial civil-rights organizations have been led and financed by whites, and the majority of their white members have been Jews. Insofar as a Negro effort emerged to break loose from involvement with whites, from domination of the civil-rights struggle by white liberals, it meant concretely a break with Jews, for they were the whites who were active in these movements.
The Black Nationalist leadership had to push whites (Jews) ‘out of the way,’ and to stop white (Jewish) ‘interference’ in order to get whites (Jews) ‘off their backs.’”
“. . .‘If you’re for freedom,’ says Otto Preminger, ‘tell me dis: Is it all right for a Jew to leave Russia and settle in Israel?’. . .”
Meanwhile, Black Power groups such as SNCC and the Black Panthers were voicing support for the Arabs against Israel. This sometimes looked like a mere matter of black nationalism; after all, Egypt was a part of Africa, and black nationalist literature sometimes seemed to identify the Arabs as blacks fighting the white Israelis. Or else it looked like merely a commitment to world socialism; the Soviet Union and China supported the Arabs against the imperialist tools, the Israelis.
But many Jewish leaders regarded the anti-Zionist stances of groups like the Panthers as a veiled American-brand anti-Semitism, tied up with such less theoretical matters as extortion, robbery and mayhem by blacks against Jews in ghetto areas.
They cited things like the August 30, 1969, issue of Black Panther, which carried an article entitled “Zionism (Kosher Nationalism) + Imperialism = Fascism” and spoke of “the fascist pigs.” The June, 1967, issue of another Panther publication, Black Power, had carried a poem entitled “Jew-Land,” which said:
Jew-Land, On a summer afternoon,/Really, Couldn’t kill the Jews too soon,/Now dig. The Jews have stolen our bread/Their filthy women tricked our men into bed So I won’t rest until the Jews are dead . . .In Jew-Land, Don’t be a Tom on Israel’s side / Really, Cause that’s where Christ was crucified.
But in the most literate circles of the New Left—well, the Panthers’ pronouncements on foreign affairs couldn’t be taken too seriously. Ideologically, they were still feeling their way around. To be a UJA Zionist about the whole thing was to be old-fashioned, middle-class middle-aged, suburban, Oceanside-Cedarhurstian, in an age when the youth of the New Left had re-programmed the whole circuitry of Left opposition to oppression. The main thing was that the Panthers were the legitimate vanguard of the black struggle for liberation—among the culturati whom Leonard Bernstein could be expected to know and respect, this was not a point of debate, it was an axiom. The chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic,
The New York Review of Books, regularly cast Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver as the Simón Bolívar and José Martí of the black ghettos. On August 24, 1967, The New York Review of Books paid homage to the summer urban riot season by printing a diagram for the making of a Molotov cocktail on its front page. In fact, the journal was sometimes referred to good-naturedly as The Parlour Panther, with the -our spelling of Parlour being an allusion to its concurrent motif of anglophilia.
The Review’s embracing of such apparently contradictory attitudes—the nitty-gritty of the ghetto warriors and the preciosity of traditional English Leavis & Loomis intellectualism—was really no contradiction at all, of course. It was merely the essential double-track mentality of Radical Chic—nostagie de la boue and high protocol—in its literary form. In any case, given all this, people like Lenny and Felicia could hardly have been expected to comprehend a complex matter like the latter-day friction between blacks and Jews."
It was later when I came into contact with yet another chronicle of the hallucinated distortions that came to be known as the "Left" in American campuses and broader cultural wars -to which we were not part down in Latin America, busy as we were trying to survive actual dictators, real fascists and communists and open warfare and torture-.
The author was David Horowitz, who had been a second generation Marxist Jew and supporting member of the Black Panthers Party. Horowitz also had his experience of being mugged by reality, and he told it in "Radical Son" and other books reporting the American Left domination of humanities and social sciences studies after the sixties and seventies.
The author was David Horowitz, who had been a second generation Marxist Jew and supporting member of the Black Panthers Party. Horowitz also had his experience of being mugged by reality, and he told it in "Radical Son" and other books reporting the American Left domination of humanities and social sciences studies after the sixties and seventies.
Forty years later, and after the fall of the USSR, the conversion of China to "market Communism" and Vietnam in a close commercial ally of US, the images of Mao, Guevara, Cuba and Vietnam have taken a deep and well-deserve scrutiny and beating among those who look at the actual facts as they happened with the benefit of not having being part of them.
The distortion of Marx's and Engels' scientific materialism theories into postmodern anti-rationalism and relativism as embraced by the American Left is so incredible that deserves a separate treatment, which I prefer to leave for another entry.
William F. Buckley is dead and David Horowitz has taken yet another turn towards pro-Trumpian self-immolation, so the landscape of critical thinking about the Left seems rather limited to explain electoral losses.
The American Left still reveres the Cuban dictatorship, compares Israel with South Africa and engages in identity politics and arbitrating political correctness in speech. Not a drop of George Orwell's "newspeak" and "Animal Farm", "1984" and "Politics and the English Language" seem to have survived the massive wipe-out of actual Left thinking required to build the Pisa Tower of the American Left intellectual construct.
But fortunately there are still fragments in the Web for those who want to keep them in sight, for as Ronald Reagan wisely commented, "liberty is always a generation away from extinction".
Alan Sokal made good fun of exposing the American (and French) Left and its post-modern frauds, but the tenured American Left hold on American campuses keeps these stories out of reach of younger generations.
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment