adequate vision of radical commitment and radical change, is to take a firmer grip on the ground under its feet.
This article was published in the December 8, 1979 issue of The Nation as “A Radical’s Disenchantment”—a title provided by the editors. It turned out to be my farewell to the left. (See Radical Son, pp. 305–7.)
1Baez had written an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam” to protest the post-peace repression in Vietnam. Even though the ad blamed the United States for its role in the war, she was denounced as a CIA agent by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda for her efforts (Radical Son pp. 302–3). Later I appeared on a television talk-show with Baez to discuss the Vietnam War. During the discussion she peremptorily dismissed my views, saying, “I don’t trust someone who’s had second thoughts.” Stern and Radosh had published an article, based on FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, suggesting that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy. There was an uproar in the left and the two of them came under vitriolic attack from their (now) ex-friends. My role in the genesis of this article and the subsequent book by Radosh and Joyce Milton (The Rosenberg File) is described in Radical Son, pp. 300–302.
2The Nation’s Richard Falk was one of the outspoken promoters of the idea that the Ayatollah’s revolution would be a “liberation” for Iran.
3This was obviously wishful thinking.
4Chomsky’s extreme adverse reaction to this reference, which is described in Radical Son (he wrote me two six-page single-spaced, vituperative and personally abusive letters in response), caused me to begin a reassessment of his character. For my second thoughts on Chomsky, see the articles in Volume Two of this series, Progressives.
5Chomsky ignored this obvious criticism and went on to elaborate the same preposterous thesis in his most famous book, Manufactured Consent, co-authored with Edward S. Herman.
6Another, by Gareth Porter, however, did admirably deal with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.
My life as a leftist began with a May Day Parade in 1948, when I was nine years old, and lasted for more than twenty-five years until December 1974, when a murder committed by my political comrades brought my radical career to an end. My parents had joined the Communist Party along with many other idealistic Americans in the 1930s, before I was born. Just as today’s leftists believe that the seeds of justice have been planted by the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, my parents and their radical friends saw them blooming in Soviet Russia, which many of them visited during Stalin’s purges. Not even the testimony of a Bolshevik legend like the exiled Trotsky could persuade them that they were deceived about the “new society” they thought they saw under construction in the socialist state. Confident that their own ideals were pure, my parents and their political friends dismissed Trotsky and others whose experience had caused them to know better, smearing them as “counter-revolutionaries,” “anti-Soviets” and “renegades.”
Twenty years later, when my parents had reached middle age, their arrogance betrayed them and took away their self-respect. In 1956 power shifted in the Kremlin, and my parents along with the rest of the progressive left discovered that the socialist future they had served all their lives was a monstrous lie. They had thought they were fighting for social justice, for the powerless and the poor. But in reality they had served a gang of cynical despots who had slaughtered more peasants, caused more hunger and human misery, and killed more leftists like themselves than all the capitalist governments since the beginning of time.
After Stalin’s death, it was the confrontation with this reality, and not Senator Joe McCarthy’s famous crusade, which demoralized and destroyed the old Communist guard in America. I was seventeen at the time, and at the funeral of the Old Left I swore to myself I would not repeat my parents’ fate. I would never be loyal to a movement based on a lie or be complicit in political crimes; I would never support a cause that required the suppression of its own truths, whether by self-censorship or firing squads or political smears. But my youth prevented me from comprehending what the catastrophe had revealed. I continued to believe in the fantasy of the socialist future. When a New Left began to emerge a few years later, I was ready to believe that it was a fresh beginning and eager to assist at its birth.
For a long time I was able to keep the promises I had made. As an activist and writer in the movement of the Sixties, I never endorsed what I knew to be a lie or concealed what I knew to be a crime. I never stigmatized a dissenting view as morally beyond the pale. At the same time, however, I closed my eyes to evidence that would have shown me the left had not really changed at all. Like the rest of my radical comrades, I welcomed Castro’s triumph in Cuba, which he proclaimed a revolution of “bread without terror” and “neither red nor black but Cuban olive green.” When Castro established his own dictatorship and gulag and joined the Soviet axis, I too blamed his dereliction on the anti-Communist phobia of the United States, and I averted my eyes from the truth.
A decade later, when the Vietnam War came to an end, there was a massive exodus from the New Left by those who had joined its ranks to avoid military service. I stayed. I had never been eligible for the draft and had joined the movement in order to serve the progressive ideal.
In 1974 I began a new project with the Black Panther Party, which the New Left had identified in the Sixties as the “vanguard of the revolution.” I raised the funds to create a “Community Learning Center” for the Panthers in the heart of the East Oakland ghetto. The Center provided schooling and free meals to 150 children, and community services to an even larger number of adults. The following year the woman I had hired as a bookkeeper for the Center was kidnapped, sexually tormented, and then brutally murdered by my Black Panther comrades.
When I first discovered what had happened, I was paralyzed with fear, a fear that grew as I learned about other murders and violent crimes the Panthers had committed—all without retribution from the law. At the time, the left saw the Panthers as a persecuted vanguard, victimized by racist police because of their role in the liberation struggle. The Panthers’ leader had found refuge from several criminal indictments in Castro’s Cuba; the Party’s spokesmen appeared regularly at progressive rallies to agitate against capitalist “repression” at home. In the eyes of the left, the Panthers were what they always had been: an embodiment of the progressive idea. To defend them against the “fascist” attacks of the police was a radical’s first responsibility and task.
In reality the Panthers were a criminal gang that preyed on the black ghetto itself. With the weapons they had justified as necessary for “self-defense” against “racist authority,” they pursued various avenues of criminal violence which included extortion, drug-trafficking and murder. Not all the murders they committed had a monetary rationale. Some were merely gratuitous, as when they killed a leader of the Black Students Union at Grove Street College in Oakland because he had inadvertently insulted one of their enforcers. The Oakland police were aware of the Panthers’ criminal activities; but were rendered powerless to stop them by the nationwide network of liberal and radical Panther supporters who sprang to their defense.
With community fronts like the school I had created, with lobbyists in the state house and activists in the streets, with million-dollar defense funds and high-powered attorneys, with civil liberties organizations ready with lawsuits and witnesses ready to perjure themselves, the New Left provided the Panthers with an Achilles Shield that protected them from the law. All
