House and the anti-subversive campaigns of the FBI, all the alleged wiretaps and infiltrations of the Panther organization, could not provide the means to sustain a single legal conviction against the Panthers for their crimes, or prevent the 20 or more murders they committed, including that of the woman I had hired. During a decade of radical protest as reckless in its charges as it was indiscriminate in its targets, the left had made civil authority in America so weak that the law could not punish ordinary criminal acts when committed by its progressive vanguard.
Because of what I knew, I myself now lived in fear of the Panther terror. In my fear, it became impossible for me not to connect these events with the nightmares of the radical past. Just as Stalin had used the idealism and loyalty of my parents’ generation to commit his crimes in the Thirties, so the Panthers had used my generation’s idealism in the Sixties. My political odyssey had come full circle. When I was beginning, I had promised myself that I would never be silent when confronted by such misdeeds; that I would fight within the left for the same justice as the left demanded of the world outside. But now I discovered that I could not keep my promise and remain a part of the movement I had served. Because a progressive vanguard had committed the crime, my duty as a progressive was to defend the criminal. As a result, the left suddenly became a hostile terrain for me. I had already been threatened by the Panthers to keep silent about what I knew. The facts I knew would not be conclusive evidence in a court of law; but they posed a threat to the Panthers’ political shield. If their criminal acts were exposed to the left, the Panthers might lose their protection and support.
But even if I told what I knew, the Panthers might have little to fear. The whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was damaging to the progressive cause.
At the murdered woman’s funeral, I had approached her daughter, who was 18 and a radical like me. On the way to the graveside, I told her that I was convinced the Panthers had killed her mother. The daughter’s grief for her mother was great, but so was the solidarity she felt for black people who were oppressed and for their revolutionary vanguard. When later she was asked publicly about the tragedy, she said that as far as she was concerned the Panthers were above suspicion. To suggest the contrary was racist.11
Years later Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, came to the conclusion that the Panthers had murdered her mother. With the help of friends, she hired a private detective who had worked regularly for leftwing defense attorneys to investigate the case. His report concluded that the Panthers were responsible for the murder of Betty Van Patter.
What the daughter of the murdered woman did was “politically correct.” I knew at the time that if I were to step forward and publicly accuse the Panthers of the crime, I would be denounced by my own community in the name of the values we shared. All my previous life of dedication and commitment to the radical cause overnight would count for nothing. My own comrades would stigmatize me as a “racist,” shun me as a “renegade” and expel me from their ranks.
My dedication to the progressive cause had made me self-righteous and arrogant and blind. Now a cruel and irreversible crime had humbled me and restored my sight. I had started out with others of my generation confident that we were wiser than our parents and would avoid their radical fate. But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to the generation that had been silent during the years of Stalin’s slaughters. The Stalinists and the Panthers may have operated on stages vastly different in scale, but ultimately their achievements were the same. Stalin and the Panthers were ruthless exploiters of the radical dream; just like our forbears, my comrades and I were credulous idealists who had served a criminal lie.
Through this microcosm I saw what I had failed to see 18 years before, at the time of “de-Stalinization,” when the New Left was born. The problem of the left was not Stalin or “Stalinism.” The problem was the left itself.
Although the Panther vanguard was isolated and small, its leaders were able to rob and kill without incurring the penalty of law. They were able to do so because the left had made the Panthers a law unto themselves—the same way the left had made Stalin a law unto himself—the same way the left makes Fidel Castro and the Sandinista comandantes laws unto themselves.
By crowning the criminals with the halo of humanity’s hope, the left shields them from judgment for their criminal deeds. Thus in the name of revolutionary justice, the left defends revolutionary injustice; in the name of human liberation, the left creates a new world of oppression.
The lesson I had learned for my pain turned out to be modest and simple: the best intentions can lead to the worst results. I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.
*This article appeared in The Village Voice, September 30, 1986.
1Years later Betty’s daughter, Tamara Baltar, came to the conclusion that the Panthers had murdered her mother. With the help of friends, she hired a private detective who had worked regularly for leftwing defense attorneys to investigate the case. His report concluded that the Panthers were responsible for the murder of Betty Van Patter.
I was born fifty years ago in 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland. This is my first trip to your country, and it has been inspiring to me to see that although you have been occupied for half a century you have not been defeated.
The members of my family were socialists for more than a hundred years, first in Moravia and the Ukraine, then in New York and Berkeley; first as socialists; then as Communists; and then as New-Left Marxists. My grandparents came to New York to escape persecution as Jews in the Pale of Settlement. My grandfather was a tailor. He lived with other Jews in poverty on the Lower East Side and earned three dollars a week. He was so poor that sometimes he had to sleep under his sewing-machine in the factory where he worked. Compared to czarist Russia from which he had fled, America was a new world. He was still poor, but he had arrived in a land of opportunities provided by its free-market economy and political democracy; a land where people could grow rich beyond their wildest dreams.
That was my grandfather’s reality. Like many others who arrived in America, my grandfather also had a dream. His dream, however, was not a dream of riches. It was a dream he shared with other members of the international left: the dream of a socialist future, a world of planned economy and economic equality, of material abundance and social justice. In 1917, my grandfather thought he saw his dream become reality in Bolshevik Russia. By this time he also had a son. Like the children of other immigrant families, his son studied and worked hard to take advantage of the opportunities provided by America’s freedom. He became a high-school teacher and married a colleague and also had a son.
By this time my father was no longer poor like his father but middle-class. He and my mother could afford culture, travel, an automobile, and a grand piano. In 1949, with their schoolteachers’ salaries, they bought a six-room house on credit for $18,000. In 1986, when my father died, the house belonged to him as his property. It was worth $200,000. That was my father’s reality: riches and freedom beyond his father’s wildest dreams.
But like his father, my father had his heart set on a dream beyond the freedom and wealth that America had made possible for him. Just as his father had been
