From Communist to Conservative
By Alan Caruba
“The law
of socialist economy is this: from each according to his exploitability, to the
nomenklatura (the elite governing
group) according to its greed. Not only does the socialist economy not produce
wealth at a rate a free economy does; the socialist economy consumes wealth it
accumulated in the past.”
This quote
is drawn from the nearly 400 pages of David Horowitz’s new book, “The Black
Book of the American Left”, a vast collection of his commentaries and speeches,
written since this son of communists, raised to be a communist, experienced an
epiphany about communism when a friend of his was murdered by the Black
Panthers, a 1970s group he thought was among the vanguard of social justice in
America.
I would
remind you that Barack Obama is the son of two dedicated socialists (I will use
the milder term). His father, a Kenyan and Muslim, divorced his mother after he
was born and returned home to his other wives. His mother married an Indonesian
man who adopted Barack, but she would divorce him and leave her son with her
parents in Hawaii. While growing up there, he was mentored by a card-carrying
member of the Communist Party USA, Frank Marshall Davis, formerly of Chicago.
Horowitz
has authored many books and articles. His output is extraordinary and his
conversion from communism to conservatism became his mission in life as he
sought to explain first to himself and then to all others who would listen why
he so deeply believed in a system dedicated to defeating capitalism, imposing
Soviet-style dictatorships, and bringing down the United States, the champion
of liberty in the world.
“The
truths revealed that we were just what our enemies had always said we were.
There were spies among us, and we were agents for a tainted cause. All of us
had treason in our hearts in the name of a future that would never come.”
“In 1956
power shifted in the Kremlin and my parents along with the rest of the
progressive left discovered that the socialist future they all served was a
monstrous lie. They 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.”
Horowitz’s
life and my own parallel each other’s as we are about the same age and
experienced the same events, but while my own parents were liberal, they were
also the son and daughter of immigrants and understood the blessing of being
born and raised in America. My father never shed his liberal outlook, but my
Mother, during the Clinton years, changed her party affiliation to Republican.
I was not
politically engaged for much of my younger years, but growing from childhood to
maturity during the course of the Cold War was sufficient for me to develop a
healthy distrust of communism.
I regarded
the 1960s as some kind of bizarre circus with its hippies, free love, and drug
culture. I voted for Democrats without giving it any serious thought, but the
Vietnam War awakened my interest as it did for many in the 1970s. I did not see
it as one more effort to expand communism, but as a war that even U.S. generals
had warned against. It was pursued by Lyndon B. Johnson while he also
fruitlessly spent billions on his “war on poverty.” Like most liberal
fantasies, it did more harm than good. After Johnson’s first full term, he
declined to run again as the nation turned against the Asian war. It was left
to Nixon to bring it to a conclusion. When the North Vietnamese took over,
there was a massive bloodbath there and in neighboring Cambodia.
Consider
now that the communist movement in America, misleadingly called “progressive”,
has patiently spent decades since the 1960s transforming the nation. It has
infiltrated and taken control of the nation’s educational system from kindergarten
to its universities. It controls the Democratic Party. Much of the nation’s
mainstream media is the handmaiden of liberalism. And it has elected the most
leftist president the nation has ever had. Twice!
My friend
who goes under the nom-de-plume of J.D. Longstreet at his blog, Insight on Freedom, recently wrote, “I think one of the most
difficult obstacles those of us old freedom loving Americans have to confront
is the near total ignorance of younger Americans about what they have already
lost -- and -- have yet to lose. It is a hurdle that must be removed,
surmounted, or circumvented ... somehow. See, younger Americans have never
experienced, nor enjoyed, the freedom we older Americans have. They have
never had it, therefore, they do not miss it -- nor feel the yearning for it
that we do.”
If
you have been wondering how we reached this point, Horowitz’s book is a useful
guide and a frightening one. We have only a few years to turn around the
takeover of our government by communist radicals, disdainful of our
Constitution, and of the vast portion of our population that has no grasp of
our history or the history of communism. Its goal remains the destruction of capitalism,
the freedoms that most nations have never achieved, and which Americans are at
risk of losing.
©
Alan Caruba, 2013
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Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning Signs" and shared on dozens
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