The Black Book of the American Left Quotes

“They are for ‘freedom’ when it is freedom to kill third-term fetuses or engage in same-sex marriages or stuff coke up their noses; they do not define freedom as anything to do with captive peoples around the world having the chance to escape the tyrannies that constrain them. They like Fidel because he is a thorn in America’s side and a sort of dime-store existentialist, and they rhapsodize about his spreading of literacy in Cuba without considering the fact that at the same time that he teaches people to read he tortures writers like Armando Valladares whose books he doesn’t like.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“In my own passage out of the left nearly 20 years ago, it occurred to me that my revolutionary comrades never addressed to themselves what should be the obvious questions for social reformers: “What makes a society work?” “What will make this society work?” In all the socialist literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records in making their inhabitants poor?”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“The catastrophe of every socialist scheme in the 20th century has had a devastating effect on leftwing optimism and has replaced it with the corrosive nihilism that makes it impossible for most leftists to defend a country which, compared to the socialist paradises, is a veritable heaven on earth. All that remains of the revolutionary project is the bitter hatred of the society its exponents inhabit, and their destructive will to bring it down.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“The effort to transform natural inequalities into social equality could only lead to greater, more brutal inequality; the socialist effort to transform individual diversity into social unity could only lead to the totalitarian state.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“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.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“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.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“What is ahead of us? Like Pascal, we don’t know. “Believers and non-believers stand in the same darkness. Neither sees God.” Therefore like Pascal we should wager on life. We should bear ourselves in this world as though we have seen God, be kind to each other, love wisely, and give to our children what we would have wished for ourselves.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings

“who self-consciously served the Communist rulers in Vietnam. When Hayden and Jane Fonda went”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“If we knew where every Soviet missile and tank was, there could be no surprise attacks or false “missile gaps” based on erroneous estimates, such as had underwritten Kennedy’s arms-buildup in the Sixties. To print Peck’s article would strike a blow against the war machine.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Bunchy” Carter, the so-called “Mayor of Watts.” Carter’s enforcer, Frank Diggs, is one of Elaine’s first Party heroes: “Frank Diggs, Captain Franco, was reputedly leader of the Panther underground. He had spent twelve years in Sing Sing Prison in New York on robbery and murder charges.” Captain Franco describes to Elaine and Ericka Huggins”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“you for or against the equality of human beings?”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Every Communist revolution begins as a rape of the present and continues as a cannibalization of the past.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Ludwig von Mises wrote a book on socialism that predicted the catastrophe we see before us. Socialist economy, he argued, was economic irrationality, and socialist planning a prescription for chaos. Only a capitalist market could provide a system of rational allocations and rational accounts. Only private property and the profit-motive could unleash the forces of individual initiative and human creativity to produce real and expanding wealth—not only for the rich but”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“But all our wisdom had been vanity. I could no longer feel superior to”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Consider, too, for a moment, Chomsky’s misleading comparison of the Soviet and American presses as “mirror images.” In fact, the ignorance imposed on the Soviet public by government-controlled media and official”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“The current dimensions of the left’s intellectual crisis are more readily grasped in a writer like Noam Chomsky, who, as an anarchist, has never had illusions about existing “socialisms” and has no attachment, intellectual or visceral, to pristine Marxism. Chomsky’s intellectual integrity and moral courage, to my mind, set a standard for political intellectuals.4 Yet in a manner that is not only characteristic of the non-Trotskyist left but seems endemic to its”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“She understood instinctively that it was the very insignificance of her life up to that moment—its unobtrusiveness—that made her suitable for the task she was being called perform. It was the Party that spoke but it was History that called, and she answered. Ann left her infant son with her husband in New York and took a plane to Mexico. There she delivered a sealed envelope to a contact the Party had designated. After making the delivery, she flew back to New York and resumed the life she had lived before. It was as simple as that. Yet it was not simple at all. As Ann soon discovered, she had become a small but decisive link in the chain by which Joseph Stalin reached out from Moscow to Cayocoán, Mexico, to put an ice-pick in Leon Trotsky’s head.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“While most American unions supported the Marshall Plan as an economic boon for their members and a necessary defense measure for the West, Al Bernstein’s union did not. Along with all the other Communist-controlled unions in America, Al Bernstein’s United Public Workers attacked the Marshall Plan as a Cold War plot and launched an all-out campaign against it. On the political front, Al Bernstein and his comrades bolted the Democratic Party and organized the Progressive Party candidacy of Henry Wallace in the hope of unseating Truman and ending his anti-Communist program. Their actions were in fact a Soviet-orchestrated plot to sabotage the defense of Europe against Soviet aggression.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“This lack of second thoughts is the telltale heart of the American left. Why no reckoning? Because reckonings are conservative. They counsel against the heedless rush to redeem the ambiguous and mottled realities of the human condition. They prove that life is made better only incrementally and with great difficulty, but it is made worse—much worse—very easily.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“During the Sixties, we also became a culture of splinter-groups, of people who identified ourselves according to ethnicity, gender, special interests—a galaxy of minorities, united only by a sensibility that now regarded society at large with suspicion.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“It is an archetypal Sixties case history—the rejection of real solutions in favor of demands that are made with the knowledge they cannot be met.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“It was what I believed to be the humanity of the Marxist idea that made me what I was then; it is the inhumanity of what I have seen to be the Marxist reality that has made me what I am now.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“As our opposition to the war grew more violent and our prophecies of impending fascism more intense, I took note of how we were actually being treated by the system we condemned. By the decade’s end we had deliberately crossed the line of legitimate dissent and abused every First Amendment privilege and right reserved to us as Americans. While American boys were dying overseas, we spat on the flag, broke the law, denigrated and disrupted the institutions of government and education, gave comfort and aid, even revealing classified secrets, to the enemy.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Like most of the left’s leaders, I was a Marxist and a socialist. I believed in the “dialectic” of history and therefore, even though I knew that the societies calling themselves Marxist were ruled by ruthless dictatorships, I believed they would soon evolve into socialist democracies. I attributed their negative features to under-development and to the capitalist pasts from which they had emerged.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Let me make this perfectly clear. Those of us who inspired and then led the antiwar movement did not want just to stop the killing, as so many veterans of those domestic battles now claim. We wanted the Communists to win.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, “a new era of economic development and social justice.” The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“Vietnam was a universal solvent—the explanation for every evil we saw and the justification for every excess we committed. Trashing the windows of merchants on the main streets of America seemed warranted by the notion that these petty-bourgeois shopkeepers were cogs in the system of capitalist exploitation that was obliterating Vietnam. Fantasizing the death of local cops seemed warranted by the role they played as an occupying army in America’s black ghettos, those mini-Vietnams we yearned to see explode in domestic wars of liberation. Vietnam caused us to acquire a new appreciation for foreign tyrants like Kim Il Sung of North Korea.1 Vietnam also caused us to support the domestic extortionism and violence of groups like the Black Panthers, and to dismiss derisively Martin Luther King, Jr. as an “Uncle Tom.” (The left has conveniently forgotten this fact now that it finds it expedient to invoke King’s name”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“In fact, however, Kathy Boudin and her comrades were deliberately building an anti-personnel bomb filled with nails, intending to detonate it at a social dance at Fort Dix. The dance would be attended by 18-year-old draftees and their dates.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

“In 1971, when still a radical, I wrote a widely-read article in Ramparts attacking the Weather Underground for its terrorist ideas and practices.”
― David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz