UNNECESSARY LOSSES

By David Horowitz
April 1987

Communism is the philosophy of losers. —Daniel, The Book of Daniel

April 1987

Dear Carol,

I'm sorry it has taken me so long to answer your letter. When I returned to California after my father's funeral, I spent a long time thinking about what happened during that weekend in New York. I thought about my phone call to you on Friday after I came back from the cemetery; how I had invited you to the memorial service we had planned for Sunday at my mother's house; how you had said you would come and how com­forting that felt; how our conversation had turned to politics and changed into an argument, and our voices had become angry; how I had begun to feel invisible, and how the loneliness this caused in me became so intense I said we should stop; and how, when we could not stop, I hung up.

I thought about my feelings when you did not call back that day or the next; and when you did not come to my father's memorial on Sunday as you had said you would. I thought about the plane ride back home, when I began to realize how deep the wound in our friendship had be­come.

I thought about how our friendship had begun nearly half a century before at the Sunnyside Progressive Nursery School—so long in memory that I have no image of a life without it. In the community of the Left, I guess, it is perfectly normal to erase the intimacies of a lifetime over po­litical differences. Yet on the long plane ride home, it caused me great pain to think that I might never hear from you again.

And then, a week after my return, your letter arrived in the mail. You were sorry, you said, about the way our phone call ended. Because of our common heritage (you said) the personal and the political cannot so easily be separated. Your words reminded me of the "Khrushchev divorces" of 1956—the twenty-year marriages in our parents' generation that ended in disputes between the partners over the "correct" political position to take toward his secret report on the crimes of Stalin. As though a politi­cal idea defined their reality.

But then, as though a political idea defined our reality too, your let­ter suddenly forgot about what had happened between us as friends, and reopened the wound to resume the argument.

Dear David,

I was sorry that your call ended the way it did. It was not my idea to get into a political argument, but apparently you had a need to provoke it. I would have preferred to talk more about personal mat­ters. But because of our common heritage the personal and the po­litical cannot really be separated. And that is why I can't help thinking that the views you now hold are psychological rather than intellectual in origin.

I want to add some things to clarify my position. I still consider myself part of the left, but my views have changed significantly over the years. I haven't been a Stalinist since I visited the Soviet Union in 1957, when I was nineteen. After that, like you, I became part of the New Left. I no longer consider the Soviet Union a model for the socialist future. But after all the garbage has been left behind I do hold certain basic tenets from my old left background. The first is that there are classes and the rich are not on the same side as the rest of us. They exploit. The second is that I am still a socialist. I still be­lieve in theory socialism is better than capitalism. If it has not worked so far, it is because it has not really been tried.

What concerns me about you is that you have lost the compassion and humanism which motivated our parents to make their original choice. There can be no other explanation for your support of the vile policies of Ronald Reagan. Except that you are operating from an emotional position which surpasses rational thinking. Also, by as­suming that because you are no longer "left," you must be "right, "you appear to be lacking a capacity to tolerate ambiguity; and the real world is indeed ambiguous. Why do you feel the need to jump on es­tablishment bandwagons? I assume they are paying you well for your efforts.

Your old (one of the oldest) friend, Carol

The wound in our friendship is really a mirror of the wound that a polit­ical faith has inflicted on our lives; the wounds that political lives like ours have inflicted on our times.

Let me begin with a concession. It is probably correct of you to blame me for our argument. Apparently you had a need to provoke it. I probably did. I had just buried a father whose politics was the most im­portant passion in his life. Political ideas provided the only truths he con­sidered worth knowing, and the only patrimony he thought worth giving. When I was seventeen and had political ideas of my own for the first time, politics made us strangers. The year was 1956. My father and I were one of the Khrushchev divorces.

We never actually stopped speaking to each other. But the distance was there just the same. After I had my own children and understood him better, I learned to avoid the areas where our conflicts flourished. I was even able to make a "separate peace," accepting him as the father he was rather than fighting to make him the one I wanted him to be. But he never was able to make the same peace with me. In all those thirty years that were left to us after I left home, there was not a day I was not aware of the line that politics had drawn between us, not a day that I did not feel how alien my ideas made me to him.

Emotions of grief and mourning make a perverse chemistry. If I pro­voked you to attack me on my father's burial day, perhaps I had a need for it: to do battle with the ideas which in ways and at times seemed more important to him than I was; to resume the combat that was his strongest emotional connection to other human beings and to me. Perhaps I thought I could resurrect his ghost in you, one of my oldest and dearest friends, who despite "all the garbage" you have left behind remain true enough to the faith of our fathers to act as his stand-in.

I don't mean to excuse my provocation, but only to remind you of what you forgot in your political passion that evening and in the silence that followed. Me. David. An old friend in need. I had been obliterated by a political idea. I felt like those ideological enemies of the past whom Stalin had made into "unpersons" by erasing the memory of who they had been. Which is what happened to my father at his own memorial that Sunday you did not come.

For nearly fifty years, our parents' little colony of "progressives" had lived in the same ten-block neighborhood of Sunnyside in Queens. And for fifty years, their political faith had set them apart from everyone else. They inhabited Sunnyside like a race of aliens—in the community but never of it; in cultural and psychological exile. They lived in a state of permanent hostility not only to the Sunnyside community, but to every other community that touched them, including America itself.

The only community to which they belonged was one that existed in their minds: the international community of the progressive Idea. Other­wise, they lived as internal exiles waiting for the time when they would be able to go home. "Home," to them, was not a place somewhere other than Sunnyside and America; "home" was a time in the future when the Sunnyside and America they knew would no longer exist. No compro­mise with their home ground could put an end to their exile; only a wave of destruction that would sweep away the institutions and traditions of the communities around them, and allow the international community of the progressive Idea to rise up in their place.

To my father and his comrades the fantasy of this future was more important than the reality around them. All the activities of the Sunny-side progressives—the political meetings they attended five and six nights a week, the organizations they formed, the causes they promoted—were solely to serve their revolutionary Idea. The result was that after five decades of social effort, there was not a single footprint to show that they had really lived in our little ten-block neighborhood. When my father's life came to its close, he was buried as a stranger in the community where he had spent his last fifty years.

My father lived the sinister irony that lies at the heart of our com­mon heritage: the very humanity that is the alleged object of its "com­passion" is a humanity that it holds in contempt. This irony defined my father's attitude toward the people around him, beginning with those who were closest—the heirs of his Jewish heritage, whose community center he would never be part of and whose synagogue he would never enter. Every Friday night, his own mother still lit the shabat candles, but as a progressive he had left such "superstitions" behind. To my father, the traditions his fellow Jews still cherished as the ark of their survival were but a final episode in the woeful history of human bondage, age-old chains of ignorance and oppression from which they would soon be set free. With the members of the real communities around him my father was unable to enjoy the fraternity of equals based on mutual respect.

The only community my father respected was the community of other people who shared his progressive Idea, people like your parents. To my father and his Sunnyside comrades, this meant the orthodoxies that comprised the Stalinist faith. But when he was just past fifty, a Kremlin earthquake shattered the myth that held together the only com­munity to which my father belonged. The year was 1956. It was the year my father's world collapsed.

By the time I reached Sunnyside from California, my mother had al­ready decided that his burial arrangements would be made by the Shea Funeral Home on Skillman Avenue. The Shea Funeral Home had been the last stop for the Catholics of the neighborhood for as long as I could remember. My father hated its very name. To him, the little storefront was a symbolic fortress of the enemy forces in his life—the Christian per­secutors of the ghetto past he tried to forget, the anti-Communist cru­saders of his ghettoized present. My father took his hate to the grave. But for his widow, the battles were already forgotten, the political passions dead with the past. What was alive was her new solitude and grief, and her terror in the knowledge that everything had changed. To my mother, the Shea Funeral Home was an ark of survival, as familiar and comfort­ing as the neighborhood itself.

My father's burial was attended only by his immediate family. We were accompanied to the cemetery by a rabbi I had somewhat disloyally hired to speak at the graveside after confirming with my mother that she would find his presence comforting too. Having been primed with a few details of my father's life, the rabbi observed that death had come to him the week before Passover, whose rituals commemorated an exodus to freedom not unlike the one that had brought him as an infant from Rus­sia eighty-one years before. Not unlike the dream of a promised future that had shaped his political life.

The place of burial was Beth Moses, a Jewish cemetery on Long Is­land fifty miles away from Sunnyside, the last of my father's exile homes. It seemed appropriate to me that my father who had struggled so hard in life to escape from his past should find peace in the end in a cemetery called the "House of Moses." And that this final compromise should have been made for him by the international community of his political faith. The grave where my father was buried among strangers was in a section of the cemetery reserved for Jews who had once belonged to the Interna­tional Workers Order, a long-defunct Communist front that had sold the plots as a fringe benefit to its members.

On Sunday, the last of my father's surviving comrades assembled in my mother's living room for the memorial. No ceremony had been planned, just a gathering of friends. Those present had known my fa­ther—some of them for more than fifty years—with the special intimacy of comrades who shared the scars of a common battleground, lifetime co­habitants in a community of exiles.

I could remember meetings when the same room had reverberated with their political arguments in the past. But now that the time had come to speak in my father's memory, they were strangely inarticulate, mute. As though they were unequal to the task before them: to remem­ber my father as a man.

My father was a man of modest achievements. His only real marks were the ones he made on the lives of the individuals he touched. The ones who were there now. The memories of the people who had gathered in my mother's living room were practically the only traces of my father still left on this earth. But when they finally began to speak, what they said was this: Your father was a man who tried his best to make the world a better place. . . your father was a man who was a teacher to others. . . your father was a man who was socially conscious, progressive. . . who made a contribution.

And that was all they said. People who had known my father since before I was born, who had been his comrades and intimate friends, could not remember a particular fact about him, could not really re­member him. All that was memorable to them in the actual life my father had lived—all that was real—were the elements that conformed to their progressive Idea. My father's life was invisible to the only people who had ever been close enough to see who he was.

The obliteration of my father's life at his own memorial is the real meaning of what you call "our common heritage."

Our common heritage. Such a precious evasion. Our parents and their comrades were members of the Communist Party, were they not? Our common heritage was Marxism. Your need for the Orwellian phrase is re­vealing. It can hardly be for the benefit of an old comrade like me. In fact, its camouflage is for you. "Our common heritage" betrays your need to be insulated from your own reality—the reality of your totalitarian faith.

I'm sure this charge upsets you. In your own mind, the only elements that survive of our heritage are the innocent ones: I haven't been a Stalin­ist since I visited the Soviet Union in 1957, when I was nineteen. . . . I no longer consider the Soviet Union a model for the socialist future. But what leftists who are able to enjoy the privileges of bourgeois democracy in the West think of themselves as Stalinists anymore, or the Soviet Union as a socialist model? Such vulgar convictions are reserved for the revolution­ary heroes of the Third World who actually wield the power—the Viet­namese and Cuban and Nicaraguan comrades—to whom you and other left-wing sophisticates pledge your loyalties and support. They are Stalin­ists even if you are not.

It is not an idealistic intention, but a totalitarian faith that creates the common bond between revolutionary cynics like Stalin and Fidel, the Sandinista comandantes, and progressive believers like yourself.

Totalitarianism is the possession of reality by a political Idea—the Idea of the socialist kingdom of heaven on earth; the redemption of hu­manity by political force. To radical believers this Idea is so beautiful it is like God Himself. It provides the meaning of a radical life. This is the so­lution that makes everything possible; the noble end that justifies the re­grettable means. Belief in the kingdom of socialist heaven is a faith that can transform vice into virtue, lies into truth, evil into good. In this rev­olutionary religion, the Way, the Truth, and the life of salvation lie not with God above, but with men below—ruthless, brutal, venal men—on whom faith confers the power of gods. There is no mystery in the trans­formation of the socialist paradise into Communist hell: liberation theol­ogy is a satanic creed.

Totalitarianism is what my father's funeral and your letter are about.

Totalitarianism is the crushing of ordinary, intractable, human real­ity by a political Idea.

Your letter indicts me because my ideas have changed. I accept the indictment. But the biggest change in me is not in any new political con­victions I may have. It is in the new way I have discovered of looking at things. The biggest change is seeing that reality—concrete, messy, com­mon and complex reality—is more important than any idea. In the years since we were close, I have gained respect for the ordinary experience of others and of myself. It is not a change I wanted to make. It is something that happened to me despite my resistance. But it is a change that has al­lowed me to learn from what I know. To connect, for example, the little episodes of our progressive heritage (like my father's memorial) with the epic inhumanities that its revolutions inspire. It is because you have not changed that these connections remain invisible to you.

What concerns me about you is that you have lost the compassion and humanism which motivated our parents to make their original choice.

Their original choice. Another Orwellian evasion. Their "original choice" was Communism. Our parents were idolators in the church of a mass murderer named Stalin. They were not moralists, as you suggest, but Marxist-Leninists. For them the Revolution was morality (and beauty and truth as well). For them, compassion outside the Revolution was mere bourgeois sentimentality. How could you forget this? Compas­sion is not what inspired our parents' political choices. Nor is compassion what inspired the Left to which you and I both belonged—the New Left that forgot the people it liberated in Indochina once their murderers and oppressors were red; that never gave a thought to the Cubans it helped to bury alive in Castro's jails; that is still indifferent to the genocides of Marxist conquest—the fate of the Afghanistans, Cambodias and Tibets.

Compassion is not what motivates the Left, which is oblivious to the human suffering its generations have caused. What motivates the Left is the totalitarian Idea. The Idea that is more important than reality itself. What motivates the Left is the Idea of the future in which everything is changed, everything transcended. The future in which the present is al­ready annihilated, and its reality no longer exists.

What motivates the Left is an Idea whose true consciousness is this: Everything deserves to perish. Everything that is flesh-and-blood humanity is only the disposable past. This is the consciousness that makes mass murderers of well-intentioned humanists and earnest progressives, the Hegelian liberators of the socialist cause.

In the minds of the liberators, it is not really people that are buried when they bury their victims. Because it is not really people who stand in their way. Only "agents of past oppressions;" only "enemies of the pro­gressive Idea." Here is an official rationale, from a Cheka official of the time of Lenin, for the disposal of 30 million human souls: "We are not carrying out war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is—to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror."

The Red Terror is terror in the name of an Idea.

The Red Terror is the terror that "idealistic" Communists (like our parents) and "anti-Stalinist" Leftists (like ourselves) have helped to spread around the world. You and I and our parents were totalitarians in demo­cratic America. The democratic fact of America prevented us from com­mitting the atrocities willed by our faith. Impotence was our only innocence. In struggles all over the world, we pledged our support to per-petrators of the totalitarian deed. Our solidarity with them, like the crimes they committed, was justified in the name of the revolutionary Idea. Our capabilities were different from theirs, but our passion was the same.

And yours is still. You might not condone some of the crimes com­mitted by the Vietnamese or Cubans, or the Nicaraguan comandantes. But you would not condemn them. Or withhold from their perpetrators your comradely support. Nor, despite all your enlightenment since the time of Stalin, are your thoughts really very different from theirs.

Does it occur to you that you condemn me in exactly the same terms that dissidents are condemned by the present-day guardians of the Soviet state? There can be no other explanation for your support of the vile policies of Ronald Reagan. Except that you are operating from an emotional position which surpasses rational thinking. In other words, the only explanation for my anti-Communist convictions is that I am "antisocial" and lacking compassion, or insane.

What kind of revolution do you think you and your radical com­rades would bring to the lives of the ordinary people who support the "vile policies of Ronald Reagan" in such overwhelming numbers, people for whom you have so little real sympathy and such obvious contempt? The answer is self-evident: exactly the same kind of revolution that radi­cals of our "common heritage" have brought to the lives of ordinary peo­ple wherever they have seized power. For when the people refuse to believe as they should, it becomes necessary to make them believe by force. It is the unbelieving people who require the "Revolutionary Watch Committees" to keep tabs on their neighborhoods, the gulags to dispose of their intractable elements, the censors to keep them in ignorance and the police to keep them afraid. It is the reality of ordinary humanity that necessitates the totalitarian measures; it is the people that require their own suppression for the revolution that is made in their name. To revo­lutionaries, the Idea of "the people" is more important than the people themselves.

Do you see it yet? The compassionate ideas of our common heritage are really only masks of hostility and contempt. We, the revolutionaries, are enemies of the very people we claim to defend. Our promise of liber­ation is only the warrant for a new and more terrible oppression.

This is the realization that has changed my politics.

These are not clever thoughts that one day popped into mind, but, as you know (and choose to forget), conclusions I was able to reach only at the end of a long night of pain. Until then, I had shared your convic­tion that we were all radicals for compassionate reasons, to serve benevo­lent ends. However perverted those ends might have become in the past, however grotesque the tragedies that occurred, I believed in the revolu­tionary project itself. I believed in it as the cause of humanity's hope. And I was confident that we could learn from history and be able to avoid its destructive turns. We could create a new Left that would be guided by the principles of the revolutionary ideal, that would reject the claims of dic­tators like Stalin who had perverted the revolutions past.

After 1956, I joined others who shared this dream in the attempts to create a new Left in America, and for nearly twenty years I was part of the efforts to make it a reality. But eventually I realized that our efforts had failed. I gave up my political activities and embarked on a quest to un­derstand what had happened. When it was over, I saw that what we had dreamed in 1956 was not really possible. The problem of the Left did not lie in sociopathic leaders like Stalin or Castro, who had perverted the rev­olutionary Idea. It was the revolutionary Idea that perverted the Left.

Because you knew me from the very beginning, you were aware of the road I had traveled, the connection between what I had lived through and what I had become. No matter how different the traveler appeared at the end of the journey, you were a witness to who he was. To the reality he had lived. But it is clear now that this reality—my reality—is some­thing you no longer want to know. You prefer to erase me instead. It is not unlike the erasure of my father's truth that occurred at his memorial service.

Let me tell you some things you once knew but have tried to forget about the person you accuse now of being unable to cope with real-life complexity, of responding to the loss of one ideological certainty by reflexively embracing its opposite.

The formative experience of my politics was the shattering of the Old Left's illusions by the Khrushchev Report and the events of 1956. You and I were seventeen at the time, now suddenly suspended between a political past that was no longer possible and a future that remained un­certain. Our parents' political faith had been exposed as a monstrous lie, making it impossible for us to be "Left" in the way that they had been. But I did not assume therefore that I had to be "Right." I did swear that I would never be part of another nightmare like theirs. But I didn't want to give up their beautiful Idea. So I joined others in our generation who were setting out to rescue the Idea from the taint of the past, to create a Left that was new.

In the years that followed, I could always be seen in the ranks of this Left, standing alongside my radical comrades. But in all those years there was a part of me that was always alone. I was alone because I never stopped thinking about the ambiguous legacy that we all had inherited. I was alone because it was a legacy that my New Left comrades had already decided to forget.

It was as though the radicals who came to politics in the Sixties wanted to think of themselves as having been born without parents. As though they wanted to obliterate the bad memory of what had happened to their dream when it became reality in the Soviet Union. To them the Soviet Union was no longer a model for the revolutionary future, but it was also not a warning of the revolutionary fate. It was, in the phrase of the time, "irrelevant." The next generation already knew better.

All during the Sixties, I wrestled with the troubling legacies that my comrades ignored. While others invoked Marx as a political weapon, I studied the four volumes of Capital to see "how much of the theory re­mained viable after the Stalin debacle" (as I explained in the preface to a book I wrote called The Fate of Midas). Meanwhile, Marxism had gained a new life. For most New Left radicals who were impatient to "bring the System down," it was Marxism that provided the convenient ax. Even if Marx was wrong, he was right. If Marxism promoted the desired result, what did it matter if the theory was false? But to me it mattered. All the nightmares of the past cried out that it did.

In the mid-Sixties, I moved to London and came under the influence of Isaac Deutscher, an older Marxist who had written panoramic histories of the Russian Revolution and die lives of its protagonists Stalin and Trotsky. For me, Deutscher was the perfect mentor, fully aware of the dark realities of the revolutionary past, but believing still in the revolu­tionary Idea.

Inspired by my new teacher, I expanded my study of revolutionary history and intensified my search for a solution to the problems of our political inheritance. Before his untimely death in 1967, Deutscher en­couraged me to expand one of the essays I had written into a full-length literary effort. When Empire and Revolution was completed in 1968, it represented my "solution" to the radical legacy. I had confronted the rev­olutionary Idea with its failures, and I had established a new basis for confidence in its truth. In Europe, my book joined those of a handful of others that shared its concerns, but in America, Empire and Revolution stood all by itself. I don't think you will find another book like it written by an American New Leftist during that entire radical decade. In living with the ambiguities of the radical legacy, in my generation I was virtu­ally unique.

When it was published in America, Empire and Revolution made no impression. The willful ignorance of New Left activists had by then become an unshakable faith that had long since ceased to be innocent. Al­liances had been struck with totalitarian forces in the Communist bloc; Stalinist rhetoric and Leninist vanguards had become the prevailing rad­ical fashions. Even a New Left founder like Tom Hayden, previously im­mune to Marxist dogmas, had announced plans to form a new "Communist Party." As though the human catastrophes that had been caused by such instruments had never occurred.

In the face of these developments, I had begun to have doubts as to whether a New Left was possible at all. Whether the very nature of the Left condemned it to endless repetitions of its bloody past. But I deferred my doubts to what I saw at the time as a more pressing issue—Americas anti-Communist war in Vietnam. Opposing the war was a moral obliga­tion that in my mind took precedence over all other political tasks. The prospect of the revolution that was the focus of my doubts was a reality remote by comparison. Even though I was uncomfortably allied with "Marxist-Leninists" whom I found politically dangerous and personally repellent, I didn't break ranks. As long as the Vietnam War continued, I accepted the ambiguity of my political position and remained committed to the radical cause.

But then the war came to an end and my doubts could no longer be deferred. The revolutionaries we had supported in Indochina were re­vealed in victory as conquerors and oppressors: millions were summarily slaughtered; new wars of aggression were launched; the small freedoms that had existed before were quickly extinguished; the poverty of the peo­ple increased. In Asia, a new empire expanded as a result of our efforts and, over the peoples of Laos and Cambodia and South Vietnam fell the familiar darkness of a totalitarian night.

The result of our deeds was devastating to all that we in the Left had said and believed. For some of us, this revelation was the beginning of a painful reassessment. But for others there were no second thoughts. For them, the reality in Vietnam finally didn't matter. All that mattered was the revolutionary Idea. It was more important than the reality itself. When they resumed their positions on the field of battle, they recalled "Vietnam" as a radical victory. The "Vietnam" they invoked in their new political slogans was a symbol of their revolutionary Idea: Vietnam has won, El Salvador will win. The next generation of the Left had begun. The only condition of its birth was forgetfulness, forgetting what really had happened in Vietnam; erasing the memory of its bloody past.