Paige McKenzie, NewsMax.com
Saturday, Dec. 6, 2003

With gut-wrenching examples of the hypocrisy of the left, Horowitz details venomous betrayals of those who preach tolerance but refuse to tolerate those who disagree with them, and how they want to silence or destroy.

“As the recently opened Soviet archives attest, American Communists were willing enlistees in a secretive movement that did take its orders and money from Moscow,” writes Horowitz. “This movement was self-consciously dedicated not only to the overthrow of American democracy, but to the undermining of America’s security.”

These American communists included many who were members of or controlled numerous labor and teachers’ unions, members of the Democratic Party, and adults from Horowitz’s own childhood who revealed to him more than 20 years later the secret illegal acts they committed out of allegiance to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union.

“As a youngster in the 1940s, I could observe the FBI agents who regularly staked out the streets of our neighborhood, a center of communist activity, to chart people’s comings and going,” Horowitz remembers. “Unfair as the treatment of my family and our communist friends may have seemed to us at the time, there was a reasonable explanation for it, and a large element of truth to the conspiracy charges themselves. ... [M]ost of those who fell into McCarthy’s net were indeed loyal to a foreign dictatorship and actively supported its anti-American agendas.”

Horowitz scoffs at the phrase “reign of terror” as Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein quotes his father, Al, in his book “Loyalties,” in which he writes about his parents’ involvement in the Communist Party. Though Bernstein writes that the phrase was not just a cliché, Horowitz answers, “It’s a lie.”

Horowitz discloses how active communists such as Al Bernstein and others went on to enjoy lucrative careers. Indeed Carl Bernstein himself ended up at the Washington Post, poised to topple President Richard Nixon, when he confessed to editor Ben Bradley the involvement of his parents in the Communist Party. Bradley, of course, did not remove him.

“... [I]n anti-communist, paranoid America, home of the reign of terror, the editor of the most politically powerful media organ in the nation told you to get on with the job of removing a president in the middle of an anti-communist war,” Horowitz addresses Bernstein. “And what did you learn from that experience? Exactly nothing.”

But the left was not as gracious with dissenters as America was with the left. With example after example, Horowitz details how those who refused to go along with the communist agenda, or who – like him – left the faith altogether, were and continue to be shunned, harassed and vilified.

Leftists Admit Viewing Non-Communists as 'the Enemy'

Even Bernstein writes, “There was a feeling that unless you joined [the Communist Party] ... you were the enemy.”

As Horowitz notes, United Mine Workers head and party ally John Lewis was attacked as a pro-Nazi treasonist when he refused to align with the communist-supported no-strike pledge after the Germany’s invasion of Russia.

“... The communists were not ... compassionate pilgrims ... but political conspirators who had infiltrated and manipulated and taken over their own organizations to subvert them for hidden agendas. They were leftwing zealots who slandered, libeled and blacklisted those who opposed the party line. They were self-conscious subversives who lied to the public, pretending that they were not Marxists or loyal to soviet Russia when in fact they were. ... The communists lied to everyone then, and the new keepers of the faith are still lying today.”

Horowitz also exposes examples of recent attacks during the Clinton administration on himself, journalists such as Matt Drudge, philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaif and others, by leftists such as Sidney Blumenthal, James Carville, David Brock and Joe Conason.

Even faithful leftist Christopher Hitchens was labeled a Judas by his “friends” who heaped outlandish false attacks in retribution for Hitchens’ writing of "No One Left to Lie To," detailing Bill Clinton’s prostituting of the Lincoln bedroom, the selling of advanced military technology to America’s enemies, and the numerous other atrocities of the Clinton administration.

“Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose (as Christopher Hitchens put it): to ‘distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake.’

“One after another they [Hitchens’ comrades] rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they were by a man whom only yesterday they still called 'friend' and whom they no longer wished to know.”

Notes Horowitz, none of Hitchens’ leftist allies of 30 years came forward to stand up for him.

Horowitz can relate, as he and friends Ronald Radosh and Phillip Collier – also former leftists – have been labeled as murderers, racists and homophobes in the campaign of hatred against them, which began from the first moments they had a political change of heart. In short, the same political left that coined the phrase “the politics of personal destruction” has made it its mission to engage in such personal destruction.

“This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith. It is what keeps the faithful, faithful. ... This is why Alger Hiss kept his silence to the end, and why, even thirty and fifty years after the fact, the memories of leftists are so elusive and disingenuous when it comes to telling the hard political and personal truths about who they were and what they did.”

And the left continues to perpetuate the lies. Far from dead, the tenets of leftism are thriving in 21st-century America. Horowitz points out that Bernstein’s book, praised by prestigious reviewers such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, received one criticism from the leftist critics: that he did not give enough justification for his parents' communist activities.

“... [T]he left aims to be born again by erasing the embarrassment of its disreputable past, by hiding the shame of having supported Stalin and Mao and Fidel and Ho and all the purges, mass murders, and other 'necessary' means that finally served no beneficial ends. But the real embarrassment for the left is to have been so stubbornly and perversely on the wrong side of history; to have embraced 'solutions' that were morally, politically and economically bankrupt in the important struggles of our time. As Joseph Stalin was the first socialist to truly understand, the airbrushing of history is the only sure means to preserve the honor of the left.”

Nearly 40 years have passed since the days of McCarthy, “the most irretrievable political corpse of the McCarthy era,” Horowitz observes.

But the enemy is still alive and well, and more dangerous than ever.

“The era of the progressive witch-hunt has been far worse in its consequences to individuals and freedom for expression than was the McCarthy era,” writes Horowitz. “Worse, unlike the McCarthy era witch-hunt, which lasted only a few years, the one enforced by left-wing progressives is now entering its third decade and shows no signs of abating.”

Next: political war and the war on terror. Previous installment: How Multiculturalism Is Devouring America.

Note: You can get David Horowitz's must-read "Left Illusions" free with NewsMax Magazine: Click here.

Editor's note:
Shop NewsMax.com’s store for the best deals on books, tapes, videos and more! Click Here Now!

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Clinton Scandals

Media Bias