Books : Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9781890626563
ISBN: 1890626562
Label: Spence Publishing Company
Manufacturer: Spence Publishing Company
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 497
Publication Date: September 26, 2005
Publisher: Spence Publishing Company
Sales Rank: 884186
Studio: Spence Publishing Company
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David Horowitz underwent the most dramatic political conversion since Whittaker Chambers. And at every stop of his intellectual journey, he has produced sparkling and provocative commentary. From his youthful days as a leader of the New Left in the 1960s to his current role as master strategist of the right, Horowitz’s polemical legacy is unmatched in wit and integrity.
Horowitz’s newest book, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, provides the first map of his intellectual development. Complementing his acclaimed autobiography, Radical Son, the selections in Left Illusions range from his first book, published over forty years ago, to his most recent writings on the war against terror. The pieces include his polemics, journalism, and scholarship, along with select chapters from most of his books. Their subjects range from the origins of the New Left to the Cold War, from the fall of communism to political radicalism, race relations, the war on terror, the intellectual culture wars, and modern conservatism. Twenty-eight of the selections have not been published in book form or are contained in texts that are generally unavailable.
"I make no apologies for my present position," Horowitz writes. "My values have not changed, but my sense of what supports them and makes them possible has." He became profoundly disillusioned with the radical movement because of a tragedy both personal and political. The whole fascinating story is here for the reader to follow as it unfolded. Left Illusions is really the story of our times, lived out by an extraordinary individual.
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There are only a few noted writers who have chosen to abandon long cherished beliefs of one end of the political spectrum to embrace the tenets of the other. Some, like David Brock, clearly chose to do so for political expediency. Others, like David Horowitz, had to undergo some pretty intense personal introspection over an extended period of time. In LEFT ILLUSIONS, Horowitz details the pain of alienation from his long held association with the left that began with his very earliest childhood and ended with the scarring experience of the murder of a close friend that caused him to re-evaluate some troubling aspects of his leftist ideology that this murder forced to come to the forefront.
LEFT ILLUSIONS is not a new book in the sense that he wrote it specifically to outline his conversion from a dedicated socialist to a rational pragmatist. Rather, he felt that he could better trace his regeneration of self by reprinting articles and chapters from previous published works that delineated how he felt at that time. He begins with his childhood. He was a Jewish boy whose parents were committed communists. As he grew to maturity, he immersed himself in the totality of leftist ideology, which he saw up close and personal. He knew all the big names of the left: Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Bobby Seale--anyone who counted as an anti-Vietnam war chanter. He was considered one of "them", a trusted socialist/communist. But Horowitz had concerns that began with the murder ... Read More
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The book is a compendium of articles,and most of them were published before. It gives us an intellectual history of his rise in the Left, and his eventual disaffection with it. It thus includes some of his earlier left-wing pieces and includes some published in the radical Ramparts that he formerly edited. However,the bulk of the articles here come from his new found conservatism, and they feature some of his best writings.
Howorwitz has already covered his previous thoughts in book form, especially in The Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties, and Radical Son (1997). In those he covered a wide range of issues, with all of the conservative battlegrounds given a run. So, three decades worth of controversy are covered; there are articles on Solzhenitsyn, Nicaragua, racism, political correctness on campus, AIDS, free speech, multiculturalism, the Middle East crisis, terrorism, and the Clinton years all given judicious treatment.
It was not really a religious conversion that led to this change of heart. It was an increased awareness that the Left was simply hypocritical, constantly denouncing supposed atrocities of capitalism and American foreign policy, and it ignored or condoned the barbarism of socialism and leftist dictators. A tremendous amount of human blood had been shed on the altars of leftist utopianism, Horowitz discovered.
Thus as someone who has been there, his criticisms of the left should be heard. Not very ... Read More
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In reading these other commentaries, it never ceases to amaze me that so many Leftists or Leftist sympathizers fly into paroxysms of rage, vitriolic insults or meandering diversionary accusations whenever someone points out their own ideology's record of crimes and deceptions.
As a former Trotskyist myself, I can say that the anti-Horowitz comments here are a "flim-flam" diversion from the specificity of David Horowitz's book. The absence of evidence against someone being a "fifth columnist" is not evidence of absence. One need only READ much of the propaganda put out by the Left to understand that many on the Left -- either wittingly or unwittingly -- have created a "propaganda alliance of convenience" with Jihadists when they frequently portray Islamic fanatics as some sort of "liberation" resistance fighters. It is manifestly obvious that many of the opinion-makers on the Left have crawled into a temporary propaganda "bed" with Islamic partisans, because the Left and Islamists are both opposed to American market capitalism and American commercial dominance, and many on the Left, with their usual tunnel-vision, see modern market capitalism as a greater "evil" than any other evil . . . no matter how immediate or real other evils may be. Islamists and Jihadists like to portray themselves as "revolutionaries" against western "imperialism", but the Islamic agenda is EXPLICITLY imperialist, and pursuing that agenda (spreading the RULE of Islam by any means necessary) is ... Read More
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What makes this book special is that it contains writings by Horowitz from the beginning, thereby providing an illuminating overview of his intellectual development from New Left ideologue (destructive Marxist) to a champion of freedom. There are articles, essays and book excerpts covering a broad spectrum of issues encompassing inter alia the roots of the New Left, the Cold War, Nicaragua, AIDS, the collapse of communism, race relations, the culture wars, political correctness, freedom of speech, political radicalism, the Middle East situation, the Clinton presidency and the War on Terror.
Of these selections, 28 had never been published in book form or were previously out of print. The introduction by Jamie Glazov provides absorbing background information on Horowitz's intellectual journey with reference to and quotes from his many articles and books like Destructive Generation (1989) - an analysis of the legacy of the New Left, the autobiography Radical Son (1997) and its intellectual companion piece The Politics of Bad Faith (1998).
Amongst the earlier leftist pieces from Ramparts, "The Passion of the Jews" is thought-provoking, especially when compared to his later succinct essay on beleaguered Israel: "Why Israel is the Victim". A gifted wordsmith, Horowitz always intrigues and provokes and often amuses, for example when he labels as "Kitsch Marxism" certain aspects of leftist ideology, the whole of which he considers a crypto religion, like a Gnostic ... Read More
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Did He clarify that he is a Jewish Zionist? "Deception" is what the Zionists believe in to achieve their goals.
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