LEFTIES FOR REAGAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000200990016-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 16
• Publication Date: March 17, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ARTICLE APPEARED
oil PAG)r ~~??
WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE
17 March 1985
We have seen the enemy
and he is not us
BY PETER COLLIER AND DAVID HOROWITZ
hen we tell our old radical friends
that we voted for Ronald Reagan last
November, the response is usually
one of annoyed incredulity. After
making sure that we are not putting
them on, our old friends make nerv-
ous jokes about Jerry Falwell and
Phyllis Schlafly, about gods that have
failed, about aging yuppies ascending
to consumer heaven in their BMWs.
We remind them of an old adage:
"Anyone under 40 who isn't a social-
Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
who were editors of Ramparts
magazine, are the authors of The
Rockefellers: An American Dynasty
and The Kennedys: An American
Drama
ist has no heart; anyone over 40 who
is a socialist has no brain."
Inevitably the talk becomes bitter.
One old comrade, after a tirade in
which she had denounced us as reac-
tionaries and crypto-fascists, finally
sputtered, ,And the worst thing is
that you've turned your back on the
Sixties!" That was exactly right: cast-
ing our ballots for Ronald Reagan was
indeed a way of finally saying good-
bye to all that-to the self-aggrandiz-
ing romance with corrupt Third
Worldism; to the casual indulgence of
Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypo-
critical and self-dramatizing anti-
Americanism which is the New Left's
bequest to mainstream politics.
The instruments of popular culture.
P90-00965 R000200990016-8
may perhaps be forgiven for continu-
ing to portray the '60s as a time of in-
fectious idealism, but those of us who
were active then have no excuse for
abetting this banality. If in some ways
it was the best of times, it was also
the worst of times, an era of blood-
thirsty fantasies as well as spiritual
ones. We ourselves experienced both
aspects, starting as civil rights and
antiwar activists and ending as co-
editors of the New Left magazine
Ramparts. The magazine post allowed
us to write about the rough beast
slouching through America and also to
urge it on through noneditorial activi-
ties we thought of as clandestine until
we later read about them in the FBI
and CIA files we both accumulated.
Cattwuw
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a.
Like other radicals in those days,
we were against electoral politics, re-
garding voting as one of those cha-
rades used by the ruling class to le-
gitimate its power. We were even
more against Reagan, then governor
of California, having.been roughed up
by his troopers during the People's
Park demonstrations in Berkeley and
tear-gassed by his National Guard
helicopters during the University of
California's Third World Liberation
Front Strike. But neither elections
nor elected officials seemed particu-
larly important compared with the
auguries of revolution the left saw
everywhere by the end of the decade
-in the way the nefarious Richard
Nixon was widening the war in Indo-
china; in the unprovoked attacks by
paramilitary police against the Black
Panther Party, in the formation of
the Weather Underground, a group
willing to pick up the gun or the
bomb. It was a time when the apoca-
lypse struggling to be born seemed to
need only the slightest assist from the
radical midwife.
When we were in the voting booth
this past November (in different pre-
cincts but of the same mind) we both
thought back to the day in 1969 when
Tom Hayden came by the office and,
after getting a Ramparts donation to
buy gas masks and other combat
issue for Black Panther "guerrillas,"
announced portentously. "Fascism is
here, and we're all going to be in jail
by the end of the year." We agreed
wholeheartedly with this apocalyptic
vision and in fact had just written in
an editorial: "The system cannot be
revitalized. It must be overthrown. As
humanly as possible, but by any
means necessary."
EVERY THOUGHT and percep-
tion in those days was filtered
through the dark and distorting glass
of the Vietnam war. The left was
hooked on Vietnam. It was an addic-
tive drug whose rush was a potent
mix of melodrama, self-importance
and moral rectitude. Vietnam was a
universal solvent-the explanation
for every evil we saw and the justi-
fication for every excess we commit-
ted. Trashing the windows of mer-
chants 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 liber-
ation. Vietnam caused us to acquire a
new appreciation for foreign tyrants
like Kim II Sung of North Korea.
Vietnam also caused us to support
the domestic extortionism and vio-
lence of groups like the Black Pan-
thers, and to dismiss derisively Mar-
tin Luther King Jr. as an "Uncle
Tom." (The left has conveniently for-
gotten this fact now that it finds it ex-
pedient to invoke King's name and
reputation to further its domestic
politics.)
How naive the New Left was can
be debated, but by the end of the '60s
we were not political novices. We
knew that bad news from Southeast
Asia-the reports of bogged-down
campaigns and the weekly - body
counts announced by Walter Cron-
kite-was good for the radical agen-
da. The more repressive our govern-
ment in dealing with dissent at home,
the more recruits for our cause and
the sooner the appearance of the
revolutionary Armageddon.
Our assumption that Vietnam
would be the political and moral ful-
crum by which we would tip this
country toward revolution foresaw
every-possibility-except one: that the
-United States would pull out. Never
had we thought that the United
States; the archimperial power, would
of its own volition withdraw from In-
dochina. This development violated a
primary article of our hand-me-down
Marxism: that political action
through normal channels could not
alter the course of the war. The sys-
tem we had wanted to overthrow
worked tardily and only at great cost,
but it worked.
When American troops finally
came home, some of us took the occa-
sion to begin a long and painful reex-
amination of our political assump-
tions and beliefs. Others did not. For
the diehards, there was a post-Viet-
nam syndrome in its own way as de-
bilitating as that suffered by people
who had fought there-a sense of
emptiness rather than exhilaration, a
paradoxical desire to hold onto and
breathe life back into the experience
that had been their high for so many
years.
As the post-Vietnam decade pro-
gressed, the diehards on the left ign-
ored conclusions about the viability of
democratic traditions that might have
been drawn from America's exit from
Vietnam and from the Watergate .
crisis that followed it, a time when
the man whose ambitions they had
feared most was removed from office
by the Constitution rather than by a
coup. The only "lessons". of Vietnam
the left seemed interested in were
those that emphasized the danger of
American power abroad and the need
to diminish it, a view that was in-
jected into the Democratic Party with
the triumph of the McGovernite
wing. The problem with this use of
Vietnam as a moral text for American
policy, however, was that the pages
following the fall of Saigon had been
whited out.
No lesson, for instance, was seen in
Hanoi's ruthless conquest of the
South, the establishment of a police
state in Saigon and the political obliv-
ion of the National Liberation Front,
whose struggle we on the left had so
passionately supported. It was not
that credible information was lacking.
Jean Lacouture wrote in 1976: "Never
before have we had such proof of so
many detained after a war. Not in
Moscow in 1917. Not in Madrid in
Con int d
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1939, not in Paris and Rome in 1944,
nor in Havana in 1959..." But this
eminent French journalist, who had
been regarded as something of an ora-
cle when he was reporting America's
derelictions during the war, was dis-
missed as a "sellout."
In 1977, when some former antiwar
activists signed an Appeal to the Con-
science of Vietnam because of the
more than 200,000 prisoners lan-
guishing in "reeducation centers" and
the new round of self-immolations by
Buddhist monks, they were chastised
by activist David Dellinger, Institute
for Policy Studies fellow Richard
Barnet and other keepers of the flame
in a New York Times advertisement
that said in part: "The present gov-
ernment of Vietnam should be hailed
for its moderation and for its extraor-
dinary effort to achieve reconciliation
among all of its people."
When tens of thousands of unre-
conciled "boat people" began to flee
the repression of their communist
rulers, Joan Baez and others who
spoke out in their behalf were at-
tacked for breaking ranks with Hanoi.
Something might also have been
learned from the fate of wretched
Cambodia. But leftists seemed so ad-
dicted to fording an American cause
at the root of every problem that they
couldn't recognize indigenous evils.
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 2 million
Cambodians.
Finally, Vietnam emerged
as an imperialist power, tak-
ing control of Laos, invading
Cambodia and threatening
Thailand. But in a recent
editorial, The Nation ex-
plains that the Vietnamese
invaded Cambodia "to stop
the killing and restore some
semblance of civilized gov-
ernment to the devastated
country." This bloody occu-
pation is actually a "rescue
mission," and what has hap-
pened should not "obscure
the responsibility of the
United States for the disas-
ters in Indochina," disasters
that are being caused by
playing the "China card"
and refusing to normalize
relations with Vietnam.
These acts on the part of the
United States "make Viet-
namese withdrawal from
Cambodia unlikely"; only
the White House - can "re-
move the pressures on Viet-
nam from all sides [that] would bring
peace to a ravaged land." Such rea-
soning recalls the wonderful line from
the Costa-Gavras film "Z": "Always
blame the Americans. Even when
you're wrong, you're right."
ANOTHER unacknowledged les-
son from Indochina involves the way
in which Vietnam has become a satel-
lite of the Soviet Union (paying for
foreign aid by sending labor brigades
to its benefactor). This development
doesn't mesh well with the left's on-
going romantic vision of
Hanoi. It also threatens the
left's obstinate refusal to
admit that during the mid-
"70s--a time when American
democracy was trying to heal
itself from the twin traumas
of the war and Watergate-
the U.S.S.R. was demonstrat-
ing that totalitarianism ab-
hors a vacuum by moving
into Africa, Central America,
Southeast Asia and else-
where. Instead of evaluating
the Soviets because of the
change in what we used to
call "the objective condi-
tions," the left rationalizes
Soviet aggression as the
spasms of a petrified bu-
reaucracy whose policies are
annoying mainly because
they distract attention from
U.S. malfeasance around the
world.
If they were capable of
looking intently at the Soviet
Union, leftists and liberals
alike would have to concur
with Susan Sontag's conten-
tion (which many of them
jeered at when she an-
nounced it) that communism
is simply left-wing fascism
One of the reasons the left
has been so cautious in its
reassessments of the Soviets
is the fiction that the
U.S.S.R. is on the side of
"history." This assumption is
echoed in Fred Halliday's eu-
phoric claim, in a recent issue
of New Left Review, that
Soviet support was crucial to
14 Third World revolutions
during the era of "detente"
(including such triumphs of
human progress as Iran and
South Yemen), and in An-
drew Kopkind's fatuous ob-
hued
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servation that "the Soviet
Union has almost always
sided with the revolutionists,
the liberationists, the insur-
gents." In Ethiopia? Propped
up by 20,000 Cuban legion-
naires, the Marxist govern-
ment of Mengistu Haile
Mariam has as its main ac-
complishment a "Red Cam-
paign of Terror" (its official
designation) that killed thou-
sands of people. Where were
those who cheer the Soviets'
work in behalf of the socialist
zeitgeist when this episode
took place? Or this past fall
when the Marxist liberator
squandered more than $40
million on a party celebrating
the 10th anniversary of his
murderous rule while his peo-
ple starved? Where were they
to point out the moral when
capitalist America rushed in
250 million metric tons of
grain to help allay the Ethio-
pian starvation while the
Soviets were managing to
contribute only 10 million
metric tons? Where are they
now that Mengistu withholds
emergency food supplies from
the starving provinces of Eri-
trea and Tigre because the
people there are in rebellion
against his tyranny?
REAGAN is often up-
braided for having described
the Soviet Union as an evil
empire. Those opposed to
this term seem to be offended
esthetically rather than polit-
icallthy. Just how wide of the
mark is the president? Op-
pressing an array of national-
ities whose populations far
outnumber its own, Russia is
the last of the old European
empires, keeping in subjuga-
tion not only formerly inde-
pendent states such as Esto-
nia, Latvia and Lithuania
(Hitler's gift to Stalin), but
also the nations of Eastern
Europe. Every country "lib-
erated" into the Soviet bloc
has been transformed into a
national prison, where the
borders are guarded to keep
the inmates in rather than
the foreigners out.
The war in Afghanistan is
much more a metaphor for
the Soviets' view of the world
than Vietnam ever was for
America's. Of the approxi-
mately 16 million people liv-
ing in Afghanistan at the time
of the Soviet invasion, an esti-
mated 1 million have already
been killed and wounded.
There are now about 4 million
refugees, a figure that does
not include "internal" refu-
gees-the hundreds of thou-
sands of villagers forced to
leave their scorched earth for
the Soviet-controlled big
cities, the only places where
food is available. Or the thou-
sands of Afghan children who
been taken to the Soviet
Union to be "educated" and
who will eventually be re-
turned to their native land as
spies and quislings.
Soviet strategy is based on
a brutal rejoinder to Mao's
poetic notion (which we old
New Leftists used to enjoy
citing) about guerrillas being
like fish swimming in a sea of
popular support. The Soviet
solution is to boil the sea and
ultimately drain it, leaving
the fish exposed and gasping
on barren land. The Russian
presence is characterized by
systematic destruction of
crops and medical facilities,
indiscriminate terror against
the civilian population, car-
pet bombings and the deadly
"yellow rain" that even the
leftist Peoples' Tribunal in
Paris (successor to the Ber-
trand Russell War Crimes
Tribunal) has said is being
used in Afghanistan.
During each December an-
niversary of the Soviet inva-
sion, when liberal politicians
rediscover the mujaheddin
guerrillas in the hills, after 11
months of moral amnesia,
there are blithe references to
Afghanistan as "Russia's
Vietnam." Those who invoke
the analogy seem to think
that simply by doing so they
have doomed the Russian
storm troopers to defeat. But
this analogy is based on a
misunderstanding of what
Vietnam was and what Af-
ghanistan is. Unlike Amer-
ica's high-tech television war,
Afghanistan is one of those
old-fashioned encounters
that take place in the dark.
The Soviets make no attempt
to win hearts and minds; the
My Lais that are daily occur-
rences there cause no shock
because they do not appear
on Moscow TV; there are no
scenes of the peasant children
whose hands and faces have
been destroyed by antiper-
sonnel bombs in the shapes of
toy trucks and butterflies a
Los Angeles physician we
know saw strewn over the Af-
ghan countryside; there are
no images of body bags being
offloaded from Soviet trans-
ports. Because there is no
media coverage, there can be
no growing revulsion on the
home front, no protests on
Soviet campuses and in
Soviet streets, no clamor to
bring the boys home.
Afghanistan is not Russia's
,Vietnam not only because the
nation committing the atroci-
ties never sees them, but be-
cause the rest of the world is
blacked out, too. At the
height of the Vietnam war
there was a noncombatant
army of foreign journalists
present to witness its, con-
duct. In Afghanistan they are
forbidden, as are the Red
Cross and all other interna-
tional relief agencies that
were integral to what hap-
pened in Vietnam. And with-
out these witnesses, Afghani-
stan is a matter of "out of
sight, out of mind."
COJ 1N4US
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5
In Vietnam we waged a
war against ourselves and
lost. The Soviets will not let
that happen to them. The
truth of the Vietnam analogy
is not that guerrillas must
inevitably bog down and de-
feat a superior force of invad-
ers, but that war against in-
digenous forces by a super-.
power can be won if it is
waged against a backdrop of
international ignorance and
apathy. The proper analogy
for Afghanistan is not Viet-
nam at all but rather Spain-
not in the nature of the war,
but in the symbolic value it
has for our time-or should
-in terms of democracy's
will to resist aggression. Aid
to the mujaheddin should not
be a dirty little secret of the
CIA, but a matter of public
policy and national honor as
well.
PERHAPS the leading
feature of the left today is the
moral selectivity that French
social critic Jean-Francois
Revel has identified as "the
syndrome of the cross-eyed
left." Leftists can describe
Vietnam's conquest and colo-
nization of Cambodia as a
"rescue mission," while revil-
ing Ronald Reagan for apply-
ing the same term to the Gre-
nada operation, although bet-
ter than 90 percent of the is-
land's population told inde-
pendent pollsters they were
grateful for the arrival of U.S.
troops. Forgetting for a mo-
ment that Afghanistan is
"Russia's Vietnam," leftists
call Grenada "America's Af-
ghanistan," although people
in Afghanistan (as one mem-
ber of the resistance there
told us) would literally die for
the elections held in Grenada.
The left's memory can be
as selective as its morality.
When it comes to past com-
mitments that have failed,
the leftist mentality is utterly
unable to produce a coherent
balance sheet, let alone a
profit-and-loss statement.
The attitude toward Soviet
penetration of the Americas
is a good example. Current
enthusiasm for the Sandin-
ista regime in Nicaragua
should recall to those of us
old enough to remember a
previous enthusiasm for
Cuba 25 years ago. Many of
us began our New Leftism
with the Fair Play for Cuba
demonstrations. We raised
our voices and chanted,
"Cuba Si! Yanqui No!" We
embraced Fidel Castro not
only because of the flamboy-
ant personal style of the bar-
budos of his 26th of July
Movement but also because
Castro assured the world that
his revolution belonged to
neither communists nor capi-
talists, that it was neither red
nor black, but Cuban olive
green.
We attributed Castro's ex-
panding links with Moscow
to the U.S.-sponsored inva-
sion of the Bay of Pigs, and
then to the "secret war"
waged against Cuba by U.S.
intelligence and paramilitary
organizations. But while Cas-
tro's apologists in the United
States may fmd it expedient
to maintain these fictions,
Carlos Franqui and other old
Fidelistas now in exile have
made it clear that Castro em-
braced the Soviets even be-
fore the U.S. hostility became
decisive, and that he steered
his country into an alliance
with the Soviets with consid-
erable enthusiasm. Before the
Bay of Pigs he put a Soviet
general in charge of Cuban
forces. Before the Bay of Pigs
he ' destroyed Cuba's demo-
cratic trade union movement,
although its elected leader- ,
ship was drawn from his own
26th of July Movement. He
did so because he knew that
the. Stalinists of Cuba's Com-
munist Party would be de-
pendable cheerleaders and ef-
ficient policemen of his
emerging dictatorship.
One symbolic event along
the way that many of us
missed was Castro's impris-
onment of his old comrade
Huber Matos, liberator of
Matanzas Province, and one
of the four key military lead-
ers of the revolution. Matos'
crime: criticizing the growing
influence of Cuban commu-
nists (thereby jeopardizing
Castro's plans to use them as
his palace guard). Matos' sen-
tence: 20 years in a 4-by-11
concrete box- Given such a
precedent, how can we fail to
support Eden Pastora for
taking up arms against early
signs of similar totalitarian-
ism in Nicaragua?
What has come of Cuba's
revolution to break the chains
of American imperialism?
Soviets administer the still
one-crop Cuban economy,
Soviets train the Cuban
army, and Soviet subsidies,
fully one-quarter of Cuba's
gross national product, pre-
vent the Cuban treasury from
going broke. Before the revo-
lution, there were more than
35 independent newspapers
and radio stations in Havana.
Now, there is only the official
voice of Granma, the Cuban
Pravda, and a handful of
other outlets spouting the
same party line. Today Cuba
is a more abject and de-
formed colony of the Soviet
empire than it ever was of
America. The archrebel of
our youth, Fidel Castro, has
become a party hack who
cheerfully endorsed the rape
of Czechoslovakia in 1968
and endorses the ongoing
plunder of Afghanistan
today, an aging pimp who
sells his young men to the
Russians for use in their mili-
tary adventures in return for
$10 billion a year. -
In leftist circles, of course,
such arguments are anath-
ema, and no historical pre-
cedent, however daunting,
can prevent outbreaks of
radical chic. Epidemics of
radical chic cannot be pre-
vented by referring to histori-
Coots usd
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cal precedents. That peren-
nial delinquent Abbie Hoff-
man will lead his Potemkin
village tours of Managua. The
Hollywood stars will dish up
Nicaraguan president Daniel
Ortega as an exotic hors
d'oeuvre on the Beverly Hills
cocktail circuit. In the self-
righteous moral glow accom-
panying such gatherings, it
will be forgotten that,
through the offices of the
U.S. government, more eco-
nomic and military aid was
provided the Sandinistas in
the first 18 months following
their takeover than was given
to Somoza in the previous 20
years, and that this aid was
cut off primarily because of
the clear signs that political
pluralism in Nicaragua was
being terminated.
Adherents of today's ver-
sion of radical chic may never
take seriously the words of
Sandinista directorate mem-
ber Bayardo Arce when he
says that elections are a "hin-
drance" to the goal of "a
dictatorship of the proletari-
at" and necessary only "as an
expedient to deprive our ene-
mies of an argument." They
will ignore former Sandinista
hero and now contra leader
Eden Pastora who sees the
junta as traitors who have
sold out the revolutionary
dream ("now that we are oc-
cupied by foreign forces from
Cuba and Russia, now that
we are governed by a dicta-
torial government of nine
men, now more than ever the
Sandinista struggle is justi-
fied"). They will ignore oppo-
sition leader Arturo Cruz, an
early supporter of the San-
dinista revolution and previ-
ously critical of the contras,
when the worsening situation
makes him changes his mind
and ask the Reagan adminis-
tration to support them in a
statement that should have
the same weight as Andrei
Sakharov's plea to the West
to match the Soviet arms
buildup.
American leftists propose
solutions for the people of
Central America that they
wouldn't dare propose for
themselves. These armchair
revolutionaries project their
self-hatred and their con-
tempt for the privileges of
democracy-which allow
them to live well and to think
badly-onto people who
would be only too grateful for
the luxuries they disdain.
Dismissing "bourgeois" rights
as a decadent frill that the
peoples of the Third World
can't afford, leftists spreadea-
gle the Central Americans be-
tween the dictators of the
right and the dictators of the
left. The latter, of course, are
their chosen instruments for
bringing social justice and
economic well-being, al-
though no leftist revolution
has yet provided impressive
returns on either of these
qualities and most have made
the lives of their people con-
siderably more wretched than
they were before.
VOTING is symbolic
behavior, a way of evaluating
what one's country has been
as well as what it might be-
come. We do not accept Rea-
gan's policies chapter and
verse (especially in domestic
policy, which we haven't dis-
cussed here), but we agree
with his vision of the world as
a place increasingly inhospi-
table to democracy and in-
creasingly dangerous for
America.
One of the few saving
graces of age is a deeper per-
spective on the passions of
youth. Looking back on the
left's revolutionary enthu-
siasms of the last 25 years, we
have painfully learned what
should have been obvious all
along: that we five in an im-
perfect world that is bettered
only with great difficulty and
easily made worse-much
worse. This is a conservative
assessment, but on the basis
of half a lifetime's experience,
it seems about right. ^
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