Leftist Illusions

[bfp]

Changing from Communist to Capitalist, David Horowitz tells all:

In his final chapters of his new book "Left Illusions," David Horowitz reveals why the war on terror makes winning the political war more crucial than ever, and discusses the vital strategy it will take to win both.

Using the six principles of the art of political war, he identifies and defines the leftist enemy. He explains why the left opposes the war on terror by showing what it has in common with radical Islam.

After discussing throughout "Left Illusions" the horrors that occurred when pro-communist American leftists slaughtered countless South Vietnamese by persuading America to abandon its cause, Horowitz offers a dire warning about how much worse the toll will be if the Democrats are successful in their opposition to the war on terror.

“The Democrats have not learned the lesson of Vietnam,” Horowitz says. “They were on the wrong side then, and they’re on the wrong side of the Iraq war. ... In the Watergate class of 1974, which included John Kerry, I believe, they [the left] demanded that all aid be cut to South Vietnam and, agitated by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, who held meetings in the caucus rooms of the Congress ... they voted to cut off the aid.

"..[T]wo point five million innocent people ... were slaughtered in Cambodia and Vietnam as a result of the Democratic Party’s efforts. Now they’re trying to do the same things in Iraq. If they succeed there will be a bloodbath in Iraq and in New York and Washington as a direct consequence of their actions.”
To prevent this from happening, Horowitz recaps in "Left Illusions" the principles Republicans need to start practicing to win the political war against the left.

“Conservatives haven’t even begun to fight,” says Horowitz. “It’s unbelievable, but they don’t fight.” In addition, he says, they have a hard time handling the fact that so many Americans in 2000 voted for Al Gore and $3 trillion in new socialist programs. “The sooner they recognize that the better off we’ll all be.”

Fighting this socialist mentality means framing America’s romance with the underdog to conservatives’ advantage, and in so doing showing the Democrats to be the racist oppressors that they are.
“The cause of the underdog wins American hearts because it resonates with our deepest religious and moral convictions of doing good and helping others,” Horowitz writes. “This is America’s own story. We began as a small nation standing up to the world’s most powerful empire. We are a nation of immigrants who arrived with nothing and made fortunes in a new world. This is the American Dream. It’s a story that will get you every time. But at election time, Democrats know how to wield it as a political weapon, and Republicans generally don’t.”

While Republicans are busy fixing problems and trying to run things more efficiently, Democrats are running their own war against America, with the system they created of providing billions of tax dollars to secure political loyalties at our children’s expense.

“There is a human tragedy enveloping America’s inner cities. Twelve million poor children, mainly black and Hispanic, are trapped in failing government schools that are teaching them nothing. ... They have used their power to create public housing slums that are breeding grounds for drugs and crime. They have weakened the criminal justice system, allowing predators to make war on the vulnerable and the poor. ... Virtually every school board and every administration in inner city districts is controlled by Democrats, and has been controlled by Democrats for over fifty years.. Put in the language of political war: Democrats have their boot heels on the necks of poor, black, and Hispanic children. But Republicans are too polite to mention it.”

Rewriting History

Though America is still a land of freedom and opportunity, having raised unprecedented millions out of poverty, and no one in America is really “oppressed,” observes Horowitz, “(otherwise, why would poor, black, Hispanic, and Asian minorities be desperately seeking to come here? Why wouldn’t they be leaving instead?),” leftists have created revisionist history to tell a completely different story.

“Through their grip on the media and academic culture, leftists have rewritten America’s past,” Horowitz writes. “They have transformed it from an epic of freedom into a talk of racism, exploitation and oppression. ... They have turned it instead into a Marxist morality play about the powerful and their victims.”
It is this view of America as oppressor, as the Great Satan, that has aligned leftist Democrats with the terrorist enemy, and it is because of this view that the left put so much effort into defending the civil liberties of suspected terrorists after 9/11, says Horowitz.

“... [I]f radical Islam is one face of our enemy, the other is the radical left. For two hundred years, the radical left has believed in a religion promising heaven on earth whose end justifies any means. ... According to every leftist – from the Nation magazine to the [Noam] Chomsky fifth column – America is a land of capitalism, racism, and sexism, and the enforcer of this unholy trinity on a global scale. This is the world that the Islamic radicals call Dar Al-harb: the world of darkness. ... Americans better understand it sooner rather than later.”

As Horowitz observes, radical Islam and the radical left see America as the Great Satan, embodying the twin evils of capitalist oppression and Western domination. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacks on the twin symbols of American wealth and power, as defined by the Islamists and by the left.

“This is not a war about land in the Middle East ... or a U.S. military presence in the Arabian peninsula. It is a war about redemption. ... it exactly parallels the communist crusade that dominated the last century. The hope for heaven is the same fanatical inspiration that caused believers in socialism to kill tens of millions of innocent unbelievers over the course of the 20th century.”

Just as in the eyes of radical Islam the Great Satan must be destroyed for standing in the way of Islamic rule, and therefore human redemption, the left believes that America stands in the way of an earthly utopia of what it describes as "social justice."
“Americans, wake up!” urges Horowitz. “Your enemies hate you not for what you have done, but for who you are. ... They hate you because you are democratic and tolerant and unbelieving. They hate you because you are Christians ... and they hate you because you are Hindus and Buddhists, secularists and Jews.”
Unfortunately, Horowitz is not optimistic about the struggle against the left, on the international or the domestic front.
“I have watched my friends ... survive the catastrophe of their shams and go on to unexpected triumph in the ashes of their defeat. ... The society they declared war on has even rewarded them. Today they are cultural navigators in the nation most responsible for the worldwide collapse of their ideology. .... I do not know that the truth must necessarily remain in the shadows. But I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill.”

Sadly, notes Horowitz, “It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us where we are.”

[Adam D]

There's a book of propaganda for you.