Left-Wing Wackiness Is Nothing New

I just finished up the David Horowitz / Peter Collier book, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ’60s. It’s a good book, although it doesn’t compare to Horowitz’s phenomenal biography Radical Son, which covers many of the same topics and is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read.

In any case, Collier and Horowitz were big name Commie-libs back in the sixties — since reformed — who actually knew a lot of the big names in the anti-war movement like Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, the Black Panthers, etc and it was fascinating to see how little things have changed on the left in some respects.

Here are a couple of passages from the book that Collier wrote that I think will have an eerie ring of familiarity.

For example, you may know that Iraq was all about the oil, but did you know that Vietnam was all about the tin and the tungsten? For example, here’s Collier talking about Jane Fonda, who he knew personally back then…

The next thing I knew, Fonda was involved in the G.I. Coffee House movement and making appearances such as one on the Dick Cavett TV show with Mark Lane, arguing a vulgar Marxist line about Southeast Asia. We were there because our imperialism required the natural resources of the area, she said, especially the “tung and tinsten”.”

Back then it was “a vulgar Marxist line,” but today it’s part of mainstream liberalism. Back then, people who said this sort of thing — like Fonda — were shunned by much of the mainstream Democratic establishment. Today, people who say this sort of thing — like Michael Moore — are embraced by Democratic Party elites like Tom Daschle, Terry MacAuliffe, & Jimmy Carter.

Here’s another quote from the book that I’m sure the wackos at the Democratic Underground — among others — can certainly relate too…

One day, not long after Kent State, David Horowitz and I were sitting with (Tom) Hayden on the porch of one of the houses the Red Family rented for its “cadre”. “Well,” Hayden said without any apparent regret, “there will be civil war soon.” He said that fascism was inevitable under Nixon. On his advice, I bought a gun so I could be armed when the revolution arrived. I hid the loaded clip in one place and the gun itself in another, so that my children could not find them. I always forgot where the hiding places were and went for months unable to put the whole gun together if the FBI storm troopers had barged into the house to take me to the one of the concentration camps we believed they maintained.”

Ah, the decades and the wars have changed, but the loopy left has stayed more or less consistent. Too bad the crazies have become so mainstream in these days and times…

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