Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page
]]]]]]]]]]]]]] DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION -- [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
ROMANTIC MYTHS & GRUBBY TRUTHS OF THE SICK '60S
(6/10/1989)
by Natalie and Gerald Sirkin
(2nd ed., little changed from lst, published in CITIZEN NEWS of New Fair-
field, Connecticut, 6/7/89, where Dr. and Mrs. Sirkin have a regular bi-
weekly column.)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 06784LOEB]
As the Eighties recede, we find ourselves caught in the riptide of
Sixties revival. There are films, histories, and memoirs of what has
been made to seem a sort of golden age.... This revival can be
recognized as a sentimental moment.... But the nostalgia is also a
political phenomenon. The growing interest in the Sixties coincides
with a renaissance of the radicalism that was the decade's dominant
trait and is now being used to jump-start the Next Left.
Destructive Generation, p. 217
The burst of romantic nostalgia for the radicals of the Sixties helps
perpetuate the myth that it was a golden age that that gang of vandals
created.
When journalists treat the death of a sleazy ex-fugitive Abbie Hoff-
man as if a hero and benefactor of man had departed, we urgently need an
honest description of the '60s. Right on cue it arrives, by two partici-
pants now awakened from their delusions.
In the late '60s, Peter Collier and David Horowitz edited the New
Left magazine Ramparts. Their personal experiences in "The Movement" are
an integral part of their story. Their book, Destructive Generation,
Second Thoughts About the Sixties (Summit Books, 1989, 352pp., $19.95),
traces and analyzes the shameful history of the New Leftists.
Horowitz was a "red-diaper baby"--the term for children of dedicated
members of the Communist Party. Collier, from an ordinary lower-middle-
class family, was "radicalized" (had his brains scrambled) at the Univer-
sity of California at Berkeley.
Until they began to break away in the mid-'70s, Collier and Horowitz
worked for the Left though not sharing all its totalitarian enthusiasms.
When Ramparts received a manuscript on Cuba by members of the North Amer-
ican Congress on Latin America (a church-funded pro-Castro group), Edi-
tors Collier and Horowitz had their doubts: If, as the article said, a
third of the Cuban population actively participated in enacting a new
"anti-laziness" law, then why was the law needed? "Your revolutionary
responsibility is to print the piece and shut up about it," replied the
NACLA spokesman.
Their break-away was accelerated by a brutal shock. Horowitz had
persuaded Ramparts' bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, to help the Black Pan-
ther Party get its books in order. "Apparently she stumbled onto infor-
mation showing that they were dealing in drugs and protection rackets.
Wanting them to live up to her radical high hopes, she must have con-
fronted them with what she had learned." She was found floating in San
Francisco Bay, her head bashed in.
The rise and fall of the New Left's romantic fantasy--that the Black
Panthers were the heroic vanguard of the revolution--are mirrored in the
life and death of Fay Stender, a radical lawyer who devoted herself, body
and soul, to them. Portraying them as political prisoners, she labored
ceaselessly to get them and other vicious black criminals out of prison
and, with the aid of our stupid criminal justice system, usually suc-
ceeded.
Donning the militant Left uniform of leather miniskirt and high
boots, she indulged in love affairs with prisoners Huey Newton and then
George Jackson. She edited Jackson's letters from Soledad Prison, delet-
ing his references to his criminal acts and intentions. When at last her
romanticism was jolted by the fearful awakening that they were nothing
more than a criminal gang, they decided she was not loyal enough and sent
a killer who shot her, leaving her paralyzed.
Mrs. Stender was one of the irresponsible self-deceivers and fools
who made up the New Left. For ten years, in a spree of wild rhetoric,
demonstrations, and bombings, mixed with drugs, sex, and dreams of vio-
lence, these aging adolescents tried to create a revolution.
It petered out in dramatic dead-ends. Three blew themselves up in a
Greenwich Village town house while constructing a bomb that was to go off
in the Fort Dix dance hall amidst the GIs and their dates.
Kathy Boudin escaped from the explosion. She was caught during an
attempted robbery of a Brink's truck in Nyack, New York, by the Black
Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers. A guard and two po-
licemen were killed. She went to prison, one of the few who paid any-
thing for their crimes.
Most of the leaders went underground and faded from sight. Berna-
dine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and others were denounced in the Weather Under-
ground as "racists" by blacks and submitted to self-criticism, but were
expelled from that organization they had created. The old disciplined
Communist hacks, so despised by the New Left, picked up the pieces as the
New Left looney Movement fall apart. The New Left was absorbed by the
Old Left.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
After several years underground, the surviving leaders emerged, un-
scathed, unpunished, unregenerate. Mark Rudd, a leader of the Columbia
University student revolution of 1968, is a school teacher in Albuquer-
que. Many returned to graduate school and are now--heaven help us--
teaching a new generation of college students.
Ayers and Dohrn go each year to the scene of the Greenwich Village
explosion to mourn for the good old days, when they could plan bombings
and killings and inspire their followers with the example of Charles Man-
son who "killed those pigs."
Tom Hayden in 1970 was the leader of the Red Family in Berkeley, pre-
paring for "armed resistance" and urging the Black Panthers on to more
violence. Now he is a member of the California State Legislature, thanks
to the wealth of his wife, Hanoi Jane Fonda. As far as we know, they are
all still waiting for the next revolutionary uprising.
ADULT HELPERS
The looney Left could not have carried on its rampage for ten years
and escaped unpunished without substantial assistance from supposedly re-
sponsible and respectable adults.
Foundations and individuals like the "guilt-ridden fourth Rockefeller
generation" supplied money. Others supplied advice. When a "defector"
from the government National Security Agency brought RAMPARTS vital clas-
sified information on NSA's capability for deciphering Soviet codes, Ed-
itors Collier and Horowitz worried only about the legal consequences of
publishing it. The leftist legal community provided them with the serv-
ices of Charles Nesson, a Harvard professor of law. Publishing secrets,
said that Harvard professor, would be a clear violation of the Espionage
Act, but they could probably get away with it because prosecuting them
would require the Government to reveal more NSA secrets.
POISON IN OUR VEINS
Like poison in our veins, the madness of the '60s continues to circu-
late through our society. It is preserved by the sugary gloss that is be-
ing put on the history of those sick times. Typical is the tale from
Todd Gitlin, Sixties' radical. In his book, he repeats the Noam Chomsky
theme that the revolutionaries may have committed some minor sins, but
they were driven to it by the evils of America.
The destructive generation's still unregenerate leaders and their
disciples are spread throughout our country, in our educational system,
in the media, in the churches, even in the Congress, pretending to be pa-
triots while teaching hatred of America and propagating the faith that
Socialism, a criminal disaster in country after country, will yet produce
joy in some new Socialist paradise.
The antidote to that poison is DESTRUCTIVE _GENERATION. Give it to
your children. Don't wait for the movie.
Copyright, N & G Sirkin, Sherman, Conn., 1989
* * *
Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page