THE LEFT AND ITS TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA

 

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
…But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right
… You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
But when you want money
for people with minds that hate
All I can tell is brother you have to wait
…But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow
“Historian” Michael Kazin, who writes for such scholarly periodicals as The Nation, has written a book purporting to tell the story of both the successes and failures of the American Left. It is about how the Left “Changed a Nation” but failed to ever get a majority of Americans to back an all-out socialist or communist government. Kazin completely leaves out the most important point — one crystallized by John Lennon​ and Paul McCartney in their 1968 song Revolution: “But when you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out…” Indeed, the author completely ignores the violence and destruction that characterized the political Left, not only in the 1960s, but throughout the century.
E.J. Dionne loves Kazin’s new book, calling it a “masterwork” that can inspire young progressives about their noble heritage. Eric Altermann calls it a “tour de force of good scholarship.” One can’t help but wonder, however, how the victims of the American Left will embrace Kazin’s tactic of whitewashing the violence out of the history of American leftism. To be sure, what will the family of Betty Van Patter, who was murdered by the Black Panthers​, think? Kazin only reports that the Panthers “advocated violence, but discusses none of the actual crimes of this criminal gang – spelled out powerfully by David Horowitz​ in his memoir Radical Son.
My guess is that the neither the family of Sgt. Brian V. McDonnell, the San Francisco police officer who was killed by a bomb set by the Weather Underground​ (run by Obama mentor Bill Ayers​) nor Officer Robert Fogarty, who was severely wounded in the blast, would be amused by Kazin’s affectionate recounting of the terrorist group as the “most inept terrorists on the planet,” only mentioning the members who blew themselves up while making a bomb to plant at an upcoming Fort Dix dance to take out not only soldiers, but their families as well.
The people of Poland will also probably not consider the central tragedy of the Hitler-Stalin Pact to be the crisis of conscience and bad PR it caused for the American Communist Party​.
This is not even mentioning the 150 million human beings murdered in the last century by the governments supported by the Communist Party USA​, which Kazin romanticizes in “American Dreamers,” and without whom we would apparently be a society of slave-holders, surfs whose women would not be allowed to vote or get a job





HOW THE LEFT CHANGED AMERICA