DAVID HOROWITZ recently attacked Noam Chomsky in his column, The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky, in which he described the Leftist guru as a "pathological" "ayatollah of anti-American hate." Horowitz backed up his description with the evidence of how Chomsky hates himself and, therefore, his own society – which provides him with immense material and cultural rewards for doing so.
Asked about Horowitz’s attack, Chomsky replied, "I haven't read Horowitz. I didn't used to read him when he was a Stalinist and I don't read him today."
Chomsky’s smear-tactic is no surprise at all. It reveals two traditional methods by which the Left attacks the "enemies of the people": it dehumanizes them and tries to silence their voices.
Chomsky calls Horowitz a former Stalinist, but he knows full well that while Horowitz’s parents were Stalinists, Horowitz himself was never one. In 1956, after the famous Soviet 20th Party Congress (in which Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes), and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Horowitz helped contribute to the flowering of the "New Left," which saw itself as anti-Stalinist.
It was precisely his role in developing the "New Left" that allowed Horowitz to make a profound contribution to the historiography of the Left. After recognizing the perniciousness of the socialist idea, he demonstrated how it was the New Left’s project to rescue the Old Left -– without its Stalinist tinges. In the end, of course, Horowitz understood that this could not be done. In The Politics of Bad Faith, he provides a remarkable and original critique of the Left that analyzes its religious foundations, its philosophical roots going back to Rousseau and Marx, and its continuity through the New Left and post-Communist "progressive liberalism."
It becomes evident, therefore, that Chomsky’s smear of Horowitz emanates from Chomsky’s rage about what Horowitz has deciphered in him. Horowitz has perceived that the roots of the New Left, in which Chomsky has his feet solidly planted, are the same ones shared by the Stalinist Old Left. In other words, Chomsky is, at present, hurling an ugly insult that symbolizes the projection of self-hate.
Chomsky is, of course, just picking up where columnist Jack White left off. In the August 30 issue of Time magazine, White labeled Horowitz "a real, live bigot." He did this because of an article Horowitz wrote for Salon.com titled, "Guns Don't Kill Black People, Other Blacks Do." In that piece, Horowitz criticized the NAACP's lawsuit to hold gun manufacturers responsible for urban violence, since he believed Blacks had to accept individual responsibility.
When tiring of smearing Horowitz, the Left has attempted to silence him.
Eric Alterman’s "review" of Horowitz’s The Politics of Bad Faith in The Nation on November 16, 1998 was especially illuminating in this regard. Alterman did not discuss a single idea in Horowitz’s book. Instead, after informing his readers that literary critic Paul Berman believed that Horowitz was a "demented lunatic," Alterman remarked that, "When Horowitz finally dies, I suspect we will be confronted with a posthumous volume of memoirs titled The End of History." The operative word here is "finally." Horowitz has obviously not died soon enough for many Leftists’ liking. A convenient gulag would have obviously remedied this problem a long time ago.
Just like Alterman, White also craved the silencing of Horowitz. While Alterman fantasized about Horowitz’s death, White concluded that, "we’d all be better off if he’d just shut up."
This phenomenon is very much connected to how the Left has consistently attempted to wipe Horowitz out of its own reality – as if he had never existed. Just as the Soviet regime consistently rewrote its own history and erased inconvenient individuals from its past, the Left has diligently ignored most of Horowitz’s scholarship.
But when the Left cannot ignore Horowitz’s voice, it tries its best to suffocate it. Chomsky has now joined the Alterman-White duo in that regard. By saying that he has never read Horowitz’s work (which is an outright lie), Chomsky is clearly entertaining the totalitarian fantasy of pushing Horowitz into invisibility.
Chomsky’s smear is ultimately about one dark reality: in confronting a former Leftist who has offered a sincere mea culpa to the world, Chomsky is forced to look at the last thing he wants to see in the world: a mirror. As a result, he quivers and shakes, froths at the mouth, and accuses Horowitz of having once been part of a monstrosity that he (Chomsky) himself has spent very little of his life denouncing –- for obvious reasons.