Friday, Jul 4, 2008
I have never equated doubts about the war with treason. The only "fifth column" in America is that subset of the left that hates this country and loves its enemies.
Nov 25, 2002 | When conservative talk-show hosts criticize the Democrats' foot-dragging on the war, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle complains they are promoting hate and endangering his life. When conservatives like myself deplore the sympathies shown by many "antiwar" activists to America's enemies -- a sympathy documented by Michelle Goldberg in Salon's own pages -- Joe Conason accuses me of attempting to incite patriotic mobs against all critics of the war. This is the way postmodern defenders of political dialogue attempt to shut down discussion.
Here is what Conason wrote: "In many quarters on the right, doubt about war equals hatred of America or worse. This sort of hysteria now pervades the propaganda operations of David Horowitz [whose] Front Page magazine features 'The Fifth Column,' where political adversaries are smeared with treason. Like many right-wingers, he insists that anyone who doesn't enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq must despise America and love Saddam. Anyone, that is, except for the antiwar skeptics on the right -- who somehow escape being branded as traitors."
These are all -- how shall I put it delicately? -- lies. I have never equated doubt about the war with hatred of America. I recently reposted a Boston Globe article by Todd Gitlin, a man with doubts about the war, and changed the title to "A Patriotic View From the Left." The point I was making to my conservative readership was that Gitlin's view was patriotic because it was critical of the "hate America" crowd, even though Gitlin remains a leftist critic of Bush. My documenting America's fifth column is not a plot to suppress leftist critics, let alone all those who do not line up behind Bush. I do not equate political dissent with treason. Would I have spent years writing for Salon, and political capital defending its editors, if I considered them traitors? These charges are both insulting and absurd, and Conason knows it, and that is what makes his performance even more distasteful than it normally would have been.
Underneath my conservative white robe, Conason suggests I'm a communist! "While Horowitz and company focus on easy targets like Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, their deeper aim is to depict anyone who doesn't line up behind Bush as soft on terror. Aside from scamming a few quick bucks -- 'Help David Expose the Leftist Plot to Control America's Young Minds!' -- that is in fact their only purpose. (Despite its capitalist form, this enterprise strongly resembles communist methods of enforcing the correct line. You can take Horowitz out of the CP, but you can't take the CP out of Horowitz.)"
The insinuation -- the vulgar Marxist insinuation -- that my conservative politics is a plot to make money is typical of Conason (indeed, as was the subject of his first attack on me, inspired by my first Salon column). Does anyone wonder why conservatives regard socialism as envy gussied up as a political cause? Although my parents were communists, after adolescence I never was, in either practice or theory. I was always a new-leftist critic of communism. My first book, "Student" -- published in 1962 -- was dedicated to Supreme Court justice and civil libertarian Hugo Black and explicitly criticized American communists for their rigid party line and anti-democratic philosophy (and was attacked by the Communist Party's People's World for that very reason).
Far from suggesting anything close to the idea that "doubt about war equals hatred of America or worse," I have posted antiwar articles on FrontPage by my own columnist, John Zmirak. If Conason wants to maintain I have "smeared [my] adversaries with treason," he should produce the quotes. Who is he talking about -- Jane Fonda? John Walker Lindh? Or Noam Chomsky, who like Fonda traveled to hostile terrain (in this case Pakistan in the middle of the Taliban war) to accuse the United States of crimes against humanity.
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