One of the more common critiques
of “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week” is that it sweeps a huge number
of groups into one category. Setting aside the question of whether or
not these groups can accurately be described as
“fascist,” isn’t it dangerous, strategically, to lump together
Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas? Since these
groups all have different agendas, and some have slightly more moderate
wings that have attempted to enter legitimate politics, isn’t there
a danger of not “knowing thy enemy”?
Well first, let me say this
has not been the attack or the complaint about Islamo-fascism Awareness
Week and if they were, this is an intelligent question. And it’s also
at the level of actually dealing with the issue, and I wish that the
attacks had been like that. What the attacks were, was to say that we
were attacking Islam and the Muslim religion and all Muslims. And that
was a vicious slander and allowed what I would call campus thugs to
attack students who were putting on these events as racist and bigots.
It’s a form of hate speech to call somebody a racist or a bigot if
they’re not, and none of the kids who were organizing these events
were racists or bigots, so it was really disgusting.
So, to answer your question,
all of the groups that you mentioned are part of a movement within Islam.
First of all, they all either come out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which
is really the founding organization of this movement in Islam, or are
closely related. Even though Hezbollah is a Shia organization and Hamas
is a Sunni organization, they work hand in glove in the attacks on Israel
and in the summer of—I think it was 2005, might have been 2006, I
can’t remember. So there is some discussion about whether—for example
there are people who think that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate
wing. I’m not one of those people. The utility in calling this Islamo-fascism
and not just saying we have a war on terror is that you have to look
at a total movement and a religious movement like this which is also
political. And that’s the big problem here is that it’s a political
religion, so it’s a totalitarian force and it wants to control every
aspect of life, religion, concerns about individual morality and social
things, and so if you have the force of the state behind them you have
a totalitarian setup, and that’s why, for example, the poster we used
for Islamo-fascism Awareness Week was of a Muslim woman having her head
blown off by the Taliban because she had allegedly violated some religious
law.
If you have a religious movement
like this, a political religion, it’s going to have arms that look
like civil liberties arms, you know, Hezbollah provides social services.
What’s significant is what it states as its goals. Hezbollah’s goals
is to kill all the Jews, and it said so in so many words by Hassan Nasrallah.
It’s a nasty organization. I don’t care if they give free food to
poor people, that’s just sort of their nasty agenda. I would say the
same about the Muslim Brotherhood. If it’s a moderate organization
it can say that very clearly by denouncing its offshoot, Hamas, which
is a military terrorist organization whose goal is to destroy the only
Jewish state. And I liked your question. This isn’t part of the interview,
but I wish that Campus Progress reflected this kind of approach to things.
I know, but to be fair,
we did do a crib sheet on the term Islamo-fascism where
we argued against it in much of the same language I just used.
I’ll have to look at it,
and maybe if I have time I’ll email you about it.
Do you think there’s a
risk of the “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week” alienating Muslims who
would be otherwise sympathetic to the cause of fostering moderation
and preventing terrorism?
I think that’s a reasonable
question. There is no term that you use that doesn’t, you know—
politically there is no way to find a term that is not going to upset
some people, unless you’re not doing anything that makes any kind
of difference. If you’re going to make a difference in life, you know
there’s going to be conflict. The issue here—what I found interesting,
and I didn’t have a chance to you know do a lot of research on this,
you know I had a lot of things going on. But when I had an encounter
at Columbia, where the vice president of the Muslim Students Association
in the question period suggested—she went in to this long thing about
how jihad is a spiritual struggle and not a holy war, although I had
not even referred to jihad in my speech. So I asked her, I said, “Well,
will you condemn Hamas, which is a terrorist organization and has sworn
to eliminate the Jewish state?” She dodged that three different ways
I put the question in and finally I said, “Well, I know your answer.”
So I don’t regard—you know, if there are moderate Muslims who have a problem with the term “Islamo-fascism” I haven’t seen them. I don’t regard this person or that Muslim Student Association as moderate. In other words, it’s a reasonable question, but there are also reasonable ways to approach it. You have to understand, when we announced this, we said we were defending Muslims, which we were, Muslim women and others. It would have been perfectly possible, for somebody, any one of these campuses, to propose a panel. And I instructed all the students who were organizing to welcome panels with diverse views on these issues. Our contention was to stimulate a dialog, not to ram a conclusion down people’s throats.
[A phone rings on Horowitz’s
end, brief conversation.]
By the way, where did you go
to school?
Two years at Brandeis, two
years at the University of Michigan.
The first two years at Brandeis?
Yeah.
When did you graduate?
2006.
So do you think Islam is a inherently violent religion?
Well there’s a billion and
a half people in Islam, and many, many divisions. And as you know, the
Quran, just like the Bible, has plenty of contradictory statements,
just like all of these books do. My experience in life is that most
people are conflict-averse. They may, in their individual lives, get
into conflicts but they certainly don’t want to go blowing themselves
up. They aren’t going to war. But many moderate Germans didn’t make
a difference in the end, unfortunately. So, I think Islam has a certain
problem associated with it that Christianity and Judaism don’t have,
because of their histories. And the biggest one is the separation of
church and state. As you know in Turkey, there is or has been until
now, they’re going in a different direction. It’s a secular state.
Right, they’ve been forced by the military.
Right, I understand. I’m
trying to make the other case. If you look at Islam, it’s really been
an imperialistic religion for all of its life, and it’s very troubling
when, for example in Afghanistan, we put in a government, the Karzai
government, we removed the Taliban, and yet under the Karzai government—I
don’t know if you remember this happening about a year ago, a Muslim
converted to Christianity and they sentenced him to death.
And the United States government
had to intervene, what the solution was, was they got him out of the
country. So there is an intolerance in Islam which is much, much greater
than in the modern, sort of diluted, versions of Christianity and Judaism.
And certainly other religions, the high religions, really, were persecuted
in a terrible way in Iran. I think that Islam has a lot of problems
and I don’t think its helpful in discussing these problems, any time
you raise these issues to be called a religious bigot. And unfortunately
there seems to be a united front on campuses on the left over this.
Robert Spencer and I took out an ad in The Emory Wheel, at Emory
University, which said what every American needs to know about jihad.
And it quotes Osama Bin Ladin and Hassan Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad,
and says it’s a war against Christians, Jews, atheists, gays, and
women. And instead of having a discussion about our ad, the entire religious
life faculty, including the rabbi who heads the Hillel organization,
attacked us basically as religious bigots. And I don’t think that’s
very helpful.
You know I’d like to see
a discussion of the issues. Our Muslims are quite peaceful, to answer
your first question. Is it possible to have a peaceful Islam? Sure.
My concern is that the most dynamic movement within Islam is a fascist
movement, which I associate with the Muslim Brotherhood and which is
attendant in the organizations which can trace either their organizational
roots or their spiritual roots to [the Brotherhood]. And what’s known
as Salafism and Wahhabism and so forth.
I do see where you’re
coming from here. I think the question is, if you followed the Old Testament
to the letter you’d have a pretty brutal system of law…
…I think that’s exactly right. But the Old Testament… you know, Judaism has had a history since then, and Christianity. If you encountered Christianity in the Middle Ages you know, as a Jew, for example, just to get down to it, if I didn’t convert to Christianity I’d be burned at the stake.
But there is material on
your web site that makes it out as though there is an inherent difference
between Islam and other religions.
[crosstalk]
I’m sorry, your website has this description of a film you are promoting: “‘Islam: What the West Needs to Know’ reveals the violent, expansionary ideology of the so called ‘religion…’”
Well, I don’t disagree with
any of the particulars. I have had my disputes with Spencer over this
issue. It’s a huge and very complicated issue. It’s one that I intended,
with [Islamo-fascism Awareness Week], to raise. But we haven’t been
able to really raise it, because of the hate storm it was greeted by.
If you can’t discuss it—“Is Islam a peaceful religion?”—it
’s a good question. You know, when a Danish paper published some cartoons,
they killed people, burned embassies. They killed some nuns in the Middle
East. I didn’t see a lot of outrage coming from the Muslim community
against that.
So this is a much bigger problem
than people who want to just dismiss Spencer say. I don’t… I have
not in my web site or in anything I said, said that the United States
shouldn’t be engaged, supporting Muslim countries, which we do. We
support Pakistan. I think Saudi Arabia is really problematic but I haven’t
said we should break off relations with Saudi Arabia. So I, you know,
you have to—I think there’s an intellectual issue and, you know,
Spencer is an expert in Islam and Greg Davis knows a hell of a lot more
about it than I do. I’m not going to rule out their points of view
and I’m certainly not going to consider them bigoted because I’ve
read Spencer’s book, and if you see the way it’s argued, this is
not the ravings of a religious bigot, this is a scholar of Islam who’s
saying things, trying to tell you something. So, it needs to be discussed,
not just attacked.
What is your stance on France’s
law banning the wearing of religiously significant attire in public
schools?
It’s so terrible to get to—you
know, you’re a young man, so you’re incited by all the information
that comes at you, and I can tell, you know, you’re curious, you’re
alert. But when you get to my age, you’re like, “Oh my God, I have
to learn all these new things.” Okay. I’m not familiar with the
French law. I have read enough to know that there is a well-informed
opinion that says hijabs have nothing to do with religion and that they
are a political statement. I think that it is, you know, I don’t think
we can have—if you have a religion that doesn’t want to assimilate,
in some way, at least in the public square, you’ve got a serious problem.
I follow these things peripherally, not intensely. I’m not trying
to duck any issue here.
I understand that.
I don’t think we should give
drivers licenses—if you’re going to have identifications for people,
they can’t be masked, it’s that simple. If they can’t handle that,
they need to go to a country which accommodates medieval customs. That’s
what these are. I am against clitorectomies. I don’t care how religious
a custom it is, I’m against them. I’m against women getting half
the inheritance of a man, I believe in equality. And I thought [inaudible]-thinking
progressives did too. So I’m not going to make an accommodation to
barbaric religious customs. Now I’m sounding like Christopher Hitchens.
I bet people sometimes compare
you guys. You must sometimes get that.
I have a lot of affection for
Christopher although we don’t agree on a lot of things.
One of your major causes
has been state-level Academic Bills of Rights. These initiatives have
been rejected in most states, I just wanted to get your thought on why.
[background at http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/GR
I’ve explained this many
times. I never, ever intended or attempted—never attempted to legislate
what teachers should say in the classroom or to legislate curriculum.
I actually was associated with about two bills, well maybe, three: I
think Georgia, Ohio, Colorado. None of these bills were bills, they
were all resolutions, which means its like a sense of the legislature,
“We would like you…”—that’s how they were all phrased—“to
support intellectual diversity,” which means to me, exactly this:
If an issue is controversial, then students should be made aware that
it’s controversial. Or if a point of view is controversial, a matter
of controversy, then students should be made aware that there’s a
controversy, then they should be provided materials that would allow
them to decide which side of the controversy they want to be on for
themselves. I really have never found anybody who disagrees with that
when I state it that way. So this was at the outset of my campaign and
I did it for one reason only. Why did I go to legislatures? Because
when I went to universities, I started with the chairman of the—I
think they’re called regents, they might be trustees—trustees in
the SUNY system in New York, State University of New York. I wrote the
Academic Bill of Rights for him, he was a Pataki appointee, his name
was Tom Egan. He loved the Academic Bill of Rights, and told me exactly
how he would implement it. So my original intention was to get universities
to adopt it. And by the way, when I drafted the Academic Bill of Rights
and before I published it, I went to Michael Berube and Todd Gitlin,
and another leftist named [Phil] Klinkner , the dean of students now
at Hamilton University, and Stanley Fish, and I asked them if they objected
to anything in the Academic Bill of Rights. And they had a couple of
objections to the original one.
I took out what they objected
to. I argued with them, and I couldn’t convince them, and I took it
out, because I—you know I’m a very, I guess you’d call me a hot-button
conservative and I know that—this campaign should not have been a
left-right campaign. I wanted to have an ecumenical approach to this
problem because as I have written and said many, many times, the students
who suffer most from professors who indoctrinate them and from the lack
of conservatives on academic faculties are liberal students because
you guys are never challenged intellectually. Your assumptions are shared,
you can get up in a class and basically people will agree with you or
they’ll support your perspective, where the teacher will tell you
“Well, you need to get this source” or “This is a better argument.”
If you’re a conservative
student, and you have the balls to open your mouth in class, you’ve
got to be prepared to defend yourself. So the conservative kids are
getting, ironically, a much better education. They are being faced with
critical opinions from adults whereas the leftist kids never are. Um,
anyway… I’m a terrible interviewee. I don’t stay in a straight
line.
To go back to my—I went to
Egan, the chairman of the trustees. Nothing happened. He never implemented
and I kept coming back at him until finally—and then I realized what
the problem was, and the problem was there are these leftist teacher
unions, that the aggressive activists who are not primarily scholars,
but primarily political ideologues, and they’re a minority on any
faculty. I estimate in my book, The
Professors, they’re 10 percent. They dominate all political instrumentalities
of the university. They’re the leaders of the faculty senate, they’re
the leaders of the AUP, they’re the leaders of the American Federation
of Trade Unions, and the reason is because they like politics and the
other—you know, the scholars, avoid academic politics. And so I realized
that the administrators don’t really run the universities any more.
Their business is fundraising and this and that. But as far as the curriculum
is concerned, the faculty and the faculty left rule. When I saw that,
I realized that I can go to a hundred administrators—I mean, Egan
was very powerful, he was the chairman of the trustees—and I might
get sympathy, but nothing would happen and nobody would ever hear of
it. So I realized what I have to do is get some leverage and the leverage
can just be perceptual, which it was. That is, when I went to the legislature,
the left got hysterical. When the left gets hysterical, the media pays
attention. If a leftist came out with the Academic Bill of Rights, The New York Times would have published it and I would have a lot
of support.
But The New York Times is going to ignore it until the left gets upset. So the left has made
this, put this—as you know, the Academic Bill of Rights is now discussed
everywhere. And even though it’s completely misrepresented, including
on your web site—because it’s a very, very, very liberal document
with which no reasonable person can actually disagree—even though
it’s misrepresented, I think in the minds of most students who’ve
heard of it, and professors, there is a concern now, which wasn’t
there before, about traditional academic freedom values about two sides
to a question. I wish that I had been able to get further along the
way, but I haven’t. But right now I don’t really have—I haven’t
pushed the legislation, even the resolution for years.
And you’re saying that
when you did, it was non-binding.
It was completely non-binding,
and you know—look, in Texas the legislature meets every other year.
In Missouri, they meet for 40 days. I think you’ve got something,
I don’t know if it was Georgia or Missouri—these legislators you
know, state legislators, they have day jobs, and I happen to have a
very high regard, anybody who actually reads the Academic Bill of Rights
will see that I have a very high regard for the independence of the
university. So I never really pursued that. And it was the AEP—and
by the way I sent you an email about this: The AUP has now come out
and actually endorsed indoctrination, and I’m interested in what your
reaction. I sent you a long article, if you don’t have it I’m happy
to send it to you again, analyzing that, but it validates what I’ve
said from the beginning, and that is that their attacks on the Academic
Bill of Rights have been because the left and the hard left, the feminist
left in particular, want to indoctrinate students in their particular
political ideology.
And let me just say since I
have no objection to a feminist teaching, I have never called for the
firing of a teacher. You know, it would be—I actually defended [Ward]
Churchill over his political views, but when it’s been revealed that
he’s a fraud and a plagiarist and so forth, I can’t defend that.
But I’ve defended leftist professors, I defended [Erwin] Chemerinsky,
who is a flaming ideological leftist that I’ve dealt with over the
years, but I didn’t think it was—it’s damaging to the university
to withdraw an appointment because of a guy’s politics. And so I defended,
and I, people should take note that Chemerinsky was defended by many
conservatives, whereas there reverse case I’m not familiar with, where
the leftists come out and defend conservatives under attack or they’re
at all concerned with it. They disappear from university faculties.
I wanted to ask you a couple
questions about the troubled relationship between your organization
and ours, if that’s all right.
Sure.
A quote from an interview you gave
to National Review Online caught our eye:
“But the larger agenda is create a national movement to stand up to the coalition between Islamo-fascists and American liberals at home who are running interference for the terrorists. The coalition attacking Islamo-fascism Awareness Week extends from the Iranians and CAIR through the Revolutionary Communist Party to Campus Progress and College Democrats.”
Do you actually think we’re
running interference for terrorists?
Well, when you look at what
Islamo-fascism [inaudible]. Look, let me just say I was appalled though
not wholly surprised that College Democrats would get into bed with
the forces that attacked us. But Islamo-fascism Awareness Week, let’s
put it another way: Before we held the week, if you used the term Islamo-fascism
in a discussion on campus—I don’t care whether its in a classroom
or in the campus public square—you would be attacked as a religious
bigot by… it doesn’t matter who by. So in that situation, that is,
before we got on the scene, there was an effective ban or censorship
over the term and therefore the idea of Islamo-fascism.
Our week is designed to have
so many people getting out there associating with the term Islamo-fascism
that it would be much harder to discredit individuals and that the discussion
then could take place. Now I don’t know if you can use the term Islamo-fascism
yet on college campuses but that’s my agenda. To the extent that,
and I will actually re-read [the interview excerpt], and I probably
didn’t give it enough attention, um, to your statement, if you know,
I’m just going on what you said on the outset of this, I’ll take
your word for it. But you guys should have been defending us. Instead
you attacked us.
Well that’s a difference
in opinion and we happen to have different ideas about how to best address
terrorism.
Jesse, you’re a political
organization. In politics, you know—I’m an old leftist, so I understand
when… we supported the Soviet Empire critically, the new left, the
whole new left, would say “The soviet union is bad”—well not the
whole new left cause there are some idiots, but you know mainly we would
have said the Soviet Union is bad, but America’s worse, which is kind
of what the left is saying..
We would never say anything
like that because we don’t think that’s true. If you found a quote
of—
I mean, I’m happy to engage
you and I’m happy to revise judgment. There’s nothing I would…
since I told you the way I started back in the freedom campaign was
an outreach to people who have mistreated me badly, both Berube and
Todd Gitlin, because I do believe, having a lot of experience on the
left, there was a left during the Cold War which was anti-communist
and I do believe that—well actually, you guys invited Jacob Laksin
to one of your conferences and he was very impressed by the sincerity
of students who attended and their openness.
So I unfortunately have been
beat into a corner by the left, which has never engaged my work seriously.
I’ve done a lot of intellectual work and a lot of arguments that are
really within the left. You know but I’ve been tarred and feathered
at the outset. So it’s created a kind of reflex in me. I’m more
than happy to engage in the dialogue over this and I will look at that.
But what I wanted to say about politics is this: People go out in the
streets and they—you know if you interviewed the millions of leftists
that tried to save Saddam Hussein, they would say “Oh, he’s a monster,”
but they oppose the overthrow of a tyrant. Now you have to have been
in the left as long as I have and listened to us say over and over again,
“America supports dictators if they’re anti-communist—we want
America to stand up for human rights.” Well, that’s what America
did in 2003 and the left attacked us, and you know that’s the way
I view this whole thing. Although I’m going to take you your word,
I’m going engage you, and we’ll see.
Oh no, I completely appreciate
that and I very much appreciate the interview. But I think my argument
would be—you know the point of view of organizations like my own is
that none of us were arguing that Saddam wasn’t a horrible person,
we were arguing that the results of an
invasion would be worse than the results of leaving him in place and
I think that—
Oh but you don’t really believe
that. I mean the United States has gone into many countries that you
would approve of if we did. Did the left go out in the streets to attack
Bill Clinton when he was bombing Belgrade from the skies? No, because
it’s about ending ethnic cleansing—the left is out there, Jesse
Jackson, you know, complaining that America didn’t go and save the
Rwandans. I mean come on, look, this wasn’t about a… and of course
it was done with the U.N. and the Security Council resolution and there
was a truce that he violated. This wasn’t even an invasion, it was
the continuation of a war that began in 1991, when you were a toddler,
and you know he violated the terms of the truce over and over and over
again. This was a war that Bill Clinton called for, that the entire
Clinton cabinet—you know, security team and I’m sure John Podesta,
supported. To have the left so unified in attacking such a good war,
one that was to overthrow a monster, um, I just don’t buy it.
So you think there’s a
disingenuousness there?
Yeah, what overrode it was
that America’s the great Satan for the left. Now I would like to see
the day come that—let me tell you, when I was a kid, I’m getting
really old, so I was like 9 years old in 1948, which I know seems like
it might as well be Roman times, and that year what happened was this:
Harry Truman said in 1947 that it was going to be the policy of the
United States to support free people so we were resisting totalitarians.
And what that was was a message to Stalin. There was a civil war in
Greece, and he sent military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey.
Particularly in Greece there was a communist insurgency, and the progressives
of the day, who are still the progressives of today, and my parents
were communists, all of them marched out of the Democratic Party, which
they had been in, and formed the Progressive Party, which was run by
the communist party, behind the candidacy of Henry Wallace who had been
a Vice President during Roosevelt, and he was the Secretary of Agriculture
also under Roosevelt, to oppose the Cold War. He used all the arguments
the left uses today, talked about liberation in Eastern Europe when
they were actually enslaving it and so forth. And they split off from
the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, the left came back to the Democratic
Party around 1972. I think the left is so entrenched and so powerful
in the Democratic Party that I would be hard to sever them from the
party, but I would like to see—
Why did they support the
Iraq war there. Isn’t that a counter argument to your claim that they’re
overrun with leftists?
No, because when I say the
Democratic Party is a left party, I’m talking about the apparatus.
I’m talking about the congressional party. I’m not talking about
the voters.
[crosstalk]
People, the legislators, you
know—leftists always look at Democratic legislators as excessively
cowardly. What they’re doing is they’re listening to their pollsters
and saying “I can’t, my whole constituency may be screaming for
this but I can’t do this, because I’m not going to get elected next
time if I do it.” That’s what that’s about. I would like to see
the anti-Islamist liberals come out of the woodwork and have a coalition
with people like me, or if that would mean to have a coalition with
the Republicans, *** to fight the enemy, then I’ll be happy. I haven’t
seen in the Democratic Party a will to actually fight the war on terror.
What I see is a lot of sabotage in the war on terror. I’ll send you—I’ve
just written a book about it, so we can have many discussions if you
like.
Fair enough. How do you,
overall, when you look at the trajectory of the Iraq war,
what’s your stance on how its going, how it was executed…
Well I think it was, first
of all, I think it’s been sabotaged from the outset by the Democratic
Party leadership, in particular starting with Al Gore and Jimmy Carter.
This is the most disgraceful thing that’s ever happened in American
politics, which is to turn your back on a war that you support in the
beginning of the war. I think that Bush has mismanaged the war and failed
to explain it well to the American people. But, you know, the Democrats
created a situation in which he had very little flexibility. Shinseki,
who I was critical of when he said it, but he was absolutely right,
he said that there weren’t enough troops. But no Democrats proposed
bills to increase the troop numbers. The surge is working, but the Democrats
have opposed it. They’ve done it in part for just really shortsighted
political objectives. I mean, it’s just opportunistic and terrible.
It’s embarrassing.
You don’t think that there
are people who genuinely think the war is lost. You think it’s political
opportunism?
Oh I think that there’s always
people who think honestly on all sides of issues. This isn’t really
about motives. It’s a mix of motives.
It’s about the consequences.
Yeah. That’s why, you know,
I’m sure that most of the leftists who marched to save Saddam Hussein
thought he was a bad guy but I have to evaluate what they did, not their
intentions. Leftists never—do leftists worry about the intentions
of Dick Cheney? Come on! They look at what they think he did and they
condemn him for it.
So you think they’re overly
consequentialist?
I didn’t say that. I think
they have a double standard. They’re consequentialist when it comes
to any conservatives. They never allow conservatives to have good intentions.
And they’re intentionalists when it comes to themselves—they never
allow themselves to have bad motives.
Isn’t everybody guilty
of that a little?
It’s kind of a human thing.
Who likes to say they’re wrong? I haven’t met the person who—
“I’d like to propose
this bill, which is incorrect.”
Or, even the day after or the
year after or 20 years after it’s very hard to get people to admit
they made a mistake. And, you know, I don’t know what you know about
my history but I wrote a book which was very ruthless with the left
but also with myself. I know what it is to go through and to say you
made a mistake. I know how painful it is. And so I’m really good at
judging whether people have actually had second thoughts or changed
their minds about something.
You’ve spoken about receiving
death threats from people on the left and needing body guards. Do you
think people on the left in the U.S. are more irrational or prone to
violence than people on the right?
I’ve written a lot about
this issue. The left and the right are not parallel formations. It’s
not people who look at a problem pragmatically and come to different
judgments about it. They’re really different types—the left is a
missionary movement, it’s really a religious movement. The birth of
the modern left coincides with the decline of institutional religion.
The French Revolution, they set up the temple of reason, and actually
the first modern genocide was there during the French Revolution when
they went in to the Vendée and killed every Catholic man, woman, and
child.
But if you’re on the left
you believe in an earthly redemption of some sort or another. You consider
yourself a social redeemer. You see the problems of the world, social
problems, as a result of bad institutions that can be changed, and you
believe that there can be a world, or society, if you like, with no
racism, no sexism, no homophobia, no Islamophobia, and whatever. And
if you look at this—no poverty—this is really as close to the kingdom
of heaven on earth as you can get. That’s conceptually what it is,
it’s an escape from the existential reality that we all face, which
is that the world’s full of misery and suffering and always has been
and probably always will be. So if you’re on the left you see yourself
as an army of the saints and you see your opponents—conservatives
and Republicans who think that you really can’t do what you want to
do and who are going to oppose it—you see us as party of stigma. So
the left is much more intolerant than the right.
Now there are people on the
right who are religious fanatics, who have the same mentality as leftists.
And people who blow up abortion clinics or people who, you know, think
that you can eliminate abortions by passing laws, you can’t do that.
You just can’t. I happen to be not—I think abortion is a bad idea
but I don’t think it should be outlawed. I’m kind of in the middle.
And when I grew up abortion was illegal after the first trimester, that’s
probably reasonable. I’d like to see it discouraged more.
Conservatives believe that
the root cause of social problems is us, individuals. We’re the problem,
we’re greedy, we’re deceptive—everybody has all these vices in
them. And it is remarkable, when you look at it from the conservative
point of view, how people on the left can think that government can
be the solution to anything. After all, government is responsible for
slavery. The people in government, they’re the same people as the
people causing the problems except they have a hell of a lot more power.
So they’re dangerous. So limited government seems like a really good
idea. Not withstanding that, there are all kinds of things where government
ought to step in and try to help out.
Well then don’t you think
that if liberals have that tendency to think government can solve everything,
isn’t there that same tendency among conservatives with the free market
or Christianity—it seems like they’re easy fixes.
I think that people are always
longing for an escape from reality and you’re right about that. When
I’m speaking to conservative audiences one of the things that I say
is that there is a difference between religion and politics. Religion
is about saving your eternal soul, and if you mess with the devil you
endanger your eternal soul. In politics it’s about getting in to office,
and you make pacts with the devil all the time. So I try to explain
the difference. So yes, there is an impulse in all of us to try to find
a solution, to try to end not only human suffering but our own frustrations,
and that just isn’t going to happen.
You’ve
referred to Campus Progress as part of
the “gutter left.” Um—
Look, maybe we’ve begun a
new day here.
Okay.
[Crosstalk]
Wait, wait, wait. It’s not
like—and this I know is before your time—and you’ve got an interesting
intellect so I’m, you know… When I see what you write about me it
might change my mind. But Campus Progress attacked me from the very
beginning. I’ve gone over the profile to show you how many wrong things
are in there. I have written before to Campus Progress and there has
been little result. The best thing I can say about Campus Progress is
first that it invited Jacob [Laskin] to be on the panel and his impression
was a good one, and second that it’s, that you’ve undertaken to
start this dialogue. So I’m open but I’m not going to apologize
about the past because I was attacked I didn’t attack you guys first.
I just responded.
What I will say in our defense
is that I do think it would be unfair to engage in your argument by
calling you a bigot, that’s not something that I would do, but I think
that your argument deserves more nuance than that and a response. But
similarly I think that our argument deserves more than, you know—we’ve
been compared to terrorists, we’ve been told we’re anti-American.
I think we have different opinions on these things.
I don’t think that I did
that. I said that you were… what did I say—
“Running
interference for the terrorists…”
Interference is a very different
concept than embracing terrorism or anything like that and it can come
from various reasons. One is this opportunistic idea that if the war
in Iraq goes well it helps Bush. Actually, that’s an unsophisticated
view of politics. The more Bush succeeds, the more the problem that
Americans elected him to solve goes away, the less reason there is for
them to elect him. This is what happened with the crime problem. Republicans
won a lot of elections because Democrats had a delusional view of criminals.
But when the crime problem began to go away, that wasn’t a factor
any more and they came back.
Or interference can come because
you think that America’s a bigger danger now. I’ve written an autobiography
which all this is in, but in the early ‘70s, just to give you an analogy,
as you know The New York Times helped actual traitors—that
is, people who violated the espionage laws by leaking national security
programs like the NSA surveillance program, destroyed the program—that’s
aiding and abetting the enemy. Why would they do that? Does that mean
that the editors of The New York Times are Islamists? Does it
mean that they have a pathological hatred for America the way, say,
Cindy Sheehan does? No, it doesn’t mean that.
I, in the early ‘70s was
an editor of the largest magazine on the left, Ramparts, and
I thought I was pretty sophisticated, although in retrospect I was pretty
naïve. You know, I was critical of the Soviet Union and knew it was
a dictatorship. And we got a manuscript in a manila envelope and it
had a lot of capitalized words in it, and it was actually about the
National Security Agency, the NSA, which at that time was completely
unknown, was not a public thing. And it claimed, the author said, that
he had been manning one of the NSA stations in Turkey, and he claimed
to have listened in when the Soviet astronaut burned up and he claimed
that we had broken the Soviet code and we knew where every Soviet tank
and airplane was when it took off because they had radio communications
and so forth. And I looked at it and this was a nut, and that was my
reaction, but there was a guy in my office worked as an editor who had
been in the 82nd Airborne in intelligence and he was shaking because
he recognized the code words, he said “These are real code words,
and just by telling you this I could go to jail.
Unfortunately, he was wrong
about that. Anyway so we interviewed this guy and we ran a story, but
before we ran the story, I called up a member of the [Daniel] Ellsberg
defense team. I had four children and was living in Berkley and treason,
I don’t know, I wanted to know what my risks were before I took this
leap. So the lawyer was Charles Nesson, a constitutional law professor
at Harvard to this day, and he advised me, he said, “If you publish
this guy’s stuff, you will be violating the Espionage Act.” He said,
however, that the espionage act was written in a peculiar way so that
if you first—[inaudible] destroy it and deny having seen it—so he’s
advising me on how to commit treason. And then he said, even so, we
live in a democracy and that means that the government is going to have
to prove, in a court of law, that you damaged national security, which
means it’s going to have reveal a lot more about our national security
apparatus than it’s going to want to reveal. So the likelihood is
you won’t be prosecuted.
This is why there have been
no prosecutions by the Bush administration. This is why trying terrorists
in a court of law is so difficult and why it’s important to have military
tribunals. But anyway, so I went ahead and now why did I publish that?
Particularly because I didn’t think that the communists were going
to bring heaven to Vietnam, I knew that they were Stalinists. But I
said to myself, “This will weaken the United States and if the United
States loses in Vietnam that will be good, because even if the Vietnamese
fuck it up, it’s better for them to do it than for America to do it.”
Now I was completely—that’s why I did it, that was my motive. I
was completely wrong about that because what the communists did was
that they killed 100,000 people, 500,000, actually a million Vietnamese
fled, more refugees than they’ve had in a thousand years, and half
of the ones who fled died trying to escape, not just shot by the communists,
but whatever, they died, and of course there were two and a half million
Cambodians who were slaughtered. I was completely wrong. But my motives
for doing it were well-intended. I actually thought that by breaking
the Soviet code there couldn’t be any surprise attacks. We could have
peace in the world because if everybody knew what everybody was doing
they could know in advance. What I didn’t factor in—and this was
my stupidity at the time—was that the Soviets know we’ve broken
the code so they would change the code.
In those days that was a front
page story in The New York Times, this whole incident, and Times actually covered in those days, was more on our side, because
they printed a front page story saying that the United States hadn’t
actually broken the code and just dismissing the claim, so that was
kind of interesting.
Who are some of your favorite
liberals at the moment?
Randall Kennedy, who is a law
professor at Harvard. Orlando Patterson, who is a sociologist at the
W.E.B. Dubois institute at Harvard. You know I read, I do it less now
because I just don’t have the time, but writers like Cass Sunstein.
Um, I used to read Jeffrey Rosen, I don’t know why I was interested
in legal things. Stanley Fish I think has written terrific stuff on
academic freedom, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve read, I would be
more than happy to send you anything that I’ve written. But if you
read Indoctrination U or The Professors, which nobody
who’s attacked it has read, they just read the profiles they don’t
read the explanations. There’s nothing that I disagree with in Stanley
Fish’s writing I think on academic freedom. I think he’s wise on
this subject. I like several of Phillip Roth’s novels. Sabbath’s
Theater is a work of demented genius and American Pastoral is the best and most ruthlessly critical book about the ‘60s that
anybody has ever written. including me. Wonderful book.
I like The Human Stain a lot.
I like the Human Stain. I thought
the Vietnam vet was cliché character but you know…
Thanks for your time. This
is probably an audience you don’t reach often, so is there anything
else you want to say?
I would like to see much more
conversation, left and right, conservative/liberal, whatever you want
to call it, much less name-calling. I have, on occasion, subjected individuals
to attacks that were unfounded and after regretted it and said so. I
wish there was more of that from the left. I think it’d be better
if all of us… I try only to respond and not to aggress [inaudible].
You know, I would look forward to some kind of, maybe we could do a
joint conference some time and discuss these issues, or I’m happy
to open my pages to a discussion. I’ve offered you to do that on this
critical issue, since you guys are interested in academic life, on the
AAUP’s atrocious new statement and its betrayal of its own mission.
If I can find common ground with Stanley Fish, who as you know is a
left-winger, I certainly should be able to find common ground with some
people at Campus Progress. You know, I’m going to regard you as a
kind of unique at the moment, I don’t know if I’m wrong about that.
You proved me wrong, I’m happy to be proven wrong. And I will look
at your statements and I wish I understood a little more about how your
organization is run. I’ve written a book on [George] Soros and the
Center for American Progress.
I think we’re less shadowy
than you think, would be my guess. And maybe you’re less shadowy than
we think.
I was going to say I think
that generally the rule. Can I close with this anecdote? Let me give
you an anecdote. Can I have one of those light bulb moments?
Yeah, sure.
I have a discussion group in
L.A. called The Wednesday Morning Club, and one of the members of my
steering committee asked me to invite Leon Panetta to speak. The discussion
audience is very conservative, and I said sure and Panetta came and
you know he used to be, he was once an important congressman and then
he was Clinton’s chief of staff right before Podesta, and he was Clinton’s
chief of staff during the Monica Lewinsky episode during the whole impeachment
thing. And he’s now got a… institute for statesmanship in Monterey.
And he gave a talk on civic virtues… and he was, it was all about
the kind of things that we all love to hear about civic responsibility
and bringing the community together, and he was critical of the Republicans
and he was critical of Clinton and Gore and he was just—anyway, my
audience loved it. And I came up to him afterwards and I said Mr. Panetta,
I said, “You know when I used to see you on the tube I wanted to throw
my shoe at the television, and now what you just said was marvelous.
What happened?” And he said to me, “Oh, that was just the partisan
thing,” and I suddenly saw that behind, in the political arena, I
knew this, you always have to be protecting your flanks and if you show
the slightest bit of openness they just jump down your throat and kill
you.
So I saw that behind all these masks I see on television, I can’t even hardly watch the talking heads, I don’t care I they’re Republicans or if they’re Democrats, the political operatives, everything has spin, it’s not a real conversation. This was such a refreshing idea and I really had hoped when—this is what I would like to see happen on campuses again. I think it’s tragic that our campuses have been so politicized. When I went to school a long time ago, it was in the 1950s, I never heard a professor, and I was a Marxist and this was the McCarthy era—I never heard one of my professors one time in one class express a political point of view. It was all about teaching. It was never about any kind of trying to persuade you to any political viewpoint. And there was very little political activity on campus—and it was something we complained about but in retrospect it allows you to think. If you’re always fighting political battles you never can think.
