More on Leftists Who Turned Right
Tikkun Editor Michael Lerner, who is quoted in Bob Sipchen’s profile of Peter Collier and me, is entitled to have any opinion about our present politics he likes, but he does not have license to rewrite the past.
He describes Peter Collier and myself as “camp followers of political correctness” during the ‘60s and me as “a Black Panther cheerleader.” He claims that few others on the left “were so naive as to embrace (the Panthers) unskeptically.”
These are all baldfaced lies. The Panthers were officially declared “the vanguard of the revolution” by Students for a Democratic Society, the largest organization of the New Left, and regarded as heroes by people as diverse as Angela Davis and Leonard Bernstein.
I never publicly cheered the Panthers. What I did was raise money for a school they ran, after they claimed to have “put away the gun” and had turned to community projects.
Far from being politically correct, I never joined a New Left organization and was frequently attacked as an editor of Ramparts for my critical essays on Maoism, the Weather Underground, SDS Marxists and the North Vietnamese Communists.
DAVID HOROWITZ
Studio City
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