[Peace-discuss] Chomsky Reply re Irving Howe, Dissent, etc.

[David Green]

My feeling is that the origins of both neoconservatism
the broader social democratic backlash to the New Left
are in their resentment of the civil rights movement
as it moved North, and of New Left opposition to the
Vietnam War. The 1967 Middle East war came along at a
fortuitous time, when people from Howe to Podhoretz
could frame their resentments in terms of supporting
Israel, opposing anti-Semitism, etc. They had never
been much interested in Israel or A-S before that.

>From Znet reader:

Dear Professor Chomsky,

I just finished watching a documentary called "Arguing
the World," which chronicles the life and times of
Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Irving
Kristol.; While the last three all seemed to hold
pretty objectionable views (Kristol, in particular,
comes across as a clown), Irving Howe was presented as
someone who maintained his integrity and his
radicalism throughout his life.; I was wondering what
your thoughts were on Howe and his work?; Were any of
his writings useful to you and would you recommend
them to the younger generation?; Also, did you come
into contact with any of the four during the 60s as a
prominent anti-war activist and intellectual? The
documentary shows that they all were pretty tepid in
their criticisms of the Vietnam war (if they
criticized it at all) and mentions their denunciations
of the New Left and the student demonstrators. I
instantly wondered if you or Howard Zinn or some of
the other leaders of the anti-war movement had any
personal experiences dealing with them. Thanks again
for your time and tireless efforts


Reply from NC,

In my judgment, Howe's work in the 40s and 50s was
quite good. In the 40s, what I saw of his was mostly
in the Schachtmanite (Trotskyite) press, very sharp,
analytic, hard-hitting -- at least, that's my memory;
Personally, I couldn't go along with their dedication
to Leninist principles, but found a lot of the writing
on current affairs useful.; In the 50s, I thought his
book Politics and the Novel was very interesting.; He
and Lewis Coser founded Dissent in the early 50s.; I
thought it was a valuable journal, meriting then the
term "democratic socialist," often publishing material
that wouldn't have appeared elsewhere. Through the
60s, it began to change.; Howe despised the New Left.;
Dissent was mildly anti-war.; Their position in 1964
was that the US could not withdraw or there would be a
slaughter of all South Vietnamese anti-Communists: so
therefore the US had to carry out a huge slaughter in
South Vietnam and practically destroy the country
(sound familiar?).; Amazingly, they repeated this
stand after the war, proudly claiming that they had
been vindicated.; Howe and others were strongly
influenced by one of their old Schachtmanite comrades,
Milton Sacks, who had become a Vietnam specialist, was
working with the government, and was a super-hawk,
Sidney Hook-style. After the Israeli military victory
in 1967, he (and Dissent) changed quite
significantly.; Previously, Israel had been a marginal
issue for them and Zionism was regarded with some
contempt (at least as far as I recall).; But they
reacted like many other intellectuals to Israel's
smashing military victory -- with enormous
enthusiasm.; The Rambo image is very appealing to
intellectuals, not uncommonly.; The change was so
radical that by 1982, when considerable criticism was
developing -- even in the US, but more so in Europe --
of Israel's shocking crimes in its invasion of
Lebanon, the Israeli press referred to Howe
(ironically) as the last person who would be holding
up the blue and white flag when the ship was sinking.;
By the late 1960s, he was using "support for Israel"
as a weapon to beat his hated enemies: the New Left,
the anti-war movement, Dan Berrigan, etc.; He wrote
some really vile pieces, one of them an op-ed in the
NYT that he was particular proud of (included it as
the final piece of an anthology he edited), satirizing
the New Left "from Scarsdale to Palo Alto" (as
distinct from the working class blokes in his
department in Brandeis and the Dissent offices) as
fanatic anti-Semites and neo-fascists, also adding
some shameful and quite silly slanders about another
of his prime enemies, Sartre.; This was one part of an
extensive effort by US intellectuals, including those
regarded as left, to exploit "support for Israel" in
this manner, with ludicrous lies and slanders -- for
what it's worth, the New Left was mostly dovish
Zionist, including the journals they bitterly
denounced.; It's not unlike the Horowitz-Pipes-style
attacks on Columbia and the universities generally
today.; I wrote about it in some detail at the time,
some of it recently reprinted.; Norman Finkelstein has
as well, with far more extensive discussion of the
more general background of which it was an ugly
part.One can make what one likes of the correlation,
but it's hard to ignore that as these transitions took
place, Howe's reputation changed too.; He became a
leading humanist and defender of everything that is
right and just.; Quite typical. I knew Howe
personally, and ran into Glazer occasionally, but
don't want to go into the personal aspects.; Glazer
too had been a Trotskyite, but by the 60s was pretty
much of a hawk, and has often sunk pretty low.;; I
haven't asked, but I suspect that they despised Howard
Zinn just as they did Berrigan (and me, for what it's
worth).; These are the folks who now modestly describe
themselves as the "decent left," upholding the noble
cause against the maniacs of left and right.; They do
give arguments against the right, but for their
enemies on the left they rarely go beyond tantrums and
hysteria, often quite comical.; Paul Street has
written about it, sometimes on Znet.