By Brian Carnell

Monday, July 10, 2000

Unlike David Horowitz, I do not find anything particularly edifying about repeating the Pledge of Allegiance before starting school (I attended a public school where nobody ever said the Pledge), and do not see the point of right wing creation myths along the lines of the film "The Patriot," but Horowitz does manage a decent point or two in his latest diatribe for Salon, "The smearing of 'The Patriot'."

Attacking |The Nation| publisher Victor Navasky's view of patriotism (which constitutes protesting and marching against the United States rather than saluting the American flag) Horowitz writes:

 This is really the core alibi of the left. It is a favorite, for example, of the most prominent intellectual America-hater of our time, MIT professor Noam Chomsky, who invariably uses it to explain why he is able to muster such fervent hostility for his own country's imperfect democracy while speaking from the platform of a Marxist dictatorship, as he did in Nicaragua during the 1980s.

 But the hypocrisy here is readily exposed. If it is a more authentic form of loyalty to attack the failings of one's own house, then why are leftists, like Navasky and Chomsky, so zealous in covering up the crimes of the left? The Nation was perhaps the last media institution in America to admit the guilt of the Rosenberg spies, or the crimes of the Black Panthers, let alone of the monster Pol Pot. It has still not made its peace with the guilt of Alger Hiss. For decades Nation writers -- and leftists generally -- made pariahs of the Trotskyist critics of the |Stalin| regime and actively colluded in the coverup of Communist atrocities throughout the Cold War.

That seems pretty spot on to me -- for individuals willing to say it is their first duty to question the very nation that claims to be a shining beacon of freedom (which is certainly a worthy pursuit), people such as Chomsky seem unwilling to go very far in criticizing their own movement. Chomsky has no problem calling Milton Friedman a liar, but given the opportunity to say a word against |Michael Parenti|'s pro-Soviet apologia on Z Magazine's discussion forums, Chomsky was uncharacteristically reticent to denounce a defender of tyranny.

On the other hand, Horowitz does not do much to redeem himself with his defense of "The Patriot" when he glosses over the film's depiction of slavery by claiming that,

But it is a historical fact that there were free blacks in the antebellum South. Their presence in the film is not an oversight but a calculation. "The Patriot" forcefully embraces the idea that the American revolution and black freedom is one continuum.

It is true that there were free blacks in the South during colonial times, but close to one-fifth of the entire population of colonial America were black slaves. To focus on the experiences of a very tiny percentage of free blacks is absurd. Imagine a Leftist film about prisons in the Soviet Union which only dealt with individuals guilty of murder or rape who got their just desserts while in prison? Horowitz would rant and rave until the cows came home about the terrible disservice done by ignoring political prisoners, and he would be right. By ignoring the plight of the general slave population and focusing on free Blacks, "The Patriot" does a terrible disservice to history (and, as I have written previously, ignores the tension between freedom and slavery that was so important to the Revolution and the cause of freedom in general).

It is just as absurd for "The Patriot" to ignore the real issues of slavery as it is for Philip A. Klinkner to write in the July 3, 2000 issue of The Nation (in a set of book reviews denouncing Ward Connerly and praising Randall Robinson's argument in favor of reparations for descendants of slaves) that, "Throughout American history, in nearly every instance in which they have been given a direct vote on the matter, the majority of white Americans have rejected any measure beneficial to the interests of blacks. At times, such propositions have passed, but only with a coalition of a majority of minorities and a minority of whites."

It seems both right and left find straightforward, mythical tales of good and evil more useful for their respective causes than the unvarnished, though often ambiguous, history.

Source:

The smearing of "The Patriot". David Horowitz, Salon.Com, July 10, 2000.

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