Reddit Reddit reviews Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist

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2 Reddit comments about Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist:

u/Plutarch_Rime · 2 pointsr/conservatives

I have always had, even at the times I sympathized most with the Left -- such as its opposition to the wars of the 21st century and the various outrages that went with them -- a visceral reaction to communism in general. Communism never "sounded good to me on paper." It was never "a beautiful dream, for another age." It was always just a nightmare to me. I just never held my own social class in any special esteem. There is me, I, and then the rest of the world, and that's how it's always been. Not by choice; by configuration. That is how I was wired at birth: as an individualist.

I always liked Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the Grapes of Wrath and sympathized with these strolling dustbowl troubadours and the like, many of which were communists, or fellow travelers, or at least pink around the edges.

This caused me an amazing amount of cognitive dissonance because there's a lot of interesting stuff in Lefty culture - the Wobblies and the early 20th century labor movement, and the music, in particular. I like that stuff. My collection of Phil Ochs and Billy Bragg and the Broadside stuff could stand up against that of even the most stubborn Red Diaper Baby.

I had this funny experience in college -- as a political science undergrad, I took a course - Introduction to Labor Studies, with a visiting professor who described himself, on the first day, as the only "actual card-carrying Red" in the department. He'd been an organizer, had been arrested, and I liked the guy very much. He was a lot different from the ivory tower socialists I was used to in the rest of the political science department.

Most of my profs were very obviously privileged, from a higher social caste than I was, and yet lecturing me about this working class concern, or that working class concern, their smooth fingers pushing up expensive designer eyeglass frames periodically.

But this Labor prof was sunburned, calloused. A lot more like those dustbowl types, but, Puerto Rican.

Anyway so one of the things going on in the class is a discussion of the culture - the anarchists - (Goldman, etc.), and the teacher, who by this point knew I'd grown up a young conservative, was somewhat irked that I was the only one in class who knew the songs, the history, because I'd been fascinated with it since a kid. I've watched the Left anthropologically (if informally) and occasionally rubbed shoulders on those few specific issues where paleoconservatism, libertarianism, and socialism meet -- generally as relates to foreign policy.

And it is amazing how few people I'd meet who were like this professor, or those Dust Bowl types. No -- the kinds of communists I'd meet were inevitably these lily-white, upper-middle class types.

I want to use the word "poseur" to describe them, except that's unfair to them -- a lot of them were, at least at the time, committed and emotionally invested to the point of frothing at the mouth. But there was, especially when they got going, a kind of meanness to them, a kind of misanthropy directed at anyone outside what at the time I thought was their political set.

I got it wrong: not their political set, their social set. It took years for me to understand why I found these people so damn objectionable, beyond their obvious privilege: it was like a social clique. Young modern Leftists party with each other, drink with each other, fuck each other, do drugs with each other, march with each other. There was a whiff of high school to it. (See any Leftie subreddit - in particular the catty lunchtable of /r/ShitRedditSays.)

The other thing about these people was just how little actual real work they'd done. Tom Joad and that set were working in agricultural fields breaking their backs. And more than once I got the sense that, "come the revolution..." these people were under the impression they'd get their bread and roses for being propagandists. Like they'd deserve it as much as the people who had to till the fields, work on assembly lines -- all of the things communists sing songs about and wax nostalgic about (because communists have a specific streak of conservatism that is always nostalgically looking at the past -- in large part because, given the marginal nature of these movements, it is necessary to connect oneself to these great historical moments like the Spanish Civil War in order to take oneself seriously. Or maybe I'm just being snarky.)

This part of the interview was particularly interesting:

> FP: You mention that your dad was a communist. Tell us about his world view and how this affected your family and your own intellectual journey.

> Dalrymple: My father was a communist though he was also a businessman. Our house was full of communist literature from the 1930s and 40s, and I remember such authors as Plekhanov and Maurice Hindus and Edgar Snow. It was always clear that my father's concern for humanity was not always matched by his concern for men, to put it mildly, for whom (as individuals) he often expressed contempt. He found it difficult to enter an equal relationship with anyone, and preferred to play Stalin to their Molotov. We had The Short Course in the house, incidentally, and one of my favourite books (which I used to leaf through as a child) was a vast picture book of the Soviet Union in 1947.

> I think the great disjunction between my father's expressed ideas (and ideals) and his everyday conduct affected me, and made me suspicious of people with grand schemes of universal improvement.

The Left is in love with the Left, and, on paper at least, with the people whose plight it purports to join in solidarity with. It would be interesting to see exactly how far the comradeship would go between a young communist from Bard College, and some po'bucker Pentecostal miner in Appalachia -- and more to the point, what the po'bucker Pentecostal miner would make of the inevitably soft, effete communist from the Northeast.

Speaking of Frontpage, I'd spent a lot of years reading these books about the New Left - the SDS, Weather Underground, and groups like this. They're very self-aggrandizing -- especially see Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days, his truthy book about his days with the Weathermen. The book itself is a spectacle. I have to believe there are modern communists out there who want to say something like, "Well that's Billy Ayers," but I strongly suspect (I lurk in a lot of Leftish forums) that this is quite typical of the way most of the Left sees itself in the mirror.

It's not what I see.

Speaking of Frontpage, if I could recommend one book by David Horowitz (and Peter Collier), it's Destructive Generation - the only counterpoint to the dozens of self-congratulatory books the New Left has written about itself.

For those who don't know, Horowitz is the founder of Frontpage magazine, and an ex-Leftie himself, once writing for the 60s and 70s New Left publication Ramparts. In it, he reflects back on all of these Leftish heroes (like Huey Newton). I'm sure people all over the Left think it's a smear. But why I liked it is, in reading all of these self-congratulatory memoirs about the 60s and the Left, I always got the sense of whitewash -- even by the best writers. Something about Destructive Generation rings true -- not because I was there, but because of what I always sensed in between the lines of those self-satisfied reminiscences and hagiographies of 60s personalities.

Some other great stuff in here:

> Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.

Speaking of /r/shitredditsays...

u/BoneyNicole · 2 pointsr/politics

Oh boy, haha. Way to open Pandora's box here.

My own work is primarily on British riots, but I have a broader interest in mass movements in general. I'll recommend the book I mentioned in my comment - Eric Hoffer's The True Believer and Bill Ayers' Fugitive Days to start. Ayers is somewhat controversial because Ayers, but that book is incredibly thought-provoking and valuable.

Less controversial but no less thought-provoking (and currently relevant considering our depressing state of climate-change denial) is Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World - it's a book about our changing perceptions of the world around us.

Finally, before I give you an 80-page list, I'm going to recommend this one. Peter Novick's That Noble Dream - I don't expect anyone but nerds like me to read this, but if more people understood the study of history itself as a constantly changing profession and philosophy (as well as science) I think the general population would see the value in it more. History isn't a static thing, and the way we approach it has changed dramatically in 150 years.