David Horowitz



David Joel Horowitz (born January 10, 1939) is an American conservative writer and activist. A prominent supporter of Marxism and a member of the New Left in the 1960s, Horowitz later rejected Leftism and now identifies with the right wing of the political spectrum.

1960s

 * Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution.
 * from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.


 * More than ever before, for humanity to live under capitalism, is to live on borrowed time.
 * from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.


 * For the continuing worldwide oppression of class, nation and race, the incalculable waste and untold misery, the unending destruction and preparation for destruction and the permanent threat to democratic order that characterize the rule of capitalism in this, its most technically advanced, most "enlightened" and most materially wealthy era now threaten human survival itself. In the age of atomic weapons and intercontinental missiles, the predatory system of imperialist rivalry and global exploitation, of military intervention and counterrevolutionary war, faces mankind with the prospect of the ultimate barbarism.
 * from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.

1990s

 * If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?


 * In the sociology of the left, including the NAACP, there cannot be a wound the black community inflicts on itself that is not ultimately the responsibility of malicious whites.


 * Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims of the genocidal campaign that white America is waging against them.
 * from the 1999 book Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes.

2001

 * The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?

2003

 * On campuses across this country, embedded in the leadership of every radical "anti-war" protest group, are organizations that promote the culture of Islamic terrorism and its anti-Western, anti-Israeli and anti-American agendas. One that will serve as an example for the others is the radical Muslim Student Association (MSA). The Muslim Student Association is an organization financed by the Saudis and also by student funds at every university where it operates. The ideas and enthusiasms that it promotes among impressionable college students should give every American cause for concern.


 * They are radical groups who identify with the violent jihad of Islamacist terror organizations like al-Qaeda, Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. And they have the support of a radical culture that regards America as the Great Satan, and Muslims and Arabs as the people whom America oppresses.


 * Baghdad is liberated. In the days to come let us not forget that if it was not for one man, and one man alone &mdash; George Bush &mdash; the people of Iraq would not be celebrating in the streets and pulling down Saddam's statues today... We have entered the era of a new civil war between the forces of freedom and the powers of Islamo-fascist and communist darkness, and once again the left is clearly determined to take its stand on the other side. The good news is that America is back. Our military has performed superlatively. Our leadership has stood tall. We ourselves can celebrate over this and look confidently towards what lies ahead.


 * Politics is about winning. If you don’t win, you don’t get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

2006

 * Until the arrival of Arafat and the Palestinian terrorists, Lebanon was a Christian democracy. But Islamic radicalism could not tolerate either Christianity or democracy. This — not the presence of tiny Israel (one hundred times smaller than its current antagonists) is the root cause of the violence in the Middle East. The cause is Arab intolerance and Islamic hate. One Jewish state among 22 Arab states was one too many. Six million Jews among 300 million Arabs was too much to bear. A sliver of land, less than one percent of the Arab land mass, which belonged to first to the Turks and then to the British was an imperialist outrage.


 * The source of the terror in Lebanon as in Iraq is to be found in the Koran and in the despotisms of the Arab Middle East.

2008

 * We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to five Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the four liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?
 * Horowitz speaks about Obama birth certificate doubters.

2009

 * I have written a book with Jacob Laksin about universities called One Party Classroom. Among other things, the title highlights the fact that so-called liberals have purged American faculties of conservative voices. It has been the most successful witch-hunt in American history.

2013

 * I'm an agnostic, but I understand that a book like the Bible that has been around as long as it has, because there is wisdom in it. People don't read over two thousand years, four thousand years, a book that doesn't have wisdom. Think of the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve were given paradise. It's better than anything that Nanci Pelosi promises, the garden of Eden, they didn't have to work, there was no pain, they lived forever, plucked fruit from the trees, but, there was one rule, which was: "Do not eat of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil", don't eat from that tree. Well, our foreparents were too ornery to obey that law and so they were expelled from the garden, and God put an angel with a flaming sword in the entrance to Eden. This is a very important parable for understanding where we are. An angel with a flaming sword to prevent human beings from returning to Eden, only by a divine hand, could we return. The whole agenda of the left, is to return us to Eden.
 * Young America's Foundation conference at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara - YouTube

Quotes about

 * In Brazil, it goes like this: communists only read communist authors, (economic) liberals only read liberal authors and so on. Each one is afraid of tarnishing their little soul with sinful thoughts. In order for someone to speak with some propriety about the communist movement, they must have previously studied the following things:


 * 1) The classics of Marxism: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong.
 * 2) The most important Marxist philosophers: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Althusser.
 * 3) Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski.
 * 4) Some good history and sociology books about the revolutionary movement in general, such as Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington, The Pursuit of the Millenium, by Norman Cohn, The New Science of Politics, by Eric Voegelin.
 * 5) Good books on the history of communist regimes written from a non-apologetic point of view.
 * 6) Books by the most famous critics of Marxism, like Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, Raymond Aron, Roger Scruton, Nicolai Berdiaev and so many others.
 * 7) Books about the communist strategy and tactics on their rise to power, about the underground activities of the movement in the West and chiefly about the "active measures" (disinformation, agents of influence), like those by Anatolyi Golitsyn, Christopher Andrew, John Earl Haynes, Ladislaw Bittman, Diana West.
 * 8) The largest number possible of testimonies by former communist agents and militants who recall their experience in service of the movement or communist governments, such as Arthur Koestler, Ian Valtin, Ion Mihai Pacepa, Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz.
 * 9) High-value testimonies about human condition in socialist societies, like those by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vladimir Bukovski, Nadiejda Mandelstam, Alexander Soljenítsin, Richard Wurmbrand.


 * This is a reading program that can be accomplished in four or five years by a good student. I do not know, either in the Brazilian right or left, anyone, absolutely anyone, who has accomplished it.
 * Olavo de Carvalho, in Estudar antes de falar, Diário do Comércio, 13 August 2013