92 Comments
User's avatar
So Many Kinds of Voices's avatar

In his late 60's novel 'I Want It Now', Kinglsy Amis's protagonist flies to America. All he has to read is a book someone has handed him entitled 'LBJ: Tool of Fascism'. I quote from memory: 'After reading it, Ronnie found he liked LBJ rather more than any of the people whom the book's author liked.'

Expand full comment
Ed West's avatar

ha

Expand full comment
Steve Rogerson's avatar

I suspect that all the hectoring anti-racism; all the out and proud trans activism, all the shrill woke messages in so many pieces of so-called entertainment, all the DEI courses and denunciations of their fellow men as "racists/trans killers/upholders of the patriarchy have exactly the same effect on the ordinary man in the street (perhaps less so for the ordinary woman, but I hope I am wrong). To push them away from the message and the woke, towards their instinctive fairness and reasonableness. People don't like scolds and to be scolded.

Expand full comment
Finn's avatar

“there was awkwardness when some Czech dissidents asked her to speak up on behalf of political prisoners in that country. Her reply: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’”

Good to be reminded occasionally that there were some genuinely brave radicals in the 1960s - those stuck behind the iron curtain.

Expand full comment
Marwan Alblooshi's avatar

A bizarre spectacle of a civilization that is destroying itself out of boredom and manufactured self-loathing!

Expand full comment
Bill Jarett's avatar

Degenerate societal self cannibalism.

Expand full comment
Marwan Alblooshi's avatar

This happens all the time when great civilizations reach their peak! But don’t worry, the West will rise again; a great man from the Middle East predicted this with rather astonishing accuracy and acute sociological observation!

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

If you're talking about Jesus He never predicted any particular civilization or nation would triumph. Instead all would be judged and found wanting. Instead Heaven would triumph and we would all become citizens of His Kingdom as all else passed away.

Expand full comment
David Cockayne's avatar

And yet, it was us Europeans who moulded the faith to our liking and proceeded to conquer the world with it. The culmination of that victory being General Allenby's entry into Jerusalem in 1917. Not the triumph of Heaven but of the empire upon which the sun never set. All downhill since, of course.

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

It was not Christianity that conquered the world, but a mutant bastardized paganized idolatrous version of it that was coopted by the ruling class.

Expand full comment
David Cockayne's avatar

Tush: let's not rerun the Wars of Religion, much less the Crusades. Byzantium had its moment as did we. I wonder who's next? Current fashions notwithstanding, my money's on Buddhism with CCP characteristics.

Expand full comment
Neil C's avatar

Michael Moynihan always says that you can get away with any amount of violence as long as you provide breakfasts for local kids (like the Black Panthers did)

Expand full comment
StatisticsThomas's avatar

What a great overview. I read Tom Wolfe's column about the Black Panther party at the Bernstein's a year or so back. I wish that I hadn't, in the sense that it's so well-written, so perfect a piercing of their affected disingenuous posturing, that I've not been able to listen to anything by Bernstein since. His (Bernstein's) lectures about the development of western music, and in particular his description of what Beethoven was doing in the 5th, had been one of my life's pleasures. (I switched off the biopic about Bernstein after 25 minutes too.) Never look at your heroes (cognate with my desire that actors in general would shut up on social media; I can't watch them in anything after I've seen them making fools of themselves over infantile politics.)

That's all up my own backside, metaphorically! The point you are making is so important: that the intelligentsia bears a historical guilt for the succour it has repeatedly given to the revolutionary left and the inevitable violent sequellae. (You don't mention Beatrice and Sydney Webb, fawners over Stalin, arch-Fabians and progenitors of the LSE, for example. There are more examples than even virtual paper can carry.) Thank you.

Expand full comment
User's avatar
Comment deleted
Sep 26
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

Gramsci was not remotely connected to the 60s radicals. He would have dismissed the lot of them, as a bunch of decadent bourgeois playing at revolution. Gramsci advocated for a genuine working class culture instead of the

"false culture" defined by the owning classes.

Expand full comment
Conor Fitzgerald's avatar

Great stuff. Anyone interested should read up Norman Mailer’s role in the Jack Abbott fiasco, not expressly political but motivated by the same radical social impulses as the stuff you mention here. These people never change

Expand full comment
Ed West's avatar

Yeah it's grim. I mentioned it a while back https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-problem-of-crime-stockholm-syndrome

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

I don’t know what’s hit me more in the last few years.

The realisation that everything I’d grew up on; the idea of liberalism, of neutral institutions of ‘violence solves nothing’ was a lie; or the fact it took me to age 40 to realise it

Expand full comment
ChrisC's avatar

Honestly, as Ed's article points out, things have kind of gotten better. I like to remind people that John Kennedy was killed by a hard core communist and his brother (running for president) was killed by a "Palestinian activist". So, we have a ways to go to catch up with that level of violence.

Expand full comment
Stlrose's avatar

This comment is right, although its hard to believe things are better today. BLM vs. the Black Panthers, both were criminal organizations but BLM much to be preferred. The weather underground vs antifa, not so clear but antifa is kind of pitiful compared to the radicals of the late sixties early seventies.

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

Why would a hard core communist assassinate the fairly dovish JFK? Look what happened in Vietnam when the VP LBJ took over.

Expand full comment
Ed West's avatar

JFK was pretty hawkish!

Expand full comment
ChrisC's avatar

Oswald was a marxist utopian. He was kicked out of the USSR because of his endless complaints about how the Russians had screwed up communism. He viewed Cuba as the perfect communist society and revered Castro. He was enraged at Kennedy's anti-Castro policies, to the point of killing him.

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

He was a former US marine too. Before that he was a juvenile delinquent. But no, it was the Marxism what done it.

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

Yes, it's Oliver Stone's nonsense that JFK was going to wind down the Vietnam business. He was a dedicated Cold Warrior, as his brinksmanship with Cuba in 1962 showed.

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

He avoided direct conflict with the USSR by withdrawing US missiles from Turkey (as part of the secret agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis) and a year later: gosh, he’s been shot dead by a “hard core” communist!

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

Of all the nonsense that you hear on the BBC for instance, it is the guff about that crisis that amazes me most. It wasn’t the brink of WWIII, though it could have led to direct conflict in the Caribbean Sea. And the USSR didn’t back down, it got what it wanted (and the proximity of the missiles in Cuba to the US didn’t matter much anyway in the era of long-range bombers and ICBMs).

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

One misstep and Very Bad Things could have followed. The assassination of an archduke shouldn't have convulsed Europe into general war with millions dead and the map redrawn-- but it did.

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

I have the feeling that if he was a white supremacist we would all know that and conspiracy theories would get less airing

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

How many people on the street would be able to tell you Kennedy was killed by a hardcore communist I wonder

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

Or he was a veteran. Or mad. Or a patsy?

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

But is it true ? Lee Harvey Oswald was firing from a distance with only a medium-power firearm. He seems only to have winged JFK.

There's good reason to believe that the fatal shot came from nearby, from one of JFK's security men, either in panic or by design. Possibly at the instigation of James Angleton of the CIA, who was certainly cranky and fanatical enough.

And why did Jack Ruby, a criminal night club owner, shoot Lee Harvey Oswald ? It is difficult to believe it was from honest motives.

The main beneficiary of the assassination was LBJ, a politician of truly insane ambition, witness his running successfully for the Senate while suffering from a kidney disease and drenched constantly in the sweat of agony.

Expand full comment
Stuart Matheson's avatar

Goodness, it's hard to believe long-debunked "grassy knoll" conspiracy theories are still getting aired today. There's no good reason to believe any shots came from nearby.

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

This isn’t the grassy knoll theory.

There is good reason to believe Lee Harvey's shots weren't fatal. So whose was ?

It's almost impossible to get at the truth of the matter,

But Lee Harvey Oswald is a useful scapegoat for right-wing bigots (a depressingly common species nowadays) to blame.

JFK had many bitter enemies outside the Eastern Bloc - organised crime and far-right Cuban exiles, for starters.

Expand full comment
Stuart Matheson's avatar

Best evidence by far is that Oswald was the shooter. The gun was his, he left his work immediately after the shooting, he killed a policeman- never been contested-he went to an afternoon cinema show!!! He was almost certainly the one who had earlier in the year tried to shoot General Edwin Walker.

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

Oswald was certainly a shooter. But JFK had many enemies and probably another shooter.

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

While I am open-minded about Oswald (it seems clear he was at least trying to shoot JFK) you are right to point out the implausibility of life-long wrong-un Jack Ruby (not his real name) coming over all patriotic and shooting the alleged assassin. Amazing to think that Ruby’s conviction for the murder - captured on camera and in front of several witnesses, including police officers - was OVERTURNED on appeal! Sniff test not passed, m’lud.

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

It's possible something funny was up with Jack Ruby-- someone wanted to take out Oswald. But that still points to Oswald being the assassin, but maybe directed to do the job by some Other.

Expand full comment
Keith's avatar

Such unfairness makes me feel vaguely sick so goodness knows how people directly impacted by the lovely Angela Davis and co. must feel about the way they have been lionised.

There is a scene in Manon of the Spring where Manon hears two of her neighbours laughing about how they blocked her father's water source and ultimately caused his premature death. On overhearing this conversation, Manon gives out an unearthly scream, unable to bear the unfairness of what has been done to her father. The Weather Underground and Black Panthers victims' families must feel something like that.

Hard to know who to hate more, the Bernadette Dohrns of this world or the Leonard Bernsteins.

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

Please don't fall into hatred - that's THEIR currency.

Expand full comment
Keith's avatar

Hate is common to us all, not just the left. It's just that some people have been persuaded that to hate is wrong. I haven't, and have no idea where such a strange idea came from, though I could take a reasonable guess. I suppose some people would also say it's wrong for a man to feel jealousy when he sees his wife kissing another man. If the latter is okay but the former isn't, I can't see why.

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

It depends on what you mean by hate. Anger is sometimes a legitimate defence mechanism, as in the case of the affronted husband.

But serious hatred - where you seriously (not just in a moment of rage) wish someone dead - is murder, and murder is always wrong.

Expand full comment
Keith's avatar

Excuse me, but wishing someone dead is not murder. If it were, I would be a serial murderer. Even Keir Starmer hasn't suggested making thought crime an actual crime.

Expand full comment
Madjack's avatar

Disgusting violent amoral thug scum. I hate them all.

Expand full comment
JD Free's avatar

The terrorists won then, just as the terrorists win now. 9/11 has achieved a Muslim conquest of the West, and the DEI brigade will take down what's left of the resistance.

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

Did these things happen in another timeline? Sounds like nothing that happened here.

Expand full comment
Harbinger's avatar

...well timed essay Ed. Needs a wide distribution.

Expand full comment
Bill Jarett's avatar

This article reminds me why I absolutely abhor the baby boomer "New Left". Spoiled rotten degenerates vandalizing their inheritance and leaving us with the mess.

And thus why I am a conservative.

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

I was a teenage left-liberal in the late-Sixties, but considered violence abhorrent and scary.

Looking back, I think the Sixties (and early Seventies) Leftism was a loud echo of the triumphant Leftism of the 1940's. But it was only an echo and didn't in fact achieve very much.

The Left's success has been in the social sphere - esp the sexual and gender revolutions, in which the Left has had widespread public support.

Why were we so angry ? Here (and this is rather eerie) I think we were unconsciously channelling the hurt and rage of all the conscripts who had been slaughtered or traumatised in the two world wars and Korea.

The years from 1945-65 weren't a Golden Age; they only seem so in retrospect. They were smug, authoritarian and conformist. Above all, they weren't nearly so upright, patriotic or clean-living as they pretended to be. Which is why a few students were able to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

Authoritarian and conformist. Now you’re talking!

Expand full comment
Bill Jarett's avatar

Lol

Expand full comment
Bless America's avatar

Excellent article, thanks. I am a paid subscriber now!

I remember the Leonard Bernstein party. Back then- I was quite young- we all dismissed it as one of Maestro's eccentricities. At some point late in life, for example, he decided to take ballet lessons. But now as I read I see the dark aura of this entire history.

And what I wonder is if it belongs in the same maddening chapters on human nature or the fall of a civilisation as the current massive support of these type of people and so many others for Hamas, a designated terrorist group of savage actions , including against their own people, and world Islamic conquest ideology, and their excoriation of Israel and new Jew-hatred violence immediately after 10/7, before Israel had a chance to react. The jubilation in seeing Jews murdered by terrorists who desire our entire Western demise now somewhat links to the horrible history relayed here, and a new Western wave of terror idolisation, at our own suicidal expense, what Gad Saad terms " suicidal empathy". The terrorists are the victims to them.

Expand full comment
ChrisC's avatar

Nice summary of 60-70's history of leftist violence in America. A friend of mine said after Charlie Kirk's assassination, "the left has crossed a line now". I responded that they had crossed the line in 1791 and have never looked back.

Expand full comment
Sun god's avatar

Reminds me of a reverse of the situation in Weimar Germany. Hitler and Nazis repeatedly getting off lightly because of lenient conservative/reactionary judiciary. We know how that ended.

I suppose Weimar was quite different in some ways because parts of the state were controlled by the left, and others by the right, so would be working against each other amid weak democratic oversight. Nowadays perhaps only special forces units are right-wing -- if things really go down the drain, they'll probably be the ones stepping in to a power vacuum, as Dominic Cummings hinted at recently.

Expand full comment
Ed West's avatar

Yes that is a parallel I've thought about. the judges didn't approve of their action necessarily, but they were basically on the same side.

Expand full comment
Little known history's avatar

Although wasn't Hitler banned for speaking - considering what happened- a great argument for free speech.

Expand full comment
Michael's avatar

The judges seem ok with knifing people for burning a book

Expand full comment
Greg's avatar

Also, Bavaria was a big state that saw itself as almost independent - I believe it technically had its own king! Almost no one liked the Left there, partly because there had been a violent coup in 1919 by communists that was snuffed out by the authorities, but with the crucial help of the Freikorps - hard right ex-soldiers and future Nazis.

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

Didn’t work in Rhodesia

Expand full comment
Bill Jarett's avatar

Because the natives massively outnumbered the colonists.

Expand full comment
Lucas's avatar

Yeah it’s not a perfect comparison lol

Expand full comment
Tony Buck's avatar

Wasn't Maximilien Robespierre, the bloodiest of the French Revolutionaries, an idol of the Left ?

Come to think of it, he still is.

Robespierre and his Jacobin Party, were the main inspiration of Karl Marx's revolutionary politics. But Lenin thought that Robespierre had been too soft - a mistake that Lenin certainly didn't make in Russia.

It is well-known that Robespierre guillotined his fellow-Jacobin Georges Danton when the latter tried to stop the Terror, i.e. the guillotining and other murders. Less well-known is that he did so under the influence of his devoutly Catholic wife, going to confession and being reconciled with the Church in the process.

Expand full comment
JonF311's avatar

Re: But Lenin thought that Robespierre had been too soft - a mistake that Lenin certainly didn't make in Russia.

How was Robespierre "soft"? The guilotine did not sit idle gathering dust, and the erstwhile royal couple did not escape. The guy made some mistakes in his Reign of Terror, such as turning on his allies, and probably in overestimating the extent of his power and control. The people who overthrew him were not aristocratic reactionaries, but solid leftists themselves. France under the Directorate remained Europe's most radical nation state, and target for the monarchial powers around it.

Expand full comment