The Enduring Dangerous Legacy of the Sixties New Left

by Ron Radosh

The New Left is already pretty old, and for many, quite irrelevant. As many liberals argued during the 2008 campaign, trying to smear Obama by bringing up his friendship with Bill Ayers was as silly and irrelevant as Democrats “waving the bloody shirt” years after the Civil War in campaigns against Republicans, or Democrats running against Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression in the post-World War II era.
Now, however, two articles have appeared that offer a direct challenge to the view that the old theories of the ’60s Left are completely irrelevant in today’s 21^st century world. First, writing in his blog at the website of World Affairs Journal, British professor Alan Johnson ties together the anti-Zionism and hatred of Israel of today’s leftists with that originated in the 60s by its earlier brethren. Johnson recalls how 35 years ago this week, two young German leftists were among those who hijacked an Air France jet and flew it to Entebbe, where they and Arab terrorists set about separating Jewish from non-Jewish passengers, and prepared to execute the Jews.
How, he asks, did idealistic New Leftists join with Arab terrorists in an act that mimicked the policies of Hitler’s regime, especially since these leftists all thought of themselves as anti-fascists? Johnson writes:

The answer lies in modern left-wing “anti-Zionism.” But to understand that phenomenon, we must go deeper still, to the worldview cultivated in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s.
In the decidedly non-calloused hands of this largely student, spectacularly arrogant, but largely know-nothing New Left, an already-authoritarian Marxism became completely unmoored from the working class, the West, and democracy and moored instead to ideologies of the noble savage, fantasies of “Third World Revolution” and an irrational belief in the redemptive power of violence. The New Left saw the world in a very peculiar way. A third world “periphery” was pitted against the metropolitan “center” and “good” oppressed nations were at war with “bad” oppressor nations. “Camp” replaced “class” as the track along which a great deal of left-wing thought would now run.

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