That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.
Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done;
Here where my dearest dead are laid—my wife—my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove?
For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze—
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June’s long-lighted days?
You’ll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean
To Arelate’s triple gate; but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!
You’ll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock’s neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean shines.
You’ll go where laurel crowns are won, but—will you e’er forget
The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet?
Let me work here for Britain’s sake—at any task you will—
A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to drill.
Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border keep,
Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates sleep.
Legate, I come to you in tears—My cohort ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind—the only life I know.
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!
The Islanders, by Rudyard Kipling
Editor’s Introduction
We have legends of the time after the Legions departed and a Romanized Briton called Artorius was named Dux and charged with protecting the land from the Saxons. Arthur failed, and the Saxons were supreme, to be conquered in their turn by the Danes, then the Normans under William. Norman and Saxon and Celt fused into one people who proudly gave the world the notion of ordered liberty; and built an empire on which the sun never set. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was clear that the British Empire, like the Roman, would bring peace and order to the world. Empire has a price, though; and secure behind the shelter of the English Channel, the Islanders were unwilling to pay it. In 1902 Kipling thought it worth while to warn his people that wealth and laziness do not last long in this world.
It is a lesson that each nation, each generation, must learn in its own way; for the new Islanders of the United States seem to have forgotten.
The Islanders
Rudyard Kipling
No doubt but ye are the People—your throne is above the King’s.
Whoso speaks in your presence must say acceptable things:
Bowing the head in worship, bending the knee in fear—
Bringing the word well smoothen—such as a King should hear.
Fenced by your careful fathers, ringed by your leaden seas,
Long did ye wake in quiet and long lie down at ease;
Till ye said of Strife, “What is it?” of the Sword, “It is far from our ken”;
Till ye made a sport of your shrunken hosts and a toy of your armed men.
Ye stopped your ears to the warning—ye would neither look nor heed—
Ye set your leisure before their toil and your lusts above their need.
Because of your witless learning and your beasts of warren and chase,
Ye grudged your sons to their service and your fields for their camping-place.
Ye forced them glean in the highways the straw for the bricks they brought;
Ye forced them follow in byways the craft that ye never taught.
Ye hampered and hindered and crippled; ye thrust out of sight and away
Those that would serve you for honour and those that served you for pay.
Then were the judgments loosened; then was your shame revealed,
At the hands of a little people, few but apt in the field.
Yet ye were saved by a remnant (and your land’s long-suffering star),
When your strong men cheered in their millions while your striplings went to the war.
Sons of the sheltered city—unmade, unhandled, unmeet—
Ye pushed them raw to the battle as ye picked them raw from the street.
And what did ye look they should compass? Warcraft learned in a breath,
Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?
So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?
How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?
But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”
And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:
And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,
Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.
Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie,
Ye saw that the land lay fenceless, and ye let the months go by
Waiting some easy wonder, hoping some saving sign—
Idle—openly idle—in the lee of the forespent Line.
Idle—except for your boasting—and what is your boasting worth
If ye grudge a year of service to the lordliest life on earth?
Ancient, effortless, ordered, cycle on cycle set,
Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget
It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with the deep.
Men, not gods, devised it. Men, not gods, must keep.
Men, not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from afar,
But each man born in the Island broke to the matter of war.
Soberly and by custom taken and trained for the same,
Each man born in the Island entered at youth to the game—
As it were almost cricket, not to be mastered in haste,
But after trial and labour, by temperance, living chaste.
As it were almost cricket—as it were even your play,
Weighed and pondered and worshipped, and practiced day and day.
So ye shall bide sure-guarded when the restless lightnings wake
In the womb of the blotting war-cloud, and the pallid nations quake.
So, at the haggard trumpets, instant your soul shall leap
Forthright, accoutred, accepting—alert from the wells of sleep.
So at the threat ye shall summon—so at the need ye shall send
Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end;
Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise,
Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice…
But ye say, “It will mar our comfort.” Ye say, “It will minish our trade.”
Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?
For the low, red glare to southward when the raided coast-towns burn?
(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time to learn.)
Will ye pitch some white pavilion, and lustily even the odds,
With nets and hoops and mallets, with rackets and bats and rods?
Will the rabbit war with your foemen—the red deer horn them for hire?
Your kept cock-pheasant keep you?—he is master of many a shire.
Arid, aloof, incurious, unthinking, unthanking, gelt,
Will ye loose your schools to flout them till their brow-beat columns melt?
Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back from your shore?
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?
Will ye rise and dethrone your rulers? (Because ye were idle both?
Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?)
No doubt but ye are the People; who shall make you afraid?
Also your gods are many; no doubt but your gods shall aid.
Idols of greasy altars built for the body’s ease;
Proud little brazen Baals and talking fetishes;
Teraphs of sept and party and wise wood-pavement gods—
These shall come down to the battle and snatch you from under the rods?
From the gusty, flickering gun-roll with viewless salvoes rent,
And the pitted hail of the bullets that tell not whence they were sent.
When ye are ringed as with iron, when ye are scourged as with whips,
When the meat is yet in your belly, and the boast is yet on your lips;
When ye go forth at morning and the noon beholds you broke,
Ere ye lie down at even, your remnant, under the yoke?
No doubt but ye are the People—absolute, strong, and wise;
Whatever your heart has desired ye have not withheld from your eyes.
On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!
Another “Low Dishonest Decade” on the Left, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz
Editor’s Introduction
It is an occupational habit for actors on the political stage to distort the truth, for reasons and in ways that vary with the nature of the power they hold. Autocrats, in direct control of all means of communication and expression, disguise the present and rewrite the past. Democrats, whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues’ substance. Their skill in presenting their case almost entirely replaces their interest in the facts. So that in free societies the past is sometimes misrepresented, not, as in slave societies, by crude censorship and lies, but suavely, through legitimate persuasion and the free propagation of an adulterated or entirely bogus version of an event. With repetition, this version joins the body of accepted ideas, those the masses believe; it acquires the status of truth, so firmly that hardly anyone thinks of checking the original facts for confirmation.
—Jean-Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish, Doubleday, 1983
Democracies perish because no one defends them. The public no longer heeds the call to arms. Why fight for a corrupt regime? It is immoral to think of the enemy’s sins; we must concentrate on our own. The call to arms is sounded, but few answer.
Peter Cottier and David Horowitz understand this all too well. Co-authors of The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty and The Kennedys: An American Drama, they founded Ramparts magazine and were leaders of the antiwar movement in the sixties. They have much to say about the lessons of that time.
Another “Low Dishonest Decade” on the Left
Peter Collier and David Horowitz
We first became involved with the New Left—that movement which eventually degenerated into the devious and dishonest Left of today—at the end of the 1950s, a time when McCarthyism was dying and a new radical movement was struggling to be born in demonstrations against the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The “end of ideology” had ended; Khrushchev had admitted that what a previous generation of leftists had regarded as “anti-Soviet lies” about Stalin’s crimes had actually been true. What attracted us to this new political atmosphere was the opportunity to be leftists in a new way: not as the servile agents of a foreign power, but as members of an indigenous radical movement. Along with other early New Leftists, we regarded members of the Old Communist Left as figures to be scorned—people who were (in both meanings of the term) boring from within: intriguers with a discredited intrigue who always lurked on the fringes of our meetings, trying to find a group, any group, they could infiltrate.
The New Left saw itself as a movement which would design its own future—a sort of activist American-studies curriculum. The phrase “participatory democracy” captured its intention to make the promise of America real. Its first campaign—for civil rights—was based on a belief in this promise. Ultimately the Vietnam war provided the occasion for this optimism to ferment and then to sour. The speed with which the New Left became disaffected from the country and from its own early ideals, and the fact that this happened with so little resistance, suggests that the movement had a split personality from the outset—one part believing in America and the other not believing in anything. Ruminating about the instant alienation of the New Left, Paul Goodman, one of its earliest mentors, thought that its leading characteristic was a “loss of patriotic feeling.” He wrote: “For the first time… the mention of country, community, place, has lost its power to animate. Nobody but a scoundrel even tries it.”
That loss of patriotic feeling led the New Left to declare war against America, matching every escalation in Vietnam with an escalation of its own in the conflict at home. Sympathy for America’s alleged victims developed into an identification with America’s real enemies. By the end of the ‘60s participatory democracy was a language no longer spoken on the Left. The slogans changed. “Bring the boys home” became “Bring the war home.” The organizations changed, too. In 1969, a year after Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the heart of the New Left—had converted to Marxism-Leninism, its convention broke into various factions chanting the names of Chairman Mao and Uncle Ho, dictators of China and North Vietnam who had become its household gods.
In its later, rococo phase some members of the New Left dallied with the Soviet Union, revising our earlier revisionism. (Deep in his Black Panther period, Eldridge Cleaver claimed that Stalin was “a brother off the block,” while Trotsky was a “white bourgeois intellectual.”) But for the most part this dalliance was nothing more than rhetorical posturing, and the Soviets remained stigmatized.
Not so the romantic revolutionaries of the Third World. SDS delegations met with the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Cuba and Czechoslovakia as well as North Vietnam, and agreed to collaborate with their war effort by providing propaganda advice and orchestrating a campaign to demoralize American troops in the field and to create disorder and disruption back home. Anti-war activists with Old Left politics like Cora Weiss and guilty liberals like Reverend William Sloane Coffin went to Hanoi to second the cause. After visiting American POW’s whom the Communists had tortured, they assured the world that American prisoners were being treated well. In 1969 a group of radicals, including the SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn and the prominent Castro apologist Saul Landau, traveled to Cuba where they met with Vietnamese officials and also launched the “Venceremos Brigades.” The ostensible reason for this effort was to help with the Cuban sugar harvest. The real reason was to map out strategies for war in America, the “other” war which would ultimately defeat the United States in a way that the battlefield situation in Vietnam never could have done.
As editors of Ramparts, then the most widely read magazine of the New Left, we were dubious about the totalitarian enthusiasms of people like Weiss, Landau, and Dohrn. When confronted with these tendencies we argued against them. One almost amusing “struggle session” occurred when, shortly after the return of the Venceremos Brigades, members of the pro-Castro North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) came into our offices with an article. It purported to be a report on the progress of “socialist democracy” in Cuba, focusing on the recent passage of an anti-laziness law as evidence of the “people’s rule” and claiming that some three million Cubans, about half the population, had actively participated in the making of this law. We asked the obvious question: if the civic involvement was this high, why was the law necessary? In the confrontation that followed, NACLA members told us that, because of our “white skin privileges,” we had no right to question anything Third World r
evolutionaries did. In the words of one of the NACLA spokesmen, “You should do your revolutionary duty. Print the piece and shut up about it.”
But while we rejected the crude propaganda of people we regarded even then as Castro’s agents, we did provide a platform in 1969 for the more sophisticated apologetics of Susan Sontag, who catechized our readers on “The Right Way (For Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution.” The issue of Ramparts in which this piece appeared accurately captured the ethos that had come to prevail in the New Left. Over the cover photograph of a wholesome six-year-old carrying a Vietcong flag were these words: “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.”
Like most of the Movement, we presumed that a Vietcong victory would mean a peasant Utopia in Southeast Asia. But we were less concerned with what happened in Vietnam than with making sure that America was defeated. A fundamental tenet of our New Leftism was that America’s offenses against Vietnam were only a fraction of its larger imperial sins. We shared with most others on the Left its most implausible and destructive myth: that America had become rich and powerful not by its own efforts but by making the rest of the world impotent and poor.
To force America’s global retreat had become for us the highest good and we were willing to accomplish this end, in one of the odious catch phrases of the day, “by any means necessary.” Our most significant opportunity came when we developed a contact with a young man who had just quit a job as a cryptanalyst with the National Security Agency (NSA) because of his disillusionment with the Vietnam war. At the time, few people knew anything about this top-secret agency which processed some 80 percent of the intelligence the U.S. gathered. Prodding our “defector,” we developed an article that described the operations of the NSA in detail and also revealed its capabilities for deciphering Soviet codes, then one of the most deeply embedded of all American intelligence secrets and one whose revelation would have profound consequences.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 11