…What it Should Teach the British Left
Ron Radosh
PJ Media
10/12/2013
You may not know the name Ralph Miliband, but by now, the late Marxist professor is a household name in the UK. He was the father of the Labor Party’s leader and possible future PM, Ed Miliband. When the conservative Daily Mail ran a story about the father’s influence on his son, the controversy began.
It started with an Oct.1 story by Geoffrey Levy, in which the journalist wrote that young Ed wants nothing less than to fulfill his father’s dreams, and return England from the legacy left by Margaret Thatcher to a new 21st Century socialism. “Ed is now determined to bring about that vision,” Levy writes. “How proud Ralph would have been to hear him responding the other day to a man in the street who asked when he was ‘going to bring back socialism’ with the words: ‘That’s what we are doing, sir.’”…
…The editors of The Daily Mail responded by saying that Ralph Miliband sought to drive “a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation so many of us genuinely love.”…
…David Horowitz proved with the rejection of his attempt to dialogue with Ralph Miliband that they had both belonged to “a community of faith, hermetically sealed from knowledge that might wake it from its dream.” Miliband could not even discuss the challenge Horowitz had put before him; had he done so, confronting the bitter truths might have led him too to the path of rejecting Marxism. That he could never do.
They still believed that “it was only ‘actually existing socialism that had failed; ‘real socialism’ had not yet been tried.” And so, the dream lived on, as it does today for Ralph Miliband’s son, Ed. The lessons Horowitz learned were costly for him; he lost many whom he thought were his friends, and was subject to vitriolic diatribes from those who could never learn from history. As far as they were concerned, he had nothing to teach them. Miliband obviously saw Horowitz only as a renegade who had betrayed him.
Our British friends, thus, would be wise to read David Horowitz’s “Road to Nowhere,”-his Open Letter- and Radical Son. There they will learn the truth about the late Ralph Miliband, who indeed was as his critics charge, a defender of the Soviet Union and of the Marxist faith.
Read the entire article at PJ Media.
Update: The Threat We Face
Below is a speech given by David Horowitz at the Kohler conference of the Bradley Foundation. It has been revised and edited for publication as an article.
I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a family of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and therefore were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction of this country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and so-called liberals would be the first to deny it…
…The president, his chief operative Valerie Jarrett and his chief political strategist David Axelrod all came out of the same Communist left and the same radical new left as I did, and all have remained heart and soul a part of it. As someone who turned his back on that destructive movement, I can say with confidence that they have not. If a person belongs to an organization or is the supporter of an idea that they come to see as destructive or evil, the first thing they will want to do when they leave is to warn others against it, to warn them of the dangers it represents. If a person does not do this – that tells me that he or she hasn’t left the destructive movement or abandoned the pernicious idea but has just put another face on them. Instead of calling themselves communists or socialists they call themselves liberals and progressives. This camouflage is very old. I never once heard my parents and their party friends refer to themselves as Communists. They were progressives – and registered Democrats…
