POINTS ARER
THE END OF IDEOLOGY
It's sad to see the New Left go out on a sour note. Its
accomplishments are obscured by zealots like Daniel Berrigan, whose
latest blast at Israel -- in which one can hear the echoes of the New
Left -- leads one to question everything he has said and done. In a
moving piece in the
Voice
recently, Paul Cowan points out some of the
foolishness and ignorance behind Berrigan's pro-Arab remarks, but at–
tributes them mostly to his naivety and his overdeveloped sense of
justice. I'm afraid however that it was not so much Berrigan's high–
mindedness as his ideology that showed through his bad-tempered anti–
Israeli -- and anti-Jewish -- charges. And it is even clearer now than it
was in the sixties that Berrigan's ideology -- like that of much of the
New Left -- which was actually a watered down version of old Marxist
and Communist notions, was responsible for the dedication as well as the
narrowness of his politics. Of course, the final irony, which hardly needs
pointing up now, is that the movement that spawned freewheeling
doctrinaires like Berrigan began as a joose, populist, anti-ideological,
youthful, almost anarchist variety of idealism without ideology. Obvious–
ly, its particular brand of anti-ideology left it open to all the traditional
ideologies on the left.
FOOTNOTE TO TH E FIFTIES
It is in the nature of history, of course, to be rewritten by
each generation. But it is disturbing to think that what makes our sense
of the past contemporary at the same time distorts it.
For example, Morris Dickstein's strong 'piece on the fifties in this
issue, with much of which I agree, has a view of the Cold War and of the
anti-Communist spirit of the time that does not jibe with my own
experience. For one thing, I do not feel that the many complex literary
currents of the period can be explained by the Cold War atmosphere
which Dickstein believes dominated the fifties. Nor do I think the Cold
War was the American invention that revisionist history made it out to
be; and if it was an expression of the international conflict and not a
self-generating "Cold War mentality," then it alone could not be respon–
sible for the disruption of American culture, For the record, I should
also say that the overwrought anti-Communism Dickstein talks about
was not the whole show, and Dickstein's discussion of the Rosenberg
case also seems to me out of focus . Most of us were anti-Communist, and
properly so, but this was only one element in our left or liberal perspec–
tive. We were anti-Communists of the left. As for the Rosenbergs, many
people like myself thought they were guilty, but we were not gleeful or
bloodthirsty. The truth is that, unlike some of the New Left -- and the
Communists, of course - - we did not consider espionage a concern of
