Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Leftism: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Author:Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn [Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Erik von]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History
ISBN: 9780870001437
Publisher: Arlington House
Published: 1974-11-15T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 19

The New Left

To begin with, the New Left is not so very new and it is not genuinely left either. Its existence, however, cannot be understood without a knowledge of the leftish soil in which the new plant started to grow. Furthermore, this newcomer on our ideological scene must be viewed as a reaction against our present profoundly left-influenced culture and civilization. Here we also have to face the fact that much of the New Left’s critique of our way of life is—unknowingly rather than knowingly—copied from conservative sources. Finally, one can only fully comprehend the New Left if one realizes that it happens to be tied in with the student movement, the “academic unrest,”1 as well as with the worldwide disillusionment with the Classic Left, which by now is morally bankrupt. (Moral bankruptcy, unfortunately, causes physical decline only in the very long run.) In its refusal to yield to the right, the New Left, moreover, shows us its profile against the background of all the many gruesome failures of the leftist movements, the leftist establishments which have accumulated in the last 200 years. Yet it is equally certain that the New Left cannot take over the receivership, the inheritance of the Great Leftist Drive because it offers no real alternatives: Unlike genuine leftism it has produced neither a coherent ideology nor a concrete utopia. It offers criticisms but no real answers.

Let us first look at the geographic origins of the New Left. In 1918 we have grave political disorders at the University of Córdoba in Argentina. The year 1918 was bad and Córdoba has bad memories. The Córdoba massacres in the 1820s mark a low point in Argentine history, a low point not so easily overcome.2 After 1918 the disease spread in a northwestern direction, reaching the oldest university of the Americas, San Marcos in Peru eight years afterward. Under the leadership of young Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre (later to become the leader of the leftist APRA) the students succeeded in forcing the authorities to grant them comanagement (cogobernación).3 This thoroughly ruined the university which to this day has not overcome either ideologically or academically, this particular shock. After World War II the anarchical student unrest gripped Japan, where authority, all authority had been gravely shaken by utter defeat. The virus then crossed the Pacific again and affected the third seismic area, California. From there it was carried to the Eastern United States and then made its appearance in West Berlin, the European point of infection. This is not surprising because West Berlin has no conscription laws and thus became the haven for draft-dodgers from the Federal German Republic. The student rebellion then quickly spread to Frankfurt and from there to Paris, Rome, and Madrid.

There are good reasons for this development which, so far, has spared the Nordic countries from England to Finland. In Latin America we have not only the Catholic faith with all its anarchical implications4 but also the specific irrationalism of that part



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