Entertaining propaganda

David Horowitz used to be a "loony lefty". Despite being White and Jewish, he belonged to the Black Panther Party during their *worst* phase, when the Panthers had degenerated and become a racketeering crime gang (they even murdered their own party treasurer, another White person, when she uncovered some illegal drug dealings).

Horowitz, to his credit, left the Panthers after this. Less creditably, he then joined forces with the loony right!

"Unholy alliance" is ostensibly a book about how the American left supports Muslim fundamentalism and opposes Israel. An interesting subject, to be sure. I'm one of those rare leftists loony enough to *support* Israel's right to exist and *oppose* Muslim fundamentalism. Horowitz, however, never really delivers. His book turns out to be a truly demented screed of Cold War propaganda, delivered decades too late. Indeed, the author is so bad at spinning lies and distortions, that the book actually becomes entertaining. Well, at least up to a point. Two-thirds through, I decided not to finish it...

It's a well-known fact, that the United States supported a whole string of right-wing dictatorships during the Cold War. Sometimes, the US even supported Communist regimes or movements, provided these were anti-Soviet. China under Hua Guofeng or the Khmer Rouge (!) after their fall from power comes to mind. Nor were all members of NATO democratic. Both Greece and Turkey were military dictatorships for a period, but neither was excluded from NATO. It's obvious that whatever the "Cold" War might have been, it certainly wasn't a conflict between "democracy" and "Communist totalitarianism".

How does Horowitz attempt to prove the opposite? He claims that the Korean War was a conflict between democracy and dictatorship. But at the time, *both* South Korea and North Korea were dictatorships. So how could the war be a struggle for democracy? Well, says our author, South Korea *did* become democratic 35 years later! Therefore, the Korean War was about democracy...

I'm not kidding. He actually says this.

Many other arguments in the book have an equally surreal quality. The United States, we learn, overthrew Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines. What took them so long? And what about the People's Power movement? Weren't they at least peripherally involved? The author also hotly denies that the United States supported Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war. "We didn't support Saddam. We just sent him weapons". I suppose this is the loony right-wing version of Trotskyist "military but not political support"!

David H. also denies the genocide of the American Indians. Why, he opines, there are *more* Indians alive today than at the time of the conquista, so how can there have been a genocide? Well, David, aren't there more Jews alive today than at the time of World War Two? Perhaps the Holocaust didn't happen either. Or maybe it just wasn't a "genocide". Besides, the argument about more Indians presumably refers to the entire American continent. In the United States, the Indians are obviously outnumbered by Whites (and maybe even Jews).

And so it goes on, page after page. There is something anachronistic about a book that still today (long after the fall of the Berlin Wall) fights the propaganda battles of the Cold War. I suppose that's why the rest of the book plays the anti-Muslim card. During the Cold War, after all, Usama bin-Laden and other Muslim fundamentalists were "our" allies.

But of course, you will never learn about *that* unholy alliance from a book by David Horowitz.