I’m inviting Hasan Piker to the Anti-Communist Film Festival in October, which is sponsored by the Victims of Communism Foundation.
Why not? Piker is the hot Marxist right now. New York Times reporter Jack Crosbie called Piker “a progressive mind in a body made for the manosphere,” and was almost drooling as he described 34-year-old Piker as “an avowed socialist who is just as at ease dressing in French maid drag as he is on the basketball court.”
Yet Piker’s shtick is very old indeed. Like the other young revolutionaries, he’s a copy of a copy of a copy – going all the way back to the Russian Revolution. Because the schools don’t teach the history of communism, to Piker’s fans, he comes across as exciting and revolutionary. They haven’t heard names like Whittaker Chambers, Arthur Koestler, and David Horowitz. Piker has no doubt never seen The Lives of Others. The son of two academics and the nephew of Cenk Ungur, Piker doesn’t realize how played out he is. He’s like a character out of the 1930s.
In a recent photograph, Piker is seen posing on a train with a copy of What Is To Be Done? by Lenin. As Sam Tannenhaus notes in his biography of Whittaker Chambers, would-be revolutionaries often tout Lenin’s work while ignoring the violence in the same pages. Lenin’s The Soviets at Work is a book that, as Tannenhau notes, “is written in a prose of almost unrelieved brutality, a combination of insults (“Let the poodles of bourgeois society scream and bark”) and threats (“Everyone who violates the labor discipline in any enterprise and in any business … should be discovered, tried and punished without mercy”).” Lenin’s analogies “are drawn almost exclusively from the battlefield,” and “he is thrilled by the spectacle of violence. His favorite adjective is ‘merciless.’ Nor does Lenin conceal the authoritarian character of the government he is assembling. Democracy in the new world can be achieved, he explains, only ‘by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.’”
Lenin disdains the “anarchy” of capitalism and calls for a new order ruled by “an iron hand,” an “organization of strict and universal accounting and control.”
It’s not shocking that Piker once declared, “Let the streets soak in the red, capitalist blood!” None of this stuff is new. American movies, many largely forgotten, have been exposing communism going back to the 1920s.
Another Marxist who, like Whittaker Chambers, abandoned the communist faith was David Horowitz. The son of two American Communists and a radical student leader in the 1960s and early 1970s, Horowitz turned to the right politically in 1974, when his friend Betty Van Patter was murdered after going to work for the Black Panther Party. As he recounts in his autobiography Radical Son, van Patter’s death caused a crisis and a conversion to conservatism. The murder was never solved, but here is how Horowitz described it in a 1999 article: “In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions and even the Oakland business establishment.”
In works like his autobiography Radical Son and The Black Book of the American Left, Horowowitz argued that the “activists” of the 1960s, like the “progressives” of earlier eras, and like the liberals of today, are all basically Communists. The Black Panthers, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, Saul Alinsky, Tom Hayden. Angel Davis. Todd Gitlin. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, and Mary – all of them called for a revolution. None were interested in mainstream Democrats like Hubert Humphrey.
Several years ago, Horowitz was on a panel at Georgetown University with Michael Kazin, who had been a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist group in the 1960s. All the left wanted to do, Kazin said, “was give peace a chance.” Horowitz often reminded readers that during the Vietnam era, Kazin embraced the motto “bring the war home” – i.e., cause violence on American streets as much as possible. Horowitz noted that at a 1969 rally, Kazin led the following cheer: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF [Vietnamese Communists] is Gonna Win!” Horowitz: “It had been liberalism that guided America to power in the postwar world. It was liberalism that had gotten America into Vietnam. Centrist liberalism was the balance wheel giving synchronicity to the entire political system. But now radicals assaulted the center; if it could not hold, America would fall.”
“I am constantly asked by people who have read my autobiography, Radical Son,” Horowitz once wrote, “or who have heard me talk about these events, how it is that my former comrades on the left can remain so silently and stubbornly devoted to ‘experiments’ like the Panthers that failed, to doctrines that are false and to causes that are demonstrably wrongheaded and even evil.”
The answer is age-old: fanaticism and the thirst for power. In his 2009 book Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution, Horowitz observes that “A radical once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words, the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause, which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”
I’m pretty sure Hasan Piker has never heard those words. He will if he attends the Anti-Communist Film Festival.
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