Spiegel is a fourth-year history student and a member of the
Spartacus Youth Club. Â
By Lital Spiegel
Joel Schwartz’s column (“Campus Left, Right guilty
of petty branding,” Viewpoint, May 7) puts him squarely in
the camp of U.S. imperialism’s reactionary ideologues David
Horowitz and Dinesh D’Souza.
Horowitz, a notorious apologist for slavery, obscenely claims
that slave labor “created wealth for black Americans”
and thinks black people are in debt to America and should be
grateful that their ancestors were kidnapped and brought here as
slaves. D’Souza’s motto as an editor of the Dartmouth
Review was “Genocide is never having to say you’re
sorry.” But to Schwartz, these vile racists are misunderstood
“scholars” worthy of respect, and his venom is reserved
for those at UCLA who protested them.
He condescendingly brands the African Student Union rally a
“childish cacophony,” and he labels the Marxist
Spartacus Youth Club’s vocal opposition to these racist
demagogues as “analogous” to the acts of racist
lynchers. What chutzpa!
Schwartz then echoes Horowitz’s lie that well-funded
right-wingers are the poor oppressed victims of a campus witch
hunt. In fact, Horowitz and D’Souza have been actively
promoting a systematic provocation on campuses nationwide ““ a
neo-McCarthyite campaign aimed at driving off all those who oppose
racism and the U.S. imperialist “war on terrorism.”
At UCLA, D’Souza denounced protesters of the war as
“homegrown Taliban.” Likewise, Horowitz’s campus
ads ranting about “treason” are nothing but thinly
veiled calls for government repression of war protesters and come
at a time when immigrants are facing very real government
persecution. To expose this sinister campaign, the Spartacus Youth
Club has organized protests when and where we can, including at
Berkeley, Harvard, University of Chicago and Columbia ““ as
well as Westwood Plaza. We organized such protests, not to deny the
“right to speak” of Horowitz and D’Souza as
Schwartz claims, but to enable those opposed to these
Neo-McCarthyite witch hunters to exercise their right to free
speech.
Our side is with the working class in defense of all the
oppressed. On Feb. 9, the Spartacus Youth Club helped mobilize
workers in defense of immigrant, black and union rights targeted by
the “war on terror.” Hundreds of protesters including
International Longshoremen & Warehouse Union, other union
members, immigrant rights activists, students and socialists
demonstrated against the capitalist government’s bipartisan
“national unity” campaign in the service of imperialist
war and domestic repression.
Lies, Orwellian logic and poor writing are clearly not a barrier
to Schwartz getting space in the Daily Bruin to insult protesters
of racism and war. Schwartz tells those who despise his column to
“not steal my computer.” Nobody wants Schwartz’s
computer, but he should not whine if one day the lights go out and
the garbage piles up as campus workers (many of them blacks,
Latinos and immigrants) strike in defense of their class interests
““ and in defiance of the likes of Horowitz & Co. and the
capitalist rulers they serve.