The Left's History Of Violence
by Daniel J. Flynn
01/12/2011


The surest way to become a folk hero on the Hard Left is to kill a human
being.

As Mumia Abu-Jamal, Joe Hill and Huey Newton could have attested, murder
trumps even treason for establishing radical credentials. You certainly
don’t get invitations to deliver commencement addresses, become the
subject of folk songs, or hang with the likes of Marlon Brando and Jane
Fonda by protesting a traffic ticket. Taking the life of another person
elevates a radical to cause celebre status like nothing else can.

So why all the carping about “violent rhetoric” from people wearing
“Che” T-shirts and imploring us to “Free Leonard Peltier”?


“Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from?” Paul Krugman asks in the New
York Times. “Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming,
overwhelmingly, from the Right.” Michael Tomasky writes in the
Manchester Guardian that violent rhetoric is “too encoded in
conservative DNA” and “central to Republican electoral strategy” to go
away. Tomasky posits a connection between “violent rhetoric that
emanates from the Right wing of American society” and “what happened in
Arizona on Saturday.”

What constitutes violent political rhetoric is subjective; what
constitutes political violence is more clear-cut. One can debate whether
the American Right currently has the market cornered on the former, as
Krugman and Tomasky suggest. But the latter, at least as assaults upon
high-profile American politicians are concerned, overwhelmingly stems
from the Left. And let’s face it: Violence, not “violent rhetoric,”
kills people.

Four men have murdered U.S. presidents. Three of them have been
communists.

Charles Guiteau, the troubled Bible Communist who lived for more than
five years in John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community, murdered President
James Garfield. Leon Czolgosz, an anarcho-communist follower of Emma
Goldman, murdered President William McKinley. Lee Harvey Oswald, a
Marxist enthusiast of Fidel Castro who lived briefly in the Soviet
Union, murdered President John F. Kennedy.

Rather than confront this troubled history, Leftists downplay the
radicalism of these assassins or invent wild conspiracy theories to cast
blame on political enemies rather than the politically inconvenient
villain.

Even most of the failed presidential assassins have cited Left-wing
motivations. Giuseppe Zangara, would-be murderer of Franklin D,
Roosevelt, confessed: “I kill kings and presidents first, and next all
capitalists.” Manson follower Squeaky Fromme claimed her desire “to be a
voice for the Earth” sparked her decision to approach President Gerald
Ford with a loaded gun. She maintained that “before class and race and
gender, the Earth needs to be seen and heard and fought for.” Sarah Jane
Moore, who worked for the Symbionese Liberation Army-inspired People In
Need, tried to kill the 38th president 17 days later. “The government
had declared war on the Left,” she later explained of her motives.
“Nixon’s appointment of Ford as vice president and his resignation
making Ford president seemed to be a continuing assault on America.”

It’s important to note that for several of the gunmen — cultists Charles
Guiteau and Squeaky Fromme, to name two — their political views were
incidental; their mental instability, crucial. This seems the case with
Jared Lee Loughner, which makes the effort to score political points off
the tragedy he induced so puzzling. This puzzlement increases after
learning that the killer’s political disposition doesn’t resemble any of
the talk-show hosts or politicians lambasted for allegedly contributing
to a climate that gave rise to Saturday’s tragedy.

Loughner, a registered independent, didn’t even vote in November. Rather
than spurred to violence by the Tea Parties, the killer became obsessed
with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords back in 2007 — two years before
the first Tea Party rally.

One classmate described him as “Left-wing, quite liberal,” while another
remembered him being frustrated by George W. Bush. His favorite books
prove especially instructive, as he listed offerings by Karl Marx, Adolf
Hitler, and Ayn Rand. Jared Lee Loughner was all over the place.

There is a tradition of political violence on the Right as there is on
the Left. The anarchist bomber Timothy McVeigh, and anti-abortion bomber
Eric Richard Rudolph, certainly can be said to vaguely share views with
parts of the American Right. Both sides have their share of violent
extremists. But both sides differ greatly in how they treat such violent
extremists.

Weathermen get tenure. The Unabomber gets offered a book deal. John
Brown gets a hagiographic song. Right-wing terrorists get ostracized.
There’s no romanticism of political violence on the Right as there is on
the Left. Where is the Right’s Sacco and Vanzetti, Tom Mooney, or H. Rap
Brown?

The Left lionize their murderers. The Right runs from theirs.

These very different reactions to political violence, and the very
different histories of political violence (that leaves a preponderance
of killing on one side), do much to explain the Hard Left’s desperate
attempt to blame Saturday’s tragedy upon its political adversaries.

Daniel J. Flynn is a columnist for HUMAN EVENTS and the author of
numerous books, including A Conservative History of the American Left
(Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why
the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002).
--
"If I say two plus two is four and a Democrat says two plus two is eight,
it's not a partial victory for me when we agree that two plus two is
six. " Jonah Goldberg (modified)