---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 10:11:46 -0700
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Bobby Seales Confession: Confirming the Truths of David Horowitz
Bobby Seale's Confession: Confirming the Truths of David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 25, 2002
By: Jamie Glazov
BOBBY SEALE, THE FORMER CHAIRMAN AND CO-FOUNDER of the Black Panther Party,
has just recently made a confession about Panther criminality that has
vindicated what David Horowitz has been saying for years.
Seale is best remembered for his 1969 courtroom histrionics as one of the
Chicago Eight, the eight moral degenerates who were put on trial for
inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Seale's behavior caused
the judge to order him shackled to a chair and gagged.
Seale is now apparently ungagging himself about the Panther past. In a
recent speech at a Panther reunion, he confessed that the Panthers were
little more than extortionists, gangsters and murderers and that they
killed Betty Van Patter -- whose murder remains unsolved till this day.
As expected, the former Panther engaged in selective memory and exonerated
himself from any personal wrongdoing in Panther crimes. He also called
David Horowitz a liar - even though he (Seale) simultaneously admitted
that the Panthers were everything Horowitz has been saying they were.
Seale's confession serves as yet another reminder of the Left's practice of
historical amnesia, since the Liberal Establishment has yet to reconcile
itself with who and what the Panthers really were. This explains why there
has been a literal blackout by the national media on this issue.
To fight this assault on historical memory, Horowitz has devoted much of
his life to exposing Panther criminality. He has done so because the
Panthers abducted and killed his friend - Betty Van Patter. For speaking
the truth about the criminality of the Left's revolutionary vanguard,
Horowitz has paid a large personal price. His life has been put in danger
and his intellectual scholarship has been banned by the Nazi-like Leftist
censors in academia.
Seale's confession now serves as yet another vindication of Horowitz.
Eldridge Cleaver's confession did the same several years back. In the now
famous 1998 60 Minutes program during which he admitted the pernicious
ruthlessness of the Panthers, the former Panther leader discussed his
change of heart. Cleaver stated, "If people had listened to Huey Newton and
me in the 1960s, there would have been a holocaust in this country."
Betty Van Patter was one of the tragic victims of that holocaust in its
beginning stages - and fortunately that potential holocaust did not
animate itself into a larger force.
Betty had been recruited by Horowitz in the early 1970s to keep the books
of a "Learning Center" in Oakland that he had created to run a school for
the children of Black Panthers. A Leftist radical at the time, Horowitz had
become affiliated with the Panthers after he met their infamous leader,
Huey Newton, and became enchanted with him.
Horowitz didn't have a clue that the "Learning Center" served as a cover
for Panther criminal activity; it was a military training center that was
also being used as a vehicle to embezzle millions of dollars in California
state and local education funds.
After Newton killed a teenage prostitute and fled to Cuba in 1974, Elaine
Brown took over as leader of the Panthers. She asked Horowitz to recommend
an accountant to run the Party's finances. Horowitz suggested Betty.
Extremely naïve about what she was dealing with, Betty found something
wrong with the Panthers' record books and went to inform Brown. She
subsequently disappeared. In January 1975, Betty's battered body -- with
her head caved in -- was found floating in San Francisco Bay.
Horowitz was horrified by the murder of his friend. He felt a personal
responsibility because he had brought Betty into the fold. He began to ask
questions about her death, but he faced a disturbing lack of curiosity
among his Leftwing associates.
Horowitz was soon to learn that, in the mind of the Leftist, curiosity
about Betty's fate was tantamount to disloyalty to the cause. Jean-Paul
Sartre had set the example long before: appealing to Leftists to avoid
speaking, let alone seeking, the truth about Stalin's gulags, since doing
so would demoralize the French proletariat. In his autobiography Radical
Son, Horowitz explains:
"To doubt the Panthers was to jeopardize the faith that the Left had placed
in them. Even though the era of revolutionary enthusiasm was over, they had
remained a symbolic vanguard, the embodiment of black America's revolt
against white oppression and the incalculable odds every radical faced."
(p.243)
In his essay, "Black Murder Inc." published in Hating Whitey, Horowitz notes,
"The existence of a Murder Incorporated in the heart of the American left
is something the left really doesn't want to know or think about. Such
knowledge would refute its most cherished self-understandings and beliefs.
It would undermine the sense of righteous indignation that is the crucial
starting point of a progressive attitude. It would explode the myths on
which the attitude depends." (p.121)
Thus, Betty's murder, and the eerie indifference shown to it by her Leftist
friends and colleagues, forced Horowitz to face the unfathomable: that the
revolutionary vanguard of his own socialist dream was a criminal entity. As
a result, the radical's utopian odyssey came to an abrupt and sudden end.
His Whittaker Chambers-like conversion began.
As Horowitz considered the insignificance of Betty's life and death in the
eyes of his comrades, he began to recognize a familiar historical reality
being played out in the surroundings of his own life: totalitarian and
ruthless means were being perpetrated to build the fantasy of an earthly
paradise. Real human flesh and blood was being sacrificed on the altar of
ideals.
While Horowitz could no longer blind himself about the Panthers, the
American Left continued to do just that. It explains why, even though many
radicals of the counter-culture have knowledge about what happened to Betty
Van Patter, no one has ever been charged in her death. It also explains
why, after more than two decades, the national media have yet to conduct
even one serious investigation into any Panther murders.
Now Bobby Seale has come forward and acknowledged that the Panthers
murdered Betty. He has admitted that the Panthers were what the Left has
always denied they were. His confession is no Twentieth Party Congress --
that landmark watershed in Soviet history (1956) that witnessed Nikita
Khrushchev expose and denounce Stalin's crimes. But one can hope that it
might be the foundation for something that can become analogous to
Khrushchev's secret speech.
This is not to suggest that the Panther reality is equivalent to the
Stalinist horror. Implying such a thing would only trivialize and minimize
the large-scale diabolical evil that Stalinism was. But it is to suggest
that many of the ingredients that spawned the Panther nightmare and the
Stalinist terror were exactly the same.
Seale might have just let the genie out of the bottle, and maybe we will
soon be told more truth about what a mutated form of Stalinism, albeit on a
much smaller scale, perpetrated in America.
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Jamie Glazov holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies.
He is the author of 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist and of Canadian
Policy Toward Khruschev's Soviet Union ( McGill-Queens University Press,
2002). Born in the U.S.S.R., Jamie is the son of prominent Soviet
dissidents, and now resides in Vancouver, Canada. He writes the Dr.
Progressive advice column for angst-ridden leftists at
EnterStageRight.com. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
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