Fury and fun.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Right wing terrorism - Editorial

So The New York Times called the other day. Correspondent Peter Applebome was doing a story on the militias, and he wanted me to talk about the connections between the far right today and the New Left in the 1960s. I didn't take the bait. I told him that the militias had really nothing in common with the civil-rights and anti-war protesters. I urged him to examine such facile paternity claims, and he'd see that the militias are the true heirs not of the New Left but of the white-supremacist and nativist movements of the late Nineteenth Century.

I hung up the phone in a fury. I wasn't particularly eloquent, and I was mad at myself for that, but I was even angrier because I sensed that the Times was about to publish a piece on the far right that would pin their violence on us, the left. I was even more worried, an hour later, when I got a call from June Jordan, who said she'd just had a similar conversation with Applebome and was having trouble disabusing him of his theory.

Sure enough, on May 7, Applebome's front-page story ran, entitled, An Unlikely Legacy of the Sixties: The Violent Right. The thesis of the massive piece was helpfully spelled out on the jump-page title, The Radical Right has an Unlikely Soulmate in the Leftist Politics of the Sixties.

It was obscene. The leftist politics of the 1960s were about peace, justice, and participatory democracy. They were not about bigotry, paranoia, and violence. But everything's the left's fault, even the grotesque bombing by the far right, which claimed 167 Americans.

Applebome's theory is a favorite of George Will and his ilk, and no wonder. It deflects responsibility from the far-rightists and their conservative cousins, who've been providing ideological cover for them. The far right despises the government: blame Abbie Hoffman. The far right takes up arms: blame Huey Newton. The far right spews bizarre conspiracy theories: blame Oliver Stone.

Never mind the direct historical links with Tom Watson, Father Coughlin, and the Grand Dragons. Or the current links among the militias, the Klan, the Aryan Nations, the NRA, and a passel of Republicans. Nah, blame the militias on the left. Awfully convenient, isn't it?

One more thing. If some wayward member of the left had murdered 167 people, and if 40,000 armed leftists were training to overthrow the government, you can bet that Congress wouldn't be holding hearings about the validity of our cause.

I had fun this month. One of my favorite sections...