At FrontPageMag, Dalrymple reviews The Black Book of the American Left, a new collection of essays as well as a partial autobiography by the indispensable David Horowitz:
Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.