A few weeks ago an advertisement was sent to a number of student newspapers in the US. Framed in deliberately provocative terms, it poured scorn on the "reparation" movement in the US which has advocated compensation for the descendants of slaves. Some papers refused to run it. Others did and saw their print runs trashed by angry student activists. At the University of Chicago it provoked a furious protest. It has led to a debate about both reparation and censorship. Both sides have accused the other of "racism" and "fascism".
The advertisement was written and placed by a neo-conservative commentator called David Horowitz, who claims the response is an indication of the totalitarian, politically correct nature of American society. He says that he has feared for his life and can now enter campuses only with an armed guard. His opponents suggest he is a "demogogic provocateur " and a driven obsessive more interested in promoting himself than free speech. The row over the advertisements comes at a sensitive time in US racial politics with last month's riots in Cincinnati showing how raw the issue still is.
The case for reparation is best encapsulated in The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, by Randall Robinson, a black academic and writer, and founder of Trans-Africa, a Washington-based organisation which seeks to influence US policy on Africa and the Caribbean. This movement for reparation, long dormant, has been revived over the last few years by this book and by black academics and politicians. Essentially it argues that the government, having profited economically from the free work carried out by generations of slaves, should make reparation, as promised in the 19th century when an agreement to give "40 acres and a mule" to freed slaves was made but later broken. Horowitz's advertisement, placed by his Santa Monica-based Centre for the Study of Popular Culture, is a 10-point attack on the idea of reparation and simultaneously a sideswipe at affirmative action in particular and black politics in general.
"There is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery" is the heading of the first point in the ad which blames "Black Africans and Arabs [as] responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?"
The advertisement continues in the same vein, arguing that black Americans have actually benefited from being brought to the US: "American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of 20 to 50 times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped." It argues that a small minority of whites were slave-owners, that 350,000 Union soldiers died to free the slave. Nor, suggests the advertisement, should the reparations made to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans who had property confiscated in the second world war or African-Americans used in medical experiments be seen as comparable. "The recipients of [those] reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families."
At the heart of the advertisement is the belief that any disadvantages suffered by black Americans are largely their own fault: "The black middle class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago?" This "crippling sense of victimhood" is damaging to black Americans, suggests the ad. "Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) - all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances."
Most controversially the advertisement argues that white Christians - English and American - created the anti-slavery movement and if it were not for the sacrifices of white soldiers in the civil war, blacks would still be slaves instead of enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. "Where," asks the ad rhetorically, "is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?"
Of the 71 college papers to which the ad was sent, 39 rejected it, 22 printed it, 15 of whom apologised to their readers for so doing. The budget for the advertisements was $20,000, paid for by Horowitz's supporters and subscribers. Earlier this month, at the University of Chicago, a meeting which Horowitz was addressing was held up for 30 minutes by angry protests and security guards were called to remove protesters. The row over whether the ad should be run and if so whether the editorial board should apologise for it, has entertained conservative America greatly. Here was further proof of the intolerence of the "liberal PC society", a familiar refrain on the right ever since the notion of "political correctness" was constructed in the 80s and became a staple of the conservative media. The press on the left has also entered the argument with the Nation, a weekly liberal magazine and itself an object of Horowitz's scorn, arguing that the advertisement should be accepted by the college papers.
"Our view is that if a right-wing propagandist like Horowitz is foolish enough to put his money at our disposal, then it would be foolish for us to turn it down," wrote the Nation's publisher, Victor Navasky.
The man behind the ad is a walking road map of American politics. David Horowitz's father was a communist teacher sacked for refusing to say whether he was a party member. He grew up in Sunnyside, New York and graduated in English at Columbia University before moving to the University of California at Berkeley, where the ad also has caused a rumpus. Horowitz spoke out against the Vietnam war and was so attracted to Sweden after seeing Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal that he went to live there. He moved to England for a while, where he worked for the Bertrand Russell Foundation for six years and regarded the academic Ralph Miliband as his mentor. He returned to an America in the midst of political and racial turmoil, edited the then highly regarded radical journal, Ramparts, and became an ally of the Black Panthers, then the most jauntily outspoken wing of the American left. He was a close confidant of the Panther leader, Huey Newton.
Then came an epiphany. Horowitz had recommended a white woman friend, Betty Van Patter, to the Panthers as a bookkeeper and she worked for them briefly before being murdered mysteriously in 1974. No one has ever been charged with her death but Horowitz was convinced that the Panthers were to blame. Since then he has been a driven man. He talks of his "karmic journey" and his "atonement" for Van Patter's death. He did vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980 but he has since moved further and further to the right, speech-writing for Bob Dole and publishing increasingly provocative attacks on the left. He went to Nicaragua to advise anti-Sandinista unions on organising. He has also co-written successful biographies of dynasties such as the Rockefellers and Kennedys.
His views are expressed on his website (FrontPagemagazine.com) and in frequent visits to the studios of radio and television stations. His latest book is self-explanatory: Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. Back at his home in Malibu after criss-crossing the country on a talking tour, he described the attacks on him over the ad as a "shakedown operation. It conforms to the fashion of victimology."
The genesis of the ad, he says, was a 46-1 vote in the Chicago city council calling on the mayor to apologise for slavery. This is "Orwellian" both in the content of the motion and in the tally of the vote, he says, and was the result of no Democrat being able to get elected without the black vote. "This is racial McCarthyism. It is at least as potent as McCarthyism in the 50s. A lot of people will not challenge the lunacy on this issue because of the threat of being casually associated with the word racism. Everyone is afraid to say boo."
Of the decision to try and place the advertisements in places where they were bound to offend, he says: "Old-fashioned me, I kind of think a university is supposed to teach people how to think."
Universities in the US are now, he says, like "third world universities - I'm sure the same thing has happened in England. This is the totalitarian left at work. It is campus fascism. At Berkeley - which is not radical but people think of it that way - the editor was visited by a mob of irate leftists and he apologised for running the advertisement. "It has been the temper tantrum from the left. I have proven that it is impossible for there to be two sides of the issue discussed. It has done me quite a bit of damage. I could have been killed."
Surely he anticipated the reaction? "I don't work that way. I'm working out my karma. If I calculated everything I would have stayed on the left. The left controls the commanding heights of culture." He could have had an easy life in academia, he says, like his contemporaries on the Nation, for whom he reserves much of his bile. He thinks the whole business of reparations and suing for damages has gone mad. He speaks of the "Jewish hustlers" trying to sue the US for not bombing Auschwitz. He recognises, he says, that the original freed slaves had a genuine claim and says that the then government's refusal to pay former slaves 40 acres and a mule as had been agreed was a "criminal act" but adds that was many generations ago.
What has enraged his opponents most has been his suggestion that welfare is essentially reparation and that black Americans have already received much of it. His claim is that black people receive a more in welfare than they pay in tax and so white America has repaid whatever debt it owed in full. "All I'm trying to do in my ad is point out - hey, some things have been done."
Now the claims of the advertisement have now been scrutinised painstakingly by two academics, Ernest Allen Jr and Robert Chrisman, who argue that many of the "facts" and statistics quoted by Horowitz are fictions or distortions and that "the idea of black debt to US society is a rehash of the Christian missionary argument of the 17th and 18th centuries: because Africans were considered heathens, it was therefore legitimate to enslave them and drag them in chains to a Christian nation. Following their partial conversion, their moral and material lot was improved, for which black folk should be eternally grateful."
Historian John Hope Franklin has also responded to Horowitz: "Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century." The median white income in the US is $49,023 (£34,510) and the median black income $29,404 (£20,697).
Horowitz's former colleagues on the left have differing views on the path he has chosen. One writer who knew him in his Ramparts days says: "Horowitz is a psychological study in political extremism. He's the Stalinist ex-Stalinist."
Some former friends say that they do not believe Horowitz is a racist but puzzle over why he expends so much energy railing about the imaginary power of the left when the country has its most rightwing government in years. They also say that he has overdramatised his role as a man who needs an armed guard on the campuses he visits.
"No one would even recognise him," says one. Some say that that his obsession over Van Patter's death has seriously blurred his judgment and wonder if he might eventually do another abou turn.
"It would be ruinous," says Horowitz, "to became a leftist again but believe me, if I come to the conclusion [that that is right] and anyone who knows me would say that's what I would do. That's who I am. I've never worried about material success. I can thank my radical upbringing for that."