The New Yorker carried a piece last week in its “Talk of the Town” section about a gathering of graying (and not so graying) leftists at a West Village bar, celebrating and commiserating over the 40th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death. Among the luminaries was Tariq Ali, an editor of the New Left Review, the cover of whose book Clash of Fundamentalisms is a case study in the Left’s post-September 11 moral equivalence.
Other such lions of the modern far-Left abounded at this kaffeeklatsch, prominent among them my old Yale chum Chesa Boudin, class of 2003 and “radical chic Rhodes Scholar.” He’s the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weathermen terrorists responsible for the deaths of two police officers and a Brinks Security guard killed during a botched 1981 bank heist. Kathy Boudin is herself the daughter of Leonard Boudin, the famous leftist defense lawyer who represented Castro’s Cuba, Paul Robeson, and was a leading member of the fellow-traveling National Lawyers Guild. Chesa’s genealogy would be of little concern were it not for his obnoxious penchant for invoking his parents in the name of his own radical ideology. As he told the New York Times upon winning the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship:
“We have a different name for the war we’re fighting now—now we call it the war on terrorism, then they called it the war on Communism,” Mr. Boudin said. ”My parents were all dedicated to fighting U.S. imperialism around the world. I’m dedicated to the same thing.”
”I don’t know that much about my parents’ tactics; I’ll talk about my tactics,” he added. ”The historical moment we find ourselves in determines what is most appropriate for social change.”
Only in the mind of a closet totalitarian could killing a black police officer be construed as “fighting U.S. imperialism around the world.” This is to say nothing of Boudin’s dishonesty in claiming not to “know that much” about his parent’s tactics, which are a matter of public and legal record. The Boudin family legacy has been one of defending and propagandizing on behalf of despots who rob and murder their own people in the name of “progressive ideals,” and Boudin is doing a bang-up job of carrying forward that tradition. The New Yorker reports on his homilies for Che Guevara:
At seven-thirty, the partygoers gathered in an auditorium to hear from the new guard of Che admirers, including Chesa Boudin, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Kathy Boudin, who was jailed after serving as an accomplice in the 1981 Brink’s robbery. Boudin, a Rhodes scholar, author, and political consultant, had a neat, buzzed haircut and wore a pink lattice-patterned shirt and gray pants. He said that he had to make a 6:30 A.M. flight to Caracas (“I was in twenty-six countries last year”), and he spoke to the crowd about Che’s legacy: “Most of us don’t remember when he was killed. But all of us have seen Che Guevara T-shirts.”
I wrote a piece for the Yale Daily News several years ago about Boudin, after he was quoted in a New York Times story about credulous Westerners traveling to Chavez’s Venezuela in hopes of finding the New Jerusalem.
