Socialist Gulags
Mike at Cold Fury excerpts two great articles contrasting the fascination of the socialist left with tyranny, and what happens when you really do speak truth to power.
Excerpting his excerpts, here’s a whiff of Ralph Peters:
The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate - especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.
The truly outrageous aspect of such comparisons is that the American left, with its Stalin-redux willingness to rearrange history, neglects to mention that, outside of Japan, all of the 20th century’s great totalitarian regimes had roots on the political left.
[Note: Japan's regime arose from a true imperialism, not capitalism or libertarianism.]
And a good strong snort of Christopher Hitchens, himself a leftist who seems to be waking up:
The simplest way of phrasing it is to say that Solzhenitsyn lived “as if.” Barely deigning to notice the sniggering, pick-nose bullies who followed him and harassed him, he carried on “as if” he were a free citizen, “as if” he had the right to study his own country’s history, “as if” there were such a thing as human dignity.
Read the whole things, all three of them.
Tags: Christopher Hitchens, cold fury, leftist, Mike Hendricks, socialism, Solzhenitsyn