ricketyclick

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.

Andrew Klavan, writing in City Journal on how cultures transmit themselves from one generation to the next:

The teacher told me that she once had to explain to the class why her last name was the same as her father’s. She dusted off the whole ancient ritual of legitimacy for them—marriages, maiden names, and so on. When she was done, there was a short silence. Then one child piped up softly: “Yeah . . . I’ve heard of that.”

I’ve heard of that. It would break a heart of stone.

Our culture is doing a lousy job transmitting itself, because the people charged with doing so, the teachers, have by and large been trained to think that it’s not worth transmitting.

From Donald Kingsbury’s The Moon Goddess and the Son:

Any god who is a major thinker and a master manipulator can build magnificently to his own design, but, alas, his palace will always crumble for he will have to build it of unfired bricks. There is only only one fire in the universe strong enough to bake enduring bricks: the flame of thought. And yet, whoever builds his edifice out of thinking men, cannot build to his own design for his bricks will be having a say about where they are put. Alas to be a god!

This is the core insight underlying capitalism and libertarianism. Both socialism and Islamism shun this kiln, and so their bricks always crumble.

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Kingsbury’s story telling tends to be a bit clunky. Moon Goddess and Son was stitched together out of a couple of short stories, and it shows. Everybody in it seems to speak with Kingsbury’s voice. I still highly recommend it for his analysis of Russian history and little nuggets of political insights like these. (I wish I could find someone who actually knew Russian history to tell me how accurate it is.)

And, despite its clunkiness, the story’s rollicking good fun, for an engineering sensibility.