mindtreason
For a few brief years, I believed that we had transcended that point in history where the chattering classes -- the intellectuals, academia, and NPR hosts -- had generated not only a weird blindness to the sins of their communist co-ideologits, but lived in a strange world where the United States was responsible for world suffering. September 11th and its aftermath resurfaced this ugly brand of intellectualism, and it is worth revisting the horrific crimes committed by intelelctuals in their support of folks like Stalin.
David Pryce-Jones analyzes the mindtreason of Eric Hobsbawm in particular:
A mystery peculiar to the twentieth century is that intellectuals were eager to endorse the terror and mass-murder which characterized Soviet rule, at one and the same time abdicating humane feelings and all sense of responsibility towards others, and of course perverting the pursuit of truth. The man who sets dogs on concentration camp victims or fires his revolver into the back of their necks is evidently a brute; the intellectual who devises justifications for the brutality is harder to deal with, and far more sinister in the long run. Apologizing for the Soviet Union, such intellectuals licensed and ratified unprecedented crime and tyranny, to degrade and confuse all standards of humanity and morality. Hobsbawm is an outstand- ing example of the type. The overriding question is: how was someone with his capacity able to deceive himself so completely about reality and take his stand alongside the commissar signing death warrants?
