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[fortdixlover]

Are Kerry's spokespeople traitors to the human mind?

FDL


From http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14757

What is so staggering about [ridiculous comment by the left] is not just the stupidity and moral cretinism of the comment, but the immediate, knee-jerk reaction from people - particularly the grubby "protestors" scampering throughout New York - that such pollution is somehow a form of free speech that deserves respect. When such a ridiculous comment is met with ridicule, liberals are quick so attach the cliché - hey, that's what makes this country great. Everyone can give their opinion.

But this is not as much an opinion as it is hostility to thought itself. That phrase, "hostility to thought itself," comes from the great historian Robert Conquest, author of a brilliant book about totalitarianism, Reflections of a Ravaged Century.

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Calling someone unpatriotic allows them access to the grab bag of counter-charges: McCarthyism, hostile to dissent, what makes America great is protest, censorship, etc. They immediately don the mantle of victim, and it often works.

Conquest points to the real problem: "Many whose allegiance went to the Soviet Union may well be seen as traitors to their countries, and to the democratic culture. But their profounder fault was more basic still. Seeing themselves as independent brains, making their choices as thinking beings, they ignored their own criteria. They did not examine the multifarious evidence, already available in the 1930s, on the realities of the Communist regimes. That is to say, they were traitors to the human mind, to thought itself."

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This hostility to thought itself was difficult to shake long after the 1930s. Indeed, it became something of a contagion in the 1960s during the Vietnam war. America was not only in a losing but honorable battle against a totalitarian regime - indeed, an heir of Stalin - but was the evil force in the war. Student protestors didn't call for America's retreat, they openly praised the Vietcong. In the coverage after Saigon fell, and in the recent coverage of John Kerry's anti-wart activism, one angel is absent: an assessment of communism and what it did to that country. This is hostility to thought itself.