The treason of the intellectuals

The Belmont Club reflects on the tendency of intellectuals to be taken in by tyrants.

If you could pick anyone to represent an intelligent man of the American Left from 1930 to 1950, you could do worse than choose Paul Robeson. He was smart, athletic and gifted. And the story of his life touches on all that was good - and ludicrous - about the Left. Robeson believed in the equality of man, but believed the Soviet Union offered it - certainly the segregated America of his time did not. That duality, which was the sensitivity to injustice coupled with the delusion that Marxism offered its solution, gave mid-twentieth century activists their particular character.

The singer in the video below is Paul Robeson, and the song is the Soviet anthem:

In the 20th century far more people were killed by the government ruling them than were killed in all of the wars of that century - 169 million, and that includes 61 million in the USSR between 1917 and 1991, most of those in the years that Stalin and Lenin ruled.

Excuses are still being made for tyrants - demagogues like Chavez, bloody oppressors like Assad or Castro or the Iranian regime. The democracies, with all their flaws - and there are many flaws - always look good by comparison.

Source: The Belmont Club: Paradise Lost