Why am I no longer part of the totalitarian cult (even though I never for a second would have conceded that I was a part of it at the time)? Ultimately, I don’t really know. What broke my faith, however, is that I could not close my eyes to the practical results of our efforts. [...]
From ElSe on my post about Bill Maher’s Sugar Stalinism:
I’m not sure that you’ve got right the idea of Stalinism, David. When one reads Solzhenitsyn’s memoires (or any memoires of the Stalin’s survivors, in that matter) one clearly sees that Stalin’s meat-grinder wasn’t meant to reshape the society or have had any particular targets , [...]
Contrary to your assertions, the left is in fact more vibrant and more powerful than it has ever been. How else did it manage to put a million activists in the streets to prevent the United States from taking down a monstrous regime and liberating millions of Third World people, and did so (unlike Vietnam) [...]
Peter Collier and I drew attention to this nihilism more than a decade ago in “Destructive Generation,” the book we wrote about our second thoughts. We, too, pointed out the sense of alienation as a defining element of the “progressive” left. As editors of Ramparts magazine, we had produced a cover featuring a 7-year-old, the [...]
