"Intellectuals"

by Thomas Sowell - November 11, 2008 - Townhall.com

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model-- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear-- that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine-- about the same number as the people killed in Hitler's Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

Thomas Sowell, as he so often does on issues of the day, sums up all the fears of the Obama victory in the recent election. From the pacifist orientation of his followers, deluded about the war with Islamo-fascism and their determination to prove that this war is our fault, to the slavish love for the dreamed of socialist utopia by the media (along with their determination to drive out of the media world any who would dare disagree), the election of Barack Obama is a terrifying repeat of a history that is not that old.

The famous quote from George Santayana comes to mind, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

A more frightening quote from Santayana also comes to mind when you hear the determination of Democrats to end conservative talk radio, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." The easiest way to determine the motives of evil people is to watch them try and censor their adversaries. As soon as you control the public dialog, tyranny is never far behind. It is quite instructive that an early goal of the Obama tyranny is his determination to end conservative talk radio.