Tuesday, June 8, 2010
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Richard Landes: From Useful Idiot to Useful Infidel: Meditations on the Folly of 21st Century "Intellectuals" - 'Lenin allegedly referred to Western intellectuals who so supported the communist experiment that they disguised its horrors from the West as "useful idiots," because their idiotic romantic attachment to communist dreams made them highly useful allies in deceiving the West and preventing it from opposing the Soviet Union when it was still vulnerable. Today observers use the term to describe liberal intellectuals who enjoy freedom and prosperity, yet undermine both by giving moral and material support to revolutionary movements hostile to such bourgeois values. But that's actually a mild accusation against useful idiocy. By covering up the engineered famines in Ukraine and in China, by dismissing evidence of the Gulag Archipelago or the Cambodian killing fields, all of which killed tens, even hundreds of millions of people, useful idiots have been responsible for aiding and abetting the terrifying death machines...'
Indeed - and some historical contrasts that can be made should arrest the attention of anyone possessed of a conscience and probative interests.
E.g., approximately one-hundred million murdered, often en masse, during the seventy years that comprised the Marxist/Leninist, Stalinist and Maoist era - while during the three-hundred fifty years that comprised the Spanish Inquisition fewer than five-thousand were killed/murdered, most of those occurring during the first fifty years (1480 to 1530) of that perversion ***.
*** this according to Henry Kamen, whose actual figure is . Kamen is widely regarded as the foremost English speaking historian of Spain and the Spanish Inquisition in particular.
(Most of those killed during that inquisition were Jews and the formal expulsion of Jews from Spain occurred in 1492, coinciding with the early years of that inquisition, so I am not in any sense minimizing that aspect. But the raw numbers should speak volumes for anyone wont to compare such things as the Spanish Inquisition with more contemporary, 20th century events committed by thoroughgoing "secular" regimes - most notably Lenin/Stalin, Hitler and Mao, along with their proteges such as Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, et al.)
This an excellent piece of writing and should be essential reading in all universities.
One of Landes' observations among many good ones: