The deluded intelligentsia.

What is this now? Surely, collectively, chapter one zillion and two on said topic.

Leftists (i.e., fascists, communists, socialists, liberals) are indifferent to liberty. Purity of heart comes first, in the view of liberals. If commies say they are for the liberation of man, liberals never feel it necessary to look beyond the expression and examine the methods used to achieve said stated goal. Show trials? They're trials, aren't they? See? Right there in black in white it says "trial." (Communists, of course, are committed to the extinguishments of liberty in favor of pure discretionary government on the part of The Beautiful People and understand that that is what they are after.)

Western leftists simply lack the wit to imagine the consequences their ideas entail. As a religious broadcaster, whose name we cannot now recall, said one day recently, many people seem to think that what Jesus said was said in a free and democratic polity and that his words can be interpreted on this basis. Western leftists, similarly, interpret their own ideas from the standpoint that all real events will continue to unfold in the tolerant, free, safe legal environment in which they formulate and express their ideas.

One businessman in the U.S. is reported once to have said that the capacity of U.S. rivers to absorb pollution is one of the great natural resources of the country. We don't know if this is apocryphal or not but it is useful here nonetheless: Liberals think that the institutions of a free society can be polluted by illiberality indefinitely. Any fatuous or societally suicidal policies can be implemented until Al Gore admits that anthropogenic global warming is a fraud -- all without consequence.

Our featured author Ruth Dudley Edwards notes that "the [1930s English] establishment found the whole notion of evil distasteful" and "[English diplomats in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office today] continue to demonstrate a touching belief that if only you are nice to people they will be nice to you."

If people are not nice to you, then it must be that you have been insufficiently nice to them and must redouble your efforts to be nice. The fact that those stupid-to-the-bone mother truckers are desperately begging for an ass whipping just never seems to occur to them.

Ms. Edwards writes cogently about how clever people in the last century were monumentally deluded by obvious monsters and so desperate to avoid facing reality that they then did what they now do about the "alleged racism of Jade Goody, now under investigation by the [police] for misuse of the word 'poppadom'."

This in contrast to official ho huminess vis-a-vis

[TV news film of] British mosques [showing] thousands of British Muslims listening, apparently contentedly, as they were exhorted by Islamist preachers to throw homosexuals off mountains and sign up their children to kill kuffars (non-Muslims).

Right here in River City, folks. Speech that reveals minds of people who have no business being within 100 miles of Big Ben, unless it's by being chained to a seat in an overflying jet making a rendition delivery to Six Flags Over Gitmo.

A hard call that, isn't it, dear readers? Go after expression of "poppadom" or kick murderous cretins out of Britain?

Me, too! I'd go after "poppadom" straightaway.

BTAIM. Enjoy Ruth Dudley Edwards on the default mindset:

I grew up in the Republic of Ireland under an authoritarian religion that bossed about submissive governments; as a British public servant, I saw the damage done by pusillanimous jobsworths; as an historian of the 1930s, I learnt how the wishful thinking of the deluded intelligentsia helped Hitler and Stalin; researching a book on the Foreign Office I came to understand the limitations of a diplomacy that believes the best of everyone; and fascination with the wilder shores of Irish republicanism that I encountered at my mad granny's knee led me subsequently – as a journalist and campaigner – to spend many years in intellectual combat with militant Irish republicanism, struggling, with some success, to understand the terrorist mind.

* * * *

When I left the public service, researching and writing the biography of the publisher Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, and then a subsequent history of The Economist, made me realise how many clever people are fools. The Left were push-overs for communist propaganda, but they could at least recognise fascism as evil: the establishment found the whole notion of evil distasteful. I read enough Times and Economist leaders written by Oxbridge double-firsts welcoming the encouraging signs of statesmanship emanating from Herr Hitler to disillusion me forever about the wisdom of the commentariat: the default mindset is still to resist the notion that evil exists and that when bad people say bad things, they may just mean them.

"Sleepwalking with the enemy." By Ruth Dudley Edwards, Telegraph.co.uk, 2/4/07 <-- ICJS Reports.