Leftist indecency.

Reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in The New Yorker in 1974, George Steiner wrote that “to infer [sic] that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency,” revealing with those words the vast blind spot of Western Left intellectuals.^[1]

Leftist intellectuals have proven themselves corrupt at every turn. Not only did a swine like Steiner attempt to draw the curtain across the enormity of Soviet crimes –with ten times the number of Nazi victims – but he worked to establish the proposition that if an innocent were consumed in a German death camp because of his religion, this was more hideous than if an innocent were consumed in a Soviet death camp because he was a class enemy of the proletariat. To people like Steiner, the latter death was not only a matter of no importance but to call attention to it was "moral indecency" itself.

Apparently, the imminent prospect of "9 grams" in the back of the head (instant, painless death) or transport to an Arctic concentration camp (slow, agonizing death) was something to make the victim rejoice at his good fortune at merely being a class enemy. Imagine how bad it would go for him if he had the wrong religion.

Far worse, leftist intellectuals have labored long and hard to perpetuate the danger of repeating the Soviet terror in the West by obscuring the fact that (1) it was made possible only because the USSR had stripped itself of all the legal protections that Westerners enjoy and stepped far away from the Western, liberal tradition and (2) its criminal leadership was thus left to exercise absolute, untrammeled discretion over every aspect of the lives of the people with a 66 million or 30 million (take your pick) death toll.

The left not only obscures the Soviets' hypocritical abandonment of the rule of law – always hidden behind a veneer of legality (think "Moscow show trials") – but works unceasingly to foist off the lie of a "living Constitution" on Americans in the service of expanding federal power and judicial tyranny. (The madness of a command economy is also embraced by the left but that is a topic for another day.)

The left plays with matches next to a lake of gasoline, at best. At worst, it works to undermine a way of life that it views with a malevolent hatred and to repeat the horrors of the last century but with the "right" kind of victims this time.

It always bears emphasis that the left has never passed up an opportunity to characterize National Socialism as "right wing." "Right wing" on the totalitarian-liberty continuum, of course, logically signifies devotion to liberty as opposed to devotion to state control. However, "right wing" historically was used by Stalin to signify any political opponent, even if he was himself an ardent communist or merely an inconvenient insect. Kirov and the quite non-communist Captain Kangaroo would both fit nicely into this definition of "rightist." Such is the taxonomical precision of the left.

Similarly, one of the major weapons of the leftist intellectual has been to create a false definition of "fascist," signifying someone on the "right wing," of course, and hence, evil itself. Thus, National Socialists were fascists out there on the "right wing" and, since Nazis are the sole locus of evil in the 20th century (as neo-Nazis and racists are in the 21st) anyone on the "right" is an animal and anyone on the left is a caring, rational, enlightened, trustworthy brick of a guy. "Right" bad; "left" good.

So Steiner is a leaf in this great river of leftist sewage and his political allies today control the White House. They direct the affairs of our nation and struggle to push it away from its moorings in familiar, workable laws into the realm of leftist fantasy and untrammeled discretion, with the consequences thereof artfully either concealed or affirmatively marketed as free Disneyland and Red Lobster, all day, every day.

It is hard to conceive of people who live in the West and benefit from it who have such a seething hatred of their own lands, but they are out there. They openly declare their disdain at every opportunity and pervert its freedoms.

Some "blind spot."

Notes
^[1] "In the Nightmare." By Ronald Radosh, National Review, 9/29/08, reprinted by the Hudson Institute. It's not clear in his article but Mr. Radosh refers to Tim Tzouliadis's book The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (2009).