A stubbornly resisted lesson.

Roughly 100,000,000 people died in the last century as the result of communism and the lawless police apparatuses it spawned that operated free of the control of populace, court, or law. That huge numbers among educated Western elites have failed to acknowledge this carnage, or to atone for their failure to resist it and warn against it, is one of the greatest moral and intellectual failings in history.

George Handlery writes this on the stubbornly resisted lesson of political terror:

Che called revolutionary terror a useful instrument to destroy whatever blocked his preferred transformation of reality into a better world. In practice, this targets everybody whose views and values might prove in the course of time to represent limits on the system dedicated to improve mankind. Here we encounter one of the most stubbornly resisted lessons of the recent past. It is that institutionalized and morally embedded terror is not selective. Nor is it likely to diminish once the initial battle of the cause is won. This being so, those who might have approved of system-embedded violence, assuming that the “enemy” must always be someone else, are likely to become its eventual victims.

And now the Nation flirts with a man clearly insensate to the dangers of revolution, whose idea of “change” most definitely encompasses the dismantling of basic legal protections. What other inference is possible from his embrace of black liberation theology?

"To be black is to be committed to destroying everything this country loves and adores."

~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970).

And from his embrace of Bill Ayers, terrorist? Some of Ayers's Weather Underground associates thought it would be necessary to kill off several million diehard capitalists after the success of the revolution they were working for. Not much concern for legal protections there.

We shall see if there is any residual resiliency in our institutions. Perhaps the Supreme Court will grow a spine and ensure a measure of separation of powers in the period that might be ushered in by an electorate taking leave of their senses.

Maybe voters think it is like Mardi Gras. After the big blowout, it’s all back to normal Monday morning, no harm, no foul.

"Duly Noted: Freedom Is a Burden." By George Handlery, Brussels Journal, 10/25/08.