As the link bar to the right probably betrays, I am a fan of National Review online. I make it a point to read The Corner and the pieces by Jonah Goldberg, Jay Nordlinger, and Victor Davis Hanson.
One reason I like Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus is that he brings up so many things that may escape your attention. Today's Impromptu was no exception.
He points out this piece by David Pryce-Jones in The New Criterion.
The first two paragraphs grab you:
"Intellectuals by and large disgraced the twentieth century. With rare exceptions, they whored after strange gods, of which the most odious and overwhelming was power. Writers, artists, philosophers, historians, even musicians and architects, enthusiastically committed their talents to the service of one cause or another. This treason of the clerks spread like an epidemic, diminishing the world’s hard-won stock of wisdom and morality, and civilization is still reeling from it."
"Why did so many intelligent men and women choose to serve power rather than speak truth to it as conscience and an honorable tradition of principled opposition dictated? What explains the adoration for Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, for Hitler and Mao and Ho Chi Minh, Mussolini and Pol Pot, Castro, and the rest of this deranged and inhuman crew of cause- mongers?"
Too many still do. I'll come back to this when time allows.
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