Leftist-totalitarian alliance

There has always been an alliance between leftist journalists /professors and totalitarians (yes, the Right has had its own fascist alliances), e.g., from the Labor Government of Britian (the basis of Orwell’s novel 1984), the  New York Times’ correspondent Harrison Salisbury’s love affair with Stalin, Wilfred Burchett’s fawning “journalistic coverage” of the Viet Cong, Edgar Snow’s sympathetic account of Mao Tse Tung’s revolution, the general kid gloves treatment of eco terrorists, etc., and most recently ongoing support for the brutal totalitarianism of political Islam–even at the expense of gays’ and womens’s rights which at one time had been two of the most important and just crusades of Left. Here.

An old quote even more relevant today

“Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.” –James Burnham, Suicide of the West (1964)  [excerpt]. Though Burnham’s “Suicide of the West”, which I read about ten or more years ago,  ruminated against communism it is perhaps even more relevant today.