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To: general_re
thanks for posting that -- excellent article. However, I think there is a simpler explanation for why university-bred 'intellectuals' seemed to be particularly attracted to Communism. Most of these 'intellectuals' think they are smarter than everyone else and, as a result, because they are so smart they should be the ones who are in charge. Communism presents the perfect ideology for such a person. It provides them with both the justification for seizing power as well as the means for employing it -- because Communists believe that in order for an earthly workers' paradise to come into existence, the Communist Party must have absolute power to do what it will. And what is the Party? Well, the Party is a small elite of people who have demonstrated their intellectual fitness by mastering the difficult to understand (indeed some might say absolutely nonsensical) tenets of Communism. As a result, Communism presents the perfect fit for university professors who aspire to greater things than just being the petty tyrant in the classroom.
24 posted on 06/14/2003 9:52:49 AM PDT by vbmoneyspender
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To: vbmoneyspender
The funny thing is, communism as it's been implemented around the world is deeply anti-intellectual - communism can brook no dissent to its orthodoxy, and intellectuals in general, and university professors in particular, are regarded as a threat to the stability of the state and the party, because of the possibility of dissent from honest investigators. Communists don't want honest intellectuals, they want mental plantation-dwellers like Hobsbawm, who have simply learned a slightly more erudite way of bleating out party platitudes, much like Orwell's sheep in "Animal Farm".

Consider the following real-world case: in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge regularly murdered people who wore glasses, on the theory that they were more likely to be educated and intellectual, an episode which remains shockingly perverse, even from the jaded perspective of nearly thirty years later. The irony of Hobsbawm's pursuit of communism, and the pursuit by other self-proclaimed intellectuals, is that the system they lust after has the goal of positively stifling and destroying true intellectualism by stifling and destroying the very sort of freedom of intellect that permits them to evangelize on behalf of communism. They use the very freedoms we afford to them in order to try and destroy the same freedoms for others. Ironic, no? ;)

27 posted on 06/14/2003 10:09:35 AM PDT by general_re (ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.)
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