• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Years later—after even the New York Times had acknowledged the carnage—liberal icon Noam Chomsky was still defending the Khmer Rouge, maintaining that Pol Pot had murdered just a “few thousand” Cambodians,18 and noting its “constructive achievements for much of the population.”19 The skulls tell a different story.

It’s not just communists whom liberals admire; they defend all mobs. Princeton professor Richard Falk cheered the downfall of the shah of Iran, writing in the New York Times in February 1979 that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been “defamed,” and mocking claims that he would “turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti-Semitism, and with a new political disorder, ‘theocratic fascism,’ about to be set loose on the world.” To the contrary, Falk said, Khomeini would “provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”20

These days, Falk, who is still at Princeton, is a prominent 9/11 truther and a UN “Rapporteur” on “human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” So he wasn’t just naive back in 1979—he’s still defending Khomeinist proxies.

Amazingly, just a few years before Ronald Reagan achieved the final victory over Soviet communism, “Conscience of the Senate” Teddy Kennedy was sending secret messages to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov complaining about Reagan. Kennedy said how “very impressed” he was with Andropov, while decrying “Reagan’s belligerence.” The communist bootlicker asked for pointers on responding to Reagan’s “propaganda,” particularly any tips on Reagan’s vulnerabilities. Most perplexing for the Soviets must have been Kennedy’s suggestion that Andropov embark on an American media tour to counter Reagan, with Kennedy proposing interviews with Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters.21

American liberals not only defend each successive iteration of the French Revolution around the globe, they try to imitate it at home. No matter how many carcasses pile up, liberals simply cannot shake their belief that government is the key to improving the human condition.

It’s striking how uniform the playbook is. Totalitarians use mobs to seize power, impose their theories on the populace for the good of humanity, and then set about exterminating a lot of that humanity. Each new set of reformers never notices that the last mob claiming to be fighting for “the people” ended up killing the people.

Or perhaps they notice, but it doesn’t bother them because they view humans as nothing but raw material for their schemes. The chilling phrase “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” is attributed to both Lenin and Robespierre (On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs). Rousseau’s successors discern no spark of divinity in humans; they believe man achieves moral stature only through the government.

A mob can’t be fired up by promises of gradual, incremental change based on individual rights and voluntary transactions. There must be promises of grand social transformation overnight. It’s the serpent’s lie from the Garden of Eden: “Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:1–6).

No matter how mad the plan is—Fraternité, the “New Soviet Man,” the Master Race, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Building a New Society, ObamaCare—a mob will believe it. Time and again, the world has to relearn Michael Oakeshott’s rule: “The conjunction of ruling and dreaming generates tyranny.”

One of the main theoreticians of the French Revolution was Saint-Just. His utopian plan was that men should be only soldiers or farmers. Children would be taken from their parents at a young age and turned into “an army of robots,” as historian Erik Durschmied says. Women were irrelevant to Saint-Just’s plan.22

Saint-Just, Robespierre, Desmoulins, and the rest had their disagreements, but they couldn’t have cared less what the French people wanted. This tiny group of fanatics would impose its program on the entire country. As with Obama and his national health care,