you honestly believe that Hillary is considered intelligent just because she's a democrat? please don't even compare the two. next thing you're gonna say is that GW is just as smart as Bill.
andjust imagine the field day conservatives would have with a female candidate who chose to abort her baby.

There was a very interesting book review in the "Bookshelf" section of WSJ yesterday. The column (The Siren Call of Tyranny) discussed the book "Last Exit to Utopia" by famous French political philosopher Jean-Francois Revel.
I was fascinated by this thought : "The totalitarian phenomenon," Revel observed years ago, "is not to beunderstood without making an allowance for the thesis that someimportant part of every society consists of people who actively wanttyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—tosubmit to it."
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'Last Exit to Utopia" was first published in France nearly a decadeago. It concerns itself primarily with the failure of much of theFrench left to come to grips with the collapse of communism and theexposure of its innumerable crimes. The events and debates under itsreview date mainly to the 1990s, and its author died in 2006.
Yet the book, at last available in English in this fine translation,ought to command close attention because it was written byJean-Francois Revel, who—unlike such bien-pensant idols asJean-Paul Sartre (an admirer of Stalin) and Michel Foucault (acheerleader of the Ayatollah Khomeini)—deserves to be ranked as thepre-eminent French political philosopher of the second half of the 20thcentury. What's more, the book's themes continue to resonate today,when murderous ideologies still compete for legitimacy and"enlightened" understanding by the Western intelligentsia.

Revel's great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice butalso its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychologicalattractions. In books such as "The Totalitarian Temptation" (1976) and"How Democracies Perish" (1983), he dissected the mind-set of Westernintellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulagcountries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in freeones—the U.S. most of all.
Why was that? "The totalitarian phenomenon," Revel observed years ago,"is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesisthat some important part of every society consists of people whoactively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much moremysteriously—to submit to it.

It was a temptation that proved to be remarkably resilient.Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the once fellow-travelingEuropean left had no choice but to admit that the god to which it hadlong rendered faithful service had been an illusion, and incurablydysfunctional to boot. Yet that grudging concession, as Revel observed,did little to chasten the former groupies of totalitar ianism. On thecontrary, it served as a springboard for a fresh assault onliberal-democratic principles.
The tipping point, in Revel's view, was the publication in 1997 of"The Black Book of Communism," an 800-page compendium of the serialbarbarities of communist regimes from China and Ethiopia to Russia andCambodia.

This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research andincontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury bymuch of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its owneyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin andPol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaustdenial.Nor could this same intelligentsia acknowledge that the collapse ofcommunism was the supreme vindication for Cold War anticommunists suchas Revel, long reviled as a political paranoid and closet fascist.Instead, the left's new refrain was that, whatever the excesses ofcommunism, they were as nothing next to those of "liberaltotalitarianism" and "savage capitalism." Communism, in this view, morethan redeemed itself through its aspirations for social justice. And tothe extent that actual Communist regimes—namely, all of them—fell shortof that ideal, it merely proved that they hadn't been Communist tobegin with!

Of this mental fortress, Revel acidly writes: "Utopia is not underthe slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is toallow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what doesnot." Thus the political collapse of communism offered members of thehard left an avenue of ideological resurrection, since they couldreturn to their favorite pastime of lambasting globalization and otherAmerican conspiracies to enslave the world without having to suffer anyunpalatable reminders of some of the alternatives—the Berlin Wall, forinstance.
Then again, this approach, by underscoring the far left'sprotectionist and xenophobic impulses, also served to expose itshistoric kinship with the far right. Here Revel instructively reprisesthe Nazis' profound debt to Marxism (Hitler once described himself as"not merely the vanquisher of Marxism [but also] its implementer") aswell as to the anti-Semitic and racist dogmas of Karl Marx.

"What is the worldly religion of the Jew?" Marx asked."Huckstering. What is his God? Money." Communism, according to itsfounding father, "would make the Jew impossible."
Revel's analysis helps to make senseof the latest version of the totalitarian temptation, this time the temptation of radical Islam (though "Last Exit to Utopia" does not explicitly broach the subject). Strange as it may seem, today's Western"progressives," whose domestic political fixations include gay marriage and abortion rights, nonetheless frequently find themselves making common cause with Muslim fanatics for whom such things are anathema.
This seemingly strange affiliation has partly to do with a shared loathing, among radical leftists and radical Islamists, of the U.S. and Israel.

But as Revel astutely notes, the deeper bond is what he calls the"excommunication of modernity," a mark of the left going back to theprimitivist and anti-civilizational musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.The Islamists understand this commonality as well: Among the doctrinalsources cited by Osama bin Laden, one finds not only the Quran but alsothe works of Noam Chomsky.

Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin's mausoleum would do well to read this book, a fitting literary capstone in the career of one of France's true immortals.




Mr. Stephens is the Journal's foreign-affairs columnist and a deputy editorial page editor.

next thing you're gonna say is that GW is just as smart as Bill

GW had an SAT score of 1206 and Slick Willy of 1032..
SAT score has a very close correlation with IQ. So maybe Dabya is a smarter man..

I was actually trying to figure out how GW got into HBS and what was his GMAT score. But i guess at the time GMAT was not required .

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Человек, который почувствовал ветер перемен, должен построить не щит от ветра, а ветряную мельницу