Beware of Intellectuals Who Are Fascists in Disguise

In 1970, McGraw-Hill, which then published some sixty magazines, moved me to Chicago so I could fly almost weekly to interview many of the top intellectual educators throughout the country. Although initially I was impressed with the keenest of their minds and the depth of their knowledge of history, literature and politics, I soon became somewhat distrustful of their common sense. The lived almost wholly within their minds and often, I found, reality many times did not intrude into their cerebral cortex. Most of these acclaimed intellectuals also never really ever had a job in their entire lives, and especially in their teenage years, involving physical labor. They had not been paperboys or waitresses. Did not cut lawns for extra money. Work after school helping out at Safeway. They came from middle- to upper-middle-class families and always did well in school, ending up getting graduate degrees.

???? Daniel Pipes wrote a column for the U.S. version of the British Spectator Magazine that points out how many intellectuals over the years supported and celebrated vicious dictators.

??? For example, Daniel Pipes, cites Herbert Croly, founding editor of the very liberal New Republic, heralded Mussolini for enabling “Italians to master themselves through a renewal of moral vision.” Croly called fascism a “political experiment which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose.” In other words, the state took preference of the individual for the benefit of the majority. Sounds a lot of something Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might say.

??????? Historian Arnold Toynbee interviewed Hitler in 1936 and said Toynbee was “convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace in Europe.”

???????? John K. Fairbank, Harvard’s dean of American China scholars, said: “The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened to the Chinese people in centuries.”

?????? Princeton political scientist Richard Falk said Khomeini, the original Iranian ayatollah, had created “a new model of popular revolution, based for the most part on non-violent tactics.” He added, “Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of human governance for third-world country.”

???????? Norman Mailer told Fidel Castro, “You were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second War…you are the answer to the argument…that revolutions cannot last, that they turn corrupt or total or they eat their own.”? It just took time before Cuba began eating its own.

????????? We have had 40 years of these intellectuals programing our college students with the need to overthrow our democratic republic and create a centralized socialistic (and fascistic) government that makes certain everyone is equal in their own level of economic, intellectual and social poverty except for the intellectuals, like themselves, who are in control. Portland and Seattle are the model for bringing this about.

???????? Later on as a more experienced journalist when I was sent to do interviews about how people are thinking in a city, what the state of the state was in say Boston, I would first find a somewhat seedy bar in a lower middle class neighborhood and sit for a few hours and listen and ask questions of the bartender and the patrons prior to interviewing the mayor or local high-level business executives or high-level educators.? I found the patrons at the lower middle- class bars, and the bartenders in particular, had a much better grasp of what was happening in the city than those who thought they were running things. You might want to try this yourself. Go to Baltimore, Southside Chicago, South Philly. The Bronx or Washington, DC.

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