Did any of you know that most of the 20th-century monsters—Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Ceausescu, Duvalier, and even the Ethiopian mini-Napoleon Mengistu—were rather good writers who could form better-than-average sentences that said that power grew out of the barrel of a gun? I read this in a Big Bagel weekly that was once known for its wit but is now so blinded by hate against The Donald that it’s turned into a rag, surpassed in venom only by The New York Times and CNN. I knew that Mussolini was a scribbler of notes because he wrote the editorials of his newspaper Il Popolo before he took power. “Inequality and discipline, these are the substitutes for the cries of Equality and Liberty,” wrote Il Duce. That’s telling them, Benito—them being all those American Times hacks like the lachrymose Roger Cohen and the lugubrious Paul Krugman, who as I write are undergoing nonstop colonoscopies in order to cleanse their brains of depression following the British election. Professor Klinghoffer, who is administering the procedure in his Austrian clinic, told me that the more he studies the Cohen-Krugman gray matter, the closer he’s getting to proving his theory that only people who have shit for brains can work for The New York Times.
Mind you, one never knows why some people write well and others bludgeon sentences like those men and women at The New York Times. I suppose hate for the Orange Man clouds their noggins, but then how come a monster like Stalin could write like the proverbial dream? Hitler put down “writer” as his occupation while starving and unemployed in Vienna. The two good dictators, Franco and Salazar, kept their scribbling to a minimum, as good dictators should. But I still find it amazing that Stalin loved books and plays and befriended playwrights and offered valid criticisms to prominent writers. And, when not reading or offering advice and criticism, murdered anywhere from 30 to 100 million innocent human beings.
Against the Left: A Ro...
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I find it strange that today’s writers resemble dictators of the past in their unwillingness to accept opinions contrary to their own. Especially in America, where different views from those of the academe or the media are strictly verboten, and we the people have to view the world through a similar lens as they do—or else. It is probably the greatest irony ever: We fought a seventy-year battle against a totalitarian system that prohibited free speech, and having won it, we adopted the very system we defeated and imposed it on ourselves. The easiest way of shutting down free speech is by using the R-word. Call someone a racist and all doors close, and needless to say no smug progressive, no arch feminist, no super-woke riffraff has failed to use it at the slightest disagreement. It’s the easiest way to impose one’s opinion since the advent of the Colt 45.
Actually we live in an age where people want to cancel other people out, to disappear them. No one ever feared Torquemada or Savonarola as much as they fear the Twitter mob today. The ultra-woke protect their sensibilities with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and crying rooms. Freedom-loving folk like yours truly are seen as freaks and fascists, long past our sell-by date. Tarzan, too, is a goner. He just got canceled back in Westchester County, N.Y. A school was planning to perform a Disney version of the jungle classic, but it was nixed after two parents blasted the play as imperialist. A white man as the king of the jungle in Africa, that’s like singing “Springtime for Hitler” for real.
