Commentary
Writing on the anniversary of the “Tank Man” incident in Tiananmen Square (June 5, 1989), I find myself thinking about some signal anatomists of the totalitarian impulse.
George Orwell, for example, would have been surprised to discover that his searing portrayals of tyranny have been adopted as how-to manuals by the new lobotomized left, whose maliciousness is exceeded only by its ignorance.
I think, too, of the Swiss-born French writer Benjamin Constant, whose famous essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819) is as pertinent to our concerns today as it was in the immediate post-Napoleonic era in which Constant wrote….