Daniel Pipes reviews a recent translation (from Polish) by Teresa Adelson:
Legutko does not claim liberalism resembles communism in its monstrosity, much less that the two ideologies are identical; he fully acknowledges that the first is democratic and the second brutally tyrannical. After recognizing this contrast, however, he gets down to the more pungent topic of what the two have in common.
He first perceived those commonalities in the 1970s when visiting the West, where he saw how its liberals preferred communists to anti-communists; later, with the overthrow of the Soviet Bloc, he watched liberals warmly welcome communists, but not their anti-communist opponents. Why so?
Because, he argues, liberalism shares with communism a powerful faith in rational minds finding solutions which translates into a drive to improve the citizen, modernize him, and mold him into a superior being. Accordingly, both ideologies politicize, and thereby debase, every aspect of life, including sexuality, the family, religion, sports, entertainment, and the arts. (Here’s a mischievous but deadly serious question: which is the more awful art, the communist or the liberal, Stalin’s or the Venice Biennale’s?) [see below]
Both engage in social engineering to create a society whose members are “indistinguishable, in words, thoughts, and deeds ” from one another, aiming for a largely interchangeable population with no dissidents making trouble. Each sublimely assumes its specific vision constitutes the greatest hope for mankind and represents the end of history, the final stage of mankind’s evolution.
Trouble is, such grand schemes for improving mankind inevitably lead to severe disappointment; human beings, it turns out, are far more stubborn and less malleable then dreamers would like. When things go badly (say, food production for communists, unfettered immigration for liberals), two nasty consequences follow.
