Totalitarian Chic

Paul Berman is one of the best left-liberal writers and thinkers around. His book Terror and Liberalism is the best I’ve yet read about the meaning of the attacks on September 11. He issues a liberal call to arms, on properly left-wing grounds, against what he calls the new totalitarians, the Middle Eastern inheritors of the Nazi, fascist, and Stalinist legacies.
Unlike me, he is still on the left. But he is a besieged minority within it. And today in Slate he blasts The Motorcycle Diaries, the new film about Che Guevara, and the standing ovation the audience gave it at Sundance.
Berman shouldn’t expect his fellow lefties to take up arms against the new totalitarians until they stop applauding the old ones.