A whole new kind of black humor popped up this week on Twitter. Wits competed to improve on the moral idiocy of a New York Times headline.

For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big https://t.co/Fci82iAPxM

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) September 26, 2017

See one of the best ripostes below:

For all its flaws, the Khmer Rouge taught Cambodians it was ok to challenge elites. https://t.co/RfzwqmCDCU

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) September 26, 2017

And here’s another:

For all its flaws, sex slavery gives young people a chance to travel. https://t.co/k6wESW1593

— Dawn (@aurora_g96) September 26, 2017

That story was just as bad as its headline promised. Its account of life for women in the vast, totalitarian prison house which Mao made of China admitted that the system wasn’t perfect. Residual sexism, from before the Revolution, remained a problem. But the piece was mostly sunny, like others from the Times’ ongoing series of puff jobs for Communism. Apparently the open socialism of Bernie Sanders and radicalism of Antifa have made it acceptable again to peddle apologias for Mao and Stalin, or at least those who served their causes.

You’re a dime a dozen, pal. Get in line.

I’m not sure how an account of “women in China under Communism” can miss the blood-drinking dragon in the room: the One-Child Policy. That project cooked up by Western population cranks and sold to China’s despots caused tens of millions of forced abortions, and triggered the “gendercide” of millions of baby girls. You might have thought that a journalistic account might mention it. You know, the way that the Holocaust could crop up in a story on German Jews. But not in the New York Times! They’re above that kind of cheap, obvious “gotcha journalism.” Why, they didn’t even report on the Ukrainian famine while it happened. It would have spoiled their reporter’s personal access to Joseph Stalin.

A victim of Chinese Communism, Helen Raleigh recounted at The Federalist the brutal abuse which the women in her family, all native Chinese, suffered at the hands of the regime. It was one grim, dreary story out of a billion. It bore all the hallmarks of life under ideology: sadism and mass stupidity, hunger and grinding fear, waste and human misery, all in the name of noble “ideals” cooked up by intellectuals.

Fantasies of Raw Power Disguised as Idealism

Worse than that. It’s one thing for embittered young men in a poor, chaotic country (like Russia in 1917 or China in 1949) to latch onto radicalism. And then to cling to it despite the mounting evidence that its promises won’t pay off. Human nature simply refuses to be transformed in the image that some delusional theorist like Marx had predicted. No matter how many men you tortured and killed, mankind remained, stubbornly fallen, hungry for freedom. But it takes courage and raw humility to admit that. (Penitent ex-Communists like Leszek Kolakowski and Czesław Miłosz, Arthur Koestler and John Dos Passos, found the grace to do that. Many more never did.)

It’s quite another thing to be a comfortable, middle-class professional in a free and wealthy country, and spend your energies fostering misery and tyranny abroad. To fulminate against minor injustices at home, while lavishly tonguing the jackboots of blood-caked foreign dictators — like Mao. To plumb those depths of imbecilic wickedness, you must be an intellectual.

The Less You Know, the Better

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. Nor any expertise in economics, politics, or the history of the country. In fact, those might stand in the way. No, it’s best if you achieve some notoriety in some unrelated area, like poetry or philosophy. Then you read about the vast, world-changing promises made by some foreign guerrilla leader or dictator. Instead of applying the same skepticism you certainly would to sermons by a preacher, or proposed changes to your tenure contract, you do something different.

You flick a switch in your head. And your critical faculties shut down. Suddenly you’re an immature 13-year-old girl in love. That “bad boy” in the leather boots strutting up on the platform before his followers begins to haunt your dreams. He gratifies all your resentment at how little difference you seem to make in the world, no matter how impassioned are your letters to the editor. He embodies your hunger for revenge. (At your parents, at “society,” at those “philistines” who mock your work.)

You flick a switch in your head. And your critical faculties shut down. Suddenly you’re 13-year-old girl in love. That “bad boy” in the leather boots strutting up on the platform before his followers begins to haunt your dreams.

When his latest atrocity against helpless peasants or locked-up priests gets any ink, you rush to make excuses. You whore out your mind for his regime, soon proud of your shamelessness. You mistake the willfulness this requires for saintly fervor. This is how far you’re willing to go to fight injustice. Who else has your courage?

Match the Dictator with the Fanboy

Well, the answer is, lots of people. You’re a dime a dozen, pal. Get in line. Because tens of thousands of “intellectuals” (real or self-styled) have sold their souls for the cheap thrill of extremism. Paul Johnson documented that unforgettably in his classic Intellectuals. Roger Scruton went into more depth, unpacking and brilliantly refuting the biggest and worst in his Frauds, Fools, and Firebrands. The latest in this genre of intellectual Darwin Awards is Paul Hollander’s highly readable and grimly funny book. The title is From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez. The book is up to date and highly detailed. It’s appalling beyond mere words. And, yes, it’s really funny.

Where else can you find out which liberal intellectuals fawned on Benito Mussolini? Which academics assured us of Hitler’s gentle kindness? The list grows much longer in the chapter on Stalin. No matter the horror stories pouring from Russian exiles. Or the lurid, ridiculous show trials that mostly (happily) executed faithful Communists. Or the Russian leaders’ collusion with Adolf Hitler in crucifying Poland. None of that mattered, to men like Gyorgy Lukacs (a critic teachers tried to force me to read in grad school). Nor to George Bernard Shaw, the author who gave us Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins. They don’t matter now to postmodern sophist Slavoj Zizek, who wows Millennial audiences with defenses of Stalin’s gulags and Lenin’s death squads. (I was pleased to see that Hollander footnoted to my own essay on Zizek: “Onan the Librarian.”)

Norman Mailer, Graham Greene, Noam Chomsky & Other Dupes

Where else will you learn that gay sadomasochist, sex addict, and highly influential literary critic Michel Foucault was a fanboy of the Ayatollah Khomeni? (Foucault was another name on the syllabus that I skipped in my Ph.D. studies.) Or that Noam Chomsky, that scourge of “cruel” American foreign policy, fiercely defended Pol Pot? You know, the Sorbonne graduate who came back to Cambodia to kill everyone who wore eyeglasses? Or that novelist Graham Greene was the pitiful dupe of Panama narco-dictator Omar Trujillo? Egomaniacal blowhard Norman Mailer, you’ll be comforted to know, didn’t just champion American murderers like Jack Henry Abbott. No, he was a lifelong devotee of Fidel Castro. And so on, through darkly funny chapter after chapter. The list of those who adored or defended Mao Zedong is long and luminous, including Edgar Snow, historian A.L. Rowse, Swedish social reformer Jan Myrdal, and Jean Paul Sartre.

My favorite part of Hollander’s book? The fawning, delusional poems of praise and thanksgiving penned by literati for the Communist puppet ruler of Hungary, Matthias Rakosi. I’ve never seen anything like them. Here are some samples:

In his hands a lovely stalk of wheat:
the radiant fate of the nation.
He is never frightened and
confronts storms with courage.
He takes to his heart
the troubles of millions.

Today Rakosi speaks on the radio …
The wind subsides,
and the heart of the country is throbbing
in the palm of his hand …

My friend Robert Oscar Lopez is daily Tweeting verses from the Bible. I think I’ll take the time to start Tweeting these minor masterworks of madness.