The Third World War

In their recounting of events, liberal ideologues used to need only a moderate distortion of the pattern to bring it sufficiently into line with their axioms and sentiments. Nowadays, as the gap between their ideas and reality deepens into a gulf, their stratagems become more desperate. They are driven not merely to bend but to falsify and erase the record. I cite as typical instance the review in New York Times Book Review, Jan. 4—by, typically, a Harvard professor, Gerald Holton—of Philip M. Stern’s The Oppenheimer Case.

I will not begin with such gems as “the story sometimes reads as if it were the transcript of a purge trial in Czechoslovakia”—though perhaps I should pause to wonder what transcript of what purge trial in Czechoslovakia Professor Holton had located. I want to limit attention to a single sentence.

JB

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James Burnham

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In their recounting of events, liberal ideologues used to need only a moderate distortion of the pattern to bring it sufficiently into line with their axioms and sentiments. Nowadays, as the gap between their ideas and reality deepens into a gulf, their stratagems become more desperate. They are driven not merely to bend but to falsify and erase the record. I cite as typical instance the review in New York Times Book Review, Jan. 4—by, typically, a Harvard professor, Gerald Holton—of Philip M. Stern’s The Oppenheimer Case.

I will not begin with such gems as “the story sometimes reads as if it were the transcript of a purge trial in Czechoslovakia”—though perhaps I should pause to wonder what transcript of what purge trial in Czechoslovakia Professor Holton had located. I want to limit attention to a single sentence.