Paul Hollander was in his mid twenties when he left his native Hungary at the time of the 1956 revolution. Firsthand experience of Nazism and then Communism marked him for life. These dictatorial regimes claimed to be acting on behalf of the masses, but he could recognize persecution and injustice when he saw it. Settling in the United States, Hollander found thousands and thousands of educated men and women who supported Communism. The virtues they ascribed of their own free will to the Soviet Union were fictions that they were asking the public to take for truth. Not merely deluded, they were also justifying the strong as they set about victimizing the weak. A good many of them were not members of the Communist Party but intellectuals possessed by self-righteousness and identified in the apparently neutral idiom of the period as “fellow travelers.”
Pursuing an academic career, Hollander found his place in the battle of ideas and ideology known as the Cold War. A hero of rationality and a humanist, he is everything a genuine intellectual ought to be, rescuing political and moral discourse from the demoralizing level of fellow-traveling. Lenin, the would-be master of revolution the whole world over, coined the cynical phrase “useful idiots” for the throng from Europe and the United States who were promoting Communist fictions, best of all if they were not aware of doing so. In the same vein, George Orwell once famously observed: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
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