Friday, May 18, 2018

Richard Pipes, RIP

Richard Pipes, author, presidential advisor, and noted historian, has died.

An excerpt from his book, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime:

At bottom, the totalitarian regimes of the left and right varieties were united not only by similar political philosophies and practices, but by the common psychology of their founders: its driving motive was hatred and its expression violence. Mussolini, the frankest of them, referred to violence as a "moral therapeutic" because it forced people to make clear commitments. In this, and in their determination to raze the existing world in which they felt themselves outcasts, at all costs and by all means, lay their kinship.

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