Totallitarianism Watch

Jay is fond of reminding me that the guys we call "neo-conservatives" are really closet Trotskyites. But they also have some Stalinist tendancies, including the quiet (or sometimes not) war they've been waging on intellectual freedom in and out of the academy. So I'm not surprised to see this item in this morning's Washington Post, which details the state department's efforts to purge ideologically incorrect academics by imposing a de facto exile. I don't imagine that I need to remind our gentle readers of the chilling effects that practices like exiling dissidents can have on open societies, so I won't.