Eleni

clipped from neoneocon.com It is my observation that the ranks of garden-variety liberals are composed in large part of sketchily-informed idealists. The ranks of radicals on the Left (which is a very different thing) are composed of some idealists mixed with a goodly proportion of manipulative, angry, ruthless, power-hungry tyrants. All of this is in the service of a better world, of course. I’ve written previously about the message of the Nicholas Gage book Eleni. It tells the sobering tale of what can—and often does—-happen when political idealists meet up with the roadblocks of reality and yet remain stubbornly dedicated to their plans rather than abandoning them. Those mushy idealists can turn into manipulative, angry, ruthless, power-hungry tyrants quite easily, and do so with depressing regularity: The book delineates, step by careful step, how over the course of time these people compromised and hardened until they were all but unrecognizable