As we come to the end of this murderous and unrepentant century, in which a greater number of human beings has been violently put to death in the name of criminal political ideas than in any other century of recorded history, we are left confronting a moral void that shows few signs of being rectified or even addressed by what remains of serious thought in our civilization. A century of modernity, with everything this implies about the achievements of scientific inquiry and material progress, has proved to be a paradoxical benefaction. For our technological capabilities have long ago outdistanced our powers of moral discrimination, and this parlous condition has left us incapable of attempting either a moral reckoning of the past that has shaped us or a critical vision of the future that awaits us.

Any realistic accounting of Communist crime would effectively shut the door on Utopia.

It is not only that at the end of this century we find ourselves devoid of political leaders who are equal to the task of comprehending the moral enormities that have shaped the modern age—and shaped it, moreover, under the banners of deranged social ideals. It is also a fact that much of mainstream intellectual life in our debased culture, especially in the universities and in what passes for ideas in the media, remains actively engaged in trivializing and subverting the scholarly disciplines which are essential to any true understanding of the catastrophes that have beset this terrible century.