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An excellent post. You clarify many of the issues that the reporter - and, in particular, the professor (Chaloupka) are missing. In particular your notation of Stalin first being a tyrant, with Communism merely as a control vehicle, is quite accurate. It is this facet of dictatorship which is often missed by many. The object of the dictator is control; not adherence to his means.

The opposition by neoconservatives to tyranny is a complementary ideology: opposition to the dictator and his tyranny, secondarily his ideology.

I am encouraged by the article in the Bullhorn for a few reasons. Most importantly is that they are, as you pointed out, "clearly actually attempting to diagnose the school" rather than to attack it out of fear and ignorance. This is an approach, which if adopted further by the left, I believe will bring the left further towards a better understanding and appreciation of the actual stakes of the world political situation.

I will be sure to post the follow-up articles. Again, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful and crisply analyzed post, and thank you for providing it.

Thanks, I hope it helps.

As an addendum, that I realized on looking through it again might not be obvious. I talk about the liberal Catholic to neo-con connection at one point. The intellectual background figure there is Lord Acton, the 19th century historian famous for "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Himmelfarb edited a book on Acton in the immediate post-war period ("Essays on Freedom and Power", Beacon 1948). Neuhas can be understood as reading Vatican II as a rehabilitation of Acton's views (which in Acton's own day involved a strong clash with the hierarchy). Himmelfarb's introduction to that work sketches many of the issues.

Another preface is important in understanding the intellectual origins of Strauss. The later editions of his first book, "Spinoza's Critique of Religion", include a long, densely argued preface that is something of an intellectual autobiography of Strauss's early thinking, in the context of Weimar Germany and its clearly gathering dangers. An issue cutting across both is the problem of oppression by majority or dominant sect, and what if any resources there are against it (in institutions, authorities, traditions, national independence, or morality).