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When I finished reading this article, I realized the time, concentration and discipline required to absorb it. I was wondering how many readers would click it off a third of the way through and move on to read lighter and less challenging fluff flooding too many of FR's threads these days.

To my surprise and delight, this article is inspiring a steady stream of thoughtful comments and debate. I'm heartened by the fact there IS quite a vast community of freepers interested in things intellectual. A post such as this one brings them out and we are all the better for it.

For too long, the realm of intellectualism has been scoffed at by the right and conceded to the left. People buy the perception that the leftist academia world, the media and the literary/arts community have an insurmountable lock on deep political and ideological thinking, and nobody can do much about it. Also, too often, the right shrugs its collective shoulders, passing off leftist assaults on American minds as just "more nutty professors sounding off".

What is often overlooked and yet sorely needed is counter-attacks by rightist intellectuals so that the entrenched position firmly held today by the socialist, communist, pacifist, hate-America, one-world education/information cabal is infiltrated, shaken to the core and broken up.

Norman's article is one such counter-attack. Other rightist intellectuals such as Horowitz endeavor to do the same. While we may not agree with everything they say or do, the right's few battling intellectuals should be supported and valued.

It's vital to know the past and learn from it. Most of the great Euro and Asian wars and revolutions the past two centuries were hatched not by peasants or shopkeepers, but by small cadres of faceless intellectuals, writers, professors, philosophers, scientists, along with disaffected students from the campuses of great universities, and alienated sons and daughters of wealthy and noble families. They had one trait in common....they were not warriors in the physical sense, but were educated and used their minds as weapons.

Thus, it's vital we re-take and conquer the bastions of intellectualism in this country. Podhoretz is doing his part. I really don't care if he's a conservative or a "neo-conservative" at this point. He's a precious and scarce commodity in the war to influence young thinkers, many of whom will be America's future leaders.

Leni