Punishing "thoughtcrime": the reaction to Howard Dean's passing remark about the Confederate Flag offers a sobering illustration of the P.C. commissars at work.(Political Correctness)

In the former Soviet Union, it was common for subjects to be arrested and sent to the gulag for expressing "anti-Soviet" views. Cuban poet Armando Valladares, author of the memoir Against All Hope, survived more than 20 years in Castro's gulag; Valladares was arrested for making a fleeting remark critical of the Castro regime. During Communist China's Cultural Revolution, bedrooms in government-owned dormitories were equipped with tape recorders to document any anti-government sentiments that might be expressed by people talking in their sleep.

One critical distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes is that the former assert jurisdiction over the minds of their subjects. This was memorably depicted in George Or well's masterpiece 1984, with Big Brother's regime ruthlessly punishing those guilty of "thoughtcrime." A run-of-the-mill dictator isn't interested in micro-managing the tuner lives of his subjects. He may use brutal means to acquire and retain power, but once secure in his reign he will generally leave people alone.

By contrast, totalitarian rulers seek

to re-engineer the lives and opinions of their subjects according to an ideological design. An authoritarian ruler might summarily execute somebody who threatens his power; totalitarians, on the other hand, liquidate people--often entire classes of people who cannot or will not conform to the regime's ideological blueprint.

In the Soviet Union, the regime claimed the power to imprison or liquidate anybody classified as a "'socially dangerous person." According to The Black Book of Communism--a definitive academic study compiled by six French scholars and published in English translation in 1999 -Soviet officials labeled as "'socially dangerous" any statement or gesture constituting "an attack on the political or economic achievements of the revolutionary proletariat." Soviet law, the scholars noted, "not only punished intentional transgressions but also proscribed possible or unintentional acts."

"Politically Correct" Genocide

Some might be tempted to describe this as a particularly severe version of the social malady known as "political correctness." And they would be right. For most Americans, the concept of political correctness appears to be little more than an annoyance largely confined to college campuses. For those unfortunate enough to live tinder Communist rule, the expression has lethal overtones.