One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the 
   renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist 
   claim that 'bourgeois liberty' is an illusion, there is 
   now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only 
   defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves 
   democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies 
   by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It 
   always appears that they are not only those who attack 
   it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' 
   endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other 
   words, defending democracy involves destroying all 
   independence of thought. This argument was used, for 
   instance, to justify the Russian purges. The most ardent 
   Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were 
   guilty of all the things they were accused of. but by 
   holding heretical opinions they 'objectively' harmed the 
   régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to 
   massacre them but to discredit them by false 
   accusations. The same argument was used to justify the 
   quite conscious lying that went on in the leftwing press 
   about the Trotskyists and other Republican minorities in 
   the Spanish civil war. And it was used again as a reason 
   for yelping against habeas corpus when Mosley was 
   released in 1943.


   These people don't see that if you encourage 
   totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will 
   be used against you instead of for you...