The central character in the latest Tom Stoppard play, “Rock and Roll,” which has just arrived on Broadway from London, is a familiar figure, an unashamed academic Soviet apologist named Max, played with pugnacious vigor by Brian Cox.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, such people have shrunk into the shadows, and with good reason. Inspired initially by an idealism that imagined that Karl Marx’s vision of society could become a reality, they were incapable of acknowledging what soon became clear, that the promise of the communist Russian Revolution of October 1917 was little more than a cruel illusion.

Still they persisted in their belief that it would all work out in the end, notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary. The fact that Stalin killed more of his own people than the Nazi invaders did not deter them, nor the forced incarceration of the people of East Germany in 1948, nor the vicious putting down of the popular rising in Hungary in 1956, nor the Soviet tanks which stifled the democratic activists in the Prague Spring of 1968, and so it went on.

There was no act of barbarism by the Soviets too wicked to defend, no individual act of courage by those opposed to the dehumanizing effects of communist rule too valiant to be dismissed as “bourgeois individualism.”

Trapped in their entrenched positions, too proud to admit a mistake, too closed in their minds to appraise the mounting evidence against their case, they maintained a pious air of superiority over those they dismissed as suffering from “false consciousness.”

The fact that they would themselves have been promptly slammed behind bars and sent to a Soviet prison camp had they dared try to exercise in Russia the freedom of speech they enjoyed in the West was simply another self delusion. Stoppard’s Max is a hectoring, bullying, soulless dupe who by the end of the play quietly admits to his family that he had devoted the whole of his life to a misapprehension.

No one mourns the passing of Max and his ilk. But Stoppard’s play suggests that instead of pitying them, we should perhaps be grateful to them. They were the living embodiment of an ideological sterility in our midst whom we were obliged to confront and to condemn.

They sharpened our arguments for the liberty of the human spirit and made real and present the distant horrors of communism’s dismal rule. In the West, such blind adherents to a lost cause were useful examples of how the freedom of thought and belief we cherish also includes the freedom to get things profoundly wrong.

Without the conspicuous presence of Max and his comrades, it has become far less easy to identify those who, posing often as guardians of liberty, promulgate an intolerance that would do justice to the unlamented Soviet regime. Just as Western communists ridiculed the liberties of speech and action they secretly despised, so today there are closet authoritarians who in the name of tolerance curtail free speech by stifling views they cannot abide.

Among those who ostensibly devote their lives to gender equality, racial tolerance, and academic meritocracy are Maxes — and Maxines — galore, ready to close down debates and discussions with which they do not agree.

On campuses and in schools, where freedom of thought and expression should run riot, the rational discussion of complex issues is often brought to an abrupt halt by the unthinking cry of “Sexism!” or “Racism!” or “Elitism!”

The sly censors in our midst wrap themselves, like Max, in a cloak of indignant piety and pose as the guardians of fair play and free speech. They appoint themselves the arbiters of what constitutes allowable debate and silence in advance those whose views they suspect may offend their delicate sensibilities. Their blinkered ignorance ensures that opinions of which they approve are the only views available.

Unlike Max, who was proud of his brooding isolation and was always happy to argue in favor of censorship and against “bourgeois democracy,” the successors to the old Marxist apologists rarely recognize themselves as authoritarians.

They can watch an extraordinary movie about state repression like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s exquisite “The Lives of Others,” gasp as everyone is considered guilty of unauthorized thoughts until proved otherwise, and side with the victims of invasive surveillance.

They do not have the breadth of mind to understand that in their own way they are every bit as pernicious and as self deceiving as von Donnersmarck’s Stasi heroes, who believed they were honorable, upright, patriotic citizens keeping East Germany safe from unpalatable truths. It is not always easy to spot the modern Maxes in our midst. Like the grim faced operatives of the Stasi, they hide among the rest of us and quietly take mental notes against the day that evidence of wayward thought will be needed.

Many would not recognize themselves as unappointed censors even if they were to read these words. Not that they would read a piece like this, because they have decided in advance that it contains arguments they do not wish to hear.

nwapshott@nysun.com