The American Spectator

Among the Intellectualoids

The Left's Good Warriors

By Daniel J. Flynn on 4.4.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 2 of 2)

"Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get back into the fighting might be exaggerated," Orwell wrote in 1943. "And the Left intelligenstsia made their swing-over from 'War is hell' to 'War is glorious' not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage."

Put that on the monument. Orwell's observations on the Old Left's transmutations from pacifists to warriors in the 1930s fit today's San Francisco just as well.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of the forthcoming A Conservative History of the American Left and the editor of www.flynnfiles.com.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Military, North Korea, Communism, Unions