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"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.
M. Kienholz| 7.9.09 @ 2:22PM
An on-target commentary on the Spanish Civil War's recruiting of a Seattle boy who was killed in Spain can be found in the reports of the Canwell Committee (Washington State's Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities). I am currently completing a bio of Canwell and his committee. Send me an e-mail if you are interested in obtaining the book.