The enclosed article blew me away. I just can’t believe that Frisco Fruitcakes erected a monument to American Communists who fought in the Spanish Civil War. My personal opinion of the Spanish Civil War is that Spain would have been the worst for it had the Communists won. That is not the same as saying I am in favor of fascist government.
The Lincoln Brigade was made up of volunteers who went off to fight in Spain. They fought on the wrong side both philosophically and militarily. However, Communistsand assorted do-gooders since then learned a lesson from the Lincoln Brigade: Don't go off to foreign lands and fight for communism in the company of like-minded crusaders; get others to do it for you. I am referring to sending American troops to countries that are not, and never will be, a threat to the American people. Obviously, Iraq is a very real threat as is every country that can be shown to be an unquestioned danger to the US if it is left unattended. The overwhelming majority of
countries do not threaten the US.
The San Francisco monument shows that the Left praises the members of Lincoln Brigade for fighting for what they believed in. At the same time the Lincoln Brigade is being praised by American Communists they vilify everyone who believes in fighting against communism as in Korea and Vietnam.
I would love to tell American saviors to rekindle the willingness that Lincoln Brigade members had to go and join the fighting rather than send others. Nothing is preventing today's saviors from going to any country they want to save and fight on the side that pleases them. I would also love to ask them one question: Why should Americans die so that foreign Communists can live?
Young people would do well to ask themselves the following variation of the question I posed above before they get suckered into fighting wars and revolutions that do not affect the US no matter how the propagandists present it: Do I want to sacrifice my life so that people I don't know can live?
As soon as Americans accept that they must die so others might live it quickly evolves into Americans must die so that others might live better. It goes without saying that we must all live under communism in order for everyone to live better. Only totalitarian government can guarantee the good life for one and all.
Parents with young children would do well to identify those people in government who are laying the groundwork for future touchy-feely military interventions. Identify them and get them out of power.
Every parent should take a good look at their child and ask: Am I investing my love in this child just so some Democrat or Republican in Washington can send him/her off to die when my country is NOT threatened?
The following article supplies the important details about the Lincoln Brigade (my highlights):
The Left's Good Warriors
By Daniel J. Flynn
Published 4/4/2008 12:08:21 AM
Who says San Francisco doesn't honor veterans?
Last weekend, the city, which voted in 2005 to ban military recruiters from public high schools
and colleges, unveiled a memorial to fighting men and women in uniform. The uniforms they
donned, however, were not those familiar to American soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines.
The city honored American Communists and their fellow travelers who fought in the Spanish
Civil War of the late 1930s. The $400,000 monument, donated from private funds but
hosted on
public land, extends 40-feet long and eight feet high.
Media accounts of the tribute uniformly noted that members of what has become known as the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought against Francisco Franco. But those
reports were
conspicuously silent about the man they fought for: Joseph Stalin. Similarly absent was the word
"Communist," a party with which roughly eighty percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were
officially affiliated.
The few surviving veterans are quick to point out that they fought fascists, but "fascist" in the
Communist lexicon of the 1930s was applied to everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Leon
Trotsky to Francisco Franco. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, so many American members of the
International Brigades in Spain partook in, and others fell victim to, purges of suspected
deviationists among the "republican" armies.
ONE ORGANIZER called San Francisco's monument "an antidote to amnesia," but a more apt
description would be "a product of amnesia." Communists who shamed themselves by serving
Stalin have time on their side. Short memories, particularly on a subject as seemingly distant as
Communism,
enable the servants of an evil cause to reinvent themselves as history's heroes
rather than its villains.
In Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania, monuments to Communist cult-of-personality
heroes have been torn down.
In America, particularly on college campuses, memorials to
Communists have appeared with alarming frequency every few years. San Francisco is not alone
in its veneration of people who deserve scorn and not applause.
The University of Washington, which also memorializes American veterans of the Spanish Civil
War, boasts a Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies and accompanying Harry Bridges Chair of
Labor Studies. The Australian immigrant Bridges, longtime leader of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, was (despite his repeated denials) a member of the
Communist Party.
During the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he followed Stalin's line and belittled Franklin Roosevelt. When
Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally, Bridges' support for Roosevelt (now an ally of the Soviet
Union's fight against Nazi Germany) became so complete that he urged unions to forbid strikes
during the war. Bridges didn't serve labor. Labor served him, and his cause.
The University of Massachusetts-Amherst named the showpiece of its campus, the tallest library
in the United States, after W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP. Du Bois eulogized Stalin
as "great," "courageous," and "attacked and slandered as few men of power have been." He
contended in 1950 that "the things for which the North Koreans are fighting are exactly the
things for which America fought in 1776."
In the midst of the greatest slaughter in history, Du
Bois found in Maoist China "a sense of human nature free of its most hurtful and terrible
meanness and of a people full of joy and faith and marching on in a unison unexampled in
Holland, Belgium, Britain and France; and simply inconceivable in the United States."
In gratitude, Red China officially observed his birthday, the Soviet Union awarded him the Lenin
Peace Prize, and Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana gave him sanctuary after he renounced his U.S.
citizenship. What does it say of the University of Massachusetts that it followed their lead?
Both Penn State and Rutgers house Paul Robeson Cultural Centers, named in honor of the
Communist athlete, singer, and actor who provided a morale boost to Americans fighting in the
International Brigades by visiting them on the front. Like Du Bois, Robeson won a Lenin Peace
Prize. Corliss Lamont, a trust-fund revolutionary who defended the justice of Stalin's show trials
in the 1930s and attacked Joan Baez in the 1970s for defending human rights in Communist
Vietnam, has a Corliss Lamont Rare Book Reading Room named for him at Columbia
University.
Between 1988 and 2003, Joel Kovel taught from the "Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies" at Bard
College. For several years in the mid 1990s, the Borough of Manhattan Community College even
awarded dozens of $500 Ho Chi Minh Scholarships to students who had maintained "C"
averages.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE Archives chairman Peter Carroll explained,
"Our monument
is to remember a group of people who stood up to take a stand." Who they stood up for, and
what stand they took, is something those like Carroll choose to blur.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports of the city's newest war memorial, "The translucent stone
squares show scenes from the war and faces of soldiers, as well as words about the period from
writers like Ernest Hemingway." A better source than Hemingway is George Orwell, who was
shot in the neck in the Spanish Civil War and avoided the Communist death squads seeking to
liquidate ideological deviationists.
"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 intelligentsia 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 Flynn Files.
The American Spectator
The Lincoln Brigade
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