QOTD And Fascifism Redux

That would be "Question Of The Day" [check out the third comment]:

Here's a good illustration that hit very close to home for me: After watching some news of the fighting in Fallujah, my reflexively pacifist wife (who voted for Kerry) asked why our soldiers couldn't use tear gas to clear enemy fighters out of buildings--so we wouldn't have to kill people who were trying to kill us. Seriously. I was dumbfounded. I'm still dumbfounded. Where does one even start? "Kill or be killed" is just not a conceivable scenario for 60s antiwar types. Nor is the concept of sworn enemies beyond the reach of reason.

"If you were an officer in charge of 30-40 soldiers, how many of their lives would you be prepared to sacrifice on the off chance that hardened thugs who behead their captives would be prepared to surrender peacefully?"

What? Another question before I answer the last one?

Kept you waiting didn't I? Look at the masthead.

The answer to the previous question is of course GEORGE ORWELL. And you need to go read "Pacifism And The War".

Let's cut to the chase and look at the closing paragraph:

‘Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again’ (Mr Comfort). I have never attacked ‘the intellectuals’ or ‘the intelligentsia’ en bloc. I have used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go — the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking. But even with these various schools I would differentiate between individuals. I would never think of coupling Christopher Dawson with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman with the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at very different levels. For instance Mr Comfort himself wrote one poem I value greatly (‘The Atoll in the Mind’), and I wish he would write more of them instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But his letter he has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of answering what I have said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I am little known by a misrepresentation of my general line and sneers about my ‘status’ in England. (A writer isn’t judged by his ‘status’, he is judged by his work.) That is on a par with ‘peace’ propaganda which has to avoid mention of Hitler’s invasion of Russian [sic], and it is not what I mean by intellectual honesty. It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don’t like the sneers, libels, parrot phrased and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.

Fascifism. Savor that word. It's not clear that Orwell coined it -- but he knows its proper use.

And the Nazi-theme will be extended well beyond this weekend due to a surfeit of material in the queue and far too little time available...