Good Orwell Quote

[Canuckistanian]

Found this at thepoorman.net.

By the way, the 'war' he's talking about is the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. And the 'PSUC' mentioned is the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia.

Many liberal/progressive activists actually fought in this war to stop fascism. They ultimately lost to Franco's fascists.

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy—all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. <…> Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.

George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia