The N.Y. Times Eulogizes Another ‘Starry-Eyed’ Stalinist | The American Spectator
– 3.4.16
Tools of murderous Joe Stalin still described as “always attached to just causes.”
The Iron Curtain collapsed more than a quarter century ago. But time can’t kill the Old Gray Lady’s infatuation with her fallen love.
The New York Times on Wednesday eulogized the last veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Delmer Berg, who died earlier this week at 100. Describing Berg’s enlistment to fight for Stalinist forces (after buying his way out of the National Guard stateside) in Spain as “quixotic,” Sam Roberts with unintentional irony quotes a friend: “He was always attached to just causes.”
Walter Duranty would be proud.
“Unlike a number of other starry-eyed recruits to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” Roberts writes, “Mr. Berg never outgrew his devotion to underdogs.” By “underdogs” he means Berg remained in fealty to Joseph Stalin, a name that both makes for a strange underdog and strangely never appears in an obituary of one of his last votaries. Even approaching the century mark, Berg, according to the Times, lived his life as an “unreconstructed Communist.”
During the Spanish Civil War, the Communists failed against Francisco Franco’s forces in part because of their preoccupations with purging their own ranks of deviationists. George Orwell, wounded in Spain, wrote of what he witnessed in Homage to Catalonia and Herb Romerstein documented the liquidation of leftists in Heroic Victims: Stalin’s Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War. In The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov published material from the Soviet archives further validating the derided claims of Orwell, Romerstein, and others that the Soviets used the Spanish Civil War to summarily execute rivals, real and imagined, on the Left.
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The New York Times on Wednesday eulogized the last veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Delmer Berg, who died earlier this week at 100. Describing Berg’s enlistment to fight for Stalinist forces (after buying his way out of the National Guard stateside) in Spain as “quixotic,” Sam Roberts with unintentional irony quotes a friend: “He was always attached to just causes.”
Walter Duranty would be proud.
“Unlike a number of other starry-eyed recruits to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” Roberts writes, “Mr. Berg never outgrew his devotion to underdogs.” By “underdogs” he means Berg remained in fealty to Joseph Stalin, a name that both makes for a strange underdog and strangely never appears in an obituary of one of his last votaries. Even approaching the century mark, Berg, according to the Times, lived his life as an “unreconstructed Communist.”
During the Spanish Civil War, the Communists failed against Francisco Franco’s forces in part because of their preoccupations with purging their own ranks of deviationists. George Orwell, wounded in Spain, wrote of what he witnessed in Homage to Catalonia and Herb Romerstein documented the liquidation of leftists in Heroic Victims: Stalin’s Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War. In The Secret World of American Communism, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov published material from the Soviet archives further validating the derided claims of Orwell, Romerstein, and others that the Soviets used the Spanish Civil War to summarily execute rivals, real and imagined, on the Left.
-go to links-
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