Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Their dishonesty fell into two main patterns. They willfully blinkered themselves against the fact, obvious to Orwell, that British society and ultimately the socialist movement itself rested on imperialist exploitation and the comparative prosperity it conferred on worker and capitalist alike. Dishonesty also expressed itself in the left by a simultaneous clamor for a "strong line" against Hitler (read "war") and demands for peace and disarmament. The British intellectuals, wrote Orwell in August 1941, "for ten dreadful years have kept it up that Hitler is merely a figure out of comic opera. All this reflects is the sheltered condition...
...Orwell, political issues were moral issues. He understood that peace and social justice would descend on the world, if at all, from a moral impulse, and where was that impulse to come from? Not from the "self-justifying complacent hypocrisy of the boiled rabbits. . .of the left intelligentsia." The real problem of the West, as he saw it, was to preserve mankind's ethical values- honor, mercy, justice, respect for others -in the face of an almost universal disappearance of a belief in the immortality of the soul. Being naturally a good man, he was a good humanist...
...with the wrong mob-the semi-anarchist POUM instead of the Stalinist-sponsored International Brigade. Back in London, he had found himself nudged into near oblivion by the fellow-traveling leftist press. Such experiences toughened his mind and help to explain his standing with today's young left. He was untainted either by success or by the envy and rancor that marks the "liberal" who is merely a power worshiper out of power...
Speaking before a crowd of 150 in Kirkland House, Goodwin recommended that liberals form an ideological basis for the political future. "The trouble is that all the intellectual ideas are coming out of the far right or the New Left and not the traditional sources of power," he said...
Three Cambridge city councillors left their usual haunts last night and visited their biggest and most powerful constituent, Harvard University...