Ah, those were the days.
> As to your and Carroll's attacks on Democrats - I just read "Germany
> Tried Democracy" by S. William Halperin. It does a nice job
> portraying similar attitudes among German Communist radicals who often
> found themselves on the same side of the barricade against Social
> Democrats whom they perceived as their main enemy. We know how this
> ended, it was tragedy.
I've often noted, with great interest, how the Thirties and Forties -- the rise of Fascism and the second world war -- constitute a kind of intellectual straitjacket, or better, a Procrustean bed, into which all political situations need to be crammed somehow. This intellectual tic is by no means confined to 'progressives', though it takes a somewhat different form in the more mainstream context -- it's noteworthy that every ennemi du jour is Hitler, and every diplomat is Chamberlain.