Zeyad is right on both counts: he was naive

Zeyad is right on both counts: he was naive, and this isn’t the end of it. The lying commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, who coached his soldiers to cover up their crime, may have gotten away with murder — so far — but Lieutenant Jack Saville, the platoon leader, goes on trial March 15.

The career of John T. Flynn, an old-style liberal who was one of the leaders of the America First Committee, exemplifies the course followed by many other liberals and progressives of the 1930s: his opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s warlike foreign policy — and super-centralism on the home front — exiled him from the precincts of the Left and drove him into the ranks of the “isolationist” (i.e. pro-peace) Right. After reading Lew Rockwell’s recent piece on “red-state fascism,” I thought of Flynn, who foresaw our present predicament in 1943, the year his book As We Go Marching (now sadly out of print) was published:

“When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.