Orwell and the Peaceniks

In an excellent column in the Jerusalem Post, Sarah Honig draws on George Orwell to very accurately define the "peace" crowd.

These are the facts. But propagandists don't like facts. War propagandists normally lie to raise morale. Our self-professed peaceniks do so to lower morale, facilitate retreat and further their defeatist agenda.

Back in 1942 George Orwell pointed out matter-of-factly that "so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda it concentrates on putting forward a 'case,' obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions. The line normally followed is 'those who fight Fascism become Fascist themselves.'"

Just substitute "terrorist" for "Fascist."

Peace-propagandists, Orwell noted, "evade quite obvious objections" with "propaganda-tricks" which include "pooh-poohing the actual record of Fascism," while "systematically exaggerating" alleged "Fascizing processes" within Allied ranks. Sounds familiar? It should.

Orwell was intrigued by the "psychological processes by which pacifists who started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism." Even those who don't, he wrote in the Partisan Review, "imagine that one can somehow 'overcome' the German Army by lying on one's back" and they shun "discussion of what the world would actually be like if the Axis dominated it."
[...]
They're like the antiwar activists of Orwell's day. Orwell regarded them as "objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary commonsense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'"

While she is specifically talking about the Left in Israel, clearly these same arguments apply to the current "anti-war" movements in the US and Europe.