Consider John Dos Passos’s gloomy analysis of postwar Germany, which appeared in the January 7, 1946Life. The U.S. had just flattened Imperial Japan and plowed into the heart of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich, yet Dos Passos could say “We’ve lost the peace. . . . Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American.”Screw Dos Passos. I hate that socialist bitch.
“We’ve lost the peace. . . . Friend and foe alike look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American.”
Shades of current Iraq commentary...
John Dos Passos was quite possibly the most brilliant author of the 20th Century — socialist or not.
That being understood, it is important to note that during the Spanish Civil War Dos Passos had a complete change of heart regarding socialism. Once he saw for himself the brutality and inhumanity of the Spanish communists, socialists, and anarchists, he washed his hands of leftism, and condemned Hemingway and others for supporting the Spanish Reds. He went on to become a philosophical conservative, and spent the rest of his lengthy career promoting Rightist thinking.