The Blog

World War IV

11:58 AM, Sep 11, 2007 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB
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Norman Podhoretz is on the offensive, with a piece in today's Wall Street Journal and a new video at Commentary's contentions blog. In his piece in the Journal, Podhoretz compares today's hard-left antiwar movement to the early movement that sprang up against the Vietnam War. The best line of the piece comes at the end of this little anecdote:

It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?"

Go read the whole thing...but despite all the parallels Podhoretz sees between the two movements--he even finds the current antiwar movement much stronger than its predecessor at this relatively early stage--he remains optimistic. And here's the video from contentions:

More by Michael Goldfarb

Update: I probably ought to plug his new book, too. So here's the link to his latest, World War IV.