By class traitor I don't mean a fed or infiltrator. You don't have to go out of your way to denounce leftist ideas or stop the left. You just have to have class interests directly in conflict with workers and the poor. You can let your factory unionize, and take less money. But would you choose to be that factory owner if it meant your current situation improved significantly?

I don't know what I would choose because I have no hopes of owning capital. I would love to quit my job and be free to just own stuff and make money off it. But then I would have to reckon that with my beliefs. I guess you could just accept you can't be a leftist and volunteer for the wall should the day come.

  • snicker [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    "But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which "enlightened" people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are "enlightened" all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our "enlightenment", demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep".

    -- George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling"