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Steinbeck: “Socialism is Just Another Form of Religion and Thus Delusional.”
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On February 27, 2014 @ 4:11 pm In The Point | 18 Comments
On the 112th anniversary of his birth, the left prefers to remember John Steinbeck as the author of Grapes of Wrath, not the patriot and CIA agent.
In 2012, the Central Intelligence Agency released documents indicating that Steinbeck had offered to spy for his country. The author planned a tour of Europe in 1952 and asked the agency if it needed anyone on the ground.
At the time, America and the Soviet Union had locked horns in a global cold war. The US needed smart men and women to gain the upper hand, and Gen. Walter Smith, director of the CIA, apparently was eager to recruit the author.
“If during this [trip to Europe] I can be of any service whatever to yourself or to the Agency you direct, I shall be only too glad,” Steinbeck wrote to Smith in January 1952. “Again – I shall be pleased to be of service. The pace and method of my junket together with my intention of talking with great numbers of people of all classes may offer peculiar advantages.”
While we do not know what the two men discussed in Washington, author Brian Kannard believes that Steinbeck worked for the CIA through the 1950s and ’60s. Mr. Kannard collected his evidence through Freedom of Information Act requests to the agency, as well as conversations with people close to Steinbeck, such as his son Thomas.
It was in his support for the Vietnam War, that Steinbeck most offended the left.
In 1967, Steinbeck traveled to Vietnam to report on the war, and his sympathetic portrait of the U.S. Army prompted the New York Post to denounce him for betraying his liberal past.
To all of this, Steinbeck said simply, “Socialism is just another form of religion, and thus delusional.”
From Vietnam, Steinbeck wrote;
“These newly come harbingers of peace say we don’t belong in Vietnam and can’t win. Well we do belong there and we never wanted to win. But I believe we intend to make sure that Peking doesn’t win either. That’s why we belong there.”
Steinbeck’s letters from Vietnam were not propaganda, despite the left’s accusations, he wrote about the war as it was, but he did it from the perspective of a man who had been an icon of the left, but who nevertheless understood what the stakes were.
“This generation that thinks it’s so hip could be the real lost generation,” Steinbeck said in one of his final interviews. “The proof will be in what they produce and what kind of next generation they produce. We thought we had it bad in the thirties, but I’ve never seen a time when the country was so confused as to where it’s headed.”
“It is historically true that a nation whose people take out more than they put in will collapse and disappear.”
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