Neocons' Weird Love for the Spanish Civil War (Matthew Pennekamp, The National Interest)

Sometimes when the very old die, it baffles the mind to recall how their lives spanned contrasting ages. Harriet Tubman, whose visage we now know will grace our legal tender, lived until the year after the sinking of the Titanic. Madame Chiang’s life touched three centuries, and that old curmudgeon George Kennan survived long enough to see the advent of the flip phone. So when Del Berg, the last remaining American veteran of the Spanish Civil War’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died in March at the age of one hundred, John McCain found cause for graciousness, writing in the New York Times of Berg and his comrades-in-arms, “[They] believed they were freedom fighters first, sacrificing life and limb in a country they knew little about. . . . You might consider them romantics, fighting in a doomed cause for something greater than their self-interest.”

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/neocons-weird-love-the-spanish-civil-war-16201