In the 1930s hundreds of Americans volunteered to fight on the side of the Republicans against the Fascist leader Franco in Spain. These members of the “Abraham Lincoln brigade” were vilified at the time, but today we (or at least many of us) consider them heroes.
Now I read about Michael Maldonado, 31, a former Marine lance corporal from California in Syria to help the Kurds. He is staying on to fight the Turks. Maldonado said it didn’t matter to him that Turkey was a NATO ally.
“Ally or not, we are going to fight. We see a strong country coming to massacre people who are just trying to live their lives, and we are going to try [to] stop this. We feel we have no choice.”
See Ben Hubbard and Carlotta Gall, “Turkey Attacks U.S. Ally in Syria," New York Times, (Oct. 10, 2019), pp. A1, A8.
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