The people who write pamphlets against us and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper offices hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud.

George Orwell – Hommage to Catalonia (p. 214)

Talking about the communist propaganda against the Trotskyist POUM he was fighting with in the Spanish Civil War. Sounds to me the like the negative comments you read on Indymedia etc. nowadays by “keyboard activists”.