Word: absolutist
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Generally speaking, Red Gloves lacks bias-and takes on a certain breadth-by dealing with political types rather than political tenets, and by suggesting that it takes a good many kinds of people to make up even a Communist world. The essential struggle between idealist and realist, absolutist and compromiser, is indeed common to all movements; what might be considered "anticommunist" about the play is its picturing a lack of charity that begins at home...
...novel drives this despondent dogma home with such fierce insistence that readers may need a few minutes' reflection to shake off its spell. But in the end, it will be seen that Green has trapped both Kaspan and Meddow in equally futile obsessions with absolutist quests-the one for absolute freedom and the other for absolute love...
Here, in capsule, was the implacable Left. Much of Laski's audience belonged to the placable Left-New Dealers who preached a muddled "middle way" for its own sake, without much effort to formulate principles. Yet they cheered Laski, the absolutist, who sufficiently relaxed his absolutism to make a deep bow to a compromiser, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as the "supreme friend of democracy and freedom...
...famed as a fence-sitting liberal sheet, placarded its cover: FOR A DECLARATION OF WAR, devoted four pleading pages to the argument: "It is plain in this midsummer the United States has reached the opportunity for a great decision, which may never come again." Denying it had ever been "absolutist in pacifism," the New Republic added: "We were right to hesitate at first. . . . But now we do understand. ... If it is our war enough so that we must pour our material wealth into the scales on one side only, then it is our war to fight as well...