Word: apologist
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Most of Patton's biographers come to the task with one set point of view or another, and Charles M. Province, author of The Unknown Patton is no exception. The President of the George Smith Patton, Jr., Historical Society, he is a self-appointed apologist for his subject. He notes in his introduction that "although there are no notes, exhaustive research was undertaken for this book," and while this is apparently so, it is manifested in a particularly disappointing manner. Province sculpts his book from a mass of quotations linked by his own commentary, rarely stopping to place the reader...
...says that "there is a political question involved" in the still unfilled chair. He says, "General feeling was that it was awkward to take the money and appoint an activist [against the Korean government], but on the other hand it was not in Harvard's interest to appoint an apologist for the South Korean government...
...political fantasies. Little wonder that when The Emperor was published in Poland in 1978, this story of an evil autocrat surrounded by craven functionaries was read as an allegory of Communist rule. Who but Stalin, for example, might have justified a famine in the words attributed to an apologist for Haile Selassie: "Between you and me-it is not bad for national order and a sense of national humility that the subjects be rendered skinnier, thinned down a bit. . . The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread . . . One should always beware of those...
...telling the truth about the Spartacus Youth League, Michael Anderson invited the predictable, totalitarian wrath of this "workers" vanguard" of spoiled children. In their May 10 offensive, they call Anderson a "cold war liberal," a "take-leftist," a "self-proclaimed Marxist," a "plain hard," an "apologist for the real Stalinists," and most damning of all, a "Friend...
...letter, Anderson criticizes the Spartacists for being Stalinist--a gross lie--and then becomes an apologist for the real Stalinists, the Communist Party USA. In fact, it is Anderson's own popular-front politics ("Just tell them what they want to hear") that are Stalinist, not to mention dangerous for all the struggles of the oppressed. If he didn't seem so paranoid that the Spartacist League "has got to be some right-wing front," perhaps he would be interested in discussing more important political differences...