Word: cynically
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...Cynic as Hero. At the side of such intellectuals as Andre Gide, he praised Communism incessantly, but was careful not to join the Communist Party. He got a job as correspondent for Moscow's Izvestia during the Spanish civil war, dutifully penned the Stalin line, but thought so little of it that, at the approach of World War II, he tried to get out of Europe by the Zionist route. Failing, he returned to Moscow by the Communist route and became one of Stalin's favorite thunderers. Throughout World War II he poured an unceasing flow of hate...
Ehrenburg's eulogy of Stalin after the dictator's death was more fulsome than any other. Yet, a few months later, he published a novel called The Thaw which Stalin would never have stood for. In The Thaw the Cynic, not the Idealist, is shown setting the tone of Soviet life, and for the first time in a Communist-printed work, explicit references are made to the melancholy effect on Soviet professional life of Stalin's wide-sweeping 1936-38 purge: characters bemoan the disappearance of families and friends for crimes they did not commit. Last week...
...single manner of reasoning, that of facts") was balanced by the man of passionate emotions ("I had possibly the most violent burst of passion I've ever experienced . . . The passion . . . was ambition ... I felt myself capable of the greatest crimes and infamies"). The would-be cynic ("I've got to attack every woman I meet [to] form my character") was softened by the timid lover ("With a little more assurance or a little less love, I would perhaps have been sublime and would have had her"). The fluttering social butterfly ("I was brilliant ... I was wearing a waistcoat...
...doing this?" said Mohammed Ali. "A cynic might say that we aren't doing it for our health. Well, he would be wrong. That's exactly what we are doing...
Nobody yet had the answers. If Mendès succeeds in all his aims, France might be in sounder, if more modest, circumstances than it had been in years. And if Mendès-France fails? Said a cynic: "The old gang will come back. Indo-China will still be lost, because as a nation we aren't really ready to fight for Indo-China, and our allies aren't ready to fight if we aren't. EDC might scrape through, more likely be blocked. The Americans and British will rearm the Germans anyway, which we will...