Word: gollancz
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This legend sums up British Publisher-Socialist Victor Gollancz' political jeremiad. After a lifetime of left-wing and fellow-traveling activity, Gollancz has discovered that man's only guide in life is a set of ethics absolutely and unconditionally binding under all conditions. When Christ told His followers to love all men as their brothers, He meant-insists Gollancz-exactly what He said. That creed, says Gollancz, may be accepted or rejected but should not be reduced to the petty levels of convenient compromise...
Love, Mercy & Respect. Though retaining his Jewish faith and socialist belief, Gollancz has here written a fiery, almost transported plea for a return to the ways of the early Christians. Political salvation is possible, he thunders, only if based on a union of traditional religious ethics and the secular humanist tradition of the West. A way of life based on unswerving devotion to love, mercy and respect for human personality is the only vision that can save modern man from total destruction...
...Gollancz concentrates on two major social phenomena which he feels most markedly violate his creed of Christian love: the practices of the Stalin dictatorship and the Allied occupation policy in Germany. In great detail he explores the "specialized idealism" of Stalin's followers, that double-bookkeeping morality which permits them to engage in the most immoral activity precisely because they are sincerely convinced that they work in behalf of a liberating cause. "A communist spy is particularly dangerous ... not because he's a scoundrel but because...
...Gollancz' most fiery bolts are directed against British and, by indirection, U.S. policy in Germany. To treat the Germans like a conquered people, says Gollancz, is to perpetuate the hatreds that can only lead to another war. "If we treat the Germans kindly, kindness will stir in them. If we show them mercy, they will know, by the immediacy of contact, how 'delightful' mercy is. ... A society cannot be brought into being by doing just the things which it is the very purpose of the intended society to abolish forever...
...significant indication of how more thoughtful leftists, repelled by Russian tyranny, now question their old power-centered assumptions. Strands of the Western tradition they had once blithely ignored-its respect for individuality and defense of freedom for dissident minorities-now seem terribly precious to ex-fellow travelers like Gollancz...