Word: martyre
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...committed perjury when he denied giving State Department secrets to Communist Courier Whittaker Chambers. His defense is essentially the same one that his lawyers used in his 1949 and 1950 trials. Author Alger Hiss seems remarkably devoid of personal outrage, but he pictures Defendant Alger Hiss as a political martyr in an era of "great, unreasoning fear of Communism." In the argot of the prison yard, he was "framed...
Damon sees his mother die a Christian martyr and feels his mission to be learning the truths of this strange new sect to determine its place in his own life. His initial reaction is, "If that's your religion, I say to hell with it." He thinks Christianity has a "fascinated obsession with wickedness" and, with a truly moral concern, thinks Christianity an excuse for letting people sin all their lives but still enter Heaven by last-minute repentance...
Arrested last November, he has nothing apparent in his record to justify Ulbricht's charge. In the calculated Communist view, however, Harich's record probably enhanced his merit as a scapegoat: there is nothing about it that would make him a martyr in student eyes, or even a symbol of resistance for the West...
...Force, who has joined a Carmelite convent in Compiègne on the eve of the Revolution. Weak and fearful at first, she gradually gains spiritual strength. In a strange contrast, it is the doughty Mother Superior who dies in fear, while the once cowardly Blanche dies a glorious martyr's death; she twice spurns a chance to escape and, with other Carmelites, goes serenely to the guillotine...
...startling spectacle of the Indian fakir snuggled down on his bed of nails, or the martyr thrusting his hand into the flames, has often been explained by medical science on the basis of emotional disturbances (usually hysteria). In other cases, failure to react to pain may be due to severe mental retardation or physical damage to the nervous system. But there remains a baffling group of individuals to whom none of these explanations can be applied, and who show no reaction to pain of virtually any kind...