Word: treasonously
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...individual traitors-men who from faintheartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th Century, for the first time, men banded together by millions, in movements like fascism and communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas...
...book published in the U.S. this week, The Meaning of Treason, is a clue to this clouded question...
...Book. The Meaning of Treason is a collection of Rebecca West's reports of the trials of a number of British World War II traitors. She covered the trials on assignment for the New Yorker, where her articles (now expanded and revised) were first published. But the idea was her own, and she could scarcely have chosen a better person...
...treason trials, as she records them, were not just the raw pulp of daily news, tatters of irrelevant wretchedness or cold inquests of justice upon a succession of dingy destinies. They become three-dimensional-as events in a process of history, which Miss West views as organic and continuously alive; as ordeals of a common humanity, which the men on trial shared with the men who tried them; as glimpses of a common hell, which all men know (since all men betray themselves continually), but know less terribly than those traitors who in addition had betrayed their fellows...
There were about 20 traitors. In the first circle were those whom Miss West calls the children of treason-"The ones who thought like children, and felt like children, and were treacherous as children are, without malice, only because someone was giving away sweetmeats or because the whole gang was chasing...