Word: treasons
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...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...
...Repentant. There were other children of treason. Says Author West: "The children "who go from their homes with strangers because they have been given cakes and sweets are unsustained by pride when the unkindness falls on them. They know well that they have done wrong. A person should be loyal to his father and mother, to his brothers and sisters, to his friends, to his town or village, to his province, to his country; and a person should do nothing for a bribe, even if it takes the form of a promise that he should live instead...
...Circle No. 4 is the pit. Here, in that ambiguous clarity which Milton called "no light but rather darkness visible," are two architects of betrayal. These men committed not the treason of the unlighted mind, like Kenneth Edward or Herbert George, nor the treason of depravity like John Amery, but the fully conscious treason of ideas. One was a Communist. One was a Fascist...
...Joyce joined Sir Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists. (In time he broke away to form his own British National Socialist League.) And so just before the war he fled to Germany, to lend to the treason of ideas his vibrant voice. For this he was hanged...