: : GG was famously a Soviet fellow traveler.: Oh no!! You think you've found an admirable person then....
Well, no, not necessarily; he wasn't a totalitarian, but he did admire certain progressive features of teh Soviet model. the Soviets were progressive at times, and tyrannical at other times; I wouldn't give them either blanket support or blanket condemnation. And it was certainly inspiring to most of teh world's peopel to have, for 70-odd years, a global superpower that defied the power of international capital, quite apart from anything else.
: :He actually went further than I would, defending a schoolmate of his (Kim Philby) who turned double agent and defected to the Soviet Union. Philby actually sent rebels into Albania after tipping off Hoxha, knowing that they would be killed. I can't really forgive that, but apparently Greene could.
: My God!! If he regarded human life as so expendable he must have been more of a socialist than a humanist.
Well, I don't think he GLOATEd over the deaths. I think he was trying to find an excuse not to have to criticize his high school friend. His argument was basically that the anticommunist Albanians were intent on harming their own country, that they were traitors and therefore deserved to die.
: :He's been called 'the courtesan of Castro' before, and late in his life expressed the desire to see Moscow and the Vatican, apparently his two favorite ideological centers, united in cooperation.
: That's interesting in that each where/are perfectly good systems that could learn by infusing a bit of self-government and decentralisation into their mode of organisation. I wonder if he seen it that way?
: :I'll try to dig up some good quotes for you.
: Thanks very much NJ, that's really appreciated, Cheers.
