Political and Religious Views
Gellhorn remained a committed leftist throughout her life and was contemptuous of those who, like Rebecca West, became more conservative. She considered the ideal of journalistic objectivity "nonsense", and used journalism to reflect her politics. Gellhorn was a prominent supporter of Israel and the Spanish Republic. For Gellhorn, Dachau had "changed everything", and she became a lifelong champion of Israel. She was a frequent visitor to Israel after 1949, and in the 1960s considered moving to Israel. An uncompromising opponent of fascism, Gellhorn had a more ambivalent attitude toward communism. While she is not known to have praised communism and Stalinism, she equally refused to criticize it. She believed in the innocence of Alger Hiss until her death. A self-described "hater", she attacked fascism, anti-communism, racism, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
Gellhorn was an atheist. Her part-Jewish parents had embraced secular humanism, and raised Gellhorn as such. Her only quasi-religious instruction consisted of Sunday visits to the Society for Ethical Culture.
Read more about this topic: Martha Gellhorn
Famous quotes containing the words political and, political, religious and/or views:
“What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?”
—Edgar Quinet (1803–1875)
“No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church.... We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.”
—Stephen Bayley (b. 1951)
“But of all the views of this law [universal education] none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)