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, religious and/or views:
“What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
“The chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.”
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)