Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Tragedies Versus Statistics

In a collection of essays by former Marxists called The God That Failed, poet Stephen Spender drew attention to his own hypocrisy in the matter:

"When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascists, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses; in the second only words. I gradually acquired a certain horror of the way in which my own mind worked. It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not really care about children being murdered at all."


From CWNews, Tragedies Versus Statistics

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