Guilties Abroad To my mind, Ward's death was a dignified
ending. It has been quite a summer for sig- nificant deaths. One too long postponed was that of Rakosi, the most loathsome of surviving despots. A journalist told me the other day of the campaign he conducted in the Manchester Guardian in the Thirties in favour of Rakosi's release from a Hungarian prison. It showed, he said, how little one knows as a young progres- sive. And now his successors were agitating about Ambatielos and Grimau. Not that Am- batielos seems to be quite a Rakosi type (though Grimau was). And it does seem politic to release him, even with the knowledge that he would doubtless be prepared once again to try to bring Rakosism to Greece, as in 1944 and 1947. No, the real point is simply that progressives everywhere are almost invariably totally misinformed about such cases: as we now know, they were misled about the Reichstag Fire, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the Moscow Trials. Katyn. How many more lessons are needed?
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