Scathing denunciation of dictatorship, which “regards freedom lightly if not as evil in itself,” was voiced last night by Wickham Steed, former editor of The Times, delivering the third annual Lucien Wolf Memorial Lecture.
He caustically criticized British liberals and newspaper proprietors who visit Germany to harken to its leaders and return to extol Nazism, “forgetting the crimes for which these leaders are responsible.”
Characterizing dictators as “refugees from reality,” seeking to escape from critical thought through uniformity and “shirtiness,” Mr. Steed assailed Nazi exponents for putting folk thought before individual thought.
They hold out “the behavior of a flock of sheep or a herd of swine as an ideal towards which mankind should strive,” he asserted, “provided always that there be acting sheep-dogs under an all-powerful shepherd or schweinhund (swine-dog) under a supreme swinesherd to make the flock or herd likeminded.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
