Posted by Charles Coull on April 26, 2005 at 11:46:07 from 212.137.57.41 user Charles_Coull.
In Reply to: Re: Buchan a bigot ??? posted by Peter H on April 26, 2005 at 10:53:38:
This is a difficult one because Buchan was a product of his times and many of the views that his characters express are rightly considered unacceptable now. I completely concur on the comments on the term “politically correct” made in previous posts. PC is a convenient label often used to write off what to many seems decent and reasonable now. However on the anti Semitic charge I can do no better than to quote from a recent paper by Daniel Gorman of York University in Canada:
“Buchan has often been criticized for perpetuating discriminatory stereotypes in his writing. The most common charge is that he was an anti-Semite. This claim is usually tied to the character Scudder from The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan's most famous novel. Scudder tells Richard Hannay that '[t]he Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him,' and that at the heart of every crisis is 'a little white-faced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake.' The critics usually fail to note, however, that Scudder's views are renounced in the book. Further, Buchan himself was a supporter of Zionism, and was on close terms with Chaim Weizman, president of the World Zionist Council and later the first President of Israel.”
Further to that Buchan’s name was placed in the Jewish National Fund’s Golden Book for his contribution to the campaign to create a Jewish state and was included in a list of those to be targeted by the Nazis because of his public pro Jewish pronouncements.
None of this gets away from the fact that there was much in Buchan and Ransome’s time which was routinely considered acceptable which is simply unacceptable in this genuinely more enlightened age. All the more remarkable that little if any of it comes through in Ransome’s writing.