Remembering John Le Carré, British Spy Turned Best-Selling Novelist

[yankeedoodle]

43-minute audio and transcript here:  https://www.npr.org/2020/12/14/946227312/remembering-john-le-carre-british-spy-turned-best-selling-novelist

Note his very understated British gentleman-type comment about the presumptuousness and brutality of the Israhellie Mossad. 

LE CARRE: It was not my intention at all. But they saw some kind of equivalence. You know, in the end - and it applies to doctors, scientists, and it applies to spies - people who are using the same techniques, developing the same techniques, who have the same attitude towards human beings, who put expediency and outcome over method, they are a brotherhood or a sisterhood or what you will. Moment you get together with - moment I get together with some retired generals from the Mossad, I find we understand each other very quickly.

It's a shared attitude that creates this masonry. And it's very spooky. But - and it can also be profoundly disconcerting. But - because they make assumptions about me particularly which are quite misplaced. And they have, I think, a much more brutal attitude to human beings than I ever had. But nevertheless, we are in some spooky way colleagues.

[yankeedoodle]

RIP John le Carré. The novelist reflected on his opposition to the Iraq War on a Democracy Now episode back in 2010  https://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/25/british_novelist_john_le_carr_on

"Well, I think that my anger still stands. I can't understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin. I think that a war in which we refuse to accept the body count of those that we kill is also a war of which we should be ashamed. We've always got to be careful of that. I think that — I wasn't speaking as a prophet, I was just speaking as an angry citizen, I suppose. I think it's true that we've caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time."

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