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From International Socialism, No.19, Winter 1964/5, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Two-Way Passage
Ritchie Calder
Heinemann, 30s.
That Mr. Calder cares about people, particularly starving ones, is well known. That he believes in feeding, curing and housing them through the UN and its specialised agencies, is also common knowledge. Mr Calder is a good man, and all the unnecessary ugliness and poverty of the world appals him. He has told us so many times, and we believe him. In Two-Way Passage, he relates the story yet again, enlivening the terrible statistics with a choice of anecdotes nicely designed to tug at the heart-strings and leave us with a warm glow of good feeling about the essential niceness of people.
Into Mr. Calder’s pot goes a dash of anthropology, a sprig of human-brotherliness, a seasoning of anti-communism and a basic stock of social democracy. The result is pleasant, but a bit thin, like landlady’s calves-foot jelly. In the long run, there is no substitute for politics. Mr Calder cannot, however hard he tries, wish away the fact that within each developing nation there are rapidly crystallising class-conflicts; that social progress means a social and political revolution within each nation, and not merely the traffic, two-way or not, of external aid.
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