A true “friend of freedom,” Melvin J. Lasky would have turned 100 today, Marko Martin writes.
His teenage anger over Western appeasement of Hitler and the blindness of his contemporaries in the face of Stalinist crimes, made him a Trotskyist, then a left-liberal anti-totalitarian. As a founder of the “Congress for Cultural Freedom”, and editor of Der Monat (The Month) and Encounter, Lasky inspired anti-totalitarian discourse at the highest levels, he observes (in German).
