Felix Greene

Felix Greene (21 May 1909 – 15 June 1985) was a British journalist who chronicled several communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s.

Early life Greene was educated at Sidcot School, a Quaker institution in Somerset, and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he read law. Whilst still a student, aged only 22, he stood as a National Labour candidate in South East Essex at the 1931 general election. That year, he was seconded to the Foreign Office to visit all major capitals in South America and prepare a report for the Cabinet on German and Italian propaganda exercises taking place in the region. In 1938, he was asked by the Canadian Government to assist in the preparation of a draft constitution for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Resigning from the BBC in 1940, he remained in the United States, joining the Quaker American Friends Service Committee in 1941 and helping Gerald Heard establish Trabuco College in California the following year. The Wall Street Journal argued that Greene purposely hid negative information about the extent of starvation in China and called him a "fellow traveller."

Commander R. W. Herrick of the U.S. Navy reviewed A Curtain of Ignorance in Naval War College Review, writing, "There can be no question but that [Greene] set out deliberately to 'prove' his contentions that practically everything having to do with Communist China and its policies is good, while Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist regimes are unmitigatedly bad. ... Yet, once the reader understands and allows for this bias, this book is eminently worth reading." Herrick agreed with Greene's observation that "... on matters where great national feelings are aroused, scholars and experts are just as likely as the rest of us to allow their judgments to be swayed by the prevailing climate of opinion." He found the chapters on Nationalist China and the China Lobby to be provocative reading.

In the 1970s, Greene went to Dharamsala to visit the 14th Dalai Lama, who recalled that after three days of discussion, Greene's attitude had changed.

Greene lived in the San Francisco area for twenty years, but returned to Britain before eventually moving to Mexico, where he died of cancer. The Times described him as a man who began his professional life as an establishment centrist but then veered leftwards, while still "remaining basically a liberal". He was a cousin of the author Graham Greene.

Books

Awakened China: The Country Americans Don't Know. Garden City, New York, 1961. The Enemy: What Every American Should Know About Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. VIETNAM! VIETNAM! In Photographs and text. 1966, Palo Alto, California: Fulton Publishing Company, LCCN: 66-28359 A Curtain of Ignorance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Details of how Communist China was reported in the US in the 1960s. The Wall Has Two Sides. A Portrait Of China Today, The Reprint Society, 1963.

Greene's films and photos are distributed by Contemporary Films.