the.com/sympathizer
the one nodding along until history decides which side they were on.
means A person who feels for or quietly supports a cause, group, or person — often without fully committing to action.
from From Greek 'sympatheia' — 'syn' (together) plus 'pathos' (feeling), literally 'feeling with.' It came through Latin and French into English in the 1500s, first as 'sympathy,' with 'sympathizer' arriving later for one who does the feeling-with. The faint whiff of suspicion the word now carries — the 'fellow traveler' shadow — is a much later wartime and political accretion, layered onto a root that originally meant nothing more sinister than shared emotion.
- label, not job
- Rarely self-applied, almost always assigned by others
- war origin
- Tarred entire populations during World War conflicts
- viet thanh
- Won Pulitzer Prize for novel by that name
- root word
- From Greek meaning suffering together
- the danger
- Suspicion needs no proof, only the suffix
julius rosenberg — american communist sympathizer executed for espionage in 1953
fellow travelers soviet union — western intellectuals and artists sympathetic to communism during cold war, like jean-paul sartre