RATIONALIST INTERNATIONAL
Bulletin # 34
26 March 2000
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Editor: Sanal Edamaruku
Address: P.O.Box 9110, New Delhi-110091, India.
Telephone: +91-11-2253255, Fax: +91-11-84539526
E-mail: edamaruku@yahoo.com

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NICOLAS WALTER IS NO MORE

Nicolas Walter, veteran British rationalist and humanist, is no more. He was a respected rationalist, an uncompromising fighter and a brilliant writer whose sharp pen would not spare anyone. In the December 1999 issue of The New Humanist he closed his well read column, which was famous for its punching power, and announced his retirement from the Rationalist Press Association. He wrote:

"This is a farewell to arms. I am at the same time retiring from the Rationalist Press Association and moving out of London, leaving the organisations I have belonged to and dropping the periodicals I have subscribed to, and saying goodbye to my native city and to many of my friends and all of my enemies.

"…I have been a professional humanist for too long; it is time to become an amateur human being again. I have heard too much about having a "life-stance"; I prefer life. Long ago I was asked by some reference book about my recreations; I have always been more interested in creation than in recreations, but after thinking about it I answered 'Living'. So on to a new era, not a new century or new millennium, but a new life.

"Farewell then, RPA and Humanism and London, and all the people who have filled the second half of my working life…"

Jim Herrick, Publications Director of the Rationalist Press Association and the editor of The New Humanist, briefly writes about Nicolas Walter for the readers of Rationalist International Bulletin:

NICOLAS WALTER (1934—2000)
By Jim Herrick

Nicolas Walter was renowned as an anarchist, a rationalist and a peace campaigner. He was a writer and journalist of great precision and force. He was also a broadcaster and lecturer with great quickness of mind. He had wide influence beyond his immediate circle. He followed in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, a well-known anarchist, and his maternal grandfather, a well-known humanist. His father, a well-known neurophysiologist, was also an atheist. He learnt Russian with the Royal Air Force and history at Oxford University. A succession of jobs in editing and Public Relations included six years as chief sub-editor at the Times Literary Supplement. For 25 years he worked for the Rationalist Press Association, first as editor of the New Humanist, then as Managing Director.

As an anarchist one of his most successful publications was About Anarchism, which was translated into more than twelve languages. He worked in the peace Movement in the Committee of 100 and in the Spies for Peace Group, which divulged seats of regional government in the case of nuclear war. He was imprisoned for two months for protesting about the Vietnam War in a church. A key to much of his activity was his strong belief in freedom of speech – seen in his opposition to blasphemy law and his defence of Salman Rushdie. He certainly exercised his right of free speech in innumerable letters to the press all written with the utmost lucidity and reasonableness. He wrote two books published by the Rationalist Press Association: Blasphemy Ancient and Modern (1990) and Humanism: What’s in the Word (1997).

He suffered ill-health for many years, but it did not deter him from his activities, even when in a wheel chair. He was a perfectionist and an idealist and expected high ideals from the world and his colleagues. He had luminous intelligence and also kindness for his family and colleagues.

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Photographs attached:

1. Nicolas Walter in 1999. Reproduced from The New Humanist.

2. Nicolas Walter with Joseph Edamaruku, President of Indian Rationalist Association, at the American Atheist Convention at Dallas in 1979. Both of them were speakers in this convention.

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