Politics & Power Quote by Martha Gellhorn

The punch lands in the last two words: "the Spanish". Gellhorn isn’t lamenting a bureaucratic mix-up; she’s indicting a whole humanitarian theater in which generosity is loudly performed and quietly intercepted. The sentence is built like a trap. It opens with the comforting choreography of charity - "various organizations", "collected money", "sent food parcels" - a chain of verbs that signals competence and moral purpose. Then comes the blunt reversal: "nothing was ever received". The grammar tightens, the optimism collapses, and the real subject emerges: not aid, but the mechanisms that prevent it from reaching the people it’s meant to save.

Context matters. Reporting on the Spanish Civil War and the refugee crisis it produced, Gellhorn saw how relief could be swallowed by politics: borders, blockades, corrupt intermediaries, the priorities of states that preferred symbolic help to meaningful intervention. Her wording makes "refugees" sound almost abstract at first - a category that philanthropy can manage at a distance. "The Spanish" restores specificity and nationhood, a reminder that these aren’t anonymous victims but a people being denied agency and even sustenance.

The subtext is corrosive: good intentions are not the same as good outcomes, and in wartime they can be useful cover. Gellhorn’s journalistic ethic is visible here - not sentiment, but accountability. She forces the reader to follow the parcel all the way to the empty hands.