ld Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian economist who chaired Truman's Council of Economic Advisers.
Views on race
Keynes sometimes explained the mass murder that took place during the first years of communist Russia on a racial basis, as part of the “Russian and Jewish nature”, rather than as a result of the communist rule. After a trip to Russia, he wrote in his Short View of Russia that there is "beastliness on the Russian and Jewish natures when, as now, they are allied together". He also wrote that "out of the cruelty and stupidity of the Old Russia nothing could ever emerge, but (...) beneath the cruelty and stupidity of the New Russia a speck of the ideal may lie hid", which together with other comments may be construed as anti-Russian and antisemitic.
Some critics, including Murray Rothbard, have sought to show that Keynes had sympathy with Nazism, and a number of writers described him as antisemitic. Keynes's private letters contain portraits and descriptions, some of which can be characterized as antisemitic, others as philosemitic. Scholars have suggested that these reflect clichés current at the time that he accepted uncritically, rather than any racism. On several occasions Keynes used his influence to help his Jewish friends, most notably when he successfully lobbied for Ludwig Wittgenstein to be allowed residency in the United Kingdom, explicitly in order to rescue him from being deported to Nazi-occupied Austria. Keynes was a supporter of Zionism, serving on committees supporting the cause.
Allegations that he was racist or had totalitarian beliefs have been rejected by Robert Skidelsky and other biographers. Professor Gordon Fletcher wrote that "the suggestion of a link between Keynes and any support of totalitarianism cannot be sustained". Once the aggressive tendencies of the Nazis towards Jews and other minorities had become apparent, Keynes made clear his loathing of Nazism. As a lifelong pacifist he had initially favoured peaceful containment of Nazi Germany, yet he began to advocate a forceful resolution while many conservatives were still arguing for appeasement. After the war started he roundly criticised the Left for losing their nerve to confront Hitler:
The intelligentsia of the Left were the loudest in demanding that the Nazi aggression should be resisted at all costs. When it comes to a showdown, scarce four weeks have passed before they remember that they are pacifists and write defeatist letters to your columns, leaving the defence of freedom and civilisation to Colonel Blimp and the Old School Tie, for whom Three Cheers.
Views on inflation
Keynes has been characterised as being indifferent or even positive about mild inflation. He had indeed expressed a preference for inflation over deflation, saying that if one has to choose between the two evils, it is "better to disappoint the rentier" than to inflict pain on working class families. He also supported the German hyperinflation as a way to get free from reparations obligations. However, Keynes was also aware of the dangers of inflation. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, he wrote:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
Keynes's early romantic and sexual relationships were exclusively with men. Keynes had been in relationships while at Eton and Cambridge; significant among these early partners were Dilly Knox and Daniel Macmillan. Keynes was open about his affairs, and from 1901 to 1915 kept separate diaries in which he tabulated his many sexual encounters. Keynes's relationship and later close friendship with Macmillan was to be fortunate, as Macmillan's compa