Arthur Koestler's, Hungarian journalist, political philosopher, critic and novelist, work and life is fascinating because he was touched by all the events that were of high importance at his time and is still in our daily lives. A Zionist who lived in Palestine for a while and tried to convince Menachem Beguin in 1944 to accept the two states solution after the war but said:
"When the meeting was over, I realised how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence."
Joined the Communist Party in 1931 and resigned in 1938 because of the crimes committed by Stalin. In 1940 he published "The Darkness of Noon" a novel that exposes the totalitarian atrocities. In "The God That Failed", a 1949 book collects together six essays with the testimonies of a number of famous ex-Communists, who were writers and journalists he depicts the Ukrainian genocide that killed up to 10 millions of death: "Holodomor" equals "death by hunger" in Ukrainian a genocide denied by Stalin who said the deaths were due to drought*. He killed himself in an act that can be considered as euthanasia since he did it because he could not cope with the Alzheimer disease anymore as he explained in his "suicide" note:
"My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's Disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements."
That is already a lot to discuss but there is more and I'll write about him in another post. Quotations from "The God that Failed":
"..., we conclude that if on the one hand oversensitivity to social injustice and obsessional craving for Utopia are signs of neurotic maladjustment, society may, on the other hand, reach a state of decay where the neurotic rebel causes more joy in heaven than the sane executive who orders pigs to be drowned under the eyes of starving men. This in fact was the state of our civilization when, in December, 1931, at the age of twenty-six, I joined the Communist Party of Germany. "
"..., I developed a strong dislike of the obviously rich; not because they could afford to buy things (envy plays a much smaller part in social conflict than is generally assumed) but because they were able to do so without a guilty conscience."
"I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-33 in the Ukraine: hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats which—with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads, puffed bellies—looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles; the old men with frost-bitten toes sticking out of torn slippers. I was told that these were the kulaks who had resisted the collectivization of the land and accepted the explanation; they were enemies of the people who preferred begging to work. The maid in the Hotel Regina in Kharkov fainted from hunger while doing my room: the manager explained that she was fresh from the countryside and through a technical glitch had not yet been issued her ration cards; I accepted the technical hitch."
'I not only accepted the famine as inevitable, but also the ban on foreign travel, foreign newspapers and books, and the dissemination of a grotesquely distorted picture of life in the capitalist world…Propaganda was indispensable for the survival of the Soviet Union surrounded by a hostile world. The necessary lie, the necessary slander; the necessary intimidation of the masses to preserve them from shortsighted errors; the necessary liquidation of oppositional groups and classes; the necessary sacrifice of a whole generation in the interest of the next—it may all sound monstrous and yet it was so easy to accept while rolling along the track of faith….[This] mental world…is difficult to explain to the outsider who has never entered the magic circle and played Wonderland croquet with himself."
* The same excuse given this year by US for the starvation in Somalia and other African countries.
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