Word: koestler
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Since 1940, Author Koestler has lived in England, serving as a private in the British Army and as an official propagandist. He has taken to the English language more ably than any foster-writer since Joseph Conrad...
Individualism v. Economic Law. The title of The Yogi and the Commissar, a collection of 16 essays, mostly on writing and politics, fits the book like a glove. For Koestler believes that every thinking man today is threatened or tempted by these two polar figures. On the extreme Left stands the Commissar-the superbly disciplined Communist who believes that the end justifies the means, and who has exchanged ethics, personal liberty and all irrational sentiments for a ruthless "pseudo-Communism" based on economic laws. On the extreme Right, in an "exotic hermitage," stands (or sits) the Yogi. He believes that...
Between these two figures stands the bewildered man of today. The intelligentsia, who might point a way for him, are either equally confused or deliberately blind. The blind, Koestler believes, are chiefly those who continue to put their faith in the creed of the Commissar...
Once the Leftist has nestled in to the security of the Commissar's creed he is not even critical of the Commissar's most outrageous acts. In the book's longest essay, Koestler discusses "the stupendous . . . ignorance of Soviet reality among the addicts of the Soviet myth." Soviet addicts cannot, or will not, believe that capital punishment is the penalty for going on strike in Russia. They cannot believe that a Soviet citizen may not leave his home for as little as 24 hours without notifying the police; that no one may go abroad without permission (under...
Will Russia Move West? Like most reformed Communists, Koestler is profoundly suspicious of Soviet intentions. He is convinced that Russian expansion Westward is inevitable, and that expansion, he thinks, will be prompted by a number of things: the nationalistic urge toward "more and more security and power"; the temptation to obtain world trade-lines via the Mediterranean, the Baltic and North Atlantic; the ancient Pan-Slavic tradition; the century-old Russian desire for hegemony over Poland, the Balkans and Constantinople...