Word: koestlers
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...testing ground for new weapons like the Stuka dive bomber. The Soviet Union backed the Spanish Republic and its Popular Front Government; so did Communists everywhere. Volunteers poured in from around the world, among them a brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. The war was to shape their words forevermore. They carried the memory of it within their hearts, Albert Camus observed afterward, "like an evil wound." Camus explained why: "It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that...
...ambiguity is heightened by the fact that two of Orwell's closest friends during the war, Arthur Koestler and Franz Borkenau, became enthusiastic spokesmen for official anticommunism. Both were men whose works he respected and whose judgment and friendship he valued; both became ranking members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a CIA-funded organization which was set up to ensure the loyalty of non-communist intellectuals all over the world to the interests of the emerging American empire. Koestler and Borkenau joined such right-wing figures as James Burnham and Sidney Hook in a war in which ideas were...
...even if Orwell had joined the cultural shock troops, he could never have remained with them long. More than anything else in the world he despised such "smelly little orthodoxies," and his mind was at its most joyous and acute in sniffing out the contradictions in official humbug. Unlike Koestler and Borkenau--both former Communists--Orwell had never been able to muster any enthusiasm for intellectual hooliganism; an Orwell who had become convinced that it was necessary would have been a broken man. It seems likely that he would have withdrawn from politics and simply let go of the world...
...prejudices, the name of Mr. Eric Gordon, a disillusioned Communist. As Mr. Jago well knows, the roster of famous names who have fulminated against the gods that betrayed them is far more impressive than is suggested by conjuring the aid of poor Mr. Gordon: Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer, Richard Wright, Ruth Fischer, and Stephen Spender are some of the illustrious precursors. The point which Mr. Jago characteristically misses is that it is not necessary to have been a Communist to write critically and with understanding on these matters. A Sartre, for instance, can write incisively...
Nerve and high intelligence are needed to write at Koestler's level, and Author Lange does not seem to have either. The power of Darkness at Noon lay in the fact that the inquisitor Gletkin, proceeding logically and fairly from Rubashov's own assumptions, forced him to assent to the value of his own execution. Lange, on the other hand, flies into fantasy. There is a power failure at the brain laundry, and Vandenberg climbs the electric fence and escapes...