Word: koestlers
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...side, where Allied might and Allied generalship were crushing and supreme, it had never been fought well. The why of the fighting had never been adequately spelled out. Franklin Roosevelt, looking for a name for the war, could come up with nothing better than "The War for Survival." Arthur Koestler, viewing the whole catastrophe with detachment, said that it was a war in which a lie fought against a half-truth. In such a contest, the lie had had a tremendous psychological advantage...
...faith and mind were approached in a very different way in two other books, The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4) by Arthur Koestler, brilliant ex-Communist novelist (Darkness at Noon), and The Perennial Philosophy (TIME, Oct. 1) by Novelist Aldous Huxley (Antic Hay, Brave New World). Koestler's book was a series of essays; its theme: modern man is caught between the choice of a philosophy of action (The Commissar) and a philosophy of quietism (The Yogi). Man's hope: a synthesis of the two. Author Koestler was more optimistic than hopeful...
...Arthur Koestler's biting description of 20th-century labor leaders-"men with iron wills and wooden heads"-seemed to be inaccurate. At a great Labor conference in Paris last week the iron was highly pliable, the wood intricately grained. Men who claimed to represent 75,000,000 of the world's organized workers negotiated with patience and subtlety until a new entity-W.F.T.U.-was in being...
...technique of Soviet expansion, says Koestler, will consist of "brisk surprise blows . . . followed by soothing periods . . . faits accomplis [alternating] with tokens of good will." But there will also be "treaties of friendship and mutual aid" which will lead the victim from "collaboration" to "vassalization" so discreetly that an opportune moment for Anglo-American objection will never come. The disillusioned liberal, faced by the advancing Commissar, is likely to turn helplessly to the passive resistance of the Yogi...
...Best of Each? Koestler's own preference, like that of most current prophets, is far less pungent and persuasive than his analysis. He has no wish to obliterate the teachings of the Yogi and the Commissar in toto; he is idealistic enough to hope that the best of each can be joined: a "synthesis of . . . the saint [and] the revolutionary." From the Yogi he would take the values of contemplation, the "inner voice," and reject the "sinning by omission," the passivity that invites rape. From the Commissar he would take a planned, state-controlled economy ("the inevitable next step...