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f63bf3a
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"It was quiet in the cell. Rubashov heard only the creaking of his steps on the tiles. Six and a half steps to the door, whence they must come to fetch him, six and a half steps to the window, behind which night was falling. Soon it would be over. But when he asked himself, For what actually are you dying? he found no answer. It was a mistake in the system; perhaps it lay in the precept which until now he had held to be uncontestable, in whose name he had sacrificed others and was himself being sacrificed: in the precept, that the end justifies the means. It was this sentence which had killed the great fraternity of the Revolution and made them run amuck. What had he once written in his diary? "We have thrown overboard all conventions, our sole guiding principle is that of consequent logic; we are sailing without ethical ballast."
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politics
revolution
russia
soviet-union
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Arthur Koestler |
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0d2ece0
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Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.
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apoliticism
argument
atheism
berlin
bought-priesthood
cape-coloureds
cold-war
communism
conviction
critical-thinking
enlightenment
euphemism
eurocentricism
faith
film
george-hw-bush
george-orwell
german-people
germany
groupthink
hedonism
humanism
individualism
irony
journalism
left-wing-politics
lies
literary-criticism
literature
los-angeles
margaret-thatcher
monotheism
munich
orthodoxy
personality-politics
politics
polytheism
populism
postmodernism
potus
progress
radical-politics
religion
right-wing-politics
ronald-reagan
russia
science
sectarianism
self-love
self-pity
socialism
solipsism
south-africa
soviet-union
thomas-mann
totalitarianism
tribalism
truth
united-states
xhosa-people
zulu-people
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Christopher Hitchens |
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7eff9ca
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"Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called "a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda" by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Milos Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries--Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others--that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. --it still moves, all right."
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cold-war
colonialism
communism
czechoslovakia
despotism
dictatorship
freedom
greece
journalism
liberation
mao-zedong
milos-forman
moscow
postcolonialism
propaganda
ronald-reagan
russia
soviet-union
spain
television
united-states
zimbabwe
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Christopher Hitchens |
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9e8ea4e
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...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
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darkness-at-noon
liberty
politics
soviet-union
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Arthur Koestler |
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90c01f9
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Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It's not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything--it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naive statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention.
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communism
dflp
dogmatism
edward-said
humanism
liberation
middle-east
moscow
orwell
palestine
palestinians
politics
rationality
religion
religious-extremism
soviet-union
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d90fcc7
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It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him--the winning of a democratic election.
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britain
british-empire
cold-war
conservative-party-uk
crisis
democracy
elections
history
imperialism
power
russia
soviet-union
time
truth
united-states
winston-churchill
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Christopher Hitchens |
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d3240bd
|
"In
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george-orwell
soviet-union
spain
spanish-civil-war
stalinism
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Christopher Hitchens |
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e92cb3c
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Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining public marches, reading newspapers and organizing school debates and trials. The idea was to initiate the children into the practices, cults and rituals of the Soviet system so that they would grow up to become loyal and active Communists.
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communism
indoctrination
propaganda
soviet-union
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Orlando Figes |
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0d74681
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet Empire
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freedom
russia
soviet-union
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Thomas L. Friedman |