Koestler

KOESTLER: The Indispensable Intellectual

by MICHAEL SCAMMELL

faber and faber, 2011, 720 pages, $32.99 (pb)

Arthur Koestler had a taste for political drama - as a Communist, he spied against Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War; as a Jew and a former but still warm Communist, he escaped from the Gestapo in France by joining the French Foreign Legion; he saw the inside of five jails; he wrote a famous novel of Stalin's show trials; he became a vociferous anti-Communist; and he enjoyed a fashionable vogue for his 1970s books on parapsychology.

Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler explores a man born in Hungary in 1905 whose first, and enduring, passion was Zionism, closely followed by journalism in Berlin. Indignation at capitalist misery during the Depression, however, saw Koestler join the German Communist Party as a writer and polemicist.

He waxed lyrical on turbines and tractors during a tour of the Soviet Union, the repulsiveness of Germany's Nazis keeping dormant his first seeds of doubt about Stalin, seeds which later sprouted during Stalin's assaults on the non-Stalinist left in the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's mass purges and show trials in Russia.

In 1938, Koestler resigned from the party and left a subsequent trail of works renouncing communism - The God that Failed, The Yogi and the Commissar, and Darkness at Noon, his novel which purported to explain the show trial confessions of Old Bolsheviks as the fatal outcome of allegiance to the party, or, as Scammell puts it, "the logic of Communist ideology".

Koestler's obsession with Stalinism drove him to an all-consuming crusade against the 'Communist menace'. Simone de Beauvoir was just one of his left-wing critics to note that Koestler 'hates the Communists so fanatically that he's able to team up with the worst reactionaries".

These included the intellectual luminaries of the West's Cold War anti-communist right, including their covert bagmen in the CIA which funded their propaganda work in the Congress for Cultural Freedom in which Koestler was a star performer. 'I knew from the beginning that there was American government money behind the Congress', said Koestler later of the open secret that was CIA funding.

Koestler also joined hands with the CIA in advocating the denial of civil liberties to left-wing 'totalitarians', unaware of the irony in promoting totalitarian tools of the spook trade such as "spying, lying, censorship, blackmail,and infiltrating double agents into democratic institutions". This double standard was justified by smearing as Stalinists all dissenters from capitalism - to Koestler, the left are "not left, they're east".

The irony of supporting Zionist terrorism in Palestine was also lost on the great defender of political morality whilst the principled man of liberty also had a convenient escape clause in his gender politics belief that force spiced up sex with women and could also be employed to keep them in line to fulfill their role of "typing, cooking, and looking after [their] husband's needs".

Rounding out a dismal political degeneration by career's end, Koestler took aim at scientific materialism by embracing the 'power of mind over matter' through the pseudo-scientific fads of ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, levitation and psychokinesis. He also side-swiped Galileo for sticking to his heliocentric beliefs and bringing about a regrettable breach between science and religion.

Koestler died in 1983, his belligerent words still ringing in right wing intellectual circles, which includes his biographer, that Communism was 'the great illusion of our time'. This shop-worn conservative mantra, however, denies the possibility that anti-Stalinism is compatible with democratic socialism. For, by eliminating the Old Bolsheviks, Stalin also eliminated the democratic and humanitarian ideals of the early socialists that made posible the rise to power of the bureaucratic party-state apparatus.

For socialist renegades like Koestler, however, their anti-Stalinism is just a convenient halfway house for their uncritical, born-again faith in market capitalism, an ideology so out of touch with the needs of people and planet that it, and not socialism, is the height of irrational delusion. Scammell's seven hundred page hymn to Koestler is a patience-trying apologia for a distinctly dispensable political reactionary.