Christopher Hitchens on Arthur Koestler

Christopher Hitchens has a piece on Arthur Koestler in Slate. I highly recommend giving it a read.

I especially found this analysis of Darkness at Noon very interesting:

From the first page of Darkness at Noon you become aware that the daily realization of impending execution is a powerful stimulus, both to reflection and to fatalism. Koestler’s chief character, Nicholas Rubashov, is modeled on those former Bolshevik intellectuals who made full “confessions” of fantastic and abominable crimes at the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. And, because Koestler had by no means forgotten what he had learned about the dialectic, he decided to place Rubashov in a dilemma from which he himself had escaped. What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be “historically” right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide.

We now know that this is not how the confession of Nikolai Bukharin, for example, was in fact obtained. Stalin’s men employed less subtle means of inducement and persuasion. But we do not know that this paradox was not alive in Bukharin’s own mind, even at the end. If you once accept a certain logic of history, how can you exempt yourself from it? Apart from Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, there is no finer example in fiction of a pitiless interrogator facing a victim with the intention of saving his soul. Indeed, the teamwork of the two questioners, Ivanov and Gletkin, is so logically and artistically represented that it actually had the effect of converting some people to communism! Rubashov has one fatal weakness, which is that of the open-minded intellectual: “the familiar and fatal constraint to put himself in the position of his opponent, and to see the scene through the other’s eyes.” His dogmatist jailers suffer from no such disadvantage. This is a crux that has relevance well beyond the time and place in which it was set. Orwell’s more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don’t just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them.

Very interesting points there – ones that fascinate me as well. What was in Bukharin’s mind? What was the level of awareness at these show trials? What was it actually like to be one of those guys? Insanity – down is up, up is down … history will vindicate, sure … but who?

I found the interrogation scenes in Darkness at Noon almost unreadably upsetting. It was impossible for me to not step into Rubashov’s shoes … and experience it with him. It’s like one of those nightmares – where you know you are in mortal danger, and yet somehow you cannot run … you are stuck to the ground … you try to move your legs … but you cannot. It’s mostly the unFAIRness of that scenario (amplified 100,000 %) that makes people nuts. You should be able to defend yourself against an unfair attack, but in this scenario – it is impossible. The feeling that no matter what you say … they are going to get you anyway. There is the feeling that … even if you are, technically, innocent of the crimes they accuse you of, way deep within you you know that you have committed countless crimes on an ideological thought level.

Also, though, there is something deeper going on: by its very nature, the Communist Party implicated everyone. No one could say, with impunity, that they were “innocent”. Even if you weren’t guilty of what they accused you of, you definitely were guilty of something else. We’re all in this together.