It's not terrible, fair enough to Koestler, but there's the subtext behind his attack on fanatics who want agreement, not mere obedience (not in fact true of the particular fanatics H is mainly on about these days -- the Islamists don't want us to agree with themn, just to leave them alone). And he's fallen into the sort of tedious anticommunism that Isaac Deutscher so mercilessly dissected in a brilliant essay the name of which I have now forgotten. Michael P will doubtless have it, with url, at his fingertips. The note at the bottom says that H wrote another piece on the "anticommunist intellectuals" Susan Sontag and Czecslaw Milocsz -- a kind of reductionist way to treat Sontag. Or for that matter Milocsz,a great poet.
jks
--- paul childs <npchilds at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >http://slate.msn.com/id/2125929/
> >
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I have no intention of reading this, but if someone
> with a stronger stomach than me does read it could
> they satisfy my curiosity; did he just read a 58
> year old book or did he just emerge from the
> hooch-fog long enough to remember reading it
> sometime in the last 58 years?
>
> PC
>
>
> N P Childs
>
> 'I'm Mister Bad Example, the stranger in the dirt,
> I like to have a good time and I don't care who gets
> hurt'.
>
> -Mr. Bad Example, W Zevon
>
> ___________________________________
>
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>
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