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To: rmlew

I believe you said Koestler was a communist,anti Zionist in your first comment. In this post you seem to agree that “Darkness at Noon” was a ‘devastating indictment of communism’. Did Koestler see the error of his ways or did you misstate his position?


134 posted on 05/31/2012 8:00:06 PM PDT by saradippity
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To: saradippity
Koestler held many positions in his lifetime. He was a Zionist in his youth. He came from an assimilated family, but experienced antisemitism in the Horthy regency of Hungary. He spent the rest of his life trying to find an answer to the Jewish question.
In his youth, he was a Zionist. After dropping out of college, he moved to Palestine. At first he tried to join a Kibbutz but was refused for bourgeois tendencies. He then became a Revisionist Zionist and worked for Jabotinsky for two years. He then became a journalist in Berlin, becoming a communist. He decided that the solution to the Jewish question, was to stop being Jews or Jewish. After seeing the Stalinist purges, he became an anti-communist socialist. In the 1960 and 1970s he sought to trancend his existence with drugs. It was at this time he wrote The Thirteenth Tribe. Ironically, this old idea that Jews were Khazars was one used by Hungarian Jews in a failed attempt to stop antisemitism. The 9 Tribe (On-oghur) confederation, led by Magyars, which became Hungary included the Khabars/Kavars, a group of Khazars who fled after losing a civil war. (In fact, the Magyars had been subordinates of the Khazars at least until 896, when the Khazars and Hungarians fought the Bulgarians and Pechenegs in the Bulgaro-Byzantine war. The Hungarians then invaded Pannonia). Some Hungarian Jews claimed to be Khazars as a way of saying that they were ethnically Hungarian. It is therefor ironic to find Nazis and neo-Nazis who like Hungarians rail at so-called Khazars.
Be that as it may, Koestler has lost it in the 1970s starting to write about ESP and psychokinesis.
137 posted on 05/31/2012 10:20:12 PM PDT by rmlew ("Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers.")
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