Some Things Never Change

I came across this excerpt from an essay by Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of Darkness at Noon. It appeared in the inaugural issue of Encounter in 1958:

Eternal Adolescents

The young radical intellectual of Bloomsbury, St. Germain de Pres, or Greenwich village is a relatively harmless type. Often his radicalism is derived from adolescent revolt against the parents or some other stereotyped conflict which makes him temporarily despair of the world. But some of the young radicals never grow up; they remain the eternal adolescents of the Left.

One variety of this type is frequently found both in the United States and in France, though rarely in England. Young X. stars as an enthusiastic Communist, is soon disillusioned, found a Trotskyite opposition group o ten people, discovers that six of the ten form a secret "opposition bloc" within the group, is disillusioned, founds a little "mag" with a hundred per cent true anti-capitalist, anti-Stalinist, anti-pacifist programme, goes bankrupt, starts a new little mag, and so on. All his struggles, polemics, victories, and defeats are storms in a tea cup, confined to the same small circle of radical intellectuals -- a kind of family which thrives on quarrels and mutual denunciations, and yet coheres by virtue of some unique dialectical glue. A classic example is the group of Marxist-Existentialists around Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, with their perennial quarrels and schisms. The sectarian may be said to suffer from the incestuous type of political libido.

A different type is Y., the busybody, whose name is on every "progressive" committee, whose voice is raised in protest against every injustice, who has embraced every good cause under the sun, and has never achieved anything on earth. Y. is the political equivalent of the nymphomaniac; he suffers from an excess of political libido. This kind of neurosis, too, flourishes chiefly in the climate of the Left, -- for, generally speaking the Left is politically over-sexed.

Finally, there is Z., the political masochist. With him, the parable of the mote and the beam has been reversed. The slightest injustice in his own country wrings from him cries of anguish and despair, but he finds excuses for the most heinous crimes committed in the opposite camp. When a coloured tennis player is refused a room in a London luxury hotel, Z. quivers with spontaneous indignation; when millions spit out their lungs in Soviet Arctic mines and lumber-camps, Z.'s sensitive conscience is silent. Z. is an inverted patriot, whose self-hatred and craving for self-punishment has turned into hatred for his country or social class and yearning for the whip that will scourge.

It's interesting to see how the Left's hatred of America - and freedom - manifested itself as communism in Koestler's day, and as Islamofacism/anti-Semitism in mine.