In The Freeman Online, Bruce Edward Walker brings to mind a once-popular mid-20th-century author: Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle half of the twentieth century than Arthur Koestler. The Hungarian-born author wrote magisterially (in English, no less; he first published in Hungarian, German, and Russian) of the follies of the Pink Decade of the 1930s in a series of political novels. Unfortunately, they’re all but forgotten in today’s university curricula. The world requires constant reminders of what actually happens once citizens acquiesce to big-government solutions. . . . . As this year officially marks the 70th anniversary of the publication of Koestler’s seminal novel, Darkness at Noon, and the 60th anniversary of his essay “The Initiates,” it’s a convenient opportunity to revisit both works as a reminder of what awaits all democratic societies eager to abandon liberties for the sake of utopian ideologies. Marxism proved, not for Koestler alone, a harsh mistress to please, one incapable of returning his devotion. Stalin’s purges in the ’30s — including his grotesque show trials — effectively ended Koestler’s affair with Communism, provoking his fictional jeremiads in the ’40s and thereafter. Walker’s article is here. Several

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