…Vladimir Bogrov has fallen out of the swing. One hundred fifty years ago, on the day the Bastille was stormed, the European swing once again lurched into motion after a long period of inertia, with a vigorous push away from tyranny toward what seemed an unstoppable climb to the blue sky of freedom. The ascent into the spheres of liberalism and democracy lasted a hundred years. But lo and behold, it gradually began to lose speed as it came closer to the apex, the turning point of its trajectory; then, after a brief stasis, it started moving backward, in an increasingly rapid descent. And with the same vigor as before, it carried its passengers away from freedom and back to tyranny. Whoever kept staring at the sky instead of hanging on to the swing grew dizzy and tumbled out.
Whoever wishes to avoid getting dizzy must try to grasp
the laws of motion governing the swing.
Because what we are facing is clearly a pendulum swing of history, from
absolutism to democracy, from democracy to absolute dictatorship.[1]
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)
[1]
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, tr. Philip Boehm, ed. Michael
Scammell (New York: Scribner, 2019), p. 149. The
above translation by Philip Boehm is based on the original German text
discovered in the Zurich archives in 2015.
This selection comes from Rubashov’s Diary.
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