Milk and Honey

The word “dystopian” is commonly used to describe a narrative work – a novel, play or film – that is set in some terrible, nightmarish but fictitious place. The word is used as the antithesis of utopian – an ideal place. Some critics have called Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon dystopian.(1) But Koestler wrote a work of fiction about people and places that are recognizable. He wrote about former revolutionaries, the old guard of Bolzheviks, who were still around at a time, after the death of Lenin and the expulsion of Trotsky, when Stalin was consolidating his absolute control on Russia. Stalin saw that, before he could have total control of where Russia was going, he first had to control the narrative of the revolution. Just as surely as Zeus devoured Athena so that she would sprout from his forehead, thereby making her a part of his own body and a product of his own power, Stalin had to rewrite history and erase the facts that came in conflict with his own, official, version of events. This called for what became known as the Great Purge. The old generation of revolutionaries who had witnessed and helped to shape the revolution had to be liquidated. But first they had to be denounced and as many of them as possible had to be persuaded to confess their own guilt, to apostatize their former views and then be led away to the executioner. 

Arthur Koestler, in the dedication that precedes the text of Darkness at Noon, wrote: The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials. Several of them were personally known to the author. This book is dedicated to their memory.”

Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov is one such victim of Stalin’s (identified as No. 1’s) purges. At the beginning of the novel he is arrested and imprisoned. The exact reasons for his arrest are unknown to him. And though he eventually learns the “reasons” he has been denounced, he also comes to the realization that they ultimately do not matter. He is to be destroyed because he knows the truth about the revolution, the direction of which has somehow gone desperately wrong. On one of his daily walks in the prison yard he is accompanied by a dim-witted farmer. He says to Rubashov, “A day like to-day, when one smells the melting of the snow in the air, takes hold of me. We will neither of us last much longer, your honour. They have crushed us because we are reactionaries, and because the old days when we were happy must not come back ...” 

“Were you really so happy in those days?” asked Rubashov; but the peasant only murmured something unintelligible, while his Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat several times.
Rubashov watched him from the side; after a time he said: “Do you remember the part in the Bible where the tribes in the desert begin to cry: Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt”? 

The peasant nodded eagerly and uncomprehendingly ... Then they were conducted back into the building.

Rubashov had referred, cryptically, to the moment in Numbers (14:4) in which the Jews, who had been brought out of captivity in Egypt by Moses, were beginning to doubt that they would ever see the Promised Land of which Moses had told them, a land of “milk and honey.” So they considered returning to Egypt, knowing full well what they were returning to. 

Rubashov is determined, at first, to die in silence, but his confinement and the certainty that he will be killed like all the others weakens his resolve. After days of isolation in his cell, he decides to sign a confession to crimes of which he is not guilty simply to save his neck, wanting only to be left alone, even in confinement. Pacing his cell, waiting for his interrogation, he ponders everything that has placed him in his position, while remaining convinced of the legitimacy of the revolution:

The discussions at the congresses during the Civil War had been on a level never before in history attained by a political body; they resembled reports in scientific periodicals—with the difference that on the outcome of the discussion depended the life and well-being of millions, and the future of the Revolution. Now the old guard was used up; the logic of history ordained that the more stable the régime became, the more rigid it had to become, in order to prevent the enormous dynamic forces which the Revolution had released from turning inwards and blowing the Revolution itself into the air. The time of philosophizing congresses was over; philosophical incendiarism had given place to a period of wholesome sterility. Revolutionary theory had frozen to a dogmatic cult, with a simplified, easily graspable catechism, and with No. 1 as the high priest celebrating the Mass. His speeches and articles had, even in their style, the character of an infallible catechism; they were divided into question and answer, with a marvellous consistency in the gross simplification of the actual problems and facts.

The whole thing was a pretty grotesque comedy, Rubashov thought; at bottom all this jugglery with “revolutionary philosophy” was merely a means to consolidate the dictatorship, which, though so depressing a phenomenon, yet seemed to represent a historical necessity. So much the worse for him who took the comedy seriously, who only saw what happened on the stage, and not the machinery behind it.

Finally, an old comrade, Ivanov, interrogates him in his cell:

Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him short-sightedly. “What a mess,” he said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.” Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily. “Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris. Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes. They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism. We for the first time are consequent. ...” “Yes,” said Rubashov. “So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year. So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships. Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance. The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been. We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture. We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. ... Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. ...” “Well, and what of it?” said Ivanov happily. “Don’t you find it wonderful? Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history? We are tearing the old skin off mankind and giving it a new one. That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves; but there was once a time when it filled you with enthusiasm. What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” Rubashov answered: “To continue with the same metaphor: I see the flayed body of this generation: but I see no trace of the new skin. We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics. The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once. Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once."

And Rubashov returns in his thinking to the metaphor of God’s chosen people in the desert:

What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? 

Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. Thus, it was easy to die, with the visible certainty of one’s goal before one’s eyes. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night.


(1) The German title of the novel is Sonnenfinsternis, “Solar Eclipse”. It was hurriedly translated into English by Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s girlfriend, just before the Germans invaded France in May 1940.

A Tale of Two Dutertes

Last week I wrote about Arthur Koestler's efforts to get inside the headquarters of the fascist rebels in Spain in 1936. He believed that it was the only way anyone outside Spain would ever get a clear understanding of what was happening, since none of the liberal newspapers in  Europe did. The role of a foreign journalist inside such places of conflict and confusion can sometimes be vital. Since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in 2016, I have sometimes felt like a foreign correspondent observing the extraordinary events that have taken place here. But, unlike Spain in 1936-38, or Germany after the election of Hitler as Chancellor, it seems that observers outside the Philippines have a far different, and clearer, view of events than ordinary Filipinos do.

Like the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S., which was branded as a referendum on Trump (and Trump lost), the election on May 13 here in the Philippines is a referendum on the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, whether or not anyone dares call it that. Duterte's six-year term in office is only halfway over. And if it is true that all of the congressional, gubernatoral, and mayoral races around this far-fung archipelago were a referendum on Duterte, the Philippine sitting president, unlike his American counterpart, achieved a resounding mandate. Despite a significant drop of more than twenty per cent in the president's public approval rating, it is still at a healthy 60 percent. A majority of Filipinos are convinced that Duterte, or "DU30", is the best man for the job. But they are not exposed to foreign media coverage of Duterte's performance, which is overwhelmingly negative. Which brings me to the central puzzlement: which of the two widely divergent interpretations of Duterte's performance in office is closer to the truth - the one in the Philippine domestic media that paints him as a bold and courageous champion of the people or the one in every international news outlet that paints him as a thug and a virtual dictator?

There is a long tradition of press freedom in the Philippines, but as vocal critics of Duterte's murderous drug war over the past three years have gone down, one by one, both political rivals killed in "ambushes," and elected officials, like Senator Laila de Lima, being arrested on manufactured charges and placed in "detention," it has become increasingly clear that the Philippine press is playing it safe. On any given day, camera crews from the nightly network news dutifully follow police engaged in "buy-bust" (aka sting) operations in the streets of Manila, nabbing tiny amounts of methamphetamine (called "shabu") or marijuana (both classified as "dangerous drugs") and a handful of pesos, and putting the pathetic faces of those arrested (when they aren't killed outright) on national TV. Meanwhile, Maria Ressa, one of the most distinguished Filipino journalists and editor of the online news organization known as Rappler, has been arrested on one charge after another, including libel and embezzlement, but they have not stopped her open criticism of Duterte's strong arm political tactics. Shelley named poets the unelected legislators of the age, because they alone have the freedom to tell the truth. Journalists, belonging to the Fourth Estate, have the same freedom and bear the same responsibility.

Who is Rodrigo Duterte? Now 74, he comes from a prominent provincial family in the far south of the country. He was educated as a lawyer and became a prosecutor for the city of Davao, a sprawling city on the southern coast of Mindinao, the largest of the Philippine islands, was elected vice mayor and then mayor of Davao. He served as mayor an unprecedented 22 years. Like most provincial politicians, Duterte ruled Davao with absolute impunity. We were given a terrible glimpse of such impunity in 2009 by what is still called the "Ampatuan Massacre," in which more than 50 people, mostly journalists, were gunned down when someone other than a member of the ruling clan challenged their monopolization of power and tried to file a certificate of candidacy in an upcoming election. He sent his wife to file the certificate and she was among those killed, along with her unborn child. Ten years later, the people who ordered the massacre, as well as those who carried it out, have never been prosecuted. One pathetic member of the Ampatuan family, named Zaldy, was tried and convicted. He was likely singled out because he drew he shortest straw.

Duterte organized "death squads" and even took part in their patrols of Davao City, randomly gunning down perceived lawbreakers. Human rights groups documented 1,400 deaths from 1998 to 2016. Despite Duterte's claims that he made Davao the safest of Philippine's major cities, it still has the highest murder rate and rape rate in the country. When he was elected president in May 2016, confident in his prowess as an enforcer of the law, he told followers he would make the Philippines drug free in six months. When six months had passed, he said he need another six months. Now, after three years have failed to see the Philippines made drug-free, questions are being raised about the success - or lack thereof - of Duterte's drug war.

What astonishes me is how clearly ignorant of foreign affairs Duterte has revealed himself to be, that he could think he could get away with his killing squads in Manila while the whole world was watching. Whenever Duterte and his tactics are criticized by foreign governments, as they were when Barack Obama was the American president, Duterte's reaction exposed his total ignorance of the proper role of a world leader when basic human rights are violated anywhere on the globe. But, of course, the Philippines is not in any position to judge the human rights records of any other nation. The International Criminal Court in The Hague initiated an investigation into Duterte's Drug War, that has accounted for as many as 5,000 deaths since he took office. He responded to their investigation by withdrawing the Philippines' membership in the ICC, but the investigation, we are told, will continue. Clearly, foreign pressure has demonstrated to Duterte that Manila is not Davao, and that he can no longer continue his "slaughter" (his word) of Filipinos, users and dealers alike, involved in the drug trade with impunity.

Clearly, what has happened is that the murderous methods of Philippine provincial politics have been visited on the national government. Soon after taking office, a "hotline" was set up for people to call to report "government corruption." Except it sounds like life in Nazi Germany, in which ordinary citizens were encouraged to inform on one another if they noticed they were doing or saying anything that was critical of Hitler. And once the "extra-judicial killings" (EJK) of drug dealers and users was underway, Duterte promised every policeman that he will protect every one of them from prosecution for violations of the law. Rumors ("tsismiss" in Tagalog) suggests that the primary motivation of voters last month was fear of the EJKs. Drug use has declined because dealers and users don't want to be slaughtered.

Despite his tough talk, the president is now visibly frail and barely ambulatory. He can't exit or enter a vehicle without assistance. Rumors have been flying for months about his health problems. Despite his failing health, his party's gains in the May elections will probably embolden him to double down on his drug war tactics. His foolish promise to eliminate the drug trade in the Philippines (which he couldn't do if he lived a thousand years) is bound to end in failure. As long as he doesn't address the causes of drug use and addiction, he is doing nothing but stand on the roof of the presidential palace and piss into an oncoming typhoon. And his piss is being blown right back in his face.

It is easy to remind oneself that the Philippines is a small, poor, and insignificant country. Duterte is counting on international indifference to the slaughter of Filipinos by Filipinos. He is counting on our "compassion fatigue" as well as our notoriously short attention span. Justice within the Philippines is next to impossible. It must come from without.

Darkness at Noon Reboot

And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

The writer Arthur Koestler had a nose for trouble, a willingness to confront it, and an odd confidence in his own safety. In 1936, when a rebellion against the Republican goverment of Spain broke out, and frustrated in his attempts to learn exactly what was happening, he decided to go to Spain - not to the relative safety of the Republican-held regions, as many foreigners were doing, but to what was then the capitol of the rebellion in Seville. At the beginning of his book, A Spanish Testament, Koestler described the extraordinary atmosphere of July 1936. When the democratically-elected government in Spain began to move to the Left and enact reforms that threatened land ownership and the authority and freedoms enjoyed by the Roman Catholic church, an organized rebellion commited to toppling the government arose with General Francisco Franco as its leader and military and material support from fascist Germany and Italy. But coherent news from Spain was either not forthcoming or was incomplete. Koestler explains:

On July 18th, 1936, when the Franco revolt broke out, it looked at first as though the revolt had proved abortive and that the Government was master of the situation throughout Spain. Then the news grew more and more alarming. By the end of a week it was clear that there was to be a civil war of long duration, with possible European complications. We greedily devoured a preposterous number of newspapers ... The part played by the Press in the Spanish affair was from the outset a most peculiar one. The rebels refused to allow a single correspondent of any Left-wing or even liberal newspaper into their territory, while correspondents of liberal newspapers with pronouncedly Right-wing views were equally unwelcome on the Government side. Thus a state of affairs was rapidly created whereby, roughly speaking, the Right-wing newspapers had correspondents only ont he Franco side, and the Liberal and Left Press only on the Government side. The communiqués from the respective headquarters were grossly contradictory, and almost as great were the discrepancies between the telegrams sent by thec orrespondents on both sides, for whom a drastic censorship, furthermore, made it impossible to send out unbiased messages.

"The Spanish Civil War," Koestler concludes, "had, as it were, infected the Press of Europe ... In these circumstances, as a journalist of liberal convictions I was bound to be tempted by the idea of getting into rebel territory." So, with credentials supplied by a newspaper, Koestler embarked two days later from Belgium on a ship bound for Spain. He tried to infiltrate the rebel stronghold in Seville in order to get the scoop on their activities. He was informed on by a former German colleague who recognized him and he escaped, bringing with him proof that Mussollini and Hitler were supplying the rebels with arms and personnel.

We are not living in the 1930s, when there was nothing but newspapers and radio to disseminate information (or disinformation). Nor can we argue that every news service in America is either Left, Right or Center, as they were in Europe in the '30s. George Orwell told us that "history is written by the winners," simply because what happened in the Spanish civil war is still a subject of controversy because the Government version of events was supplanted by that of the fascist rebels. And as writers like Jorge Semprun, in his script for the beautiful Alain Resnais film La Guerre est finie, pointed out, the war was still being fought thirty years after it was officially over. In some ways, it is still being fought more than forty years after Franco's death because it is now a war for the truth.

Today, there is such a multitude of sources and media outlets, on television and online, that it is simply not possible to be completely ignorant. No one today would be in the same position that Arthur Koestler was in, trying so desperately to know what is happening in any particular place of conflict that the only way to find out is to go there himself. And yet, what is happening in the civil war in Syria is far from certain. Assad's greatest victory is outlasting our curiosity about his massacres of his own people. We are suffering from what is being called "conflict fatigue" - but it's really nothing more than the usual apathy.

An even worse fatigue is afflicting people today - "information fatigue." Then the problem isn't the medium, but the message. It is no longer an issue of how one is informed but by whom one is informed. Not only are we now supposed to be wary of everything our government tells us, but the political agenda of media outlets, with billionaire ownership, is putting whole swaths of the population deliberately in the dark and keeping them there. It is not the media's job to comfort us and tell us only what we want to hear - even if what we want to hear is lies. Last week, NBC reported the reaction of a woman who is an admitted Fox News viewer to the revelation that the Robert Mueller report contained information that implicated President Trump for obstruction of justice. “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump. I hadn’t heard that before," the woman told a reporter. "I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”(1)

While I watch CNN as my primary source of news, I also get news reports from Reuters, NPR, the BBC, and The Guardian - all liberal news sources ("liberal" in the broad sense used by Koestler, synonymous with "free"). My political leanings are Leftist, so my perspective on national news in the U.S. is, accordingly, Leftist. But the news itself is presented as politically neutral. Some people, particularly on the Right who insist there is a "liberal bias" in news reporting, will probably call this a naïve expectation. But if the mainstream media is Leftist, then so, I'm afraid, is American culture. It is Leftist because the prevailing cultural attitudes are progressive instead of reactionary. If pressed, most people will profess a belief that society can improve and is improving. The good society lies ahead of us, not behind us as reactionaries believe. We have not gone too far but not far enough.

But something akin to the political atmosphere of 1936 is upon us. The same polarization of viewpoints that Koestler encountered has been happening in the American Press for several years, and has accelerated since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. He went after support from a demographic group of Americans who felt ignored or overlooked and, because of his appeal to what most concerns them (whatever it is or the liberal media might think it is), they rallied behind him and keep on rallying, despite overwhelming evidence of his incompetence. He pulled off one of the biggest cons in history. The head of the Democatic National Committee announced last month that Fox News reporters will not be invited to upcoming debates. The 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will formally begin next February. Nine months later voters will go to the polling stations to vote for which version of history will be told. You don't need Arthur Koestler to tell you it's going to be messy.


(1) The full report is here.