What Is War For?

What Is the War For?

A main modern belief has been that World War II was to be the final showdown between the forces of evil and those of good will, and that victory for the side of the believer would necessarily be victory for the forces of good.

On this too simple concept, one man wrote an obituary last week. The man who carved the epitaph was a Leftist, who translated his hopes into the terms of international socialism. His right to bury the hope was as good as any Leftist's: Arthur Koestler, of Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Haifa, Cairo, Moscow, Paris, Zurich, Seville, and now of London, is a veteran of many of Europe's military and ideological battlefields, concentration camps, hospitals, prisons, a journalist of repute, the author of one of the most brilliant and powerful novels of the present day (Darkness at Noon; TIME, May 26, 1941).

That he has survived shackles, arrests, pursuits and the daily imminence of execution for months on end testifies to the integrity of his beliefs. The body of his work is proof that he is rarely equipped as a writer.

In the New York Times Arthur Koestler addressed himself to the question: "What kind of a world are we shaping?" His conclusion:

"The coming victory will be a conservative victory and lead to a conservative peace."

Koestler's thesis: Nowhere in all his battles and jails had he seen any man dying solely for "the democratic way." This war "turns out to be a more complicated affair than it looked at the beginning. . . ." Now, he writes, "the character of this war reveals itself as what the Tories always said it was--a war for national survival, a war in defense of certain conservative igth Century ideals, and not what I and my friends of the Left said that it was--a revolutionary civil war in Europe on the Spanish pattern." Koestler believes that the war aim of each European nation is not democracy but national liberation: "One of the main curses Hitler has brought on us is that by trying to unify Europe in the wrong way, he has brought forth such a recrudescence of nationalistic, chauvinistic feeling that the clock of European evolution has been put back for at least 50 years. . . . The wish-dream of the martyrized Continent is for a super-Versailles."

For such reasons--the trend toward conservatism that he sees in such events as the recent U.S. elections, and the trend toward nationalism--Koestler concludes:

". . . This war is not the final cataclysm, not the ultimate showdown between the forces of darkness and light, but perhaps only the beginning of a new series of convulsions, spread over a much larger period of history than we originally thought, until the new world is born."

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