New York Times, January 9, 1944 Arthur Koestler writes about his attempt to inform the world about the ongoing atrocities in Polen during WW2. Arthur Koestler, a native of Hungary, is a newspaper man and author. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Spain during the civil war. Reprieved, he went to France and was imprisoned there early in …

The Nightmare That Is a Reality - Arthur Koestler

# The Nightmare That Is a Reality - Arthur Koestler
[Source](https://www.nytimes.com/1944/01/09/archives/the-nightmare-that-is-a-reality-the-grim-stories-of-nazi-atrocities.html)

**There** is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular
intervals; it is dark and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket
or brushwood; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance;
I scream for help but nobody hears me, the crowd walks past laughing
and chatting.

I know that a great many people share, with individual variations,
the same type of dream. I have quarreled about it with analysts and
I believe it to be an archetype in the Jungian sense; an expression of
the individual’s ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic
violence, and his inability to communicate the unique horror of his
experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness
of our atrocity propaganda.

For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past laughing on the road; and
there are a few of us, escaped victims or eyewitnesses of the things which
happen in the thicket and who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming
on the wireless, yelling at you in newspapers and in public meetings,
theatres and cinemas. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for
a minute. I know it each time this happens by a certain dumb wonder on
your faces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye; and I tell myself:
Now you have got them, now hold them, hold them; so that they remain
awake; but it only lasts a minute. You shake yourself like puppies who
have got their fur wet; then the transparent screen descends again and
you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound.



**We**, the screamers, have been at it now for about ten years. We started
on the night when the epileptic Van de Lubbe put fire to the German
Parliament; we said, if you don’t quench those flames at once, they
will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present
we have the mania of trying to tell you about the Killing, by hot steam,
mass electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of
Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass killing
in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the
ticking of your watch.

I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that
accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out
of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published
in pamphlets, white books, newspapers, magazines and whatnot. But the
other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He
told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out
of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that
the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies,
and that they didn't believe a word of it!

As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to
the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in
concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece,
in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have
never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec. You can convince them for an
hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self- defense begins to
work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex
temporarily weakened by a shock.



**Clearly** all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we
must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy
and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they
lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it
is the other way round: perhaps it is we. the screamers, who react in
a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you
are the neurotics who totter about in a screened fantasy world because
you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would
have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming
eyes would still be alive.

I said “perhaps” because obviously the above can only be half the
truth. There have been screamers at all times—prophets, preachers,
teachers and cranks—cursing the obtuseness of their contemporaries,
and the situation-pattern remained very much the same. There are always
the screamers screaming from the thicket and the people who pass by on
the road. They have ears but hear not, they have eyes but see not. So
the roots of this must lie deeper than mere obtuseness.



**Is** it perhaps the fault of the Screamers? Sometimes, no doubt, but I
do not believe this to be the core of the matter. Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah
were pretty good propagandists and yet they failed to shake their people
and to warn them. Cassandra’s voice was said to have pierced walls,
and yet the Trojan war took place. And at our end of the chain—in due
proportion—I believe that on the whole the Ministry of Information
and the British Broadcasting Corporation are quite competent at their
job. For almost three years they had to keep this country going on
nothing but defeats and they succeeded.

But at the same time they lamentably failed to imbue the people with
anything approaching a full awareness of what it was all about, of the
grandeur and horror of the time into which they were born. They carried
on business-as-usual style, with the only difference that the routine
of this business included killing and being killed. Matter-of-fact
unimaginativeness has become a kind of Anglo-Saxon racial myth: it is
usually opposed to Latin hysterics and praised for its high value in an
emergency. But the myth does not say what happens between emergencies
and that the same quality is responsible for the failure to prevent the
recurrence of emergencies.

In fact, this limitation of awareness is not an Anglo-Saxon privilege,
though the Anglo- Saxons are probably the only race which claims as
an asset what others regard as a deficiency. Neither is it a matter
of temperament; stoics have wider horizons than fanatics. It is a
psychological fact, inherent in our mental frame, which I believe has not
received sufficient attention in social psychology or political theory.



**We** say “I believe this” or “I don't believe that.” “I know
it” or “I don't know it.” and regard these as black-and-white
alternatives. In reality, both “knowing” and “believing”
have varying degrees of intensity. I know that there was a man called
Spartacus who led the Roman slaves into revolt; but my belief in
his one-time existence is much paler than in that of, say, Lenin.
I believe in spiral nebulae, can see them in a telescope and express
their distance in figures; but they have a lower degree of reality for
me than the inkpot on my table.

Distance in space and time degrades intensity of awareness. So does
magnitude. Seventeen is a figure which I know intimately like a friend;
fifty billions is just a sound. A dog run over by a car upsets our
emotional balance and digestion; a million Jews killed in Poland cause
but a moderate uneasiness. Statistics don't bleed: it is the detail which
counts. We are unable to embrace the total process with our awareness:
we can only focus on little lumps of reality.

So far all this is a matter of degrees: of gradations in the intensity
of knowing and believing. But when we pass the realm of the finite and
are faced with words like eternity in time, infinity of space, that is,
when we approach the sphere of the Absolute, our reaction ceases to
be a matter of degrees and becomes different in quality. Faced with
the Absolute, understanding breaks down, and our “knowing" and
“believing” is lip-service.



**Death**, for instance belongs to the category of the Absolute and our
belief in it is merely a lip- service belief. I “know" that, the average
statistical age being about 65, I may reasonably expect to live no more
than another twenty-seven years, but if I knew for certain that I should
die on Nov. 30, I970, at 5 A. M. I would be poisoned by this knowledge,
Count and recount the remaining days and hours, grudge myself every
wasted minute, in other words, develop a neurosis. This has nothing to
do with hopes to live longer than the average; if the date were fixed
ten years later, the neurosis-forming process would remain the same.

Thus we all live in a state of split consciousness. There is a
tragic plane and a trivial plane, which are mutually incompatible.
Usually we move on the trivial plane, blind and deaf to absolute
realities. Occasionally, in moments of elation, or at the death of a
relative, or when we fall in love, we find ourselves transferred to
the Absolute plane with its un-common-sense cosmic perspective; but
only for a short time. Back on the trivial plane, the realities of
the other plane appear as overstrung nerves, adolescent effusions or as
“romantic nonsense.”

And vice versa, during our short visits on the Absolute plane, our
normal routine appears as shallow, revoltingly frivolous; and we seem to
suffocate under our inability to communicate the overwhelming experience
of the other reality. Thus our minds are split into two different kinds
of experienced knowledge. Their climate and language are as different
as church Latin from business slang.



**These** limitations of awareness account for the limitations of
enlightenment by propaganda. People go to cinemas, they see films
of Nazi tortures, of mass shootings, of underground conspiracy and
self-sacrifice. They sigh, they shake their heads, some have a good
cry. But they do not connect it with the realities of their normal plane
of existence. It is romance, it is art, it is Those Higher Things, it
is church Latin. It does not click with reality. We live in a society
of the Jekyll and Hyde pattern, magnified into gigantic proportions.

This was, however, not always the case to the same extent. There
have been periods and movements in history—in Athens, in the early
Renaissance, during the first years of the Russian Revolution—when at
least certain representative layers of society had attained a relatively
high level of mental integration; times, when people seemed to rub
their eyes and come awake, when their cosmic awareness seemed to expand,
when they were “contemporaries” in a much broader and fuller sense;
when the trivial and the cosmic planes seemed on the point of fusing.



**And** there have been periods of disintegration and dissociation. But never
before, not even during the spectacular decay of Rome and Byzantium,
was split thinking so palpably evident, such a uniform mass-disease;
did human psychology reach such a height of phoneyness. Our awareness
seems to shrink in direct ratio as communications expand; the world is
open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisoners, each in his
private, portable cage. Meanwhile, the watch goes on ticking. What can
the screamers do but go on screaming, until they get blue in the face?

I know one who used to tour this country addressing meetings —an
average of ten a week. He is a well-known publisher over here. Before
each meeting he used to lock himself up in a room, to close his eyes,
and to imagine in detail, for twenty minutes, that he was one of the
people In Poland who were killed. One day he tried to feel what it was
like to be suffocated by chloride gas in a death-train; another day he
had to dig his grave with two hundred others and then face a machine gun,
which of course is rather unprecise and capricious in its aiming. Then
he walked out on the platform and talked. He kept going for a full year
before he collapsed with a nervous breakdown. He had a great command of
his audiences and perhaps he has done some good; perhaps he brought the
two planes, divided by miles of distance, an inch closer to each other.

I think one should imitate this example. Two minutes of this kind of
exercise per day, with closed eyes, after reading the morning paper,
are at present more necessary to us than physical jerks and breathing
the yogi way. It might even be a substitute for going to church. For as
long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket divided
by dream barriers, this will remain a phoney civilization.