I've only recently gotten into Koestler (read Case of the Midwife Toad, which is fascinating), but I plan to dig deeper.

Also, this is an amazing quote:

“You cannot help it if idiots and bigots share your views for their reasons. That doesn’t mean that you can be taught with their views. You have your views and they should be judged on their merits and it worries me that the very first thing we do when someone writes a controversial essay, whatever its academic standing, about the Israel lobby, about relations between this country and Israel, the first question is not, what is the truth or falsity of the substance of it, but how much does it come close to anti-semitism, does it help the anti-semites, should we not have said it, because of the anti-semitism issue? This seems to me to close down conversation with this country.”

Obviously this is true of the Israel debate, but I think it's true in a much broader sense, too. It is always the knee jerk reaction of media to attack a controversial opinion simply for being outside the mainstream than to critically examine the conceptual arguments put forth. (Remember the professor in Colorado who was fired for using the phrase "Little Eichmanns" to describe those working in the World Trade Center? Similar phenomenon.) This is the intellectual antithesis of George W. Bush's "You're either with us or against us," which unfortunately seems to be the media's default position.

Although I have to say that the author lost me here:

Judt threw the Marxist baby out with the communist bathwater, mistaking the complexities of social structure for a refutation of the underlying force of class distinction in industrial capitalism... He had no time for versions of Marxism outside of the communist orbit, viewing them as at base polluted with the same repressive potentials that had eventuated in Stalinism. It’s arguable that this was a misinterpretation.

Isn't the "communist orbit" the only possible result of applied Marxism? I think history has basically proven that in order for a communistic regime to operate, brutal oppression is the only possible reality. Are there any counter examples?