Seventy years ago, in the last week of June 1950, the inaugural event of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was held in the ruins of the Titania Palace in Berlin. The Nazis had screened propaganda films at the Titania, which had just about survived allied bombardment. Now, many of Hitler’s refugees—including Franz Borkenau, Alfred Weber and Berlin mayor Ernst Reuter—were among the attendees determined to deliver a public rebuke to totalitarianism.

It was not the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but the ‘Party line’, which brought an end to the era of ‘fellow travellers’, 80 years ago. It is ironic that the closest communism came to establishing a mass movement in Britain was between 1935 and 1939, when its adherents abandoned revolutionism and emphasised the defence of bourgeois democracy.

Oscar Clarke last wrote for us on George Orwell as Britain stood up to totalitarianism. Now he describes the work of Franz Borkenau, who like Orwell had been on the ground in Spain, and whom Orwell came to know personally after Borkenau took refuge in Britain as the Second World War broke out. George Orwell must have felt quite dejected when he returned to Britain in July 1937.

Oscar Clarke last contributed to our website with his essay “Orwell’s Battle With The Intelligentsia“, a study of the the Left Book Club in the light of a re-launch of the same. Now he considers Orwell’s war-time work, best-known through its initial essay “England Your England”, The Lion and the Unicorn.

But there is, nevertheless, something to be celebrated in the sanguinary centenary of Bolshevism, which becomes apparent when I glance at my bookshelf. There I see Koestler, Serge, Borkenau and Silone, the four writers to whom Orwell referred when he coined the term “the concentration camp novel” to summarise the literature of nineteen thirties Europe.

I don’t feel it’s right to encourage an Islamist silence to descend over the Middle East. Azar Nafisi’s memoirs, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s essays, and Boualem Sansal’s novels deserve to be read, just as Solzhenitsyn’s novels and Vaclav Havel’s Letters to Olga deserved to be read.

“All people who are morally sound have known since about 1931 that the Russian regime stinks...”

But the old argument was never just about Catholics or hot-blooded southern Europeans, the argument has been at the heart of intellectual opposition to change anywhere in the world in which democracy has yet to flourish.

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, Nirenberg, David. Norton, 610pp. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his post-war Portrait of the Anti-Semite, came to the conclusion (borrowing a phrase from Voltaire) that if the Jew did not exist then the anti-Semite would have to invent him. This “existentialist” interpretation earned the scorn of Hannah Arendt, who did not deign to linger upon his argument, summarily dismissing it as “fashionable nonsense,” before returning to her more serious reflections upon the sickness which had nearly destroyed Europe.

Oscar Clarke argues that overcoming the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad should be a moral imperative for Europeans. Not least because the ideology that has helped keep his family in power for two generations has its origins right here on the continent. The fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria will amount to the final consummation of the protracted death throes of Arab Nationalism in its most extreme manifestation – which is Baathism.

Lately, I have been reading Bartley Crum’s Behind the Silken Curtain, published in 1947 and included as a Left Book Club choice that same year. The author, a member of the Anglo-American Joint Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, was tasked with collecting evidence to help inform his government and ours in deciding what to do about the displaced Jews of Europe.

About a month prior to the ten year anniversary of the intervention against Saddam Hussein, David Rieff wrote an essay for Foreign Policy - Save us from the Liberal Hawks - in which he gave a blunt assessment of the current crisis across the border from Iraq: “Syria’s a Tragedy. But it’s not our problem.”

PDU looks at a case that shows how Europe is in need of further cooperation in bringing war criminals to justice. By Oscar Clarke. At the age of 98, Laszlo Csatary, once the sadistic chief of an internment camp for Jews, died on European soil last week. He was never punished for his crimes. Csatary participated in the deportation of Jews from the camp in the Slovak town of Kosice (under Hungarian occupation at the time) to the death camp at Auschwitz.

Europe is the most fascinating place on Earth. The home of ideas, it is on this continent that the most sublime and the most depraved episodes in the entire human drama have played themselves out. From the ancient Greeks, who strived to create a civilisation worthy of human dignity, to the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, human advancement has been one of Europe’s finest ideals.

The news last week of the death of Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s Foreign Minister under Saddam Hussein, elicited the expected mournful response from George Galloway. Announcing his candidature for the mayoral race in London, it seems, has not in any way tempered Galloway’s willingness to publically admire totalitarians.