Confessions of a Disloyal European

"I take it for granted that my readers remember what has been done. That they remember everything: the final solution to the Jewish question, the Stalin era, the Churchill decision to bomb the civilians, the colonial wars for plunder and freedom (with chopped-off heads in Malaya, electrodes against the genitals in Algeria, napalm in Viet Nam), OAS, the lying politicians, everything. But I want to underline that it has been the European, the Western intellectuals that have led and fulfilled these actions in every phase. We have written the theories, we have filled the universities with learned men giving rational motivations and reasonable techniques for every crime. (...) And everything that has been done has been done with the most sincere desire to carry on the struggle for our ideals. This has been the century of the European intelligentsia." Jan Myrdal, the radical son of famous economist Gunnar Myrdal and international dearmament activist Alva Myrdal, made a reckoning both with himself and his generation as well as the tradition of European intellectuals in the 20th Century in this memoir, "Confessions of a Disloyal European". Confessions, he writes, is meant not in the religious sense as much as in the old sense, as a statement of belief as well as apologia in one: Myrdal mercilessly dissects and criticizes his own psychology and actions, public and private, throughout his life, but also seeks to formulate an explanation of how he came to become one of the few intellectuals on the continent to systematically break with imperial traditions and become not just a Communist, but a Third Worldist, i.e. an anti-imperialist. (And he did not just become one, he stayed one, and even now in his old age campaigns against the present war in Afghanistan; honesty AND courage is even more uncommon.) The book is not easy to read, though it is merely 200-ish pages (in the reprint by Lake View Press, which includes a later afterword reaffirming the book). Some of the book is direct political commentary, based on the personal experiences of the author in foreign lands and with Swedish salon socialists, but most of it consists of opaque fragments written in a stream-of-consciousness-like style. These concern mostly his private affairs: his memories of poverty, of the death of his friends, of his own failures and flaws, his failed love affairs, his growing disillusionment with even the most 'social' of Western societies, his hatred of intellectual dishonesty. Much of this makes one wonder why a reader would want to know these intimate memories and self-criticisms, but Myrdal says he "wanted to get past the defense mechanisms of the reader by telling stories". One gets the feeling the stories still overwhelm the political purpose of raising consciousness to a greater degree than the author realized, probably because the mind of another is always a nocturnal marshland to the outside observer; but this is the most purposeful nonfictional account of one of Euro

This book deals with questions of guilt, memory, personal betrayal, and societal patterns. It is extraordinarily well written and an interesting contrast to Günter Grass' Katz und Maus (Cat and Mouse) which deals with many of the same issues.