L:: A Novel History

By Jillian Becker

Revolution sweeps Louis Zander, a charismatic philosopher of art and politics known as L, into power as dictator of England. This skillfully composed story could be a fictional realization of the Cloward-Piven strategy or Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. It is a page-turner that traces the process by which one evil man seduces, perverts and destroys an entire nation. L could be Hitler, Stalin, or even the next Prime Minister or President. Jillian Becker was inspired to write this novel while researching her internationally best-selling book, Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
*
L: A Novel History deserves to take its place among the great dystopias - The Trial, 1984, Atlas Shrugged alas the most salient literary genre of the last hundred years. - Theodore Dalrymple, author of Life at the Bottom; Our Culture, Whats Left Of It; contributing editor City Journal; contributor Wall Street Journal.
Penetrating as L is as a study of an artist-dictators mind, it is also very witty. There are situations reminiscent of the British TV series Yes Prime Minister combined with the cruelty of Quentin Tarantinos Pulp Fiction. - Dr. Josef Zaruba-Pfefferman, Institute of Art History, Charles University, Prague
Superbly engrossing Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477273920

Jillian Becker

Jillian Becker is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction, including The PLO and Hitler’s Children. She lives in England.

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Copyright © 2005, 2012 Jillian Becker. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/16/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7392-0 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7393-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-7394-4 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918067

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jillian Becker,

L: A Novel History / by Jillian Becker – 3rd ed. Expanded.

1. Fiction–General 2. Philosophy 3. British History 4. Political Science 5. World History 6. Fiction-Historical

7. Satire 8. Theatre Art 9 Art

20 1 2 9 4 2 8 7 0

Electronic book text

First U.S. e-book edition, expanded with preface 2012

Contents

Permissions*

List Of Illustrations*

Preface

Foreword

Chapter 1 Introductory

I. An Outline Of The Life And Antecedent History Of Louis Zander, Known As L

Ii. A Note On The Memoirs And Diaries

Iii. A Note On The Diaries Of L By Professor William Severn

Chapter 2 A Fearful Love

Chapter 3 A Beautiful Terror

Chapter 4 The Emperor’s New Clothes

Chapter 5 Words Into Deeds

Chapter 6 Revolution

Chapter 7 Twelve Plus One – And Another.

Chapter 8 The Theatre Of Power

Chapter 9 The Floodgates Of Chaos

Chapter 10 Resurrection And Death

Appendix I

Notes*

A Note On Sources*

General Bibliography*

About The Author

This book is dedicated to

Theodore Dalrymple

Daniel Greenfield

Victor Davis Hanson

David Horowitz

Thomas Sowell

Mark Steyn

who are the antidote to L

PREFACE

In 1979 Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, became Prime Minister. Her vision was to restore Britain to free-market prosperity, and have as many citizens as possible become property-owning share-holding capitalists. The early years of her leadership were marked by a revolt of the Left, chiefly in the form of strikes by the trade unions – in particular the miners – in the course of which people were killed, and race riots in which also blood was spilt. She crushed the unions. She partly succeeded in arresting the long decline into which Britain had been thrust since the Second World War. But the battle was hard and had she been a little less strong and courageous, had her spine been a little less steely, she might not have won. The elements of chaos and anarchy, the defeated ideologues of collectivism, were still there, lurking in the shadows.

In 1984 I began to write a fantasy of what might happen if Mrs Thatcher did not get re-elected, a radicalized Labour Party came back into power, and was too weak to resist the violent Left.

Violence and public cruelty were in the air. Shaven-headed Neo-Nazis marched in steel-studded black leather, and the Anti-Nazi League, combining numerous cranky groups, clashed with the skinheads in the streets. In the theatres, small animals – including puppies, if I remember rightly - were slaughtered on stage.

On the continent, cruelty in art was taken to even greater lengths. I was commissioned by the Sunday Times magazine to attend and write about a Festival of Performance Art taking place over ten days in Vienna. Although there were Action Artists from various European countries and America, the Austrians and Germans were the most spectacularly bloody. They were obsessed with blood and mutilation and pain. They enacted rituals of human sacrifice stopping short only of actual slaughter. They simulated the tearing and cutting of flesh, and in some instances really did tear it with whips and knives. It was as if the hellish blood-fest of the 1940s, of the war and the Holocaust, the soaking of Europe’s soil with the blood of millions, less than forty years earlier, had not been enough to slake the thirst for atrocity, ruin and death in middle Europe; and as if even more recently people had not suffered the worst that the Communist tyrants Mao and Pol Pot could inflict on helpless multitudes. The artists claimed political justification for the spectacles they created, pleading that they were themselves victims forced to produce works of art that reflected a terrible reality, caused by imperialism – by which they meant America, capitalism, prosperity, freedom, choice, opportunity, rule of law, opposition to Communism.

The illustrated article I turned in to the magazine was to be the cover story one Sunday, but at the last minute the editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times looked at the cover photograph of blood-soaked bodies and declared that he could not allow anything like that to be put on the Sunday breakfast tables of his readers. The whole story was spiked.

But what I had seen and learned in Vienna nourished the fantasy I was writing. It was apparent to me that sadism was an aesthetic rather than a moral issue for the artists, as it was for writers who had inspired the New Left, and for the affluent bourgeois terrorists I had written about in my book Hitler’s Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Terrorist Gang. For all their political excuses and pretexts, their actual aim was self-liberation, which they hoped to achieve by breaking through, outrageously, the limits set for them by the culture and custom of their Western, highly developed societies. And in the case of the Germans and Austrians, they wanted also not to be guilty; to separate themselves, by acts of defiance that would have been courageous thirty years earlier, from their nation and - necessarily according to the Marxist analysis they parroted - also from their class. They liked to claim that they suffered for the cause (variously named as peace, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, Third World liberation), and that their extreme deeds, words, and performances were heroically self-sacrificial. But there was no missing the excitement, the emotional release, the rapture they were after. Whether or not they achieved the sensations they desired, and even if their own pain and fear were less than exhilarating when they actually occurred, the pleasure of hurting and terrifying others never palled.

Georges Bataille, for example, delighted in torture, murder, and martyrdom. The movement, he wrote, that pushes a man to give himself completely, so that a bloody death ensues, can only be compared in its irresistible and hideous nature, to the blinding flashes of lightning that transform the most withering storm into transports of joy. [1]

Michel Foucault, another comrade and tragic hero of the European political left, vastly admired Bataille’s vision and lauded his aims. He endorsed Bataille’s erotic transgression, rhapsodized over the joy of torture, and longed to carry out human sacrifice with his hero - murder performed as a holy act, a spiritual thrill and a work of art. The two of them dreamt of establishing a theatre of cruelty. But even that would not be enough. Cruelty, Foucault proclaimed, should not be merely an occasional act performed for the catharsis of one’s own soul, but a constant part of everyday life, a custom for all to follow. We can and must, he wrote, make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression. [2] He proved he meant it when he contracted AIDS in a bath-house in San Francisco, and returned there from Paris as soon as he knew he had it, deliberately to infect as many others as he could. Lethal predicaments accompanied by terror and despair he called edge situations. For them he lived - and killed, and died.

Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the most adulated of all the twentieth-century philosophers in the French pandemonium, believed that the supreme and most necessary task for a human being was to live authentically. He preached that to avoid the sin of living inauthentically, one should do what is forbidden because it is forbidden. Transgress, he counseled, for transgression is a way to transcendence. In other words, do evil to save yourself from boredom. He proclaimed that the poet Charles Baudelaire’s soul was an exquisite blossom because he desired Evil for Evil’s sake. [3]

Georg Lukács, the Hungarian theatre director and writer on literature and aesthetics, interested me the most. He was the son of a wealthy banker who had been raised to the nobility. He grew up in great luxury, but was preoccupied with his own metaphysical misery. He explored his emotions, his self, as an indecipherable mystery, from which he sought distraction in aesthetic excitement. He understood the good to be what was natural, because nature was innocent; and innocence was wild, and wild innocent nature was cruel; so cruelty was good. His erotic relationships and marriages brought him no relief, being complicated by his idea that the consummation of love was suicide. When he embraced Communism it was in the hope that the Party would rescue him from himself by forcibly putting an end to his contemplative existence. He equated Revolution with Apocalypse. Beyond it lay a new condition of being in which everyone would be disburdened of his individuality and dissolved in an homogenized collective. This at last would finally provide meaning to life. In the passionate pursuit of this end, there was no crime, no act of violence, no cruelty – be it torture, terrorism, murder – that was not justified, was not positively good.

But he held that only the man who understood profoundly and completely that murder is absolutely wrong could commit the murder that would be supremely good; the entirely – and tragically - moral murder. Such a one is the terrorist. He is a heroic martyr because when he murders for the Communist Party, he does so with awesome courage, knowing full well that he himself must thereby suffer. There is no greater love than to lay down the life of a fellow man. [4]

He put this grotesque idea of his into practice when he became Commissar for Education and Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted, under its leader Béla Kun, from March until August 1919. It has been said of him that he advocated a strategy of terror, to isolate every individual by a reign of terror, causing panic and distrust; arousing self-accusations of guilt by administering random punishment. …The steam roller of terror and random victimization aims to pulverize individualities into a quaking mass that seeks security through submission to totalitarian command. [5]

Like others who tried to establish Communist republics in the midst of the political chaos of Europe at the end of the First World War - Béla Kun himself, Rosa Luxembourg in Berlin, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria - Lukács was Jewish by descent. He and all of them, following Karl Marx, repudiated their Jewishness. But Lukács wrote about politics in religious mystical terms. If the Party puts you to death it needed to be loved for doing it. It is the same concept as that of the Catholic Inquisitor when he expected the heretic to love the stake as the flames cleansed his soul by torturing his body to death. Death for the sake of the Utopian Community makes the loss of life worthy. Faith in the Utopian Community – aka the Communist Party – replaces the need for individual immortality. [6]

With all this in mind, I developed my fantasy of revolution and dystopia. Mrs Thatcher is voted out, the Left comes in. Strikes, riots, street fighting, deadly clashes with the police who find themselves unable to cope with the continual onslaughts, cause Labour leaders to take extraordinary powers to deal with the emergency. The Royal family seeks refuge in Scotland. Twelve members of the Cabinet form themselves into a Council of Ministers to govern by edict. But they are soft and fearful men and women. They know that bad things will happen, and they don’t want to be held responsible for them. So they invite a charismatic celebrity, recognized by millions of young rebels as a revolutionary leader, to join them, and into his hands they put absolute power. The man’s name is Louis Zander, commonly known as L. He is a writer, an aesthete, an avant-garde theatre director, a Marxist theorist. He has revelled in the Performance Art of Vienna. He has a taste for blood and death. He has written plays. He knows how to direct a cast. People obey him. Of Jewish extraction, he is fiercely anti-Jewish. His family is exceedingly wealthy. His banker father was ennobled. He has no scruples whatsoever about dealing mercilessly with those who do not obey his orders. He has minions to carry out his will. He also co-opts the private militia of his political arch-rival the neo-Nazi leader, Edmund Foxe, who agrees to work with L because he sees such an alliance as an opportunity to seize power himself. The Red Republic of England is established in late 1987. It lasts for five seasons, coming to an end in early 1989 after L has chosen to die (what he conceives to be) a martyr’s death.

It is a novel in the form of a history. As a history it had to have taken place in the past, so the fictional historian, Bernard Gill, writes it in the early 2020s. He depends on documents such as diaries, memoirs, letters, newspaper reports, and the recollections of people interviewed. He conjectures about certain mysteries and comes up with dramatic theories to solve them. Calmly he relates tumultuous events, transcribes descriptions of horrors, records how quickly and completely L reduces a population of tens of millions to wretched self-abasing misery. Though he restrains any inclination to display personal revulsion at L’s viciousness, he sees and demonstrates the full extent of it, and shows how L’s ultimate purpose is to make the innocent feel guilty. They must blame themselves for his suffering, which must seem to be endured for their sake. In this – though the Communist Republic falls - L to a deplorable extent succeeds.

L continues to be adulated after his death. Some will not even believe that he is dead. And indeed he is not. Lukács, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, L - they live on by inspiring others to think and feel and act and aspire and acquire power and abuse it as they did. As the book is being re-launched in 2012, I see the political trend of Russia in 1917, of Hungary in 1919, of England in the mid 1980s (a catastrophe averted in fact), arising now in Europe again - and, for the first time, in the United States. In Greece, France, Italy, Spain, the rioters are out in the streets demanding that the state look after their every need. In America, Barack Obama is trying to give powers of life and death to an ever-mightier federal government under his direction.

May the story of L be a warning to all those who would trade in their freedom for a mirage of security under a paternalistic state led by a charismatic would-be dictator.

Jillian Becker

California, 2012

*

NOTES

[1] Georges Bataille Visions of Excess: Selected Writing 1927-1934 ed. & trans. Allan Stoeckl, Manchester University Press, 1985 p 69

[2] James Miller The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993 pp 204, 206

[3] Jean-Paul Sartre Baudelaire trans. Martin Turnell

[4] Georg Lukács Tactics and Ethics. He wrote this as an approving summary of an idea expressed by Boris V. Savinkov (who wrote under the name of Ropshin) in his novel The Pale Horse. Lukács admired this novelist for his new manifestation of an old conflict between duties towards social structure and imperatives of the soul – the conflict with which Bataille, Foucault, and Sartre were also centrally concerned.

[5] Harold D. Lasswell, in his Introduction to Georg Lukács’ Marxism by Victor Zitta

[6] Victor Zitta Georg Lukács’ Marxism, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1964

L

A critical account, composed of information from personal recollections and documentary sources, of the life, thought, works and deeds of Louis Zander, known as L; the writer, philosopher, critic, theatre director and politician, who, as supernumerary Minister of Arts and Culture on the Council of Ministers known as The Terrible Twelve, ruled the short-lived Red Republic of England in its five seasons, 1987-9.

By

BERNARD GILL

with additional critical notes and comments by

PROFESSOR WILLIAM SEVERN

Edited and with a foreword by

JILLIAN BECKER

Foreword

One of the bloodiest villains of the twentieth century; one of the greatest thinkers of modern times; the arch blasphemer; hero, martyr, and perhaps – who knows – someone even higher than that; mad, criminal and sadistic; brilliant … dreamer, poet, and activist; a monster, a megalomaniac; the archetypal hero of the twentieth century*: such opinions are representative of those expressed about L in the last thirty years. To this day he is abominated as passionately as he is adulated. Although his period in power was short, lasting as it did for twelve months of the famous five seasons (fourteen months and twenty-seven days) of the Republic, the effects of the regime which he imposed as the most powerful member of the junta, and even more significantly the influence of his ideas on neo-Marxist thought, have been permanent and inestimably profound. Whether the quality of his thought is itself profound, his character noble and tragic, his policies correct as his disciples maintain; or his thought demonic and lunatic, his character egomaniac and vicious, his policies evil as his dispraisers insist; whether he represented, or was in himself, a force for political and intellectual elevation or degradation, moral and spiritual exaltation or abasement, this study, wide and deep, by Bernard Gill will surely help the reader to decide.

Professor William Severn, the acknowledged authority on the works of L, has once again exerted himself most generously for our further enlightenment. This I am sure will be pleasing to his readership which is no doubt numerous and increasing.

Jillian Becker

London, 2 June, 2023

Once I wrote, erroneously, that history is fiction.

– Louis Zander

Chapter 1

Introductory

i. An Outline of the Life and Antecedent History of Louis Zander, Known as L

Louis Philip Zander was born on 1st June, 1946. In all the official biographies published during his lifetime the place of his birth is given as London, but in fact his birth certificate [plate 2] was issued in Cape Town, South Africa. His father, Sir Nicholas Zander, and his mother Amadea (née Montfort) had emigrated to South Africa in 1939 after the outbreak of the Second World War. It was the intention of Sir Nicholas to remain there, and he opened a branch of the Flook Zander Shipping Company in Adderley Street, Cape Town in February 1940. A year later he opened a branch of the Flook Zander Merchant Bank in the same imposing building. But in 1947 the Zanders decided to return to England because, as Amadea wrote to her sister Claudia, Nicky has come to the conclusion that the right education for the children is not to be had here, and although the importation of tutors might solve the problem, it may be better in the post-war world, for the boys at least, to attend a school and learn to get along with people from other walks of life.

It was certainly very early to be making plans for Louis’s education, but he had two older brothers, Abelard, then aged eight, who was to emigrate to the United States before the revolution, transplanting the family business to Boston; and Marius, six, who was sadly to die of a virus disease of the brain before he was old enough to follow his brother to Eton. Lady Zander grieved deeply for her loss. Her fear that her youngest son might catch some infection kept Louis out of school after all, and he was educated in the family house at Hampstead and in the country on the family’s beautiful Hampshire estate then called Wispers (later turned into Clinic 5, the prison-hospital of gruesome memory).

As a child, Louis admired his brother Abelard, but had little contact with him after the older boy went off to Eton to start on that education and adaptation to the commonalty which Sir Nicholas considered to be of great importance. He kept a closer but quarrelsome companionship with Marius, who, we learn from the DIARIES, returned often to haunt his mind, and affected his adult views on children and early death. Closest of all to Louis - though it would be wrong to think of his ever having had a very close and durable relationship with anyone even in early childhood - was his sister Sophie. He continued to seek her company more than anyone else’s in the family right into adulthood, and tried unsuccessfully to dissuade her from following Abelard to America.

Sir Nicholas Zander was of Jewish descent. He liked to tell his children that the family descended in a direct line from the Maccabees, the royal heroes of Jewish history. Sir Nicholas’s father’s name had been Zaccharov. The family had been established as merchants in Vilna, capital city of the old state of Lithuania, for some generations, but had come to England via Austria, where Sir Nicholas’s grandfather had started the new family business by becoming a shipping agent for a group of Hungarian companies, with considerable backing from a number of well-established banks through family connections. The move to London had been made before the First World War. In 1919 Philip Zaccharov was created a baronet by King George V for services to His Majesty’s Armed Forces during the war. He had been chandler to the fleet from 1915 to the Armistice and beyond, and as his son Nicholas wrote to his fiancée, the Honourable Amadea Montfort, in 1934: His enemies accuse him of war-profiteering. Yet there is evidence for anyone who looks for it that this accusation is not only unjustified, it is the opposite of the truth. He has written off large sums owed to him by the government. His love of this country, amply attested by all who knew him, made him happy to serve it as best he could, and to my personal knowledge the day he persuaded his partner Flook to write off the debt was a day of celebration. To call such a man, who throws a party for his friends and employees when he loses some millions of pounds, a ‘profiteer’ is plainly unjust, as I am sure you will agree. So the next time your Aunt the Dowager Countess brings up this slander (ingenuously I am sure for she cannot have any wish to ruin your happiness by making you uneasy about the quality of the family you are to marry into), I hope you will repeat to her what I have now told you. We may conjecture from this that Zaccharov’s generosity to the British government was what earned him his title. But we cannot assert that he was motivated by desire for honours. Enough for us to notice that the reward was plainly deserved, and to add that if it was looked for, it was reasonably looked for.

It was not as Philip Zaccharov that the Royal Navy’s chandler attended the investiture. Shortly before the publication of his honour, he effected two changes in his personal state. He converted to Anglicanism, along with his wife Miriam and only child Nicholas, and he changed his name. He told his wife that Zander was the name of an old friend of his, a writer on politics, whom he admired. Articles by writers of that name are to be found in political journals of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but there is no record yet found of Philip Zaccharov having been acquainted with any of them either in Vienna or London. It has been suggested* that Philip Zaccharov himself might have been one of the Zanders, perhaps using the name when he wished to express views in the Vienna journals which he thought it inadvisable to publish under his own name as head of a government-patronized business.

So it was as Sir Philip Zander that the senior partner of The East West Shipping Company launched the ill-fated luxury liner, the Rose of Lancaster, in 1920. It sank off the coast of Newfoundland in the spring of 1921. Passengers and crew were all saved, but it is said that the event turned Sir Philip grey overnight.

It was in 1922 that the name of his company was changed to Flook Zander. In 1925 the Flook Zander Merchant Bank opened its doors for business in the City of London. Sir Nicholas succeeded to his father’s title, fortune, estates and responsibilities in 1934, the year in which he became engaged to the Honourable Amadea Montfort. The shipping firm, and to a lesser degree the bank, had gone down, understandably, during the depression; but, more perhaps because general economic conditions improved than because of any special gifts Sir Nicholas himself possessed, they began to pick up again after 1936, and by 1939 were flourishing as never before.

Even the enormously high taxation introduced by Attlee’s Labour government after the Second World War, and later in the 1960s the galloping inflation, did not significantly reduce the magnificent style of living the Zanders enjoyed and could afford. Once the years of austerity (1940-1951) were over - austerity which to some extent affected even such families as theirs - Louis lived a life of luxury, and, whatever levelling there may have been for most of the population, of privilege too. Under the guidance of the best tutors his father could find and induce away from less lucrative posts, he attained high marks in the public examinations.

In 1965 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. He emerged with a double first in Philosophy, and proceeded to Vienna, where he was awarded his doctorate in 1972. He returned to London and took up an appointment at the Slade School of Art, London University, as Lecturer in Aesthetics, in 1973.

Within four years, and after publication of only two books, WORLDNESS AND HUMANDOM (which appeared in Vienna as WELTHEIT UND MENSCHTUM), and what was to prove his most important and enduring work, -NESS, he had acquired a reputation as a Marxist theoretician of a stature little below that of Herbert Marcuse. And his literary reputation grew with each book. One highly esteemed contemporary critic, writing admiringly of L’s plastic prose, declared him to be as fine a writer as can be found in the glittering history of English literary genius.*

From 1975 onwards he did not use his full name except on legal documents. Even at the university he was known as L − Professor L when he was appointed to the chair of Theoretical Aesthetics in 1978, at the early age of thirty-one. His colleagues and all associates called him L. A reporter on a Sunday newspaper, interviewing him when he became consultant editor of the NEW WORKER in 1978,* asked him why he preferred to be known by the initial only, even in private life, and he replied: A thinker is always a cipher to others − on which cryptic reply, the interviewer reported, he refused to elaborate.

In the political events of 1979-1987, leading up to and including the Declaration of the People’s Republic, L took an increasingly important part, though remaining behind the scenes. His teaching and writing had so strong an effect that he had become an influence on real politics before he intended to, or even imagined it possible, as he said.* My words became deeds, and then I became a doer. Once he had become a doer, he shaped rather than merely affected the course of history. Kenneth Hamstead, the Prime Minister in the cabinet which suspended constitutional government on the 12th November, 1987, invited L to join the Council of Ministers which took total power into their own hands. L was one of only three members of the junta who had not been elected to Parliament in the first instance by constitutional democratic procedure. Then began that final part of L’s life as the thirteenth member of The Terrible Twelve. Of this period little need be said in this introduction, except to record that within the first month of L’s accession to power, the bookshops, newsstands, public libraries, private bookshelves, schools, academies and government offices were well stocked with the works of L in editions of all kinds, from leather-bound to paperback. All his published works were reissued, and several volumes of hitherto unpublished essays, criticism, lectures and fragments appeared. Only the two plays and the poetry he had written before going to Trinity remained unpublished. There was also in 1987 a spate of books on his works: academic theses, political exegeses, philosophical examinations, students’ handbooks, unabashed eulogies, collected essays and lectures, volumes of correspondence about and with the Master - as he was already called - and several biographies which, though acknowledging his birth in London in 1946, seemed anxious to promote the view that his significant life began at the Slade in 1973.

His life ended violently and dramatically on the 1st January, 1989. Then for a while his public reputation was at its nadir, despite his own expectation that his death would plant him at once and forever in the agonized hearts of the people.* But within six years he had begun posthumously to engage the fascinated interest of scholarly and popular historians and biographers, as well as film-makers and fiction-writers.

When it is recalled that L had the power of life and death over millions of people for a year or more in the last century; and when it is observed that his ideas are once again winning a following although his reign of terror is still within living memory; and if it is noted that scores of erroneous and unsubstantiated accounts of L’s activities have been published,* there would seem little need for further justification for a detailed study and assessment of the man and his works, especially since new information has come to light with the discovery of the DIARIES and MEMOIRS.

ii. A Note on the MEMOIRS and DIARIES

REFERENCES. The MEMOIRS and the (incomplete) DIARIES have only recently been published in their entirety, in a single volume entitled THE MEMOIRS AND DIARIES OF L, edited by the present author.*

THE FINDING OF THE DIARIES. The DIARIES were found in L’s Hampstead House. The policeman who found them was one of a company of ten sent by the new government to search it. Apparently he told neither his colleagues nor his superiors of his find, but delivered them personally to the Chief Archivist at the Central Library of Information, now the Central Memory Bank, which had been hurriedly set up in temporary quarters in the basement rooms of the empty National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, with the mission of finding, gathering together, preserving, and - where necessary and possible - restoring, books and records of all sorts which had been condemned during the Red Republic. I realized their significance almost at once, and assumed the responsibility of delivering them to you, the constable is reported to have said to the librarian; and he added, My father was an historian, and if things had been different I should have liked to follow in his footsteps. But he would not give his name, and so we do not know who to thank for this wise and civilized act that ensured the saving of an important set of documents for the nation.

He did, however, tell the librarian how he found them, and the librarian made a note of the story soon afterwards, which records the following facts:

Three of the black-covered notebooks were lying open, one of them face down, as though tossed there carelessly, in the grate of the ground-floor room overlooking the garden which L was known to have used as his study. Under them was a heap of half-burned papers, some of them pages torn from those and other notebooks. Many of the pages were stained, torn, or in other ways defaced, most of them to the extent of being rendered illegible. One book (D8) was found closed and intact on the big oak baize-covered table in the middle of the room. It had been placed between two bound volumes of government documents.

The librarian then catalogued the documents and stored them. But it seems that no one made use of them for many years, probably because no one suspected that they might be there, so no one looked for them. The first reference to them in any publication is in THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF L by William Severn, 2015.

We know from the MEMOIRS that L started to keep these diaries ten months before the revolution and throughout his dictatorship from November 1987 until his self-accusation and close confinement a year later. Each covered about three months, so there must have been at least eight of them, if the MEMOIRS are to be trusted. A few barely-decipherable pages of what would have been number 5, judging by the legible dates, and a single page of what might have been a missing end part of 7, none of them yielding anything of interest, are all we have apart from the four found as described, which were numbers 1, 2, 4 and 8, of which only 4 is wholly intact. If numbers 3, 5 and 6, or missing parts of the others exist, they are in private, possibly foreign, hands. But it does not seem likely that they will be found. Nobody has come forward with any of the missing books or pages, though they have acquired a considerable commercial value.

Why did L not take the books with him when he left the house to go to Clinic 5 where he was to await his execution? His staff packed many books, personal possessions, works of art; he had his desk removed and many articles of furniture. No restriction was put on what he might take with him. We must assume that he wished to leave the DIARIES behind. He wished them to be found and read. It was certainly not he who half destroyed them as though short of time for finishing the task. No one except his secretary and members of his own household entered that room after his departure from it. They proudly informed anyone who asked* that they were keeping it in order and readiness for L’s return, which they continued to expect right up to the end. Had one of them, acting on instructions or his own wishes, set out to destroy the DIARIES, he would surely have made a better job of it. William Severn, in the note below, suggests a solution to this mystery.

THE MEMOIRS. These were written in the last few days of L’s life. They are brief - sixty pages in all were written, and remained intact but for six pages carefully cut out and presumably destroyed, most probably by L himself. They deal mostly with recollections of, and ruminations on, the days of his youth. He makes few references to his years of influence or his months of power. There is a short passage concerning his impending death, which is quoted in full in chapter 10. They were found by his jailers* on his desk. Wherever the MEMOIRS have thrown light on a part of his life or thoughts or character, or provided missing information (such as when he started to keep and finished his diaries) they have been used in the compilation of this study.

iii. A Note on the DIARIES OF L by Professor William Severn

The DIARIES OF L were written in language less obscure than the philosophical works. In my opinion this was not because in his diaries he was writing only to himself and did not need to show off (as Jillian Becker has opined, in concurrence with most of the other critics who have published articles hostile to L; critics with whom I am largely in sympathy but who sometimes, as I have frequently needed to point out, misinterpreted the facts which they observed with admirable perspicacity). I say this because, as I have explained elsewhere,* it was chiefly to himself that L needed to show off.

But even so extreme an egomaniac as L cannot be self-sufficient. He needed others, to destroy them. And though his urge to do them harm did not abate, yet he wanted to be praised for it, by his victims themselves! His self-justification required that they not only forgive him, but admire him. They must be given such explanation for his actions that they, the victims, would pity him, the tormentor. Who can be both admired and pitied but the martyr, the man who suffers for others, dies for them? Suffer then he must, on paper at least. And so he catalogued his sufferings. He recorded how his heart bled for the human predicament. Though he was the agent of the historical process which necessitated their agonies, he suffered for them more than they could ever understand. It was his tragic fate to have to be the immediate cause of their purifying pain and grief.* While all was necessary for the greater and ultimate good of mankind, none regretted that it had to be so more than he did. If only they would understand him, understand how much more deeply and painfully he felt their agonies than they did! This is what he recorded in his diaries, for them to discover.*

It might with justice be objected that had he wished his diaries to be made public, he could easily have published them, and leaving them behind in his study was not the best way to secure that objective. But it must also be remembered that the message was addressed to his posterity. I am reasonably sure that he left the books behind when he went to prison in order that they might be read as works in which the misunderstood sufferer mused all alone on his tragic task, which because of its very nature he could not justify to those for whose good he performed it, and was thus sacrificing himself.

Eventually he had to do more than claim self-sacrifice in pursuit of wresting this kind of pity and veneration from those he knew were better, more generous people than himself (or how could he have expected their pity?). He wanted the guilt of a whole generation on his account. That was the final feast of human emotion his voracious ego hungered to cannibalize.

It is one of the most interesting aspects of this complicated and subtle personality that he did have such a view of human nature, which he never questioned and persistently assumed - that it was by and large good, forgiving, capable of guilt and shame. Because all other people were better than he, not only might they forgive him if they saw his sufferings, but they must inevitably forgive him. So those he longed to torture, those he did torture, beat down, and destroy, were those whom he believed to be good and worthy people!

Did he punish others because they were better than he? Was it envy that moved him, that underlay his vengefulness and hatred? Was his self-inflicted martyrdom an effort to equal or surpass the rest of humanity, those hundreds of millions who had qualities he knew to be superior, qualities which persecution could not eliminate nor diminish, qualities in which he feared that he himself was wholly deficient?

"To be cruel and to be loved for it: to despise and be worshipped for it - to hear your name praised by those who lie stretched on your rack, burn at your stake, are crushed between your millstones! Surely the ambition of a genius,

Reviews for L:

[katyas_26 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Book Info: Genre: Alternate HistoryReading Level: AdultRecommended for: I think everyone should read this. While I think those who favor socialism and communism will probably find the blatantly anti-communist overstory to be upsetting, I still think they should read it, and try to keep an open mind. There is more to this story that is on the surface.Trigger Warnings: rape of women and children, violence, attempted murder, murder, torture, cannibalism, lootingAnimal Abuse: multiple animals killed in “art” presentations, killing and eating of a small boy's dogMy Thoughts: Wow, this has to be one of the strangest things I've ever read. It's fiction, written like a history book, purportedly written in 2023 about events that took place from the 1960s into the early 1990s about a man who thirsted for power and destruction. If read with only a surface understanding, it appears to be vehemently anti-socialist and pro-capitalist, but a deeper understanding is needed to really understand that is being explored in this book. It is not about Left vs. Right, but about one man's desire to see the world burn around him, and how he used Leftist ideology and the desire of people to a) do right and b) be taken care of so as to be absolved of responsibilities to twist an entire country into his fist. This quote more-or-less encapsulates the idea behind the story.“When his [L's] messengers moved among the bored and aimless young, telling them that they had deep cause for resentment; that they were discriminated against and oppressed; that they had the right to all manner of good things that the state had long promised and had not yet given them enough of to make them happy—no one knowing better than he that the expectations the welfare state had aroused could never be met—he was preparing the way for disaster: and that was what he expected and passionately desired.”The thing is, so many of the people that followed him didn't even understand that socialism and communism were really about. One anecdote really brought that home to me. The characters are visiting a commune in which 12 people are living. One woman complains she cannot even leave milk for her baby in the refrigerator because someone else will just take it. Several of the people who live there proudly proclaim themselves to be Workers, but refuse to actually work. “It's not that there aren't jobs to be had, but they 'refuse to prop up the system by becoming wage-slaves'.” Instead, they seem to feel they should be supported by the commune without actually providing anything in return. This is completely antithetical to what a commune is actually about. These people would have a rude awakening if they were in a truly communist group, wherein if one wants to eat, one needs to work. The idea is not to have everything handed to you, but that everyone shares in everything. The ideals behind communism are good; it's just that people are greedy on an individual basis and think they should be exempt from actually following those ideals themselves, and communism will not work unless every single person believes in those ideals and lives them. That why it won't work, especially in our modern society where everyone wants the benefits but doesn't want to actually have to do anything to receive them. It comes down so much to the lack of personal responsibility that is becoming a curse upon our society, where everything is always the “fault” of someone else, and no fault is ever accepted. But I'm rambling way off topic.To me, the fact that so many thoughts and ideas are rolling around in my head after reading this is a very good sign. I might not have agreed with everything, and there were sections of this book that absolutely infuriated me, but it made me think, and to me, that is a sign of a very successful book. I'm telling you, so many people in this book come through as completely bughouse nuts. For example, anyone who disagreed with the Party line was called a fascist. They were militantly against racism, but hated Jews. They declared that Zionists were fascists, and therefore Jews were Nazis.... How messed up is that? An example of some of the double-speak so prevalent:“He understood the good to be what was natural, because nature was innocent; and innocence was wild, and wild innocent nature was cruel; so cruelty was good.”“But he held that only the man who understood profoundly and completely that murder was absolutely wrong could commit the murder that would be supremely good; the entirely—and tragically—moral murder. Such a one is the terrorist. He is a heroic martyr because he murders for the Communist Party, he does so with awesome courage, knowing full well that he himself must thereby suffer. There is no greater love than to lay down the life of a fellow man.”“It is of no importance whether they are true or not. What matters is that they are socially and morally unacceptable.”I wanted to say that no one would actually think this way, that no one would fall for the sorts of double-speak, manipulations, lies and propaganda that the people in this book fell for, but then I looked around, thought about some of the things I've seen on the news, read in magazines and newspapers, and heard people discussing in various places, and realized this is all-too-plausible. Frighteningly so. And it makes me despair for the world. People who know me well know I'm not an extremist one way or another politically—socially I tend to be Left and legally more Right—but I know one thing I can state unequivocally... When it comes to government, less is more. And modern government is growing too big. Legislating the sorts of personal decisions that should not be legislated is, as one character puts it in this book, doing nothing but creating wind. You can't force people to like one another with laws, and trying to will just make the problem worse. I've noted a distressing tendency lately for people to want the government to “do something” about issues in which the government should have absolutely no say, and the fact that enough people howl for it gives the government way too much power and control over our everyday life. I hope many people will read this, realize that things are going too far, and start to back off on insisting that the government “take care of us” and start taking care of themselves. Personal responsibilities need to go back to being personal. And again I'm rambling... sorry!The formatting left a lot to be desired. There were frequently sentences and fragments of sentences that were randomly swapped around and it made entire paragraphs sometimes very difficult to parse; since the book was already sometimes rather difficult to read, it made some sections practically unreadable. This is really the only issue I had with this book, and it likely a result of the fact that it is a galley. I hope that there will not be issues of this sort in the final edition. I should also point out that the edition I had was missing most of the appendices, and all of the illustrations and footnotes, so there is more to this book than I was able to access in this galley.The descriptions of the Direct Art movement in Vienna in the late 1960s and early 1970s sickened me, and I have never been so ashamed of being Austrian when I think about the sort of people who would actively support this sort of sick thing—the torture and murder of animals, the rape of young boys, the violence against their own audience—and demand it be allowed to continue in the name of “art”. Not only that, but that most of these “artists” were supported with public grants—money from taxpayers.Rather than making this already too long review any longer, I'll stop rambling now and say that I think most people should take the time to read this book and really think about it. Those who favor communism or socialism might find this book distasteful on the surface, as it paints Left ideologies in a very negative light. However, I think the meaning is deeper than that; I think this book is more about how one man's feeling of alienation and desire for power led to him utilizing the well-meaning ideologies of a certain segment of the population for his own purposes. Read it with an open mind, and really think about it. Disclosure: I received an e-galley from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.Synopsis: A charismatic sociopath orchestrates a reign of tyranny in England during the 1980s. L: A Novel History documents how distinguished political theorist, Louis Zander, or "L", uses art, artifice and ideology to ennkchant and captivate millions of English citizens. He then ups the stakes and slowly, with heart-pounding inevitability, turns his followers from democracy-loving citizens into willing participants in his collectivist dictatorship. This skillfully composed and well-researched novel could be a fictionalization of the Cloward-Piven strategy or Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Ms. Becker has written a page turner that unveils the step-by-step process by which one evil man seduces, perverts and then destroys an entire nation. "L" could be Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or even the next Prime Minister or President. Read this book at your peril. In this age of charismatic leaders, the vulnerability of our society is all too real. Ms. Becker was inspired to write this novel while researching her best selling, non-fiction work, Hitler's Children: The Story of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.