1905 - Birth of Arthur Koestler, a Jewish-Hungarian polymath author who became a naturalized British subject and a member of the communist party. (d. 1983)

That mini-bio cuts it short too fast: seeing Stalinist show trials up close, he became an anti-communist; still later an anti-science-ist, writing critiques of Darwin.

But his most famous anti-'communist' (or more correctly: anti-Stalinist) book, Darkness at Noon (French: Le Zéro et l'Infini), was a masterpiece: it is essentially the interrogation of a faithful but cleansed communist before his Stalinist show trial (with methods, I note, that pale in comparison with those applied at Abu Ghraib - wonder what our neocon warriors feel if they read the book), a review of his personal history, in the course of which, he is convinced of his own guilt, whilethe reader gets to see the corruption of the ideal, starting with the backstabbing of German and Spanish comrades.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}