Customer Reviews

The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

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One of the earlier reviewers apparently believes, as many supporters of aberrational ideologies always do, that the ad hominem argument (attack and label your opponent instead of confronting his arguments) somehow replaces rational debate.

Robert Conquest is one of the great historians of the past 50 years and perhaps the greatest scholar of Stalinism, some of which he observed first hand in WWII. He wrote the seminal work on the terror of Stalinism, "The Great Terror." He is also a keen observor of totalitarian regimes and of the the pseudo-intellectuals (usually, but not always, on the left) who attempt, in the guise of objectivity, to present totalitarians and Western democracies as morally neutral. No value judgments for them--Leonid Brezhnev is just as good to them as Ronald Reagan.

While it may offend those with such leanings to hear what Mr. Conquest has to say, the fact is that, in regard particularly to the Soviet Union, many so-called public intellectuals were far from objective (indeed delusional) about the communist regime in Russia.

This book is a review of many of these delusions and of those who foisted them on the public. Mr. Conquest is unafraid to name names and to directly confont their gullibility and/or stupidity. Mr. Conquest makes a compelling case for governments that pay more than lip service to justice and freedom over the totalitarians. In other words, he IS willing to make a value judgment.

A few years ago, the great historian Barbara Tuchman said this about leadership in the 20th century: "When it comes to leaders we have, if anything a superabundance. . . They are scurrying around, collecting consensus, gathering as wide an acceptance as possible. But what they are not doing, very notably, is standing still and saying, 'This is what I believe. This is what I will do and what I will not do. This is my code of behavior and this is outside it. This is excellent and that is trash.' There is an abdication of moral leadership in the sense of a general unwillingness to state standards."

The same can be said of historians. But Mr. Conquest is not one of the historians for whom all acts are equal and all ideologies morally neutral. In the world of historical analysis, Robert Conquest is a man who is willing to define a standard and then judge regimes against that standard. No moral equivocations for him. He has strong beliefs (backed by compelling facts) and is unafraid to state them--and while doing so to take on the equivocators.

This is a fine book by an honest and encyclopedically well-informed man. He will undoubtedly offend many, but the offense he gives is based on truth and his willingess to state it in its unvarnished state. More power to him.

This book should be widely read and given deep consideration.

Robert Conquest is more than an eminent historian of totalitarianism and fascism, novelist and poet, he is a dragon slayer of myths, manias, and political delusions. He exposes the delusions of: word-smyths of totalitarianism who twist Left into being cast as Right; about the utopianism that there is a solution to all problems; about a United Nations that Conquest describes as more like a hockey field than a nice family picnic; about the regulationist superstate of the European Union and its bureau-osophy; about the neglect of how Marxist-Leninist communism was financed in Europe and the U.S.; about the uselessness of a planned economy; about a gaggle of misleaders such as CNN with their documentary and book on the Cold War which they characterized as merely an anti-communist witch hunt and Red Scare by the U.S. The reason that Conquest can write with such depth and wisdom about such topics is not that he is a great historian (which he is) but that he lived it. He tells us he was a British military officer in the Balkans in WWII where he witnessed political hangings and torture by the Soviets and fascists. He wrote the first books that foretold of the mass famines and gulags in the USSR before they were well known in the West, he was the first to accurately quantify the massive loss of life, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet Empire. This is a quirky almost eccentric book which Conquest writes is not about history but an understanding of the totalitarian. The last third of the book deals with art, poetry, and a proposal for an Anglo-American consortium of nations rather than the U.N. or E.U. The book is dotted with thought-provoking sayings such as: "The world that Americans and other Westerners want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony, but a huge, vile-tempered mule." Conquest has a penetrating moral acuity such as when he points out that CNN and Hollywood tried to morally equate the U.S. Cold War as a Red Scare, calling it "torture by inquisition;" while ignoring real Soviet torture such as Russian movie producer Vsevolod Meyerhold who was interrogated for months by Stalin's apparatchiks by making him drink human waste, breaking his legs and plunging him into hot water for months before shooting him. Ironically, Conquest was educated at the socialist London School of Economics and even was the recipient of the socialist-communist Sydney and Beatric Webb Fellowship as a student. Conquest's apparent revulsion against totalitarianism is thus liberal, which he defines as furthering political liberty, freedom of thought, and social justice by a rule of law. Conquest's book is timely because the political Left has all but abandoned its former repugnance of totalitarianism that is currently manifesting itself in various parts of the world under the guise of fanatical fundamentalist religion. I will close this review with a common Russian joke Conquest recites in his book: "A Russian-Jewish, too-once said to me that the best outcome of the war would have been a German victory over the Soviet regime, followed by a Western nuclear destruction of Nazism. 'But you would have been dead.' 'Yes, there IS that." Highly recommended.

This masterpiece is an eloquent defence of all that is good in Western Civilization, and an identification of the toxic utopian ideas that infest our culture. Conquest analyses the erroneous myths of past and present that have caused so much suffering and destruction. He identifies a certain vague and abstract idea of righteousness with its own peculiar speech, that leads to a mindset of dislocation from reality. In this vein, he looks at the way terms like Democracy, Progress and Liberty are abused to distort reality. For example, democracy is meaningless without the rule of law and the acceptance of the rules of the political game.

In the chapter After Utopia, Conquest points out that the New Utopianism is primarily a rejection of reason and an embrace of nihilism. He brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment that led to the negative utopianism of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, with the British Enlightenment of Adam Smith, David Hume, James Madison and Edmund Burke, one that bore good fruits.

Western academia and the mass media are still dominated by negative utopianism and most of the intellectual elites are impervious to fact or argument. In the chapter Slouching Towards Byzantium the author dissects the idea of the European Superstate with a swift, sharp sword, demonstrating its non-representative nature as a bureaucratic monstrosity ruled by self-perpetuating elites.

Chapter 10 explores the massive deception practiced by the Soviet Union and how that propaganda was swallowed by a gullible Western media and even enthusiastically embraced by opinion-shapers. Quite appropriately, Conquest alerts us to the fact that there are deeper problems than terrorism or war. From the West came the blessings of individual liberty, economic prosperity and democracy under law, but also monstrous totalitarian ideologies.

The frightening fact is that the notions of this seductive nihilism are alive and well amongst the leftist intelligentsia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Empire, this mindset has taken an even more disturbing turn. The true believers had to either give up the utopian dream or deny reality. They chose the latter. In other words, postmodernism is the result of employing a skeptical epistemology to justify the leap of faith that is necessary to continue believing in the failed god of collectivism. The author performs a remarkable feat in exposing the historical falsity and the risible bankruptcy of the arguments of moral equivalence and relativism.

Dragons Of Expectation is a work of great profundity and originality. Other books that complement this illuminating work include Our Culture, What's Left of It by Theodore Dalrymple, The West And The Rest by Roger Scruton, Defending the West by Ibn Warraq, Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal, The Death Of Right And Wrong by Tammy Bruce, Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg, The Force Of Reason by Oriana Fallaci, Surrender by Bruce Bawer and United in Hate by Jamie Glazov.

Doing book reviews is really not my thing, and I don't understand why the "one star" evaluators are included (not their thing either) as it appears most of them are just making political statements and have probably not even read the book. Robert Conquest obviously knows his subject and much of his knowledge is first hand. The recommendation by fellow historian Paul Johnson was enough for me; however, the reviews by Tusvardi and Smith were right on the mark and need not be repeated here. I frankly did not enjoy the "art part" of the book because of my lack of real interest (and Conquest's level of education and experience is a bit overwhelming) in that area, but his knowledge of the history of the USSR is riveting and doubtless hard to swallow for the "baby" Bolsheviks like the "one star" guy. Conquest's evaluation of CNN (Ted "Fonda" Turner), Hollywood and the "liberal" (a/k/a as CRAPS=Communists, Radicals, Atheists, Perverts, Socialists) icons must have also grated on the "one star" guy, if he read the book. A great read for those who are interested in what the USSR was really like and why the effect of Communist propaganda still lingers in our institutions, especially the Democrat party (excuse my political statement)!!

"....a certain reluctance to admit that Communism was not only physically lethal and mentally repressive but also a total failure."

And can't we see that "reluctance" all around us today? What are Code Pink and International ANSWER saying, whenever they are questioned about the Communism they support?

Beyond that, we can notice that the book is supremely well-written. (Another reviewer whines that it should have been dumbed down to his own subliterate level.) Who else could pin down the odious record of Communism in ten totally accurate and measured words?

Conquest will make all of his readers THINK AGAIN about such fifty-dollar words as "democracy" and "fascism." But he's not belligerent about it, and in fact believes that a nation will NOT want to be ruled by people who are nuts about politics.

There is much wisdom here, and much food for thought. After all, America didn't have to do an awful lot of radical changing during the 20th century. What it really had to do was STAY THE COURSE, against the Nazis and the Communists. Sadly enough, there was no real vacation once those tasks had been accomplished: maniac anti-Semitic Islamic fascists popped up and began a whole new round of terror and violence.

Perhaps, once again, we just need to stay the course -- which means, once again, defeating the enemies of civilization.

I now return to listening to Mozart, and wish you well.

To anyone interested in why untruths thrive, especially in history and politics - this is the fountainhead. Robert Conquest is a rare man a gift to us all.

The fault may well be mine, but Conquest's prose style is a bit too dense and opaque for me. I purchased the book expecting to be enlightened; the stated purpose is to examine the "brain-blindfolds" that hinder our ability to accurately perceive the political and historical realities of the world. But through the first two chapters I had to repeatedly re-read sentences to try and decipher the point being made. I gave up at the end of chapter two, feeling like a stupid failure. Judging from other reviews written for the hardback edition, there are more astute readers who enjoyed this book and got something of value from it. Good for them. Maybe one of them could write a translation of it for me, or perhaps publish a Dummies version?

Let me provide a sample sentence, and if you can understand it, then by all means get the book: "One trouble, a nasty one, is that the more civilized attitudes of both left and right tend to spill over into their totalitarian variants, or at the minimum into one-sided tolerations, a preference for the more appealing totalitarians over opponents within their own culture, with whom they actually have far less real substantive disagreement." Want to try again? Here, try this one: "More generally, in Europe under the eighteenth-century monarchism, we run into the disorganized current of ideas considered progressive, as against the stasis and stupefaction of the old regimes - a current jammed with flotsam and jetsam, and one that yet flows today, even after socialism has steamed on to shipwreck."

If you not only understood these sentences but enjoyed them, I applaud you and I weep for me!

What a curious book.

In it, veteran historian Robert Conquest endeavours, so far as I can determine, to put the world to rights; nothing more, nothing less. Disappointingly, it transpires that his grand scheme, announced portentously and not a little pompously (Conquest adopts the royal "we", no less), is to be achieved by mostly re-hashing his own, previously published, accounts of the atrocities committed under the Soviet regime (almost half the book is given over to this endeavour) and then grumbling randomly and vaguely about the unappealing aspects of modern art.

In short, it sounds rather like a curmudgeonly old duffer - an articulate one, I grant you - having a bit of a moan.

Now I am not short on sympathy for some of Conquest's complaints, but his manner of addressing them is less than persuasive. Yes, Socialism is a silly idea, but we've known that since Mark Twain, or Winston Churchill, or whoever it was, made his pithy comment about socialists at 40 having no brain. Over a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, it is no longer news that the Communist experiment went badly wrong. Indeed, we've been on notice about that since Orwell. Nor is it a new observation that the liberal western intelligentsia, all the while, has maintained a rather rose-tinted view of the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one of the first people to make that observation was one R. Conquest, Esq. So, while the facts Conquest presents are interesting, no new ground is being broken.

Along the way, Conquest ducks some mighty issues. Derrida (and therefore all of relativism, by implication) is deemed "unreadable" and a "freak fashion" from the "silly-clever corner of academe", and therefore dismissed out of hand. Purely in terms of readability, the pot is calling the kettle black here. Take the following:

"We are concerned here to present, rather than to vindicate, arguments and facts. They are accompanied by illustrations and illuminations, rather than 'proofs.' I have, as far as possible, rid them of excess complexity or coruscation or incrustation. Inevitably, anyone who, as here, covers a wide field must accept and show that in some cases new data can bring fuller understanding. And I suppose it is necessary - though it should not be - to disavow anything like an 'ideology.' As has been well put by that fine political thinker Maurice Cranston, one can have a worldview in a broad and general sense without falling into such uncivilized frigidities."

If you have any idea what Conquest is talking about, give yourself a star. That's the very first paragraph of the book. On reading it, I considered abandoning the book at once.

More critically, though, however irksome it might seem, you cannot, with any credibility, just write off relativist thought. Derrida might be a slog, but there are writers who are beautifully clear on the subject - "illuminating", if you will - like Richard Rorty. Their very point is that this talk of "facts" is very convenient when you're giving the assembled cast the benefit of your view, but it's quite indefensible as a matter of logic against those who construe them differently.

The fact that there's even a debate for Conquest to contribute to is evidence enough of the multiple, and irreconcilable, perspectives on any political issue. It just isn't possible to king-hit them; to settle the argument for once and for all, in the way that Conquest would like to. Those who don't like the message can just write this off as "right wing screed" (see, for example, the first review below) and no amount of facts that Conquest can point to will change that. A little more time spent with Messrs. Derrida and Wittgenstein might have helped Mr Conquest understand that.

Ultimately, I don't think The Dragons of Expectation comes anywhere near to achieving what it says on the tin - and this is from a reader whose political and economic perspective is more or less aligned with the author's. Not much hope of convincing any doubters with this entry, I am afraid.

Olly Buxton

I would like to give a glowing review to this book - but I can't. It has a number of important things to say about the history of the 20th century, contemporary and not so contemporary American and British intellectuals, government (especially the EU), and it could have been a very worthwhile book. But between the sesquipedalian vocabulary and the syntactical thickets, reading some of Conquest's chapters is, to borrow a simile, "like kicking a dead whale down the beach".

Robert has written some great books, but this is not one of them.. Disjointed and vaguely written... Save your money..