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Reflections on a Ravaged Century

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Now that the Soviet parenthesis has closed, the historian Robert Conquest has been soundly vindicated. It was he, and a very few band of fellows, who _completely_ rejected the progresive aura that Soviet Communism inveigled so many other academics with. His books dealing with specific incidents and epochs of Soviet rule--sometimes for the first time in English--were resented by leftist professors as being "reactionary". Now, those books may be seen as bold testaments to the truth about Communism, published in times and places where that truth was most unwelcome, though undeniable. If you can find them, read some intellectual journals' reviews of the first edition of _The Great Terror_, to see the psychic indigestion Conquest's work caused them.

This book is a fairly concise summary of his opinions about how so much evil came upon this century, why so many otherwise good and intelligent people were taken in, and What It All Means. Familiarity with his previous work is assumed, so if you are new to Conquest, read something like _The Great Terror_ first. The book is arranged in thematic chapters. Each chapter consists of brief, numbered essays--"reflections"--somewhat like a less aphoristic Eric Hoffer, though this book is very quotable. Conquest is very old, astonishingly widely read, multi-lingual, and is an altogether trustworthy and admirable figure. It is important to remember this, because much of the book is tough sledding for less well-educated readers. Because he hates cant and sweeping generalizations, his sentences are sometimes over-stuffed with qualifiers and conditional phrases, making them precise, but a bit hard to unpack on first reading. And he's not ashamed of the impressive vocabulary he's amassed, either. "Chiliastic," "accidie," "tergiviseration," and more will tax your pocket Websters. And is "fissiparous" really _that_ much more fitting than "divisive" in discussing how political and national unities are dissolved?

Style aside, the book is less a refutation of Communism and its Western towel boys, than it is a consideration of how it and they could have enjoyed so much power and prestige over the years. All the familiar famous dupes are brought out for more execration: Duranty, Shaw, Wells, the Webbs, and prominent Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm. They are not actively engaged and disproved--that was done long ago a dozen times over--so much as they are practically drummed out of the ranks of moral, or even sentient beings. Pretty harsh for people who only wanted to "make a better world". Yet they deserve it. As Conquest says, "Many whose allegiance went to the Soviet Union may well be seen as traitors to their countries, and to the democratic culture. But their profounder fault was more basic still. Seeing themselves as independent brains, making their own choices as thinking beings, they ignored their own criteria. They did not examine the multifarious evidence, already available in the 1930s, on the realities of the Communist regimes. That is to say, they were traitors to the human mind, to thought itself."

The closing chapters concern the current state of education, the European Union, nationalism, prospects for Russia and for the West, and such. Only time will tell, etc.; but Conquest richly deserves a hearing on these issues, by virtue of having been so resoundingly right about the most important issue of this century. He is, once and for all, a hero of the Western tradition of liberty and civilization. This book is a fitting capstone to possibly the noblest career in academia in the latter half of the 20th century. END

Far anyone interested more than casually in 20th Century history, Robert Conquest's reflection on the century will teach and illuminate. The most interesting part of this excellent book was Conquest's review of the history of Soviet Communism and his skewering of those who spent long and supposedly distinguished careers arguing that Marxism is a benign way to build a new and better world. As Conquest points out, the facts have always led to the opposite conclusion and these "fellow-travellers" knew it and ignored them. In fact, what Marxism has left behind in Russia is a devastated industrial base, the absence of individual iniative, and a population psychically damaged. In the guise of building a worker's state, communism built a monument to everything that is anti-human, anti-compassion, and anti-freedom.

Conquest has never shied from his views, even when they were unpopular. We owe him a lot for his unstinting criticism of one of mankind's worst historical aberrations.

His warnings about the future should be carefully considered by all of us.

Every time I read Conquest, I think how fortunate it is that we have had this excellent a man ponder the large questions of the twentieth century. Every page of Conquest reads like somethign you wish you had written: thoughts unconsidered, points missed, sublime ideas brought to life.

And of course, there is this book- the century he got right from the very beginning. And the century to which we in the rest of the world are just now beginning to catch up with how correct Conqeust was. And we all need to be aware- Conquest figured out the important questions of communism right before anyone else did.

Chris Hitchens in his blurb got this one right- you learn more from Conquest just in a glance than you learn from streams of discourse from others. I don't aways agree with Conqeust, but even I must give the man his due: when people are asked "what was the twentieth century?", one of the first books given will be thoughts by its best commentator- Robert Conquest. When we are all dead and buried, this man will live in the minds of students.

Buy this book. Heck, buy any book by Conquest. It's hard to go wrong with the man. The man introduces the effects of ideology in the most convincing way possible.

The trenchant conservative Florence King once said of Chris Hitchens, "If Chris Hitchens is a communist, I wanna be a communist too". I remember a rant about Conquest by some radical or another, and had a thought: if Robert Conquest is a McCarthyite right wing zealot, I wanna be a McCarthyite right wing zealot too.

Robert Conquest is one of the true Heroes of the twentieth century. In books like ''Harvest of Sorrow'' and the''Great terror'' He exposed the murderous evil of stalinism which for sheer numbers causes Hitler's holocaust to pale by comparison. Yet for all His trouble Conquest was denounced by the international media establishment and the Apostles of political correctness for ''overreaching''. His allegations against the ''Workers Paradise'' could not possibly be true. Well now the Evil Empire has fallen and the archives are open and the accuracy of Conquest's work is proven beyond all doubt.No man on earth has a better right to say ''I told you so''! This book is a series of essays about the twentieth century and the ideas that turned it into a slaughterhouse; Communism, Fascism and Utopianism. All of these ideologies are rooted in the idea that the state knows better than the Individual about how to solve society's problems.And that the state should have whatever power

necessary to solve those problems. Conquest shows us what the twentieth century should have shown us that this type of thinking is the slippery slope to Auschwitz and the Gulag.Sadly Conquest shows us that mankind appears not to have learned it's lesson. This is an excellent book which provides more than sufficient armor for the continuing culture wars of the 21st century. I highly reccomend it

Conquest is an almost peerless historian of tyranny. The present volume summarizes his overview of the bloodiest century ever known, and analyses the evils of communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Conquest's thinking is deep, original, and courageous, his prose exceptional, and his research impeccable. This is the culminating work in a long career marked by dedication to illuminating painful truths about the Soviet Union and international communism. Very highly recommended.

"I have suggested elsewhere," writes Robert Conquest, "that a curious little volume might be made of the poems of Stalin, Castro, Mao and Ho Chi Minh, with illustrations by A. Hitler" (p. 208). That sounds like a good idea to me. I would suggest that a second volume be added, consisting of critical commentaries by Shaw, Neruda, Pound, Sartre, Heidegger, and other intellectual and artistic admirers of the twentieth century's collectivist monstrosities. For a slightly higher price, the publishers could supply a video of great moments from Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl.

Conquest's point is not that the works he mentions are bad art, though probably all of them are. It is that neither "art" nor "education" was sufficient, in the century just past, to prevent their devotees from ignoring, acclaiming, or collaborating in the murders of hundreds of millions of fellow human beings-sacrifices on the altar of political ideals.

Conquest will take his place in history as an intellectual who devoted himself to telling the simple truth about the vileness of those ideals and acts. His books about the horrors of Soviet history, most notably The Great Terror (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), showed how wrong other intellectuals were to believe that there was some great moral difference between National Socialism and Soviet Socialism. Although those books have made a large impression on general readers, they have made a remarkably small one on the academics and other thinkers of high thoughts who continue to affirm that Marx was a great political philosopher, not to be judged by the apparent effects of his political theories, whereas such anti-Marxist thinkers as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek were . . . well, who exactly were they, anyhow?

Every reviewer has a wish list. I wish that Conquest had not undertaken a joust with the absolute. I also wish that he had not preached decisively Hayekian doctrines about the dangers of state encroachment, while tossing softball speculations about "a sense of balance, between the proper rights of the individual and the necessary rights of the state" (p. 15). What principles will allow us to strike that balance? Not the idea that "state ownership or control" should remain smaller than "a proportion that is under debate but is usually held to be a maximum of some 30 percent of GNP" (201). Thirty percent is a very great deal. And which 30 percent do we have in mind? Incidentally, how is it that states have "rights" instead of delegated powers?

Surely, however, only the most politically correct reviewer would repine at Conquest's refusal to fulfill his every wish. The story of the twentieth century, so oversupplied with fascinating political theories and so undersupplied with political decency and honesty, would be unthinkably painful without the standard of independent thought maintained by a few people such as Robert Conquest.

For a long while, Robert Conquest was a controversial figure, for he saw and illuminated the monstrous evil of Stalinism. The Harvest of Sorrow is one of my most indispensable books, as it documents the millions of Ukranians who were sacrificed on the altar of collectivization. After a lifetime of looking at depths of human depravity in the modern era, Conquest has written a sober, reflective work that lays the harvest of corpses at the feet of the twin radical ideologies of Communism and National Socialism. Finally, he is more than a "Eurosceptic," being a scholar who is convinced that the European Union is not merely divisive, but doomed to failure. Conquest writes well and this book is full of insights that any student of history should enjoy.

For the most part, this book is a well deserved victory lap by one of the real heroes of the Cold War. At a time when most intellectuals and politicians had surrendered the ideological battle, or were actively collaborating with the Soviet Union, it was Robert Conquest, in his epochal books The Great Terror and Harvest of Sorrow, who demonstrated--in such a way that no truly open-minded person could really doubt--that Russia's Communist regime was just as murderous as Hitler and the Nazis, if not more so. Though it is quickly being forgotten, Conquest's honest appraisal was extremely rare and was greeted with almost uniform hostility. Most academics after all are left-leaning and so hoped that the Soviet experiment would eventually work out, while even politicians of the Right, like Richard Nixon, were so intent on pursuing diplomacy with the Russians that they did not care to hear about such bitter truths.

This book then, presenting more of a series of essays than a sustained thesis, allows Conquest to revisit old turf and settle old scores, place the murderous ideologies of the century in some perspective and finally to draw some conclusions and make some suggestions. His main points about the ideologies are very straightforward :

The huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts.

and

The book's general theme, then, is that any concept given anything like absolute status becomes not a guide to action but an abstraction whose imposition on reality reveals an incompatibility, as engineers say of parts that do not fit, by main force, and even then ineffectively or ruinously.

His discussion of why these ideologies appeal to intellectuals offers one of the most chilling quotations you're likely to find :

...if it could be shown that humanity would live happily ever after if the Jews were exterminated, there could be no good reason not to proceed with their extermination. -Bertrand Russell

This attitude was unfortunately reflective of too many intellectuals who believed that the application of reason to man's affairs would necessarily yield utopian results, regardless of short term consequences. Conquests arguments on these points have been put better elsewhere by other authors (see for instance, The True Believer : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951)(Eric Hoffer 1902-1983)

(Grade: A) and The Road to Serfdom (1944)(F. A. [Friedrich August von] Hayek 1899-1992) (Grade: A+), but you can't really begrudge him the opportunity to sum up what he's learned.

It's in the final section of the book that Conquest really piqued my interest. There he suggests ways to avoid a repeat of the Ravaged Century, particularly by resurrecting Winston Churchill's old vision of a unified English-Speaking World :

Generally speaking, closer integration of the (in the main) English-speaking countries, can create a center of power attractive to the other countries with a democratic tradition and form the basis of a yet broader political unity in the longer run. And this in turn could eventually be the foundation for a full unity of a democratized world.

The starting point for this grand alliance would be for Britain to bail out of the European Union and join NAFTA, a recognition that England is less European than it is democratic and capitalist.

I am less sanguine than Mr. Conquest about future steps which he envisions duplicating the American Federal System on a larger scale, with the US, Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, etc. as "united states." But even he cautions that the federal institutions of such an "Association" would have to be pretty weak just to gain acceptance from Americans. Despite some misgivings, the core idea here is really compelling. Moreover, especially if the Tories return to power in Britain, the initial steps are entirely doable. In fact, the Tories could run on a NAFTA instead of EU platform and probably do quite well.

The world can never repay the debt it owes to Robert Conquest and the other lonely voices who never lost sight of the central fact that the Soviet Union was, to quote another of the voices, "the focus of evil in the Modern World." This book, though somewhat unfocused and a bit overfamiliar, allows him to share the lessons of a lifetime and to offer some interesting ideas about the future. It's well worth reading.

GRADE : B

This is an important work because too much cultural memory about the realities of the twentieth century is already fading. Why worry about the Soviet Union or facism? Because the error of believing in strong central planning leads to real misery on a massive scale. This means real lives and real people are ground up in the machinery of a state bureaucracy that is pursuing horribly misguided ends by cruel and ridiculous means.

Mr. Conquest does a wonderful job in aiding our cultural memory. His beautiful writing keeps us involved, his insights teach us, his conclusions are persuasive to me. If they aren't to you, fine, but you will have been given much to think about.

Robert Conquest's earlier works include The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow, both of which stand with Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago as the greatest indictments of the Soviet system ever written. This book, which explores the intellectual chicanery that underwrote the Evil Empire, is another world classic.

Conquest, who has been described as our greatest living modern historian, dispenses with the scholarly footnotes that usually pepper learned books and instead uses the world's great fiction writers such as Fyodor Dostotoevsky and George Orwell to show us what depths the human soul has plumbed. Orwell, who witnessed the Ukrainian famine Stalin deliberately instigated, was amazed that the majority of English Russophiles so blithely ignored it. This complicity in such a manmade calamity is just one tiny bead in the rosary of intellectual and moral disgraces Conquest draws our attention to.

As well as reminding us just how morally and intellectually bankrupt Marxism is, he argues that the most susceptible Western intellectuals had "minds like jelly", just waiting for a Hitler, Lenin or Stalin to imprint their vile creeds on them.

Conquest shows a plentitude of the Bolsheviks' idiocies and eloquently explains how their gross ignorance contributed to the deaths of countless millions in the vast lands the Soviet commissars controlled. He also shows how, to quote Comrade Lenin, "useful idiots" such as H.G. Wells, G.B. Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in allowing their minds to be seduced by the KGB, became accessories to the Soviet Union's almost unparalleled crimes against humanity.

The untrammeled mind, as Milton's Lucifer tells us in Paradise Lost, is indeed its own domain and can so easily, with mental gymnastics, make a heaven even out of hell. Communist commissars have, throughout the twentieth century, done just that. Fixated on their puerile philosophy and using the most brutal tactics, they convinced themselves and their fellow travelers that they were building heaven on earth. In the process, their system ground millions down in a way that is comparable only to the Hitler regime, which also strove to create hell on earth.

Although these historical ogres strove to create darkness at noon, there is, if we can belatedly learn history's most obvious lessons, reason for hope. Although Conquest takes solace from the English Glorious Revolution and mentions in passing such eloquent proponents of non-violence and pluralism as Edmond Bourke, the cancer is, at least, in my opinion, more deeply embedded in our collective consciousness than that. Because silly ideas, when they enter the heads of mindless zealots, can be the most lethal viruses of them all, the challenge must be to create something better on our common planet that the Workers' Paradise Stalin and his cronies worked for. Although that quest should be never ending, Conquest is to be heartily lauded for so eloquently showing to us the deathly consequences of thuggish ideologues forcing their infantile ideas on to society at large.