"Last Exit to Utopia" may be Revel's finest work. He makes many points worth remembering, such as the fact that the Left has an ideology, while democratic freedom-lovers do NOT. To drive this point home, he mentions French "intellectuals" (which frequently translates as French "morons") who complain that extreme right-wing free-marketeers rejected the USSR because it did not conform to their rightist "ideology." Unforgettably, Revel then states (I quote from memory), "We did not condemn the Soviet Union because of ideology. We condemned it because it was a vast prison full of slaves, a huge psychiatric hospital run by the nomenklatura, and the operating base for a gang of murderers. In other words, we condemned Communism for the same reasons we condemned the Nazis." This was not a question of "ideology," unless being in favor of good and opposing evil constitutes "an ideology."
Another memorable thought is that the leftist Utopia enables the leftists to continue condemning that which exists on the basis of something which does not exist.
The most memorable part of the book, however, is Revel's painstaking dissection of the reaction of the Parisian left to the collapse of the USSR. Where almost anyone of normal intelligence would have concluded that the collapse of the Great Gulag indicated that Marxism was a failure, somehow those brilliant French "intellectuals" managed to work up an argument that "proved" that the collapse of the USSR was proof positive that democratic free-market principles had failed. (Well, I did tell you that in France, the word "intellectual" frequently translates as "moron," didn't I?)
To put whipped cream on top of their sundae, they also advanced an argument that the true victims of the collapse of the USSR were themselves, suffering in a wintry solitude, "deprived of their dreams." NOT the millions who died in the Great Gulag or the Ukrainian famine, you understand. The put-upon victims deserving of pity were, guess who, the French "intellectuals."
Revel is a master at dealing with these self-deluding, self-important, incoherent nutjobs. I mean to say, just look at the last few decades: Sartre (an admirer of Mao), Lacan, Foucault (an admirer of Khomeini), Derrida: can you think of a loonier group of people?
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