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

Rating:
Summary: A Great Historian's Analysis of Delusion in History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Dragon slayer of left, right, center
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: More right wing screed
Review: When will conservatives start trying to use facts, reason, and common sense? Instead we get vitrol once more, sometimes disguised as reasonableness. Anyone who tries to paint with the same brush the liberal embrace, temporary as it was, of Russia in the 20th century, and support for the UN in our current day and time is once again using misdirection, reading events in current history through the glasses of ideology...actually sounds a bit like those who chose communist thought while ignoring how it plays out in the real world when the theory is filtered through flawed humans. We get the transformation of our democracy into a place where patent ideological claims ride rough shod over the plain facts in front of us.