Reflections on a Ravaged Century

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Summary: by Stephen Cox
Review: "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.

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Summary: Conquest Right Again
Review: A sophisticated narrative that whilst comprehensive is never verbose. Conquest has the foresight that predicted the final collapse of the Soviet Union as a function of its philosophical contradictions and for the same his appeal at suggesting the next likely steps that could unfold make for compelling reading. Whilst his critics before were certainly vocal they then seem to have misunderstood the clear essence of his hypothesis, that is so calmly based on the underlying philosophical tenets. And it is with that appreciation that one can see how easily a future alignment between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand (Anglosphere) can take place as we recently bore witness to as Saddam's regime was removed from power as a function of US, UK and Australian forces. Some may critique this, but as a brave historian who got it right before, Conquest cannot be dismissed so easily. I look forward to more of the same.

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Summary: I hope this is not our future.
Review: An astoundingly shallow piece of work from a great historian. The work of bitterness wrapped in the guise of a pragmatic. Conquest's careful dissection of other societies can be quite convincing and penetrating. He, unfortunately, never manages to apply the same precision to his own thinking. The crux of every argument, and of the book as a whole, is "all great, megalithic ideals are bad except my great, megalithic idea." He attacks with an imbalance that undermines his points. The book is a strange combination of intelligence and ideological bullying, which, unfortunately, makes the book almost pointless. A good example of how attacking theory with theory nets next to nothing.

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Summary: Important Essays on the Value of Freedom
Review: Being one himself, Robert Conquest most certainly understands and appreciates the role of historians in helping society learn from its past. With this needed addition to the body of politico-historical literature, Conquest fulfills this role with exquisite mastery. In turning his spotlight on the twentieth century, he succeeds in conveying to the reader the tragic failure of socialism and all its heinous variants.

Surely one of the most valuable contributions of this work (and one undoubtedly bound to irk remnant Marxists) is its convincing presentation of the fact that communism and national socialism were, to a large extent, products of one mindset--that being the belief that all man's affairs can and should be ordered under a prevailing Ideology to the detriment of individual freedom. (In making this observation, Conquest is in good company; the point has been made elsewhere, though in less detail. See Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_.) For Marxists to argue this point is, indeed, to miss it. For Conquest's point is not to engage in character assassination of modern communists by placing them in nefarious alliance with Hitler. (Certainly these two camps disdain each other with a vitriol comparable to a sibling relationship.) Rather, the goal is to show that collectivization, no matter what name it is given, is inimical to human freedom and self-expression.

This book should be read not only for its detailed explication of the dangers of communism, but also because of the deep appreciation for freedom and free markets it instills in its readers.

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Summary: Reflections of a Historian of Stalinst Depravity
Review: 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.



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Summary: well deserved victory lap
Review: 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

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Summary: A master historian's summing-up
Review: Paul Johnson, quoted on the cover of this book, calls Conquest or greatest living modern historian, and it is difficult to argue with that. Certainly as a student of Russian history and a Sovietologist, he is in elite company, having produced masterworks on Stalin's long reign of terror, the disastrous Soviet collectivization of agriculture and the death camps of Kolyma.

"Reflections on a Ravaged Century" is in part a summing up of the judgments on totalitarian societies that he has earned through his decades of study and writing.

Conquest develops as his thesis the judgment that those societies proved calamitous to their citizens and to the rest of the world because of their single-minded devotion to "Ideas," which he purposely capitalizes to make the point that the theorizers driving "change" were more devoted to ideology than they were to economic reality or simple regard for human life.

A portion of the first part of the book is devoted to systematically deconstructing and debunking Marxist ideology, a thoroughly redundant task, from one point of view, but one he undertakes, I believe, in service of making a point highly relevant to today's society. That is, that the Marxist view of the world is premised on the idea that classes of society are fated to eternal struggle. No accommodation can be made to settle conflict; all disputes resolve inevitably in total and complete victory for one side or the other-and of course in the Marxist view, the inevitable victor is "the proletariat." As we think about the nature of the struggle in the Middle East, for example, we see that even without a Marxist context, this idea of a zero-sum game in human relations has hardly fallen out of favor.

Conquest also takes to task those in the West who he believes made excuses for, or ignored, the horrible excesses of the Soviet Union, choosing, he says, to believe that lives were sacrificed in the name of creating a better society. He quotes, to devastating effect, the rather recent words of the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who said, in effect, that even the loss of millions of lives would be justified by the creation of a socialist society wou. The definition of a moral blind spot, I would say.

The second, and for me less successful, part of the book takes a look at the current state of the world. Despite the West's victory over the Soviet Union, Conquest is clearly concerned that the world still stands vulnerable to the lure of "Ideas." No argument there, but for me the writer makes a mistake by seeming to equate the admittedly irritating ideas and behaviors of the "politically correct" with a drift toward totalitarianism. It seems a bit cantankerous to take to task-twice!-recycling, on the grounds that it is a worthless idea that has been foisted on us by Leftists.

Nonetheless, the second half also contains some very interesting thoughts on how he sees the West's alliances around the globe shifting-and in what direction they should, in his estimation. He also critically looks at the European Union, chastizing it for its devotion to theory rather than reality.

For those unfamiliar with Conquest's work, add a half star. It's a good introduction.

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Summary: A fascinating tour of mankind's worst century.
Review: 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

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Summary: A brilliant expose' of the danger of Ideas
Review: The 20th century offered historians a laboratory demonstration of the danger of Utopian Ideas, several of which flourished and died with grave consequences. The only Idea which has survived is that of personal freedom found in the non-Utopian Western capitalist system. But the seductive nature of the Utopian Ideas captured the minds of many of the West's intelligentsia, to their ultimate embarassment. Conquest brilliantly demonstrates the virtual inevitability of disaster when freedom is sacrificed in favor of the Idea.

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Summary: Important insights and cultural memory
Review: 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.