Reflections on a Ravaged Century: Reign of Rogue Ideologies [Hardcover]

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

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.

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.