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.

(Reviewed:05-Nov-00)

Grade: (B) Orrin C. Judd

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