Robert Conquest: Slaying Dragons
If Robert Conquest’s thought were not so challenging, it would be easy to dismiss him as a colossus from a past age. Born in 1917, he counted Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin among his friends, and won fame as a poet as well as a historian. He traversed the whole political spectrum, joining the Communist party in 1937 and, in the 1980s, writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher. As an intelligence officer during the war he was posted to Bulgaria, and it was watching the post-war Soviet takeover there that disillusioned him with communism. The Great Terror, which he published in 1968, gave a ground-breaking account of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, and was furiously denounced by western intellectuals. He followed it, in 1986, with The Harvest of Sorrow, telling the story of the collectivisation of agriculture under Stalin, during which millions of peasants died of starvation. The persistent denial of Stalin’s crimes by the leftist intelligentsia was, he insisted, “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale”.
Time has proved him right. After the opening of the Soviet archives under Gorbachev, Conquest published The Great Terror: A Reassessment, which showed that he had, if anything, underestimated the atrocities. His new book adds chilling details from recent archival research, but its eye is on the future not the past. What can we learn from the Soviet catastrophe, he asks, that will help us survive? 9/11 has brought home to us that “the world that Americans and other Westerners full of goodwill want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony but a huge vile-tempered mule”. How should we respond? The ideas he comes up with have all been aired elsewhere in his writings, but that makes The Dragons of Expectation a useful compendium of his thought, and it is also a cracking read.
His starting point is a distrust of all utopias, theories and abstractions. He blames the 18th-century continental enlightenment and the French revolution for spreading these evils among Europe’s thinking classes. Unfortunately, he notes, intellectuals always feel superior to ordinary citizens, so they are a prey to “intoxicating generalisations” that common sense would instantly dismiss. Usually, too, like the founders of Soviet communism, they are seized with an unshakeable sense of their own righteousness, which is the most lethal of human infections, and the most prolific source of slaughter, terror and savagery. It follows, he deduces, that America and the UK have nothing to learn from 300 years of continental political thought. Rather their model should be the British enlightenment, a slow growth dating back to the middle ages, that has evolved a “disorderly pluralist” society, underpinned by custom and the rule of law, which allows the maximum individual liberty, and consequently the greatest release of creative energy into humanly profitable fields.
This, for Conquest, is civilisation, and measured against it the rest of the world can be divided into “civilised, semi- civilised, and uncivilised (or decivilised) countries”....
Read entire article at Times Online (UK)
Time has proved him right. After the opening of the Soviet archives under Gorbachev, Conquest published The Great Terror: A Reassessment, which showed that he had, if anything, underestimated the atrocities. His new book adds chilling details from recent archival research, but its eye is on the future not the past. What can we learn from the Soviet catastrophe, he asks, that will help us survive? 9/11 has brought home to us that “the world that Americans and other Westerners full of goodwill want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony but a huge vile-tempered mule”. How should we respond? The ideas he comes up with have all been aired elsewhere in his writings, but that makes The Dragons of Expectation a useful compendium of his thought, and it is also a cracking read.
His starting point is a distrust of all utopias, theories and abstractions. He blames the 18th-century continental enlightenment and the French revolution for spreading these evils among Europe’s thinking classes. Unfortunately, he notes, intellectuals always feel superior to ordinary citizens, so they are a prey to “intoxicating generalisations” that common sense would instantly dismiss. Usually, too, like the founders of Soviet communism, they are seized with an unshakeable sense of their own righteousness, which is the most lethal of human infections, and the most prolific source of slaughter, terror and savagery. It follows, he deduces, that America and the UK have nothing to learn from 300 years of continental political thought. Rather their model should be the British enlightenment, a slow growth dating back to the middle ages, that has evolved a “disorderly pluralist” society, underpinned by custom and the rule of law, which allows the maximum individual liberty, and consequently the greatest release of creative energy into humanly profitable fields.
This, for Conquest, is civilisation, and measured against it the rest of the world can be divided into “civilised, semi- civilised, and uncivilised (or decivilised) countries”....