Posted on 02/15/2005 10:27:22 PM PST by Lorianne
Robert Conquest was right when he blamed the Western left for ignoring the evils of communism. But today is a different time, and terrorism a different matter. ___
Robert Conquest is one of only a handful of Western historians to have gotten the Cold War right. His life's work, especially his seminal book on Josef Stalin's purges, "The Great Terror," published in 1968, documented (as far as was possible at that time, given the paucity of sources) the extent of Soviet crimes against the Russian people, and rightly traced the regime's murderous ways to essential features of Marxist-Leninist governance -- most importantly, the tendency of communism's great world-historical mission to justify the torture and killing of "reactionary elements." Conquest was one of the few to see clearly that the Soviet Union was a genuinely evil regime, and to draw out the inevitable consequence of this insight: The regime was doomed to fail because its evil consisted precisely in its effort to falsify and suppress the most basic elements of the human condition, which could not continue once steadfastly opposed.
This uncompromising position made a lot of enemies. To the great shame of the West, most "serious" historians and social scientists of the time had genuine sympathy for the Soviet and Chinese communist regimes, while the majority of the rest attributed their own criticisms to incidental or nonessential features of communist polities -- the bad Stalin versus the good Lenin, and so on -- in part because they were afraid to seem like ... well, reactionary elements.
Conquest's service in the defense of liberal democracy has been so noble, and his historical work so distinguished, that I feel a pang of regret, as well as slight trepidation, at having to render my opinion that his new book, "Dragons of Expectation," is something of a hoax. The ostensible purpose of "Dragons" is to bring Conquest's formidable historical learning to bear on our post-Sept. 11. future. The basic problem is that, while the situation has changed enormously, Conquest is still singing an old and dated tune.
The story he tells is familiar, indeed so familiar that it has begun to take on a kind of animatronic quality in the mouths of many conservative political thinkers these days. It is a tale told most impressively -- in a more controversial, but less tendentious manner -- by Allan Bloom's wonderful "The Closing of the American Mind," from 1988, which is full of insight and ammunition for both the left and the right but was put to good use only by the right, where its themes are re-minted and recycled every few months, to considerable effect.
that promote "mind-mists" in "the psychosphere and the logosphere" of Western democracies, thereby advancing "the emerging semi-ideological conformist bureaucracy devoted to state control of much of human activity." (Whew! I thought that was how analytical Marxists spoke!) Several times he calls this evil he has identified "corporationism," although it is never clear what he means by it (we can be sure that it doesn't have anything to do with the control of much of human activity by corporations -- this isn't the kind of thing that keeps Conquest up at night). In another place he refers to it, apparently without irony, as "abstractionism."
Should we have any doubt about the bottom line, Conquest spells it out for us: He means the EU, the UN, the NHS, the ICC, the BBC, C.P. Snow (accused of "a deep emotional attachment to bureaucracy"), Ted Turner, the Tate Modern, modern art, arty leftists, leftist academics (always the primary culprit), and everything else under the warming (but not dangerously so) liberal sun.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was duly celebrated all over the free world, but not without a certain anxiety, especially on the political right, where anti-communism had done so much to hold together an uneasy electoral coalition. In the United States, Wall Street hated communism for its attack on property, while the evangelical South and Midwest hated it for its godlessness. The opposition between these groups defines much of American political history; anti-communism helped to bring them together. What would happen to the conservative movement when the Red Menace was gone?
These fears, it turns out, were exaggerated. Ideological thinking, unlike the ideological thinker, is nimble and inventive. Ideology is the smugness of power, and it is as available to the right as to the left, always ready to convert temporary political advantage into final ideological victory. New demons were invented, and are being invented still.
Consider this passage from the introduction to "Dragons": "And we are told that a number of members of the Middle Eastern terror groups had originally been in the local communist movements ... The members of [the Real IRA and the Shining Path], as with those in Italy or, for example, the Naxalities in India, were almost entirely recruited from student elements who had accepted the abstractions of fashionable academics. And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set."
It is hard to know what to make of this passage. It appears to attribute some responsibility for the horrors of Sept. 11 to left-leaning professors in Western universities. This astonishing accusation is offered without a shred of evidence or explanation, without even a footnote of substantiation, as would seem to be required if one is going to, say, assign a portion of blame for the worst terrorist attack in American history to university professors (in truth, a mild and quite harmless crowd, occasionally blown up to world-historical proportions by conservative political commentators, in an effort, it sometimes seems, to supply motives for shutting them up). To assert something like this so carelessly is an act of egregious bad faith.
Norton
Robert Conquest has written more than 20 books on Soviet history, and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
For the record: There is nothing -- nothing -- to be gained from drawing loose analogies between the perils of Soviet state expansion and Islamic terrorism, especially with respect to the crucial issue of ideological conversion to subversive doctrines and practices, the specter of which gave Cold War domestic politics its dreadful atmosphere of suspicion and recrimination. There is nothing to be gained by dragging this specter into the next century's very different challenges.
"Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them." This is good advice, especially for democracies, which tend (as even Plato and Thucydides noted) to have short-term attention spans. But we shouldn't forget an equally important lesson, articulated most forcefully by Nietzsche: The health of a person and a people also depends vitally on the capacity to forget. Forgetting is necessary to free ourselves from imperfectly understood "lessons of history," so that we can see the challenges ahead clearly, without preconceptions or prejudice. Forgetting is also the better part of forgiving, and there are whole domains of political controversy -- indeed, whole regions of the world -- where a little less history could be of service in this respect.
Elliott Noyes is working on a book called "The Birth of Political Science."
"And the September 11 bombers were almost all comfortably off young men, some having been to Western universities and there adopted the extremely anti-Western mind-set.""
why so vague?
The reviewer was disturbed by this..Is he a professor..Hmmm?
You post interesting articles, but please stop sending them to the Humor category.
I suppose this being from the Moscow Times makes it understandable that the author dismisses the influence of the leftists professors, seemingly a majority of them now, on thought in this country. His equal dismissal of the origins and influence of the left on the Arab extremists is telling. Both are at the center of the present situation.
I'm not sure how I'm sending them to the humor category. I post them from Latest articles and I tick off Foreign Affairs.
I wish I knew how to post them in the proper place.
That's odd, sounds like a bug in the topic selection.
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