The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History |
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The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History
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by Robert Conquest
Sales Rank: 579232
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$3.07
At Amazon
on 6-22-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Hard Cover with 272 pages
Published by: W. W. Norton & Company December 30, 2004
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0393059332
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0393059335
Book Dimensions:
9.4 x 6.1 x 1 inches
Weighs: 1.2 pounds
From Publishers Weekly
This occasionally brilliant and at times idiosyncratic book is a frontal assault on the pieties of the left. At its heart is Conquest's critique of a deluded idealization of the Soviet Union and the underestimation of the danger it posed to the West—the focus of Conquest's long and distinguished career (The Great Terror, etc.). But his targets here are far broader: if dreamy-eyed socialism has died, its ghost lives on, he says, in a mishmash of icons and fetishes ("democracy," "liberty," "progress"), held together by uncritical utopianism and reducing our intellectual culture to cerebral jelly. The original nursery of dragons, he suggests, was the French Enlightenment; today, these beasts dwell in academic corridors, where professors speak in jargon and channel the repressive spirit of the medieval Inquisition. His St. George, bearing the banner of the "Law-and-Liberty" tradition, is English-speaking: the United States and the United Kingdom. Responding to the war against Islamist barbarians, Conquest assails veneration of the U.N., the EU, the International Criminal Court, a knee-jerk intellectual anti-Westernism and the presumption that benevolent colonial intervention is necessarily bad. This pithy book, which concludes with a strange, poetic composition masquerading as an epilogue, will infuriate as many readers as it gladdens. But Conquest has thrown down a gauntlet to which we should all respond. 3 black and white illus.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Paul Johnson
Robert Conquest is our greatest living modern historian.
Reader Reviews
Robert Conquest is more than an eminent historian of totalitarianism and fascism, novelist and poet, he is a dragon slayer of myths, manias, and political delusions. He exposes the delusions of: word-smyths of totalitarianism who twist Left into being cast as Right; about the utopianism that there is a solution to all problems; about a United Nations that Conquest describes as more like a hockey field than a nice family picnic; about the regulationist superstate of the European Union and its bureau-osophy; about the neglect of how Marxist-Leninist communism was financed in Europe and the U.S.; about the uselessness of a planned economy; about a gaggle of misleaders such as CNN with their documentary and book on the Cold War which they characterized as merely an anti-communist witch hunt and Red Scare by the U.S. The reason that Conquest can write with such depth and wisdom about such topics is not that he is a great historian (which he is) but that he lived it. He tells us he was a British military officer in the Balkans in WWII where he witnessed political hangings and torture by the Soviets and fascists. He wrote the first books that foretold of the mass famines and gulags in the USSR before they were well known in the West, he was the first to accurately quantify the massive loss of life, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet Empire. This is a quirky almost eccentric book which Conquest writes is not about history but an understanding of the totalitarian. The last third of the book deals with art, poetry, and a proposal for an Anglo-American consortium of nations rather than the U.N. or E.U. The book is dotted with thought-provoking sayings such as: "The world that Americans and other Westerners want to mount and ride, feed and pat, is not a sweet-tempered little pony, but a huge, vile-tempered mule." Conquest has a penetrating moral acuity such as when he points out that CNN and Hollywood tried to morally equate the U.S. Cold War as a Red Scare, calling it "torture by inquisition;" while ignoring real Soviet torture such as Russian movie producer Vsevolod Meyerhold who was interrogated for months by Stalin's apparatchiks by making him drink human waste, breaking his legs and plunging him into hot water for months before shooting him. Ironically, Conquest was educated at the socialist London School of Economics and even was the recipient of the socialist-communist Sydney and Beatric Webb Fellowship as a student. Conquest's apparent revulsion against totalitarianism is thus liberal, which he defines as furthering political liberty, freedom of thought, and social justice by a rule of law. Conquest's book is timely because the political Left has all but abandoned its former repugnance of totalitarianism that is currently manifesting itself in various parts of the world under the guise of fanatical fundamentalist religion. I will close this review with a common Russian joke Conquest recites in his book: "A Russian-Jewish, too-once said to me that the best outcome of the war would have been a German victory over the Soviet regime, followed by a Western nuclear destruction of Nazism. 'But you would have been dead.' 'Yes, there IS that." Highly recommended.
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The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History
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Price: $3.07
Updated on 6-22-2008.
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