Reflections on a Ravaged Century Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Reflections on a Ravaged Century? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Reflections on a Ravaged Century ReviewNow that the Soviet parenthesis has closed, the historian Robert Conquest has been soundly vindicated. It was he, and a very few band of fellows, who _completely_ rejected the progresive aura that Soviet Communism inveigled so many other academics with. His books dealing with specific incidents and epochs of Soviet rule--sometimes for the first time in English--were resented by leftist professors as being "reactionary". Now, those books may be seen as bold testaments to the truth about Communism, published in times and places where that truth was most unwelcome, though undeniable. If you can find them, read some intellectual journals' reviews of the first edition of _The Great Terror_, to see the psychic indigestion Conquest's work caused them.
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. ENDReflections on a Ravaged Century Overview

Want to learn more information about Reflections on a Ravaged Century?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now