Hitchen's latest is even too long for me to post but it is an excellent piece of writing. He gores whole herds of oxen running the political and religious gamut. A book review.

Botnst



Robert Conquest's realities and delusions
Christopher Hitchens

Robert Conquest
THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION
Reality and delusion in the course of history
256pp. Duckworth. £18.
0 7156 3426 7
In 1983, a study of Fascism (Fashizmut) was published in Bulgaria, under the imprint of the People’s Youth Publishing House of the Central Committee of the Democratic Youth Union. Its author, Zhelyu Zhelev, did a thoroughly laudable job of anatomizing his subject. In his section on “The Structure of the Fascist State” he adumbrated the whole “Fascist” totalitarian phenomenon, covering in chapter after chapter the importance of indoctrinating “the masses”, the need to keep out foreign influences, the role of farcical elections and a powerless “parliament”, the necessity of fanaticism, the view that Western “academic freedom” was false. Above all there was the single party and that party’s control of the state, of mass organization, of all opinion, of literature and the arts, of the police, of the courts. Before it was suppressed for its hyper-correct analysis of the problem, Fashizmut had become a minor classic among Bulgarian and even Russian dissidents, with some free spirits visiting the Party bookstore and enquiring for copies of Zhelev’s Kommunismut.



I was annoyed with myself for not having known about Zhelyu Zhelev (later a distinguished post-1989 President of his country) before: he seems like an ironic Swiftian hero in the later mould of Czeslaw Milosz or Milan Kundera. But this is part of the reason why one always reads anything by Robert Conquest, who just happens to speak Bulgarian, to have served with the Bulgarian resistance in the Second World War and to be fairly conversant with most salient points of Bulgarian culture. One of his sidelines, as you might say.

I was reasonably sure that “the dragons of expectation” in the title of his latest would be drawn from William Blake but found instead that they occur in an 1844 translation by Thomas Wright of the Poetic (or Elder) Edda. These dragons come from the west, and “open the way of the fire-powerful” so that “earth and heaven burst”. Conquest is, however, not so much concerned with the apocalyptic as with the danger that attends “expectation” itself: with the hubris of teleology, if I may so phrase it, and with the confident illusions of intellectuals.

This can be considered, therefore, as a rounding-off of its predecessor volume, Reflections on a Ravaged Century. Conquest cannot quite resist a few more tossings and gorings of the bloody fools who succumbed so willingly to the totalitarian temptation, and who now rush to embrace it once again. Following Walter Laqueur, he points out that many of those who hailed the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were leaders and spokesmen of the hard-line racist Right in the United States and Europe: nihilistic demagogues who thought that any attack on “globalization” (often itself a euphemism for “Jewish world government”) was better than none. Who has not met a cretinized Leftist spouting similar windy militant trash?

http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25340-2042074,00.html