Title

Reflections on a ravaged century

Description

The main responsibility for our century's cataclysms, Conquest maintains, lies not so much in impersonal economic and social forces as in the huge mental distortions produced by ideologies like revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure.--Jacket.

Identifier

811464

393048187

Creator

Conquest, Robert

Format

1st ed.

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

2000

Program air date: December 19, 1999

Publisher

Norton

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Front endpapers list a series of "-isms" that played a large role during the 20th century - Brezhnevism, Capitalism, Marxism, Nihilism, Communism, Fascism, Socialism, Bolshevism, Nationalism - and list the names of many writers, thinkers, and political leaders on whom the author voices an opinion in the book. Other notes refer to the author's 1979 book 'Present danger' which included a program for peace that was adopted and pursued by Reagan, and the author's contribution to the journal 'Kommunist' in 1990. Also included are notes on the author's proposal of an association of English speaking peoples, the danger posed by large nuclear arsenals in the hands of terrorist countries, his opposition to the expansion of NATO and the uniting of Europe, the dumbing down of the social and intellectual atmosphere in the West, the foreign policy pursued by Russia and China, and a few important stages of the author's career. The following statements and questions are part of the notes: "Ignorance of history - modern man's negative traits". -- "[The] world can no longer afford revolutionary ideologues." -- "Common sense by itself has its vices." -- "It is a matter of luck that we were born into our heritage." -- "Democracy cannot spring fully formed and viable out of the depths of despotism." -- "The 1689 Declaration of Rights in England contained a germ of all these good laws." -- "What were the Moscow trials?" -- "Popular foundations of foreign policy are not strong - in part because media coverage of events has been inadequate." -- "Western intellectuals [are] embodiments of their own utopian fantasies." -- "We need civic order - unity and power of the democratic culture." -- "How often is history distorted? What are the reasons?" -- Annotations by Brian Lamb in the margins and underlining of pertinent phrases throughout the book. -- Examples: p. 196: "Western political culture implies nothing remotely resembling perfection, or even perfectibility. On the contrary, we can only look on it as the best and most hopeful arrangement available to us in the world of reality and enormously superior to its competitors past and present." ... "So the free society itself should not be Ideified: it is a system of compromise between the individual and the community, between the population and the state. This endlessly generates friction, myopia, corruption, faction, and perhaps always will."

Subject

"History, Modern--20th century."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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