Books: History's shoddy motives

The Western dupes of the Soviets were the idealists of their own egos.

Reflections on a Ravaged Century by Robert Conquest John Murray pounds 25

Robert Conquest has made a career out of being proved right. Now that his opponents have no serious case left - due in no small part to his 18 works of investigative history - these reflections on the century are his attempt to win the peace. The more crushing the defeat of a position, the stronger the explanation has to be of why anyone ever occupied it. In this case, having so comprehensively exposed the crimes of the Soviet Union, Conquest's task is to expose the pathology of the ideologies that afflicted his contemporaries. That these afflictions have the characteristics of mental illness is widely recognised, but according to Conquest's thesis the human mind has built up little resistance to such viruses at the end of a century that "to put it mildly, should have been instructive".

To be in the grip of a dangerous Idea requires not mere intellectual failure, but also moral failure. When one's beliefs involve the justification of human suffering on a gargantuan scale, it is a moral requirement that you test them against the facts rather than pick and choose your facts to suit those beliefs. Unfortunately, however, there are cases when even a knowledge of the facts is insufficient. Conquest's arch-enemy Eric Hobsbawm - repeatedly pilloried here - famously excused his support for the Soviet Union on the grounds that its evils were only so because the October revolution had not after all been the beginning of a faithful world revolution. It is difficult to look fondly on such people as loveable, misguided idealists.

One does well instead to follow John Osborne's advice and "look for the shoddy motive". In this Conquest is particularly unforgiving. The Western dupes of the Soviets were the idealists of nothing but their own egos, puffed up by intellectual vanity. There is a lot of mileage in the thought. Leading sit-ins at the LSE were always, one suspects, a good way of impressing the girls if nothing else. Marxist dogma is also perfectly suited to equip students with a kind of cut-price intellect, much in the way cultural relativism does today. Marxism is indeed truly egalitarian in the sense that it offers a ready-made philosophical posture to those who would otherwise find themselves hopelessly ill-equipped for the stance.

Western economists could not believe that a state could go so far as not to merely distort or exaggerate, but wholly fabricate its production figures. Western defence negotiators could not believe that the responsible representatives of a state could be prepared to risk a holocaust in the pursuit of unmitigated self-interest. This was not a matter of intelligence, he holds, but of a knowledge of history, and of evil. There are and have been many such people in power this century, and pitted not only against the Soviet Union. Neville Chamberlain, for one, is identified as the exemplar of a man who "could not conceive of anyone whose attitudes were not more or less within the limits of those prevalent in the Midlands". The consequence is the politics of appeasement that were applied to the Russian threat during much of the Cold War as fruitlessly they had been to the menace of Hitler. So while Gerald Ford refused to receive Solzhenitsyn for fear of provoking Moscow, the Kremlin could at the same time hold a lunch for the head of the French Communist Party, a man devoted to the overthrow of the Western civic order. Conquest has no doubt that the Cold War was won on the days the West stood up to the evil empire. He would no doubt take a dim view of our present government's coddling of the Chinese, along with their reckless presumption of Peking's rationality (for Chamberlain's "the Midlands", substitute "Islington").

The remainder of the book is devoted to new adversaries. Giving the elitist's usual list of modern follies, which includes the Turner Prize, the EU and trendy teaching methods, he makes one suspect that a contributing factor in the academic decline of Marxism has been the variety of other pseudo- sciences the impressionable can now choose from. As for the new Labour leadership, it might be added, they have the more acceptable inanity of a federal Europe to cleave to in place of their discredited socialism. To Conquest, Europe is not limited to the geographical definition, but includes the "Europe Overseas". The imagined Federal Europe cuts across this wider unity. Since, however, Ideas are not as dangerous as they once were, the vacuous Idea of "Europe", in all its banality and bureaucracy, may be here to stay.

Conquest advocates instead a multi-racial association of English-speaking states as the true defenders of the civic culture that respects the rule of law, freedom of speech and political liberty. These values, he notes, were not imposed from above. Neither were they the product of grand Ideas as such. Rather, they evolved in the British populace at large over many centuries of history. That democracy is the product of this culture, and not vice versa, is undeniable when the evidence of aborted reform in the Third World is considered. When these sentiments are expressed by such an individual as Conquest in such a superlative book as this, they are perhaps harder to ridicule than when blurted out by a figure of the past at the conference of an already laughable political party.