Good to find the Guardian giving Noam Chomsky a slightly harder time than usual this morning:
Does he have a share portfolio? He looks cross. "You'd have to ask my wife about that. I'm sure she does…"
(If he wants to know more about his own finances he should read Tech Central Station. Some fascinating numbers in there.) I see the Guardian piece cheered the Daily Ablution up too. If you’re still depressed by Chomsky’s victory in Prospect’s poll of world intellectuals (Communism’s great apologist, Eric Hobsbawm, made the Top 20 as well) it’s worth recalling that at least the peerless Robert Conquest is still around to inflict some damage on the self-righteous. Even in his late eighties, he continues to turn out books and essays. His latest, The Dragons of Expectation, is the peg for a lengthy Telegraph interview with George Walden. [No link yet available, apparently, but you can go here to read John Carey's review.] UPDATE: Here's the link, at last.
I had a brief encounter with Conquest at Stanford last year when he dropped by to see his neighbour, my friend Arnold Beichman. Conquest seemed incredibly frail at the time, but the impish light in his eye hadn’t gone out. As Walden points out, he certainly has every right to take pleasure in being vindicated over the Soviet Union. No one ignores the message of The Great Terror any more:
Reading the avalanche of newly released material about Soviet Russia, he says he has been struck by how much worse things were than he imagined. Much of it was suspected at the time; it was just that a lot of people didn’t want to know, or to think. Even he is awed by the moral squalor of Western communist parties which, it turns out, were given much more money from Moscow than had previously been supposed.
When the Kremlin gave the public order during the terror of the 1930s that not only the wives of the victims but children as young as 12 were to be shot, the French communists were reduced to arguing that children matured sooner in Russia than in the West. Such servility seems incredible in retrospect, but one of the main points of Conquest’s new book is that the human capacity for self-delusion is limitless in all eras. George Galloway’s words of praise for Saddam Hussein are nothing compared with what the old Leftist might have said to Stalin.
Feeling at a loose end lately, I’ve been re-reading Kingsley Amis’s memoirs. (A good book to dip into when you need to get the brain cells moving again.) He has a beautiful chapter on his old friend, drinking partner and fellow-mischiefmaker. Here's my favourite part:
For many years The Great Terror was ignored where possible or dismissed as propaganda. Then, in 1988, favourable references to it began to appear in the Soviet media. The following year, instalments of the full text started coming out in the official publication, Neva.
Recently an American publisher suggested a new edition of the book. "What about a new title, Bob? We won’t pretend it’s a new book, but a new title would be good. What do you say?"
Bob answered in terms that set a lot of his character into small compass. "Well, perhaps 'I Told You So, You F***ing Fools'. How’s that?"
Comments