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RIP Robert Conquest — 31 Comments

  1. National Socialism was also an intellectual’s creed, dependent on a few modern philosophers. Because of the brutality and the thugs, it gets portrayed and remembered as a peasant’s/worker’s party. It wasn’t. The leaders were artists, writers, intellectuals.

    I have read many explanations why intellectuals gravitate to such totalitarianism, and “lure of the profound” is one of main ones. Yet also, I think intelligent people grow frustrated by the stupidity of those around them and think it would all be better if smart people were just able to tell them what to do.

    That they themselves, and their friends, also do many stupid things – it is the human condition – they learn to discount at an early age. They see everything but themselves clearly; but that blindness is the greater and more damaging.

  2. Seems… interesting. I would have to know more, but you have raised an approving eyebrow. That’s… sometimes… quite a lot. But then you aren’t a typical bird.

    Oh… something I thought while reading this post is… why isn’t she (you) doing interviews. Even phone interviews. My guess is some of these special people might grant you a phone interview, after reading here if they needed bona fides… people who wouldn’t let a reporter within a hundred yards… people who are soon to be gone, who actual conservatives, might enjoy hearing from.

    Oh… yes… gauntlet has been presented, swung, and perhaps will make contact shortly. How it will be received is… just something for me to place a minor wager upon. Curious, now…

  3. “He [Conquest] always tended to extremes. He had become rather an extremist right-winger within 10 years.” — Denis Healey

    It is a mark of the beast that sets apart ideology from ideas. Healey’s quote is exhibit A. Healey’s observation that The Great Terror was an important influence, “but one which confirmed people in their views rather than converted them” is exhibit B. Conquest had changed very few minds and minds that will not be changed by mounds of evidence are steeped in a faith that is more religiosity than religion. The true religion has an inexhaustible supply of sinners, great and small. Religiosity of the type “Communism” and “Islam”, on the other hand, has nothing but saints and icons.

    The West had not known what it was up against when it was up against Communism. It knows not now what it is against when it up against Islam.

  4. RIP Mr Conquest and bravo for your life’s work.

    In order to protect it; I would like to share something quickly…

    When the Soviet archives were opened; it did not actually support some of Conquest’s claims. But I think Conquest was still right. Let me explain my theory on it.

    The gulags were not the equivalent of Nazi death camps. They existed for slave labor; not extermination. Anecdotal example: I had many (re: more than ‘several’) go to them. They all survived.

    But Conquest based his figures on demographics. It was only a theory that the missing were murdered in the camps. I say the millions did disappear… but that the dead were often the families of those denounced who were left behind. The spouse was often fired. Ration cards revoked… No one else had any food to spare… there were your millions murdered by the state.

  5. “Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere.”

    That should be “Caucasus” because Azerbaijan is located in the Caucasus.

  6. From the link:

    “In addition to Sovietology, he became an expert on the twilight stage of the roughly 400-year period when Britain was part of the Roman Empire. “

    That’s an interesting period: when an effete population largely unfitted for self-government, failed to preserve what was comfortable about their way of life in the face of predator populations.

    You don’t need to take the grimly comical sounding descriptions of the Briton’s hapless flailing in Bede or Gildas as verbatim reports, in order to see what de-moralization and dependency meant in practical terms.

    Obama may not be our Vortigern, but those who vote for him are not fit for much else in the way of life, other than being “ruled” by a fumbling tyrant.

    Just imagine decaying hedonist Amanda Marcotte coming up against an ISIS bride. What a laugh.

  7. Doom:

    Good question. The answer is that I don’t know why I don’t do more interviews, and that perhaps I should; I actually like doing interviews. Used to do some when the Sanity Squad did its podcasts years ago for PJ. But the only interview I’ve done for the blog was this two-parter.

  8. Maybe they’ll make that interview available again since he’s died. They ought to.

  9. For anyone who’d like to read the full transcript of PBS’s interview of Robert Conquest, I’d recommend using the Internet Archive at archive.org.

    At the top of their home page is a search box labeled “Wayback Machine.” Just paste in the dead link. If the Internet Archive has saved a copy of the page, you’ll see a calendar with the dates that it was captured. Pick one.

    Here’s a direct link http://tinyurl.com/pqutxjw

    P.S. This is also sometimes useful for finding information that the mainstream media has “sanitized.”

  10. I had never, before now, heard of this “lure of the profound” to explain the Left.

    Watching the WH cheerleading session on the new Global Warming regs, I now understand the lure of the profound.

    If we don’t do what Barack says, his grandkids can’t swim in Hawaii. I guess it is all underwater or something.

    But by the EPA’s *own* admission all of this expense will result in a .02 reduction by 2100. Benefits don’t begin to exceed the costs.

  11. And how right was he about the EU. And I think his interview was before the Euro currency was adopted. As we can see with Greece, it hasn’t worked.

  12. “Cornhead Says:

    August 5th, 2015 at 1:20 pm

    I had never, before now, heard of this “lure of the profound” to explain the Left.

    No, maybe not. But we have all heard of the “politics of meaning” and politics as “redemption”, and other conceits like “EQUALITY INC.” ( i.e., the rectifying in accordance with universal principles of justice, those systems of injustice and privileged disinterest wrought by a reality, human and otherwise, which is simultaneously held to be bereft of any actual and inherent … principles … of … justice) which the left finds exciting and “privileging”.

    You know, that whole: “Bringing about the world we dream” … yada yada yada, mystery religion shit.

  13. DNW: At least as important as that ideology, I think, is that in totalitarian societies, intellectuals have an official status: there is a Writer’s Union, a Journalist’s Union, an official designation of Academician. There’s a dacha, admission to Party stores, vacations abroad. None of those self-made millionaires or entrepreneurs who think they’re better than you, or carpenters and plumbers who think they’re your equal. Any intellectual worth his or her grant would want that!

  14. That they themselves, and their friends, also do many stupid things — it is the human condition — they learn to discount at an early age.

    Their problem can be summed up in one word, superbia.

    The reason why it is a vice, not a virtue, is merely because there are only a few real accomplishments a person can be proud of. Thus many of the things they are proud of, has little to nothing to do with their own merits and accomplishments. They stole it from others. Or crafted it out of illusion and Planned Profit parts.

  15. The Marxist Heresy converts people by convincing them that the Throne of God is empty, thus any person can ascend or any group of people can ascend, no matter their vices or tendency to prey on children.

    In another sense, the Left is about changing the world, because they can’t change themselves. You will never hear an orthodox Leftist demand or even consider it possible for a person to change his ways from evil. They will change the world so that their evil becomes applauded, rather than condemned. They will change the world so that instead of the patriarchy keeping cultural children safe, they will create cities where the powers that be will sell those children to the pedophiles and foreign rapists, so that those with evil in their hearts can live lives of utopia in the modern age. Rather than being burned, staked, or impaled as might have been the case in a more primitive time.

    They want to change the world because that’s the only way they can create more slaves for themselves. If they don’t change the world, the world’s authority will punish them for keeping sex slaves. If they don’t change the world, they can’t live in the world since they can’t change themselves.

    The power to change yourself when faced against challenges and adversity is primarily something that requires courage and willpower. It is relatively easy to change yourself for the worst, just start drinking and hitting women, children, and dogs. No matter how many vices or accomplishments you think you have, it is easy to change yourself into evil, just try it out and see how easy it is. But for the Left, they are already as evil as many of the worst pillars of sin in history have been, so they either can’t make themselves worst or they are not strong enough to make themselves better.

    Thus they want to change the world, because being murderers, rapists, and child molestors, they cannot change themselves. But then again, we must ask ourselves, what kind of a world do these Leftists selling sex slave girls to Muslims in the Uk, what kind of world do these Leftists selling parts at Planned Profit, what kind of world are these “people” going to make anew? What are they going to change?

    What kind of better world are rapists and murderers going to give us?

    For the Left, the harmony and the mystic glory, is in their future utopia, their slave empire. But for normal humans, that aren’t enemies of humanity, that goal of the Left implies a different effect entirely.

  16. Lure of the profound? Is that like rapture of the deep, except your head is in the sand instead of underwater?

  17. Malcolm Muggeridge went to the USSR in 1932 and reported what was going on. When he returned to the UK he was ostracized and couldn’t find work. Nobody wanted to know the ugly truth, they wanted to be told beautiful lies. Walter Duranty wrote lies about the USSR for the NYT and received a Pulitzer prize.

  18. SLR wrote:

    The gulags were not the equivalent of Nazi death camps. They existed for slave labor; not extermination. Anecdotal example: I had many (re: more than ‘several’) go to them. They all survived.

    But Conquest based his figures on demographics. It was only a theory that the missing were murdered in the camps.

    I believe some of the deaths in the gulag were murders, but most died from overwork, lack of food, terrible living conditions, no medical care, etc. From http://www.britannica.com/place/Gulag:

    Solzhenitsyn claimed that between 1928 and 1953 “some forty to fifty million people served long sentences in the Archipelago.” Figures supposedly compiled by the Gulag administration itself (and released by Soviet historians in 1989) show that a total of 10 million people were sent to the camps in the period from 1934 to 1947. The true figures remain unknown.

    It is estimated that the combination of very long working hours, harsh climatic and other working conditions, inadequate food, and summary executions killed off at least 10 percent of the Gulag’s total prisoner population each year. Western scholarly estimates of the total number of deaths in the Gulag in the period from 1918 to 1956 range from 15 to 30 million.

    Note the “summary executions” in the above.

    Also note that a death rate of “at least 10 percent” each year is very bad. Given that death rate, the approximate probability of death within 5 years is about 41%; in 8 years that probability jumps to about 57%, then to 72% in 12 years.

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Conditions:

    Other scholars have stressed that internal discrepancies in archival material suggests that the NKVD Gulag data are seriously incomplete.[19] Adam Jones wrote:

    It was these Siberian camps, devoted either to gold-mining or timber harvesting, that inflicted the greatest toll in the Gulag system. Such camps “can only be described as extermination centres,” according to Leo Kuper. The camp network that came to symbolize the horrors of the Gulag was centered on the Kolyma gold-fields, where “outside work for prisoners was compulsory until the temperature reached -50C and the death rate among miners in the goldfields was estimated at about 30 percent per annum.”[76]

    A 30% death rate per year is horrific. In just 2 years, the probability of death is already about 51%. At 4 years, that probability is about 76%; at 7 years, it jumps to almost 92%.

    Though not as bad as the Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulag was quite evil.

  19. Richard Saunders Says:
    August 5th, 2015 at 2:46 pm

    DNW: At least as important as that ideology, I think, is that in totalitarian societies, intellectuals have an official status: there is a Writer’s Union, a Journalist’s Union, an official designation of Academician. There’s a dacha, admission to Party stores, vacations abroad. None of those self-made millionaires or entrepreneurs who think they’re better than you, or carpenters and plumbers who think they’re your equal. Any intellectual worth his or her grant would want that!”

    I agree.

    Fortunately for the specialness of the intellectuals, they need not be all that intellectual; just in possession of that Gnosis which demonstrates their sociopolitical value and their right to direct.

    The great thing is that they don’t really have to be smarter than an intelligent carpenter, much less a medical doctor or an aerospace engineer. They don’t even have any obligation to know how to do anything at all; including support themselves … as long as they know the magic words.

    Which is why they are always fighting about who gets to say them. Like at the altar, or podium.

  20. Is that like rapture of the deep, except your head is in the sand instead of underwater?

    I think the stuff their head in, at least for Planned Profit, is more biological natured than sand.

  21. mf:

    See also my comment above from just after noon.

    Aside from the immediate issue of the Conquest interview, I think that the Wayback Machine at internetarchive.org is a useful tool, and that both Neo and her readers might find it worth a look.

    Yes, I know I’m starting to sound like one of those cranks who writes boring, repetitive letters to the editor.

  22. Cornflour:

    It is a useful tool and I made my post because of yours. I have a program that makes it easy for me to find the missing pages. So I just did it for those who might want it.

    Essentially all you have to do is tack the missing page’s URL onto this:

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/

    Which for us works out to this:

    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/july-dec99/conquest_12-24.html

    Go to that page and click a date. Any one that has black bars above it will do. I picked 2000.

    You will get a one year calendar which will have bolded dates. Click on a bolded date and voila. You should have your page.

  23. Cornflour:

    Woops. Sorry. That probably won’t work for you. I tried my directions without my program and it wants me to use their new page. I didn’t go any further.

    The program I have gets rid of scripting and tracking and other stuff on the fly so it works fine for me.

  24. I tend to be a little slow at adding comments. If anybody’s still reading these, I thought it worth copying here one of Conquest’s poems.

    I just read it this morning at a blog called “Anecdotal Evidence: a blog about the intersection of books and life.” Highly recommended for anyone here who likes that sort of thing.

    P.S. I looked up the word “pelf.” I think it’s derived from pilfered, or else it comes from the same source. It means ill-gotten gains.

    This Be the Worse
    by Robert Conquest

    They fuck you up, the chaps you choose
    To do your Letters and your Life.
    They wait till all that’s left of you’s
    A corpse in which to shove a knife.

    How ghoulishly they grub among
    Your years for stuff to shame and shock:
    The times you didn’t hold your tongue,
    The times you failed to curb your cock.

    To each of those who’ve processed me
    Into their scrap of fame or pelf:
    You think in marks for decency
    I’d lose to you? Don’t kid yourself.

  25. Cornflour:

    I will add that that poem of Conquest’s that you posted is a parody of his buddy Philip Larkin’s very famous poem “This Be the Verse.” I discussed Larkin’s poem here, where it’s number 12.

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