An Anglosphere In the Neosphere

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The New York Sun

To understand the kind of book Robert Conquest has written in “The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History” (W.W. Norton, 256 pages, $25), turn first to its last section, an appendix titled “An Anglosphere in the Neosphere.” In this modest proposal, Mr. Conquest imagines a future confederation of the English-speaking countries, led by the American president under the titular rule of the Queen of England, and governed by an Intercontinental Congress, the composition of which he specifies in great detail (49 seats for America, three apiece for Jamaica and Ireland).He even drafts a “Declaration of Interdependence” for this putative founding, in which the members of the “Anglosphere” would tell the world that, “our countries, subscribing to a common political tradition, economically and otherwise, form the strongest force of humanity.”


All of this reads, as Mr. Conquest genially acknowledges, like “science fiction without monsters.” This is not to say that Mr. Conquest’s make-believe constitution lacks a real purpose. It is a dramatic way of driving home his conviction that Britain’s future lies, not with the European Union, but with what he terms the “law-and-liberty” countries. That these are all former colonies of the British Empire, daughters of the Mother of Parliaments, is also significant: Mr. Conquest is proud of that empire and looks forward to the day when America takes up the old civilizing mission. His Anglosphere, then, is more than a game, but it is enough of a game that it is hard to take it entirely seriously. And the book as a whole shares this provocative, self delighted spirit, this sense of a mind taking its ease among its favorite ideas.


Certainly “The Dragons of Expectation” will not convince anyone who does not already sympathize with Mr. Conquest’s views on politics, culture, and history. His fame as a historian rests on his classic studies of the Soviet Union – including “The Great Terror” (1968) and “The Harvest of Sorrow” (1986) – which established the truth about its crimes once and for all. The widespread reluctance of the conventional left to acknowledge those crimes long ago earned Mr. Conquest’s merited contempt. Today, the truth about communism is established beyond challenge, and the Soviet Union has collapsed, but a lingering tolerance of its utopian ambition remains, especially in academic and educated circles. “The Dragons of Expectation” is an attempt to sop up this and other errors that he calls “mind-mists” and “brain-blindfolds.” Its three sections treat contemporary politics, with a focus on the European Union and the United Nations; lingering illusions about the benevolence of the Russian Revolution; and obscurantism in the arts.


It is the middle section, which draws on Mr. Conquest’s historical expertise, that is strongest and most precise, crisply dismissing a series of sentimental errors about the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Revolution was not a popular class uprising, but a coup d’etat: “In fact,” Mr. Conquest writes, “Lenin had great difficulty in getting a majority even of his own Central Committee to support the seizure of power.” The communist parties of all foreign countries, far from being indigenous forces for justice, were heavily subsidized by Moscow, right until the fall of the USSR; in 1921, the CPGB earned L100 from its own efforts, and received L55,000 from the Comintern. The heroic Soviet struggle against Hitler, without which World War II could not have been won, was not a vindication of Stalin’s leadership; in fact, Stalin’s paranoia and miscalculation nearly cost Russia the war.


These are all important points, worthy footnotes to Mr. Conquest’s historical work. They sit somewhat awkwardly, however, between the book’s first and last sections, which are pitched at a high level of abstraction and are far from closely argued. Not without reason does Mr. Conquest begin the book with a declaration that he is “concerned here to present, rather than to vindicate, arguments and facts.” Whether his subject is Europe, academic bureaucracy, or modern poetry, he writes less to convince his opponents than to calmly infuriate them: his slogan could be Epater les bien-pensants.


This can lead to an invigorating briskness. Mr. Conquest encapsulates the quandary of the contemporary left when he writes of “socialism having petered out but the psychological thirst for a higher aim remaining – like a movie cartoon figure (Mr. Magoo or Sylvester) still walking on air for a while after his girder has collapsed.” And it is satisfying to see him cut through the usual tergiversations of literary argument: “There is an idea that expressing any reputable sentiment or opinion on politics makes good verse. No.”


But when Mr. Conquest turns to urgent moral questions, such blitheness becomes maddening. Mr. Conquest disparages “the false idea that empires – particularly the British one – were mere oppressors.” Yet no one was more aware of the oppression, degradation, and injustice of imperialism than the ex-colonial policeman George Orwell, who is Mr. Conquest’s intellectual hero; as he goes on to write, “on the issues raised by Orwell, only one view has survived – Orwell’s.” At its best, “The Dragons of Expectation” has something of Orwell’s passion against falsehood. If only it were more passionate and less irritable.


The New York Sun

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