RIP Robert Conquest
Noted historian and poet Robert Conquest has died at the age of 98. In honor of his lengthy and fully-lived life, I’ll repost a piece I wrote about him three years ago, updated to change the tense from present to past.
First, however, I’ll add his brilliant “three laws of politics“:
—Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
—Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
—The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
An interview with Robert Conquest* on the eve of the sort-of millennium makes for some fascinating reading in retrospect.
I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. But no matter; Conquest, who wrote the book (actually, several books) on the Soviet and especially Stalinist crimes of the 20th century, had quite a bit to say in the interview:
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’ve seen the ravages committed by the Nazis and Communists in the huge scale. I mean, millions have killed but in this book I’m not so much concerned to present the actual ravages as to how they came about, how people who went in to perform these horrible operations, what motivated them. Where did they pick up these awful ideas?
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It is ideas, ideas you are exactly what you blame for these ravages.
ROBERT CONQUEST: With a capital “I” these things not ordinary idea like you and I would have but an overwhelming idea that we’ve got everything right, we know the answers for everything, and we can do anything to enforce it…
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it’s very attractive in some ways. People do want answers; this is natural, but the ordinary man in the street didn’t think he got all full answers. He knew he didn’t – it was the intellectual, creating the single, perfect answer and time and time again this has happened.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You use a term that is — Orwell’s term actually — that I like “the lure of the profound” — what do you mean by that?
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, that I use because in the book I’m trying to avoid anything plotted and incomprehensible or referring to things that nobody is going to be interested in. I tried to keep it like in Orwell’s terms, clear, and making the points and illustrating with many examples — not just examples of horror or stupidity but striking ones.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But the lure of the profound is also one of the things that at least from what I’ve observed, drives intellectuals into these totalitarian ideas, right?
ROBERT CONQUEST: Yes.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: They want the deepest, most scientific, most modern and most profound idea to be theirs?
ROBERT CONQUEST: I think they think it’s modern, that counts as profound…
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So, do you think that there are still in our intellectual life right now, ideas that are like – or remnants of ideas that are still quite dangerous?
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, I think there are ideas that given much more scope and importance than they are willow wisps on a dangerous marsh. I would include the idea of the European Community, for example. I mean, Europe is not really, cannot be a nation state. So it’s a big thing, horrendous bureaucracy. And it can’t hang together. But that’s nothing like the totalitarian ideas, it’s still an idea with a rather small, capital letter, which is distorting European history and the West —
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else do you see right now that worries you for the next century?
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’re nearly there. Russia, of course, is in a terrible state. And we don’t know what’s happening today in Chechnya for one thing, in Moscow. And it doesn’t look very nice, and that could cause real trouble. But I still think that –
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Expand on that, what do you mean?
ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere. But I still think that real trouble is getting the real unity of the democratic countries which will be able to face the troubles together, based, of course, on American alliance, and be able to cope with the really rogue states. There are states worse than Russia that don’t have much arms, but enough to cause trouble.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You’re talking about —
ROBERT CONQUEST: North Korea. Iraq. There are rogue states which have to be somehow accommodated or prevented from doing — it’s a dangerous situation.
Conquest was a poet as well as historian, which made him a rara avis in my eyes. As recently as 2010 he was still actively writing poems, such as this one entitled “Getting On”:
Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved”¦
. . And on one’s dead.
-Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.
More on Conquest and the intellectuals (and of course he himself was one, but a gadfly to the left rather than a member of it):
[Conquest] accused [left-wing intellectuals] of denying the full scale of the [Stalin-induced] famine, attacking their views as “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale.” He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: “Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act.”
My favorite anecdote about Conquest is the following (which probably is not about Conquest at all but rather his longtime friend, the writer Kingsley Amis):
After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest’s publisher asked him to expand and revise [his book] The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest’s old friend, Kingsley Amis.
And it comes as no surprise that, like so many illustrious minds on the right who understood the mentality of the left, Conquest was a political changer:
In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford [and got a doctorate in Soviet history], joining both the Carlton Club and, as an ‘open’ member, the Communist Party of Great Britain…
In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission…At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia. Witnessing first-hand the brutal Stalinist takeover in Bulgaria, he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas…
Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to “collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.”
Conquest kept on doing so for the bulk of his very long and productive life.
[* NOTE: Since I first wrote the piece with the interview excerpts, the link seems to have gone dead and I can’t find an alternate source for it online.]
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.
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…
“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.
The link to the PBS interview doesn’t work.
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.
“Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere.”
That should be “Caucasus” because Azerbaijan is located in the Caucasus.
From the link:
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.
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.
Link Bully:
The PBS interview no longer seems to be online. Pity.
Maybe they’ll make that interview available again since he’s died. They ought to.
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.”
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.
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.
“Cornhead Says:
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.
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!
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.
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.
Lure of the profound? Is that like rapture of the deep, except your head is in the sand instead of underwater?
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
The Conquest PBS interview link at the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010627083151/http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/july-dec99/conquest_12-24.html
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.
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.
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.
Cornflour:
OK. This will probably work for you. Change the template/original URL from:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/
to:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/
My program apparently stops a redirect from http to https.
Should work 🙂
mf:
OK, got it. Thanks.
Happy to see we’re on the same page, so to speak.
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.
Sounds like an http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclast
Slightly different from a rebel of the Ayers school.
[* NOTE: Since I first wrote the piece with the interview excerpts, the link seems to have gone dead and I can’t find an alternate source for it online.]
What a coincidence, right.
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.