One Conservative’s Proposed World Order

The distinguished historian Robert Conquest, now 82, made his reputation by resolutely insisting on the evil nature of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, and by documenting the extent of Stalin’s murder of several million Russian peasants and the deaths of another 2 million in political purges. Now comes “Reflections on a Ravaged Century,” an arresting and idiosyncratic work that looks at this century’s flawed utopian visions and presents Conquest’s view of how we might learn from history’s mistakes.

In “Reflections,” he states his creed: Ideology in politics tends to lead to absolutism and cruelty; the only sure road to a better society is by pragmatic trial and error; romantic revolutionaries are dangerous and sometimes deadly; the most civilized civilization is the “Anglo-Celtic” one whose heirs are Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Proud of his long association with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Conquest opposes Britain’s membership in the European Union. The continental nations have a less deep-rooted tradition of democracy, he argues, and a too deeply rooted tradition of bureaucracy. Britain would be better served, he says, if it were to join an association of those “Anglo-Celtic” nations he admires. Such an association, he says, would become the standard that the rest of the world would eventually emulate.

Would it be difficult to establish such an association? No more difficult, Conquest says, than it was to create the United States in 1787. This proposal is the most unusual one in “Reflections.” “What I am thus putting forward is a flexibly conceived Association,” he writes, “of the countries of the same language, legal tradition and general political culture, as the natural way the greater unity can develop: a unity that matches our history and feelings, and is not an artificial cutting across them.”

Conquest gives a chapter to Nazism, Italian fascism and nationalism, but the bulk of his book deals with his lifelong preoccupations, Marxism, Communism and the Soviet Union. He excoriates Western intellectuals who deluded themselves, in the face of early and mounting evidence, that the Soviet Union was truly building the happy world of tomorrow. To be fair, Conquest has some grounds to crow. For years, he was regarded by academics in this country and Europe as an unreconstructed anti-communist, much as another Bay Area octogenarian, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, was shunned by French intellectuals after he published his devastating 1953 memoir of Eastern European Communism, “The Captive Mind.” The two writers share an admiration for the leading French writer who broke the mold, Albert Camus.

Besides Camus, Conquest’s models for political commentary are George Orwell, for his unflinching honesty about fellow leftists; and Edmund Burke, the 18th century British conservative who said that “the French revolutionaries’ delusion that force could solve all problems was above all a ‘slothful’ attempt to ignore the complexity of reality.”

Conquest’s insistence on that complexity bespeaks the principled side of a deeply moral conservatism. He quotes Jefferson on the need for the education of the citizens of a democracy to be “chiefly historical,” because history, “by apprising them of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men.” “Reflections” is a good example of this, and although the proposal for an English-speaking association is problematical, even quixotic, it provides just such an education.