Reality Denial
Codevilla, Angelo M.
Books in Review "Reality Denial" sociological changes that went on during those years. And surprisingly, Troy's final conclusion comes at the very beginning: "We live in a Reaganized America." If, for...
...But once I had climbed the mountain and was guiding my graduate students up the same twisting paths, it occurred to me that Hegel was teaching us guides a game of flimflam that would endow us with authority to lead our followers wherever we wanted...
...Why then is the view to the contrary of British historian Eric Hobsbawm and of so many others still canonical...
...Only the need to under-stand the Soviet Union, I concluded, could justify spending any part of one's short life on Hegel...
...a Ugons Expectation Robert Conquest...
...This book is his latest installment...
...silly-clever...
...The second part of the book consists of case studies—rather, of observations on cases—of contemporary intellectuals' willful resistance to reality...
...The main thing most had in common was a certain mental attitude—excessive eagerness to see what they wanted to see, as well as "hostility to envisaged uprightness and to those seen as its perpetrators...
...There never was any evidence, writes Conquest, that Lenin's Bolsheviks ever represented anybody but themselves...
...In Germany, the American foothold in Berlin is surrounded by a wall, to prevent people escaping to the liberal East German republic...
...Why—long after real economic figures became avail-able and proved that Stalin's massive diversion of social resources to industrialization did not raise the pace of his country's development but rather retarded it—are the works of E.H...
...Conquest had shown in his earlier writings that, even when much less information was available, historians who worked honestly had enough to see things as they "VILE-TEMPERED MULE...
...Here Conquest, the historian perhaps principally responsible for piercing the fog of lies with which Soviet Communism had surThe Dragons of Expectation: rounded itself, reflects Reality and Delusion in the on why and how intelCourse of History lectuaLs' minds are conby Robert Conquest sumed by the dragons of (W.W...
...Hegel, he writes, "befuddled minds over six or seven generations—including of course the Marxists and post-Marxists...
...But meanwhile it is an appalling distraction...
...They have always existed and will plague us always...
...Reality Denial Reviewed by Angelo M. Codevilla Angelo M. Codevilla is aprofessor atBoston University and a fellow at the Claremont Institute...
...Although the Marxist (nee Hegelian) system of "science" is no longer defended, its intellectual essence survives: the feeling that being on the right side of human history is "both argument proof, and fact proof...
...These were not mistakes, but distortions proceeding either from the will to falsify or, worse, from a willful preference for a particular "take" over the facts...
...He shows that virtually every photo, every characterization, was crafted to give impressions contrary to the truth and unfavorable to America...
...The consensus view of modern historians about the origins of the Cold War is that the U.S...
...Absolutely all the evidence concerning the October Revolution of 1917 shows that, outside the Party, which he controlled, Lenin got outvoted in every venue at every level...
...The failure of academics now to bring their judgments into line with today's plenitude of information simply disqualifies them...
...And by the late 1970s, those who had adopted fashionable counterfactual agendas were rising in academe and deploying power and contacts...
...Exposure to harsh Soviet realities did not dent their own intellectual identities...
...Centuries before they got around to socialism," the Progressives' eagerness to transform humanity had produced other social movements JUNE 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65 B O O K S I N R E V I E W were...
...The flood of documents from the Soviet Union's collapse by no means caused academics to repudiate their adherence to Communist falsifications...
...Carr still treated with respect...
...In actuality, Reagan may have changed the world more and more permanently than he changed America...
...Rather, the problem is the audience's diminished capacity to distinguish good arguments from bad and to sniff out fakes...
...The leading lights of progressivism were worse...
...B O O K S I N R E V I E W sociological changes that went on during those years...
...Truth about the Soviet Union, and about reality in general, has been Robert Conquest's contribution to us all...
...Can this be true...
...We look forward to more...
...Conquest concludes that although it was no longer possible to present a fully Potemkinized or Webbized account...
...The "question prohibition" or frageverbot, elaborated by German philosophers has become the common intellectual heritage of Western education for its progeny: half-educated folks fit only for bureaucracy, for freezing, dumbing our cultures...
...Thank you, Robert Conquest...
...In 1953, demonstrations in favor of Russia are put down by American troops in Paris...
...Conquest describes Hegel as "a charlatan," an "hyperacademic," "the purveyor of massive, `sophisticated,' complex, impressive verbiage...
...Education is supposed to refine culture...
...If ever there was a case of a gang hijacking a government, the October Revolution was it...
...The underlying problem, then, is not mountebanks...
...It is [now] a question of the merest incapacity...
...NORTON & Co., INC., 256 PAGES, $24.95) their own expectations...
...This is not the only example of the merest dumbing down, though it is one that, as many in the field have observed, is so openly silly as not to present any challenge in the long run...
...But Reagan's effect on the culture and the politics and the governance of the United States was hardly more permanent than that of Bill Clinton, whose own effect is already being diminished by the kind of governing and leadership George W. Bush has brought to the nation...
...Eager as I then was to scale the presumed heights of modern thought, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, I took the indictment too lightly...
...That is something Reagan admirers will have no trouble agreeing with, while at the same time they continue to demand that their hero receive credit for the good times of the "morning in America" years they so fondly remember...
...And to posterity...
...But of course it is only partly true...
...English Department philosophy...
...Not the least worthy part of the book is Conquest's dissection of the CNN series on The Cold War...
...But declining standards loosen the reins on the vilest-tempered mules...
...academic logobabble at a lower level...
...in America a rigid dictatorship...
...If, for better or for worse, that is true, then Reagan has much to be praised for and as much to be blamed for...
...These are Robert Conquest's kindest words for the collective ind of progressive intellectuals—a mind likelier recalcitrant to reality than open to it...
...Perhaps Michael Moore or Oliver Stone will make a movie showing this truth, starring Kevin Costner as the good Stalin...
...But how much effort does it take for anyone to see a Russia with a free press, the open advancement of pro American views, a multiparty system...
...The governments of Western Europe are run by members of the American Fascist Capitalist Party, though after a few years many of its British, French, and Italian leaders are accused of being agents of Russia and executed after torture...
...Among other things Reagan could take credit for, the Soviet Union has ceased to exist, Germany is united, and Eastern Europe is free...
...based on such quackeries as phrenology...
...and the Soviet Union acted symmetrically, and that, if there were 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2005 differences between the two, America was more at fault...
...And the threat of nuclear war is greatly diminished...
...In 1952 America's leading Jews are tortured, then executed without publicity...
...Now nothing restrains us from due disrespect...
...a degradation of the mental level served instead...
...Since Conquest spent most of his life as an exemplary student of the Soviet Union, the examples are drawn primarily from that fertile field...
...The challenge to which he refers is intellectual...
...and so on and so on...
...And it will sweep the Oscars...
...In 1956 a Socialist rebellion in Belgium is similarly suppressed...
...Today our educational establishment turns out a stream of people who feel endowed with the right to secede "from reason and fact...
...The book's third and final part expresses a side of Robert Conquest known to too few: that of a con-summate poet...
...And in the end Troy admits as much: "But most of the problems troubling America in the 198Os predated Reagan and outlasted him," generously adding that Reagan "was not responsible for the massive govern-mental and social failures of the age...
...The final chapters include a plea for seriousness in cultural matters, summed up in an original, philosophical poem to which an editor might have given the title: "A hymn to the love of truth...
...Well, 40 years ago the great Eric Voegelin wrote a similar indictment of Hegel titled On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery...
...But the underlying problem is the subversion of the intellect by the passions of its reputed guardians...
...Because those who so treat it, like Carr, have a fondness for the idea of a planned society and disdain for those who oppose it...
Vol. 38 • June 2005 • No. 5
