The Ravaged Century
Filmed on March 28, 2000.
Guests:
Robert Conquest, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution; Author, Reflections of Europe on a Ravaged Century.
Christopher Hitchens, Professor of Liberal Studies, New School for Social Research; Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair and The Nation.
Streaming video:
RealPlayer 56K–240K http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/00fall/501_56.ram Windows Media Player 56K–240K
Streaming audio: RealPlayer 28K RealPlayer 56K Transcript 501: The Ravaged Century
Funding for this program is provided by John M. Olin Foundation and Starr Foundation.
Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Our show today, The Twentieth Century. For much of the one hundred years just past, the forces of freedom and democracy found themselves at war with two books, Das Kapital, by Karl Marx which, of course, gave rise to communism. Mein Kampf, by Adolph Hitler which gave rise to Nazism. Nazism and communism, how is it that these two totalitarian ideologies gained such a hold on tens of millions of people. If you had to decide the matter as a historical question, which one, Nazism or communism, did more damage to the fabric of our civilization?
With us today, two guests. Christopher Hitchens is a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Robert Conquest is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Conquest is also the author of the book, so to speak, on the one hundred years just ended, Reflections on a Ravaged Century. with three different plans for saving social security.
Title: The Power of Myth
Peter Robinson: Why were so many Western intellectuals taken in by the Soviets?
Robert Conquest: I'm not sure I explain it very easily except to the degree that I find that intelligentsia is subject to these unfortunate maladies.
Peter Robinson: Why, why the intelligentsia particularly? Why did you get a people particularly?
Robert Conquest: Well, well I think as Orwell wrote somewhere that, that the great bulk of the population is both too sane and too stupid to follow the arguments.
Peter Robinson: Christopher?
Christopher Hitchens: Well I think anyone who spends any time in intellectual circles realizes how gullible the cognoscente really are. And it's-look, it's not agreed it's an honorable tradition in Europe and it goes back to the French Revolution. There is-there is the view that there could be a revolution that would dissolve the-the old bonds and that would bring a new bout of freedom and so on and people were-you'd hope for that was true especially, I think, in the conditions created by the first World War which, after all, was a war fought in the highest traditions of liberalism and the enlightenment. And so, it was a great discredit of the-of the preceding regime intellectually.
Peter Robinson: What about a loss of faith? You don't take up religion particularly in your book but Chesterton wrote, "When people cease to believe in God, it's not that they cease to believe, it's that they will believe in anything." Does that have-does that have-is there this kind of void creating by ceasing to believe in religion?
Robert Conquest: It may-may be so with some people but it isn't so with everybody. There are plenty of skeptics who are perfectly sensible and don't-don't accept a substitute for religion. They're-they're agnostics, if you like.
Christopher Hitchens: I'd say that it was more like people recovering a religious faith. In other words, indeed in Russia itself too. It's not-you don't have to be tremendous psycho disoriented(?) to see that if you've had a Czar, the Czar of all the Russians for all that time and that he rules with the blessing of the church and is, in fact, thought to be divinely ordained as the...
Robert Conquest: Stalin said to the-to Pascaloff(?) that Marxism is the religion of the prototherian.
Peter Robinson: Is the-curious maybe-detachment-you're not particularly cross with these intellectuals. Went to Russia, saw Soviet Russia and swallowed every lie they could.
Robert Conquest: Well I'm fairly cross at them but I think that, by now, the comic side really comes out. The lunacy of them is more interesting than their just being-they're being-they're being nasty in a way but they're being stupid is even more interesting. That the deans of Western Social Science. After all, the webs and people should just be taken in by paper, by pachunkin(?) paperwork. It's extraordinary.
Peter Robinson: One of the most vexing questions of the twentieth century, how much were Nazism and communism alike? <snip> Michael Pugliese
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