A&L Daily Observed

You could devote an entire blog to just batting around ideas that occur, as links, on Arts and Letters Daily. Let me just settle on one.

Anne Applebaum, the author of the recently published and ravingly-reviewed Gulag, has an interesting review of another recent book on the world Communist movement, Robert Harvey's Comrades: The Rise and Fall of the World Communist Movement. She begins with some interesting observations worth reapeating:


Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Salvador Allende, Mengistu, Castro, Kim Il-sung: the list of murderous communist leaders is long, diverse and profoundly multicultural. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Angola, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba: the list of countries that have attempted to create communist societies is equally broad.

Looking back over the 20th century, it is stunning, in retrospect, to think how far and how fast communist revolutions spread, in such a relatively short period of time. It is no less stunning to think that the ideas of an exiled German philosopher, a failure in his own country, were put to the test over and over again, in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, in Christian, Buddhist, Confucian and animist societies.

Yes, it is indeed breathtaking to consider the scope and pancultural force of the Communist movement, and its success. Harvey apparently makes several suggestions as to why Communism was so successful. He regards it as a modern anti-modernity movement, deploying modern techniques to fight the forces of modernization. I am delighted to see that he agrees with my friend Dr. Rick Hernandez' thesis on the civil religion of Communism. As Hernandez has argued, Harvey also says that (in Applebaum's summary) commisars had "to offer a quasi-religious creed, powerful enough to replace indigenous religions." Rick, I think, takes this to interesting conclusions; he shows in his dissertation that it was the mechanisms of economic modernization that, once controlled by the state, were held up as objects of the people's veneration.

Anyway, it sounds like a good read. BTW, where's all the Civil War book review stuff, Doc?