What Conquest show is how easily in this century communism and nationalism converged to produce the slaughter that has marked this century. Again witness Nazism and Soviet Russia. The Soviet Union was a curious mixture of Russian nationalism and the ideology of Marx. It produced the slaughter of over 20 million people under Stalin. Incredibly, Conquest demonstrates how intellectuals in this century deplored Hitler's death camps but with the same breath played down Stalin's Gulag, refusing to acknowledge both the scale of Soviet crimes and the nature of Soviet ideology.
History is about studying and then learning the lessons of the past.
In this Postmodern world, we seem unable to do that, even with such obvious horrors as Nazism and Communism. That is the lesson of Conquest's brilliant book. Unless these exploding social pathologies are reversed, they will lead to the decline and perhaps even the fall of the American republic. I like Bennet's indicators and I share them now as indicators we need to watch in 2000. In an article in the 6 December 1999 issue of the US News and World Report , David Gergen argues somewhat persuasively that America is showing progress on all fronts.