دانلود کتاب Reflections on a Ravaged Century

"Illuminates the past with a mighty searchlight and clears away mountains of nonsense."―Gabriel Schoenfeld, Wall Street Journal
Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian." As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century’s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Winner of the Ingersoll Prize; winner of the Richard M. Weaver Prize; a New York Times Notable Book. "Provides many glowing embers of reasoned and wise argument."―Richard Bernstein, The New York Times "A book that ought to be required reading for everyone about to enter college, and by every member of Congress."―Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

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From wikipedia:

Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999)

Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a book on the psychological roots of fanaticism, in which Conquest argues that Communism and Nazism were equal and more twins than opposites.

Overall the book Conquest deals more with Communism than Nazism, partly because of Conquest's greater expertise about Communism, and partly because few Western intellectuals became Nazi. Conquest mainly focuses on attacks on intellectuals in the West who became Communists because they felt or believed that this was being anti-fascist or anti-nazist.

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From Chapter One (https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/conquest-ravaged.html):

"The huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts". He then attacks Marxism, the French Revolution, the "Revolution Idea", the "mental coarseness" of revolutionaries. And writes: "The English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution in 1776, both of them undertaken in protection of the legal and civic order, had no connotation of total and utopian change". "A liberal polity in the Anglo-American way is the very opposite; its mission is to "restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down."

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On this book, Michael Ignatieff wrote (https://web.archive.org/web/20121126020303/http://www.nybooks.com:80/articles/archives/2000/mar/23/the-man-who-was-right/):

"Conquest argues that both America and Britain belong together at the head of an alliance of English-speaking democracies. Only in "English-speaking countries" [the so-called Anglosphere], he argues, has a genuinely democratic culture taken root. Elsewhere, in Europe, democracy was a frail plant [...] Liberty, he believes, is an "Anglo-Celtic" invention. The Founding Fathers were faithful children of England’s Glorious Revolution: checks and balances, separation of powers, common law, and representative democracy remain the shared heritage of the Anglo-American peoples. [...] Britain and the United States, he argues, have more in common with each other than either have with continental Europe. The alliances embodied in the European Union and NATO made sense when the enemy was Russia but they no longer represent genuine affinities of political culture. NATO is liable, he writes, to the perils of European apathy or parochialism.[...]"