Robert Conquest R.I.P.

He is gone where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go traveler, imitate him if you can. He served liberty.
(Rather free translation from Latin of Jonathan Swift’s epitaph.)

George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG, OBE, FBA, FAAAS, FRSL, FBIS (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) has gone, and with him much savage indignation. He was 98.

I urge you to read his Wikipedia entry. Conquest was in his youth a communist, back when it was still excusable. He changed his mind after seeing communism close up and dedicated his professional career to exposing the greatest crimes of the 20th century.

He wrote about Stalin’s Great Purge; estimated murders as high as 20 million. He wrote about the planned famine in Ukraine, the holodomor; deaths somewhere between 2.4 to 7.5 million. He poured well-deserved scorn on Western intellectuals who denied, excused, or actively justified a world-wide holocaust that murdered as many as 100 million people.

By rights the crimes of communism should have had at least as much attention paid to them as the crimes of Nazism. And yet, how many people really know what happened in that “Ravaged Century” Conquest wrote about in such detail?

We live in a world in which any academic who denied or excused the Nazi holocaust would quite rightly have his career destroyed. Yet it is acceptable to deny or excuse the communist holocaust which was at least 10 times greater.

Why? For God’s sake why?

“The dead remember our silence.”