history of 2oth cent. Communism and fascism, situation in Europe and Middle east

I admit, my ambivalence about this book might just be evidence of Judt fatigue, in the sense that I've read a bunch of his books over the last year or two, and that this is an unnecessarily long compendium of NYRB essays, and most importantly in the sense that I no longer learn anything new about Tony Judt by reading his essays. I know what he's going to say. I know that, about 75% of the time, he is absolutely spot on, and that he'll write well, and so on.

But all that reading has also led me to an odd place. I no longer care to hear Tony Judt slam, e.g., Hobsbawm for not speaking out against Soviet idiocy, not because there wasn't a whole bunch of Soviet idiocy, and not because Hobsbawm is blameless, but because Judt studiously ignores those leftist intellectuals who *did* slam Soviet idiocy (there are essays here on centrists who slammed it, and on conservatives who slammed it, and on leftists who didn't slam it, but not even a single essay on the French intellectuals who did, and France is Judt's specialty). Why? There's no good reason, unless he decided that writing about, e.g., Simone Weil would damage his own standing as objective anti-Soviet intellectual by associating him with the 'left'.

Meanwhile, at the other end of his professional activities, he goes to town on American intellectuals cravenly supporting Iraq, and doesn't mention leftists, because, as he puts it, he restricts his "discussion to intellectuals with significant public influence or readership, i.e., those who mattered." Now, Chomsky is not my favorite human being, but I would have thought he fit that description pretty well. Leftists do matter, and leftists objected to the war, just as many of them objected to the USSR.

This matters because Judt wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be the great pro-anti-communist of the twentieth century, but doesn't want to trace the links between pro-anti-communism in the eighties and American bellicosity in the 2000s. He doesn't see, or doesn't want to see, that the social democracy he so brilliantly championed in this late work was undermined precisely because there was no alternative offered, and there was no alternative because anyone who suggested an alternative was immediately classified as a Socialist, and that was possible because people like Judt spent so much time arguing against fellow travelers (quite rightly) and no time arguing against neoliberalism, or arguing for alternative visions of leftism, which would have required him to distinguish consistently e.g., Soviet Communism, Communism, Marxism, socialism, and leftism. None of which he did.

That doesn't make him a bad person, but it does show the kind of thinker he was: stridently empiricist, hugely knowledgeable, but very limited when it comes to considering historical causation across periods; essentially anti-philosophical; and with horrific taste in literature.

Okay, that last one stands apart. But anyone who lists a bunch of mediocre anti-communist propaganda novelists and then calls them "the twentieth century world republic of letters" needs to be corrected. ( )

Excelente recolección de ensayos, algunos sobre personas otras sobre países o políticas, en uno de ellos cuando compara EU con EEUU habla de las particularidades inglesas y como EEUU quiere romper esa unidad Europea, donde algunas medidas preanuncian el Brexit y el apoyo de los ingleses a ello, Reivindica la vía socialista y la democracia europea ( )

Het is oppassen met deze schrijver. Sommige stukken in dit boek zijn best interessant, maar wat hij nogal eens aanhaalt in zijn besprekingen van andere schrijvers geldt ook voor hemzelf. In de tekst over België bvb gebruikt hij eenzijdig Franstalige bronnen. Hij beheerst duidelijk geen Nederlands en baseert zich dus maar op de bronnen geschreven door de minderheid in dit land. Bovendien is hij niet alleen zeer trots op zijn kennis van het Frans maar neemt zelfs hun dogma's over. 'De Elzas werd door het Duitse Rijk geannexeerd en de regionale talen in Frankrijk zijn dialecten.'

Nog bedenkelijker is zijn kennis van de Belgische geschiedenis. Zo schrijft hij dat de regeringen in de 19e eeuw de invoer van Amerikaans graan tegenhielden omdat anders hetzelfde zou gebeuren met industriële producten. De werkelijkheid was wel anders. De katholieke grootgrondbezitters hielden de invoer tegen om de prijs van hun eigen productie hoog te houden. De liberale industriëlen wilden echter het tegenovergestelde. De hoge graanprijs zorgde voor een hoge prijs van het brood met als gevolg dat de arbeiders hogere lonen eisten. ( )

This is an excellent book which reminds us what we had forgotten until the financial crisis, when despite all the neocon propaganda we needed the state to bale out the banks. It reminds us that we have states for a reason, not just to get in the way of capitalists. It also reminds us that we should still fight for the rule of law in Europe and oppose Putin's tricks. ( )