Post: #1

I'm sure you havn't heard of him.
So let's set things straight.

Quote:George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG, OBE, FBA, FAAAS, FRSL, FBIS (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) was a British-American historian and poet, notable for his influential works on Soviet history including The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968).

That's from Wikipedia.

However
We are talking about a guy, who was married 4 times.
He wrote poetry, sci-fi and non-fiction.
He served in WW2 as a foot soldier, and then was moved to the school for EE because his PhD was about the USSR.
He became a communist in the 1930s, but then saw first hand how the USSR took over Bulgaria. He became completely disillusioned with communist ideas.
He met his second wife in Bulgaria, helped her escape (Nice having local poon at your service) and then divorced his first and married the Bulgarian chick.
In 1956 he left the Foreign Office to become a "Freelancer".

Being an extremely sharp person, with careful observations he came up with the "3 laws of Politics. Reading them makes you cringe as they are so familiar to what we are witnessing:
Law #1 - Everyone is conservative about what he knows best
Law #2 - Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
Law #3 - The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

Law #2 is the brutal one. What is funny is that he used the Church and Amnesti as examples!

In the 1960s, the USSR was considered by a lot of intellectuals as the role model for society. Conquest to upon himself the task of describing the Communism as a terrorist monstrosity. An anecdote - after 1989 he was asked by his publisher to update the book, so he asked that the title would change to "I told you so! You fucking Idiots!"

Conquest's last book was published in 1999. It was dedicated to looking back at the 20th century and its trajectory. He compared Nazis with Commies and asked the English speaking nations to unite and lead the world. He was afraid of what would happen to Europe if it did not follow the democratic English block (he was so right).

We need to remember what Churchill said:

Quote:The great struggles in history have been won by superior will-power wresting victory in the teeth of odds or upon the narrowest of margins

Tat was Robert Conquest. A man of superior willpower.
Google him, look at his pics. The guy is outnumbered but continues to struggle for the truth.

Post: #2

The second of the "three laws" is actually John O'Sullivan's law. See here for a brief explanation of how this error got rolling.

Post: #3

(08-09-2015 01:26 PM)Volbeck Wrote:  The second of the "three laws" is actually John O'Sullivan's law. See here for a brief explanation of how this error got rolling.

Good call