The Great Terror by Robert Conquest
In this episode we stare into the abyss, for our subject is the definitive account of one of the deeply dark points, in an epoch of deep, deep darkness, “The Great Terror: A Reassessment” by British-American historian Robert Conquest. Published in 1990 as the Glasnost period was leading to the sudden, but inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union, the book is a revised version of Conquest’s landmark 1968 release “The Great Terror” which presented to the world for the first time, Soviet Union included, an authoritative account of the monumental brutalities unleashed by Stalin from 1934 to 1938.
Deep breath, silent but genuine moment of reflection in the memory of all the swathe of humanity ground down, brutalised and murdered in the millions for a spurious, inhuman academic theory.
There is too much to say in this topic. I will simply point to this story about the Kurapaty Forest Graves, Minsk, Belarus as a microcosmic tale somewhat representative of the horror covered in Conquest's brave and mighty tome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurapaty
ReadingforWisdom is a YouTube channel aimed at exploring some of the ideas around the idea of books as a timeless technology, essential for our intellectual evolution as a species. Considering ‘books’ can and will take us in all sorts of intellectual journeys but the channel does have a natural bias towards discussions about books, their ideas and authors who focus on history, warfare, politics, culture, science and the human condition (ok, most things that matter then).
The videos will explore the history of religion but, unlike much content on the web referring to ‘wisdom’, it is a thoroughly secular enterprise, the editor a lifelong religious sceptic. The channel is a companion to https://readingforwisdom.com, a site curated by Dr Emmet McElhatton to modestly add to what Robert Maynard Hutchings, Chicago academic, Editor-in-Chief of the Great Books of the Western World series and, with colleague Mortimer Adler, founder of the Great Books movement, described as the ‘great conversation’ of history; the dialogue created through the exchange of ideas through the medium of published writings.
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