An update to a previous post about Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia.
David Pryce-Jones reviews Last Exit… in the March 8 issue of National Review. Here’s a money graf from “Revel Against the Machine”:
Leftists are making another egregious mistake when they treat capitalism as the opposing ideology to Communism, when it is nothing of the kind: It’s not an ideology at all, but merely a way to get things done to the benefit of the many. This false analysis is a residue from the Cold War, and it now serves to extend the widespread animus against the United States. Where the United States acts to liberate, as in Iraq or Kosovo, European national pride is wounded. In a final chapter Revel says point-blank, “If you take away anti-Americanism there is nothing left of French political thought.” He goes further. Totalitarianism is Europe’s great modern innovation, its gift to the world, and Europeans consciously or unconsciously resent that the United States has been preventing them from fully developing this great modern innovation of theirs. Europe is on its own, but in the absence of aptitude for self-governance “its spinelessness stands revealed.”
What a badge of courage it is to have stood out so lucidly and forcefully against the Nazis, the Communists, and the pygmies who succeeded them and now run Europe. Revel was a free spirit in a time when this was rare.