When the collapse of the socialist bloc came it was partly — with exquisite irony — through the weight of communism’s own internal contradictions; but also, as Burleigh perhaps too strongly emphasises, through the longevity and eventual resurgence of Christian belief — a competing ideology which was both more compelling and more tolerant than that to be laid at the respective doors of Karl Marx and Lenin. The first government of the newly liberated GDR contained four Protestant pastors; there were 14 in the newly elected parliament.
And now, as Burleigh concludes, we are faced with a similarly implacable and violent totalitarian philosophy and an identical passivity or tacit connivance on the part of liberal intellectuals. ‘Islamic terrorist atrocities are a fact,’ Burleigh writes, ‘and not a figment infiltrated into our anxious imaginations by our rulers, a familiar trope of the superficially clever who regarded the Cold War in similarly domestic, instrumental terms. [Theo] Van Gogh [the Dutch film-maker executed by a Muslim fanatic] was cut to pieces not by a phantom, but by a real man, who is currently sitting in a Dutch prison.’ Burleigh continues, ‘Our murderers are inspired by hatreds of the Occident that owe as much to the history of Western self-repudiation as to resentment or puritanical and politically radicalised versions of Islam.’
History is rarely rendered in such thrilling breadth, with such wit or with such terrible topicality.
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