Summary
Alain Besancon: The evil fate of the century
The evil fate of the century - about communism, Nazism and the peculiarities of Shoa, published in the fall of 1998, in an original way analyzes the basic features of totalitarianism of the 20th century, their common features, as well as the different relations and historical memory of communism and Nazism. The book - after its publication in France - caused great interest all over the world. Great world names, historians, philosophers and journalists joined the polemic: Zbigniew Brzeziński, Timothy Garton Ash, Leszek Kołakowski, Richard Pipes, Vladimir Bukowski and others, a polemic in which the views and basic conclusions of the author were not contested. , but - from different angles - it is only deepened and illuminated differently. In this book, Besançon elaborates on the basic points made in his speech to the joint session of the five French academies - a speech which is published in its entirety as an appendix to this book - in which he tried to explain the reasons for what he calls the amnesia of communism and the hyperamnesia of Nazism. A particularly interesting part of the book seems to us to be the one (chapter four) in which Besançon, after diagnosing the common symptoms of Bolshevik communism and Hitler's Nazism, gives the whole question a theological dimension, trying to compare communism and Nazism. with ancient heresies that appeared in the history of Christianity on the trail of different concepts of good and evil.
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