"What struck me as I was reading Judt’s reflections on Sartre, Camus, Kolakowski, Hobsbawm, Koestler etc., most of which obviously have to do with Communism and Marxism, are two things. First, they were discussions of ideas where people (“real people”) have almost no place, and second, their discussion, so anachronistically placed around the events in the 1930s or 1940s, has very scant real-life resonance to somebody who lived under Communism in the 1970s and 1980s (like me) and obviously even less to anyone today. It occurred to me that practically no one of these people (Kolakowski obviously excepted) lived under Communism and for them the Cold War battles were waged in New York and Paris. Moreover, they were waged around the issues that were of almost total irrelevance to the “real people” in Eastern Europe. In some sense, these “battles” replicated Lenin without Leninism: primacy of ideology, disregard of real life."
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Historians from EnglandEssayists from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge facultyEducators from England
Original Language: English
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Branko Milanovic, "Tony Judt’s “Reappraisals”: The shipwrecks of the 20th century" (February 10, 2017)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tony_Judt
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Tony Judt
Tony Robert Judt (2 January 1948 – 6 August 2010) was a British historian, essayist, and university professor who specialized in European history.
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