“Martin Amis:
Lightness at Midnight”
Hitchens’ review of Koba
the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis. The tile refers
to Stalin’s nickname and the 20 million Russians executed during the great
terror. A very long essay that basically makes the point the Amis is
overreacting when he puts forth the notion that Stalinism was worse than Nazism
and that the plight of the “twenty million” goes largely unremembered by
history. Near the end of the essay, Hitchens writes, “His [Amis’s] is a short
work.” I would have never guessed given the length of the review.
A good quote about Amis’s writing style: “When Amis
summarizes a crux, it stays summarized.”
New learning: “Major General William Graves…commanded the American
Expeditionary Force during the 1918 invasion of Siberia…an event thoroughly
airbrushed from all American textbooks.”
Link to an article about Grave's on the Marxist Internet Archive (no iPad app yet):
New phrase: ex nihilo = Greek for “out of nothing”
I could list another 15-20 new words from this essay…thank
god for the Kindle dictionary feature. In fact, here’s the list:
probity = having strong moral principles
assiduity = close attention to what one is doing
synecdoche = a figure
of speech in which a part is meant to represent the whole
knout = a rawhide whip (from Russian knut)
piatiletka (Russian) = five year plan
Cheka = Soviet secret police
apercu = a hasty glance, an immediate understanding
arma virumque cano = opening line the the Aeneid, “I sing of
arms and of a man”
taiga (Russian) = Boreal forest (boreal = of the north)
hecatomb = slaughter of many victims
eugenic = improvement of the human population through
breeding
solipsistic = the theory that the self is all that can be
known to exist
heterodox = not conforming with orthodoxy
teleological = the study of design or purpose in natural
phenomena
Corruptio optima pessima = corruption of the best is the
worst (…or the
en passant = in passing (like in Chess)
ineluctable = inescapable
nostrums = a scheme to bring about social or political
reform
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