ACCORDING TO PLAN
THE PATTERN OF COMMUNIST REVOLUTION, by Hugh Seton-Watson; Methuen and Co., English price 25/-. N the last three or four years, journalists and others have been trying to take a quick profit by exploiting what
appeared to be a popular interest in anti-Communism. The result was far more books than the market could bear; and, mainly because the. books themselves. often lacked substance, booksellers (new and second-hand) became wary of the whole genus. Is Professor Seton-Watson’s book another justification for such wariness? The answer is mixed. The author writes of Communism as a revolutionary movement, not as an ideology or an economic theory, and is therefore concerned with the sequence of events where Communists have achieved political authority in Europe and Asia. He tries to show why the Communists succeeded. In doing this he gives a quick and fair thumb-nail sketch of the social background in the various countries where Communism is or has been a force and relates the Communist movement to that background. The best part of the book is the description of pre-1914 Europe in its social, political, economic and educational aspects. The body of the book then deals in geographic areas with the periods after the First World War and the Second World War respectively. There is far too much of the Soviet Union and its personalities and not enough, for instance, on the Bela-Kun regime in Hungary; and the author admits himself that the Asian section is weak, The last pages consist of a lecture on our duty to "make reality prevail over
fantasy." This sermonising perhaps explains the disappointment of the book. Clearly Professor Seton-Watson thought he was being objective in his writing, but his subjectivity is so apparent as to make one wonder by what process he selected his material. The author has in the past written well on Eastern Europe. | It is a pity he has felt that the times | made it appropriate to write on the pat- | tern of Communist revolution. When such a work is really properly under- | taken it will, of course, take many ‘volumes; it won’t be written in our time, and a Western European will prob- |
ably not write it.
W. B.
S.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 12
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369ACCORDING TO PLAN New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 780, 2 July 1954, Page 12
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