Antikomunistické manifesty

The subject of Fleming's informed and readable work is a quartet of influential books that shaped the Cold War: Darkness at Noon (1940) by Hungarian journalist and intellectual Arthur Koestler, Out of the Darkness (1941) by German sailor and labor activist Jan Valtin, I Chose Freedom (1946) by Soviet engineer Viktor Kravchenko, and Witness (1952) by American journalist Whittaker Chambers. All of the authors were orthodox communists who had been led by bitter disillusionment to depart from their ideology; all wrote emotional accounts of this reversal.

John V. Fleming sets the stories of these four books and their authors in the broad historical context of the 1930s through the 1950s, and discusses them in everything from political science, literary criticism, and psychology. Above all, he shows the almost fatal illusions of the left-wing and partly liberal Western European public in relation to Stalinism, communism and the Soviet Union especially after the Second World War, as well as the similar situation of the American public especially during the war. The danger of the influence of Stalinist communist parties in the West and their sympathizers was generally underestimated. In exposing the murderous and inhuman nature of the Soviet system, the four books analyzed, the "anti-communist manifestos," played a very important role, as Fleming convincingly shows, in helping to defeat Stalinist sympathizers and reorient the Western public and political representations toward the defense of democratic and liberal values.

Czech edition