Koba the Dread
Laughter and the Twenty Million
by Martin Amis · first published 1998
3mentions
1recommended by
3HN commenters
2011–2021first – last mentioned
33% recommend67% neutral
Terror sanguinario
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…those people in particular, but the way totalitarian states have worked in the past is to have them report secretly on each other. This keeps everyone in a constant state of fear and oppression. Read Koba the Dread by Martin Amis for a powerful, extremely well-written account of it.
on “President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment” ↗I see "drink-soaked, former-Trotskyist popinjay" applied to Hitchens a lot. Hitchens' 2002 review of Martin Amis Koba the Dread, "Lightness at Midnight", gives a good summary of his (i.e., Hitchens) attitude to Trotskyism and Marxism. He picks out a wonderful quote of Victor Serge: > Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies?…
on “In Memoriam: Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011” ↗I'm right in the middle of reading Martin Amis' "Koba the Dread." He raises the interesting point that most people feel a viscerally different reaction to the crimes of Hitler ("Little Moustache") than they do to those of Stalin ("Big Moustache"), even though even…
on “The dark story behind Stalin’s popular photo with a Soviet girl” ↗