This is an amazing document to read in the 21st century. It amounts to a full-throated defense of the Moscow show trials used in the late 1930s Ponty, who was one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, is arguing here contra-Koestler and "Darkness at Noon." Merleau-Ponty is quite right in arguing that liberal societies hide the violence (and terror) that they use to enforce their own order - an argument that come critics of Globalization, such as the outstanding R. Radhakrishnan, have deployed to excellent and edifying effect. However, most of the time, "Humanism and Terror" reads like a document from the inquisition in which the ideological backdrop of demonic possession, witchcraft and satanic heresy are taken at face-value and completely seriously Ponty`s continuous reliance on the judgement of history would tend to suggest that he and his arguments were "objectively incorrect" while the defendants were "proven right" (assuming, of course, that they were in some sense disloyal to the Soviet state).