The Long Goodbye

National Interest, The, Summer, 2001 by Neil McInnes

And Eric's Consoling Lies

THE FUNERAL of communism will last for thirty years, prophesied Francois Furet in 1995. "The funeral procession will be accompanied by an immense crowd", he added, "and there will be much weeping. Even young people will join the cortege, trying here and there to give it the air of a rebirth." Hopes of a rebirth were vain, for the faith in communism was irretrievably tattered, but the funeral would last for years because "anti-communism remains more than ever a damnable heresy . . . more universally condemned in the West than in the great days of victorious antifascism." [1] Furet was not thinking only of France; he explained that in the United States the revisionist mourning party would prolong the funeral indecently, laboring as diligently as the Holocaust deniers but ever so much more respectably.

Jean-Francois Revel has lately demonstrated how prescient Furet was, in a polemical tract called La Grande parade, where parade is a fencing term for a parry, meaning in this case the desperate riposte of those who refuse to let communism go into what communists themselves used to call the dustbin of history. [2] After glancing at Revel's account of this French fencing, we shall see that the same parry and thrust are being deployed in English over communism's corpse, notably in the work of the veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Revel says that, whereas in the early 1990s communism and anything like it was definitively proven to be a failure, a vast historical catastrophe, by 2000 we were confronted with a resurgence of excuses, attenuations, forgetfulness and plain misrepresentation, all in favor of a renewed belief in socialism. "The years 1980 to 1990 were the decade of the admitted collapse of communism, as well as the relative and acknowledged failure of democratic socialisms. The years 1990 to 2000 will have been the decade of largely successful efforts to obliterate the lessons of those historic experiences."

Nothing shows this better than the reception since 1997 of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, [3] a massive compilation by a team of French historians of the infamies committed by and in the name of communism over seventy years around the world. Clinically factual and amply documented, this work was denounced, in quarters from the Left-leaning Le Monde all the way to the far Left, as an apology for fascism, a maneuver in favor of the racist National Front, a diversion from the trial of the collaborator Maurice Papon, or simply (the pitiful resources of invective already beggared) a "fraud" and an "imposture." Several of the academics among the editors of the work came under intolerable pressure from their university superiors to recant in public.

The parry is much the same in the United States as in France or England, or anywhere else that Rupert Murdoch prints newspapers. To wit, any attempt at a balance sheet of decades of tyranny and genocide perpetrated in the name of utopia can only proceed from a nostalgia for the Cold War dressed up as an interest in history. That's all old stuff; why drag it up now? Are the hawks bitter at losing their stock in trade, anti-communist rhetoric, and are the eternal reactionaries still enraged by those who, in their thirst for social justice, admittedly made some generous errors but who meant well? Such views are common in the French media, whereas in the United States they are mostly confined to academe, where the professors who invented the notion "totalitarianism" now consider that it is a misleading term, never to be applied to pluralist regimes such as those of Stalin and Brezhnev, while they dismiss their elders--Malia, Ulam, Pipes and Conquest--as Cold War Sovietologists.

THERE IS resistance to this intellectual fencing even in France, as appeared lately in one of those squalid disagreements that Parisians like to call literary scandals. It concerned a massive tome by a British communist historian, which no one among French publishers wanted to bring out in a French translation, whereupon the author cried, "Censorship!" In Paris the superannuated courtesans of the communist cause, who had just discovered they had been innocent virgins all along, sprang to the author's defense behind their standard bearer, Le Monde Diplomatique. The book was Eric Hobsbawrn's The Age of Extremes, [4] which was enjoying some success in Britain and the United States and in numerous translations elsewhere, but which Parisian publishers en bloc rejected as unsellable in a country abreacting from its long infatuation with Stalinism. Said Pierre Nora of Editions Gallimard, France had been "the longest and most deeply Stalinized [Western] country" but it was now in "decompression", which entailed

hostility to anything that could, from near or far, recall that former pro-Soviet, pro-communist age, including plain Marxism. Eric Hobsbawm cultivates this attachment to the revolutionary cause as a point of pride.... But in France at this moment, it goes down badly.