The Long Goodbye

National Interest, The, Summer, 2001 by Neil McInnes

We are familiar with this mindless cult of commitment from Heidegger and Sartre, but here it is the merest hypocrisy. Imagine Hobsbawm turning up to a cell meeting in Berlin or Cambridge and saying, "I'm only here for my great hopes and absolute passions; it's their night out." He would have been told, "Either you are a sentimental idiot or you are here, like the rest of us, to promote Soviet interests, to deny the truth about Stalin's tyranny, to collaborate when instructed with Nazis, and to fight social democrats. Otherwise, heraus!" The bit about hope and passion comes later, as a lame excuse.

Communism provided the best resistance to Nazism. Since 1945, if not 1935, this has always been the strongest appeal of communism in the West, and explains the massive membership of the communist parties in countries like Italy and France, as well as the cohorts of fellow-travelers m the older democracies. For this appeal to have succeeded, however, some strenuous acts of forgetfulness were required. One must overlook the long history of collaboration between Moscow and Berlin, dating from well before the Hitler-Stalin pact, and including such services as facilitating military training and handing over foreign communists to the Gestapo. One must forget the campaign against the "social fascists", i.e., the democratic socialists, who as targets were long preferred to mere Nazis. Then and forever after the communists branded decided opponents "fascist", be they conservative, liberal or just the wrong ethnic type; this conceptual recklessness raises doubts about their true attitude to anti-democratic forces like Nazism. When the Comintern finally joined the anti-fascist coalition of the 1930s it was in order to manipulate it, starting with the decree: "You cannot be both anti-Nazi and anti-communist. You cannot criticize Hitler until you stop criticizing Stalin." Finally, one must pretend to overlook the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the brutal aggressions that it sanctioned, until a heroic people rose to save not communism, but the homeland, in what therefore had to be called, in a confession shameful for Marxists, the Great Patriotic War.

In any event, all this was so long ago, before 1945. What could resistance to Nazism have to do with the ravages of Stalin for the next eight years or the misrule of communist parties for a half century more? And yet, last year Hobsbawm was still milking this bull:

If you look at the great causes in which people of my age have been involved, such as the war against Nazism, it is impossible to say that the price paid was higher than the results obtained. ... Even with hindsight, it is impossible not to recognise that we [communists] did a great deal of bad, but also a great deal of good.

Communism was brutally effective. Communism never lacked tough-minded admirers who agreed that its methods were deplorable, but insisted that they worked. The USSR and the regimes it imposed elsewhere paid a high price for their industrialization but they got there, whereas Third World countries failed. This callous realism became less convincing when the Eastern bloc economies began slipping further behind the West; and it became quite implausible when the dilapidation of Soviet industry was laid bare.