The National Interest
Summer 2001

The Long Goodbye

by Neil McInnes

 

The funeral of communism will last for thirty years, prophesied François 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 anti-fascism." 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-François 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. . . .

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 Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes. . .