It makes nonsense of the history of the last century to accept the Marxist decree that "proletarian internationalism" would prevail and nationalism would vanish and leave nothing but a wrack of folk dancing behind. Hobsbawm was still arguing in 1990, when ethno-nationalism was about to rend the Soviet empire and the independent Balkans, that nations and nationalism were about to disappear. In what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called "a work of great learning that is equally a work of vast delusion", Hobsbawm was saying that "the great achievement of the communist regimes in multinational countries [was] to limit the disastrous effects of nationalism within them." Moynihan continues,

The spell of Marxism, however, persisted to the moment of utter falsification and will no doubt continue on impervious to experience. . . . Hobsbawm's entire work seems directed at explaining away, or even denying, the plain fact that the vertical category of nationalism has proven far more powerful than the horizontal category of class consciousness.

This stubborn error persisted not only through his Age of Extremes but into On the Edge of the New Century, where Hobsbawm says wistfully that "the re-appearance of dramatic nationalist hostilities in these [ex-communist] countries is in some ways inexplicable, particularly because they seemed to have almost disappeared." Grudgingly admitting that they did re-appear, he still insists that this was not what blew the USSR or Yugoslavia apart. Multi-ethnic states, whether managed by Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs or communists, come undone for reasons a good Marxist can acknowledge, such as war or economic failure, and it is only then that ethnic communities cast around for "new loyalties." So, in this telling, ethno-nationalism remains a secondary, derivative and artificial force, never a prime mover in history. This willful blindness to glaring fact is comforted by ending the "short twentieth century" in 1991, before the clamor of ethno-nationalism became deafening.

Another danger (besides missing nationalism) of making the ideological struggle between communism and the West the exclusive theme of the twentieth century is that, at the time, many things were subsumed into the Cold War that had little or nothing to do with it. Any outbreak of peripheral commotion was seized upon by one superpower as an occasion to incommode the other, who returned the compliment; and if the superpowers were slow to meddle, the petty states involved sought the opportunity to strut on the world stage as principled stakeholders in the universal drama. (The Non-Aligned Movement, led by ramshackle states like Yugoslavia and Indonesia, has no other explanation.) Says Zaki Laidi,

Thus if we had misguidedly interpreted a minor ethnic convulsion in Africa as an exclusively endogenous phenomenon, we would be pitied and called to order for not having grasped or appreciated the wider ramifications--whether symbolic (ideology) or material (arms consignments)--that linked these microconflicts to megahistory.

The only trouble was that when the Cold War faded the "minor convulsion" persisted, misunderstood, indeed incomprehensible, and complicated by the fact that all involved were now armed to the teeth. Laidi did well to choose Africa as an example, as recent events have shown.

These are examples of the systemic bias that a communist view of universal history is liable to. What is harder--indeed fastidious to the point of tedium--is to pinpoint the numerous little falsehoods, half-truths and willful oversights to which a communist apologist must resort if he is to weave a single fabric. Whatever respect we may have for Hobsbawm's three volumes of nineteenth-century history, we cannot take up his twentieth-century history without recalling that he has been a communist activist since 1936 and carried the card of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) almost to the day it was dissolved. Born in Alexandria, educated in Vienna and Berlin, a refugee in Cambridge, a teacher in London (in recent years in Princeton), he says he is one of those Central European Jews for whom communism seemed the only way to the future (they were fewer than he likes to think). He belonged to the Communist Historians Group after the Second World War, mainly consisting of friends and members of the CPGB, such as Christopher Hill, Maurice Dobb and E.P. Thompson. In 1997 he said, "Much of my life, probably most of my conscious life, was devoted to a hope which has been plainly disappointed, and to a cause which has plainly failed: the communism initiated by the October Revolution." But he is a man of tenacious loyalty, and he still venerates the cause of revolution. It takes a lot of little lies to shore up a position like that.

Here are some samples from Age of Extremes. Stalin was the champion of anti-Nazism (after 1934 at least) and it was the West's refusal to negotiate with him that drove him to his pact with Hitler. "What happened in Warsaw in 1944 was the penalty of premature city risings", so presumably it had nothing to do with Stalin's deliberate delay, which gave the Germans time to crush it. There is no mention of the slaughter by the Russians, on Stalin's order, of over 4,000 Polish officers at Katyn, near Smolensk. We must be grateful for this silence, for it is an advance on Hobsbawm's earlier denial of Russian guilt. What we ignorantly call the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe after 1945 Hobsbawm calls "the second great wave of global revolution", adding, "The world revolution had visibly advanced." Stalin's postwar intentions were peaceful and the USSR's "basic posture after the war was not aggressive but defensive. . . . In short, the 'communist camp' showed no sign of significant expansion between the Chinese revolution and the 1970s." So were there no wars in Korea and Vietnam? "The USSR accepted West Berlin as a Western enclave inside the German territory with reluctance but was not prepared to fight the issue." So there was no Berlin blockade either? No mention of it here, unless it is hidden in "reluctance." Such subterfuges do occur: In 1950 North Korea was "spreading to the south", and a similar "spreading" occurred later in Vietnam, so spreading seems to include armed invasion.

Given this entire absence of provocation from the Soviet side, it follows that the Cold War was entirely the result of American paranoia--not Western, note, not European, but peculiarly American--for that country was in the grip of apocalyptic anti-communism and "public hysteria." The politicians who exploited these fears were cynical and hypocritical, except for those who were "clinically mad." The "mutual fear" thus generated explains such things as the Berlin Wall of 1961, although he does not show how the Western side of this mutual fear would lead the Potsdam authorities to lock up their own citizens. The Cold War ended when the USSR was wrecked and defeated by détente: Moscow made the fatal mistake of joining the world markets in grain, oil and loans, instead of retreating deeper into autarchy.

To think that Parisian publishers shrank from putting out this farrago of lies and evasions makes one wonder about those who elsewhere had no compunction. But of course these are just the shifts and pretexts of one Western communist; another Stalinist would have his own collection of dodges and prevarications. What matters more is the standard gestures of the great parry, the eight lies about communism that console the mourners at the endless funeral. Hobsbawm is our infallible guide here, too, notably in On the Edge of the New Century. We shall list them.

Communism was not totalitarian.

The point of this denial is to avoid having communism put on the same footing as Nazism and fascism, because once that is done, all sorts of embarrassing resemblances spring into view. People have been making this awkward identification at least since Franz Borkenau wrote The Totalitarian Enemy in 1940 and coined the term "brown bolshevism." Moreover, they have advanced sound arguments for putting all these enemies of liberal democracy into one basket, whereas the deniers are reduced to splitting hairs. Hobsbawm, for example, admits Stalin wanted to be, and tried to be, a totalitarian ruler, but says he failed because he never achieved "thought control" over the ruled. But nor, notoriously, did Mussolini, who nevertheless boasted he ran a totalitarian society. If you set the bar high enough no one ever installed totalitarian rule. If that makes the term useless, let us drop it and find another, but whatever it is, it will apply equally well to communism, Nazism and fascism in respect of their common enmity toward liberal democracy. That will head off the argument that communism belonged with democracy on one side of the barricades, and fascism on the other side; which leads to the refinement that communism was, or aspired to, a higher form of democracy--which is why, its sins confessed and its soul shriven, it deserves to be mourned.

Communism was an Enlightenment project.

Curiously, this enormity is proffered not only by its mourners but by those of its opponents who nowadays say that this is just what was wrong with it, because the Enlightenment was nothing but an intellectually shallow rationalism, a conspiracy of dead white males to back up Western imperialism. The mourners make the claim because, as Hobsbawm still says, communism was devoted to the Enlightenment principles of reason, progress, science, education and popular government. That it periodically paid lip service to those ideals is true; and it even tried to cheat by passing off utterly bogus imitations of their realization (such as "the world's most democratic Constitution"). But communism was also, and preferentially, devoted to ideals incompatible with the Enlightenment project, such as monolithic authority, class-relative truth, central economic planning, and the religion of the party-state. Thus it engendered poverty, injustice and mass murder not by contingent chance but always and everywhere by its very own logic. Michael Oakeshott would have said that that logic contained as much bookish rationalism as the American Constitution, but so does any coherent policy for a modern state; that tells us nothing about its attachment to education, science, democracy and the other Enlightenment values.