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. 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, 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, "Censor-ship!" 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,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 Éditions 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.

Less charitably, Revel dismissed the book as "pure propagandist hocus-pocus", a "pro-totalitarian manifesto" put out by "an old and incurable British Stalinist" and "an imperturbable negationist" of communism's crimes.

The mourners at the funeral were determined to prove Nora wrong. They wished to demonstrate that there was indeed a ready market in France for a book designed to console true believers for the demise of communism, to assure them that "real" socialism had not failed, and that liberal capitalism remained the demon to exorcise. They did what socialists always do when the market lets them down: They wangled a subsidy out of the Minister for Culture of the ruling socialist government and gave this taxpayers' money to an obscure Belgian publisher for bringing out Hobsbawm's book in French. Helped by the notoriety generated during this dispute, the translation is selling well. The story ends with everyone convinced they were proven right.

Actually, we need not rely on that book to show Hobsbawm as the very paragon of a mourner at communism's funeral, because he has recently produced another and up-to-the-minute exercise in apologetics, On the Edge of the New Century. However, before we leave the subject of publishing works on the sudden death of communism, it is worth looking at the fortunes of a masterpiece in the genre, which has had a curious difficulty getting into English. Vladimir Bukovsky, who was rescued from twelve years in Soviet insane asylums and prisons by the Brezhnev-Pinochet prisoner exchange, wondered why there had been no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials when communism collapsed, why several thousand known criminals got off scot-free, and why anyone in the West who raised such questions was scorned as a sick cold warrior, nostalgic for the nuclear nightmare. So he wrote the sort of indictment that would be tabled at Moscow trials patterned on Nuremberg.

An engrossing side issue that Bukovsky took up was the exploitation by the internal Soviet propaganda machine of the sayings of Western sympathizers and fellow-travelers, whom Bukovsky was cruel enough to name. In translation, these passages would cause some embarrassment to people who today claim they bear no responsibility for Soviet crimes but whose words were bullets--no blood on their hands but blood all over their fountain pens, Revel would say. Given the mood Pierre Nora has described in France, this powerful Russian work found a ready French translation, but no reputable publisher could be found for an English version. It languished untranslated as long as Hobsbawm's book had, before it was taken up and mangled by a minor American publisher. The print run appears to have been paltry and the work shrank from 616 pages in French to 256 pages in English. Communism's mourners are as active in getting consolatory books translated as they are in hampering the translation of disturbing ones.

So soon after it ended, histories of the twentieth century are plentiful. There are notable ones by Clive Ponting, J.M. Roberts, Agatha Ramm and Martin Gilbert. Special mention should be made of a 1998 work by Hobsbawm's successor as professor of history at Birkbeck College, London--Mark Mazower, an author free of the partisanship of his predecessor--entitled The Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. Hobsbawm beat the field by chronicling a "short" twentieth century, which ended in 1991, so that the first version of his history was out by 1994. He stopped in 1991 because that was when the Soviet communist party went down corps et biens, and the story as he told it had communism as the tragic hero of the century; when it fell, the tale was told.

Historians are of course entitled to frame their narrative as the answer to a particular question; there is nothing wrong with such selectivity. A philosopher even says, "History books, indeed, ought commonly to be more, not less, selective than they are; greater selectivity would be a step towards objectivity, not away from it." There remains an obligation to ensure that answers to one question do not contradict the answers to other equally valid questions. Each historian cannot do his own thing regardless of others in the field. For example, one cannot tell the story of the Soviet Union and the Cold War as though it were all about the effort to realize a communist ideal and had nothing to do with nationalism and ethnicity. Hobsbawm tries to do just that. In his history, as in his essays on nationalism, he is slave to the Marxist prejudice, as old as the Communist Manifesto, that "the workers have no fatherland", and so nationalism and ethnicity could never determine their actions whenever socialism was an option.

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.

True socialism was never tried, only distortions.

You can choose your own distorter: Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, as you please. Hobsbawm chose Russian "circumstances" and maintained, in 1994, that "the failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism." There was nothing in "the socialist idea" to suggest a one-party state or the imposition of an orthodoxy, he says, ignoring the massive evidence that a central plan will always require both. Last year he was still arguing that "communism wasn't Russia. It was a global cause . . . if you think that communism is something greater than the histories of the backward countries in which it happened that communists got to power, then that history is not reason enough to abandon the chosen cause." At this rate, there can never be such a reason, since the "socialist cause" has become a metaphysical entity, forever proof against the mere facts of history. That sneer at "backward countries" suggests that the poor Russian people let communism down, the way Hitler said the German people let him down. History will always let deluded tyrants down--but unfortunately only in the long run, when so many of us are dead. Besides, as Revel asks, if local circumstances or individual villainy is distorting the socialist ideal, how does it happen that the identical formula for "really existing socialism" is transmitted from Stalin to Mao, to Kim Il Sung, to Ho Chi Minh, to Pol Pot, to Ceausescu, to Castro and to Mengistu? Were all these men suffering the betrayal of a pure ideal, or were they not rather all applying the same horrendous methods to reach the same impossible goal, the only methods and the only goal communism ever knew?

Please pity the former communists.

There was a mawkish piece in Les Temps Modernes headed "The end of communism: the winter of our souls." It gave the tone for a requiem Mass in honor, not of the countless victims, but of their executioners' friends, whose generous hopes had been so cruelly disappointed. Hobsbawm too invites us to admire their "loyalty to a great cause and to all those who had sacrificed their lives for it"--that means party activists, not those they deceived and betrayed. He says he stayed on in the cpgb long after his faith was shaken by 1956 (he can never bring himself to say "the crushing of the Hungarian revolt", just "1956", so much more sterile) out of loyalty to the heroes who had stuck to the party line. "I didn't want to end up in the company of all those ex-communists who had become anti-communists", i.e., the men and women who had the decency to admit that their god had failed. There was no need to recant anything, for party activists in, for example, Britain "cannot be held responsible for what happened in other countries and certainly not in Russia." Lying about and apologizing for "what happened in other countries" was blameless because it was inspired by noble ideals. As Hobsbawm put it: "Do I regret it? No, I don't think so. I know very well that the cause I embraced has proved not to work. Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen it. But, on the other hand, if people don't have any ideal of a better world, then they have lost something. . . . I cannot help feeling that humanity couldn't function without great hopes and absolute passions, even when these experience defeat."

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 in 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.

Meanwhile, capitalism in newly industrialized Asia was demonstrating that impressive achievements were possible without resort to brutality. But it is an argument some mourners are unwilling to surrender. Hobsbawm, for example, always accompanies his denunciations of Stalin with a counterpoint of exculpation: "tough, but it worked." He says Stalin's reliance on terror was "rationally instrumental", i.e., it worked. Incidentally, it was a pure, high-minded terror, since Stalin was "quite indifferent to the material rewards that someone in his position could command." His role as "a secular Tsar" was based upon "a sound sense of public relations", i.e., it worked. His Short History of the Party was full of "lies and intellectual limitations" but it was "pedagogically a masterly text", i.e., it worked, as propaganda.

If the "tough, but it works" line is no longer applicable to Russian industry, one can always transfer the argument to China. Sure enough, Hobsbawm offers a tentative apology for the massacre in Tiananmen Square: The communist leadership was trying to manage a difficult transition and, courageously, "it did not abdicate its responsibilities." The result: ten years later China was prosperous, whereas weakly ruled Russia was in a mess. In other words, it worked.

Capitalism has failed as much as communism.

This is a major gesture of the parry. In France it has produced a series of near-hysterical texts about l'horreur économique, the failure of liberalism and the crisis of capitalism. It is the main theme of all of Hobsbawm's recent work; he calls this the Age of Crisis, in which the "theology of the free market" has failed as miserably as communism. Capitalism (only the Pope has the courage to call it evil, says this non-believer) is lurching from one crisis to another, and its days are numbered. With it will collapse parliamentary democracy, whose elections are "contests in fiscal perjury" and whose cultural foundations have been mined by the new barbarism. He is relying on the sort of unease Schumpeter felt, that the affluence produced by successful capitalism undermines its own ethical foundations, plus a natural concern about the sort of moral decline that Francis Fukuyama has examined in The Great Disruption, and that James Kurth expressed in these pages in a previous essay on Hobsbawm. But whereas Fukuyama set these cultural facts in a historical context, and even claimed to see signs of recovery, Hobsbawm puts on his "The End is Nigh" sandwich board. The way he seizes eagerly on every foreign exchange panic, every stock market slump, every riot about globalization as proof that the Big One has arrived reminds us that Marx and Engels went on this way for decades, always sure capitalism was about to fall over. These people are reluctant to admit what economic agents soon learn: that a free-market economy leads an adventurous life of frequent alarms and excursions; that (for reasons Keynes explained) it is not always self-correcting and needs clever managing; and, finally, that some of its excesses cannot be corrected by even the cleverest interventions but have to be worked through painfully. None of which has anything to do with the Last Trump. A line drawn through these ups and downs can be resolutely inclined upward, as it has been for the ten years since communism really did fall over.

Communism gave us the welfare state. One last reason to shed a tear for communism.