The Appeal of the Empire of Lies.

• Author: MORSE, JENNIFER ROBACK

I am the adoptive mother of a child who spent his formative years in a Romanian orphanage. I spend most of my days dealing with the damage that was done to him. The harm done to many children like him in the eastern bloc set a new standard for wounded childhoods, but that harm is only a small part of the human tragedy of the Communist Evil Empire. Nicolae Ceausescu would have been a monster in any other century, but in the twentieth century, by communist standards, he was merely a petty thug. My boy is simply one victim of one institution of an insignificant communist country.

So it was with special interest that I picked up a copy of Francois Furet's magisterial book The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). In that book, Furet attempts to answer a question that surely must haunt any friend of liberty--indeed, any honest person. What made the communist idea appeal to so many people? Why did so many willingly overlook the evidence that the Soviet Union and its satellites were not the workers' paradises promised by Marxist analysis? The appeal of the communist idea continues to be so great that many people still refuse to see the great harm that it did. Leftists throughout American academia continue to make excuses for the criminal empire established by Lenin, nourished by Stalin, and still fed in places such as China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Furet places the rise of the communist idea within the European revolutionary intellectual tradition. He also offers a psychological analysis of the rhetorical strategies pioneered by Lenin and perfected by Stalin. Because those strategies continue to serve as the mainstay of the radical left in the United States, it is well worth the trouble to identify them accurately and analyze them carefully.

The Historical Analysis

World War I

Almost everyone understands that World War I played a major part in the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire. The Romanoff dynasty had exhausted the blood, treasure, and patience of the people of an empire that spanned eleven time zones. By 1917, the demoralized Russians were desperate for peace, and for the most part they acquiesced in the Bolshevik Revolution. Those who did resist were too weak to succeed.

Furet convincingly shows that the Great War laid the groundwork for the communist idea not only in Russia itself but throughout the Europe. The disillusionment occasioned by the conflict gave the Bolsheviks greater legitimacy than they could have achieved any other way.

The war had been a disaster, even for the victors. It had engaged entire populations, not simply the military classes, as in prior times. Therefore, its psychological effects were widespread. As Furet puts it,

Since 1918, France had been living in the shadow of war. In every household, a photograph of a deceased father, brother or husband stood enshrined on the mantle; every village had its war monument in the main square, engraved with a long list of the fallen--a moving sight even today. No one knew that this formidable military victory would be the last of the century, but all were aware of its price, which they continued to pay from their stock of memories. (228) The war left the people vulnerable on several levels. First, life in the trenches transformed the mental universe of the men trapped there. The appalling hardships of life in those trenches undermined the habits of mind necessary to democracy and even to civilization itself, for the soldiers in such situations are "reduced to life in a herd" and have "lost the power to reflect.... Their willpower, too, is dying. They are surrendering to discipline, which leads them this way and that, surrendering to chance, which gives them life or death. They feel they are in the hands of fate. This is the very opposite of civilization" (56; see also 49, 163,228,271).

After the war, the survivors were easy prey to two opposite appeals. Nihilism and senseless savagery seemed to be the truth of their experience in the trenches. At the same time, they had an eerie familiarity with violence. Fighting that appeared to have some point became oddly comforting. Some were eager for peace, whereas others were habituated to violence and somehow untroubled by it (183).

In either case, the vast majority of people were suspicious of the leaders and the institutions that had led them into the war. The Great War undermined the West's faith in its institutions of constitutional democracy and in the market economy, which many liberals had thought would prevent war. The traumatized population fell easily under the sway of ideologues, both communists and fascists, who attacked democracy and capitalism (75,184, 170).

The settlement of the war also set the stage for the revolutionary mentality because the treaties themselves were revolutionary. Although this claim seems startling, a glance at the maps of Europe before and after the Great War will quickly demonstrate its truth. Of the four continental empires with which the war began--the Ottoman, the German, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian--three were completely scattered or dismantled. Only defeated Germany remained intact. The small national states had no realistic chance of continued independence. As Furet observes, the "small, multi-ethnic states ... merely reproduced the shortcomings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those little states were as divided within their frontiers as they had been within the old, and were separated from one another by even greater hostility than they had experienced under German or Hungarian domination" (59). The stage was set for continual instability and upheaval and the discontent born of unrealistic expectations.

In all these ways, the Great War left Europe vulnerable to the appeal of the communist idea. The war inculcated the revolutionary mentality and the normality of violence, while creating a longing for peace; it discredited the institutions of the old Europe--the parliaments and stock exchanges that had led to or at least had been unable to prevent the war. Fighting in the war contributed to a sense of powerlessness and nihilism, a feeling that no one could prevent disaster, but, in any event, nothing mattered very much.

Enter the...