The basic statement of American anti-Communism, as well as the basic
conception of the Cold War, is the one expressed by William Buckley,
Jr., who got it from James Burnham. I quote: "In 1917 history changed
gears." Apart from the weirdness of such a mechanical metaphor--as if
history were an automobile--the meaning of it is that the Russian
Communist revolution was the principal and decisive event of this
century, which thereafter was marked by the struggle between
International Communism and the Free World (whatever that is). There
are few statements about the history of the world of which one may
say that they are complete nonsense. This is one of them.

The principal event of the twentieth century--which was a short
century, lasting seventy-five years, from 1914 to 1989--was the
outbreak of the First World War in 1914. I need not expatiate what
this catastrophe meant for Western civilization. The First World War
led to the Second World War, and the Second World War to the Cold
War. The two world wars were the two enormous mountain ranges in the
shadows of which we lived until 1989.

The Russian Communist revolution in 1917 occurred during the First
World War. This alone ought to reduce its historical importance.
Unlike the French Revolution, which had spread across Western Europe,
and which then led to a quarter century of great wars, the Russian
Revolution was one consequence of a war then current, not the cause
of it. Again, unlike the French and American Revolutions, the Russian
one did not spread anywhere. Indeed, until 1945 the Soviet Union was
the only Communist state in the world. Also, Communism in Russia
could survive only at the price of the very retreat and diminution of
Russia itself. From 1917 to 1920 five new states--Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland--broke off from Russia. They were
determinedly anti-Communist ones--again, the very opposite of what
had happened after the French Revolution.

Lenin thought and said that the location of the first Communist
revolution in Russia was an accident, that further revolutions would
very soon occur across Europe, and especially in Germany (he is
waiting still in his unquiet grave). Lenin was a revolutionary, and a
statesman not at all (Stalin turned out to be the opposite). Had the
first Communist regime been established in Germany, its influence
would have been immeasurably greater: because of German discipline,
German energy, German organization and German reputation. The fact
that Communism was incarnated in backward and semi-barbaric Russia
was fatal to its reputation--except for conventicles of intellectuals
and wannabe "revolutionaries" elsewhere in the world.

During the quarter century after 1920, there were three great forces
in the world. They were not only apparent on the political map but
repeated within almost every nation of the globe, even in Asia and in
the Americas, where each of the three ideologies had its partisans
and its opponents. There was Western parliamentary democracy,
incarnated by the English-speaking peoples and in Scandinavia and
Western Europe. There was Communism, incarnated, I repeat, solely in
Soviet Russia. And there was a new force, anti-Communist and
nationalist socialism, incarnated in many places in the world but
most forcefully in the Third Reich of Germany. Of these three forces,
Communism, in spite of its assertion of being international, was the
weakest, while National Socialism was the strongest. Eventually this
became evident in the Second World War. To defeat the German Third
Reich, the in many ways unnatural coalition of Communists and
Capitalists, of Russia and the English-speaking democracies, was
needed. Neither of them could do it without the other. The Russians
could not have conquered Germany without the Anglo-Americans, and the
Anglo-Americans--in spite of their tremendous superiority in manpower
and material resources--would not have been able to conquer Germany
by themselves. That alone should give us pause to think; but, then,
this is not the main argument of this essay.

I move on now to the history of the Cold War (the coming of which
Hitler had predicted but which came, fortunately, too late for him).
If there is a key document for the evolution of the Cold War it is
not Stalin's speech in February 1946, nor Churchill's Fulton speech
about the Iron Curtain a month later, nor Yalta or Potsdam or Tehran.
It is Churchill's statement to de Gaulle in November 1944 (recounted,
incidentally, not in the former's but in the latter's war memoirs).
After the liberation of Paris, Churchill had come to visit de Gaulle.
The Frenchman tried to wean him away from the special Anglo-American
alliance, but in vain. Among other things, de Gaulle said: Look at
the Americans. They are inexperienced. They are letting half of
Europe go to the Russians, without thinking much about it. Churchill
responded, "Yes, Russia is now a hungry wolf amidst a flock of sheep.
But after the meal comes the digestion period." As early as 1940
Churchill saw that in that war there were only two alternatives:
either Germany would dominate all of Europe or Russia would
dominate--temporarily--the eastern part of it; and one half of Europe
(especially the western half) was better than none. After the war
would come the digestion period; and the Russians would not be able
to digest their East European conquests.

And so it was to be. And how soon these digestion problems appeared!
In 1948 Tito's Yugoslavia broke off from Stalin's empire. In 1949
Stalin thought it best to put an end to his--partial--blockade of
West Berlin. In 1950 his prudence and caution dictated that he give
no support to the North Koreans, requesting the Chinese do that
instead. The result was this: before 1950 North Korea had been
largely a Russian satellite; by 1952 it had become a Chinese one. In
1952 Stalin (and his successors through 1953) was seriously
considering the ditching of the East German Communist state, in
exchange for an establishment of a "neutral"--that is, not
American-allied--united German state. In 1954 the Russians agreed to
retreat from Austria, and they gave up their privileges and ports and
bases in eastern China. In 1955 they abandoned their naval base in
Finland. In 1956 came the Hungarian and Polish revolutions. In 1958
their quarrel with China became public. In 1959 Khrushchev came to
the United States, hoping among other things to get American support
in his developing conflict with Communist China--in vain. In 1961 the
drain of people fleeing from Communist East Germany had become so
dangerous that its regime was forced to close up East from West
Berlin by a wall.

In 1962 came the Cuban Missile Crisis, from the beginning to the end
of which it was (or, rather, should have been) evident that the
Russians would not risk anything like a war for the sake of Cuba
(just as in 1956, all anti-Communist rhetoric notwithstanding, the
United States did not for a moment consider a war for the sake of
Hungary). Indeed, the foreign policy of the United States was not
only content with the existing division of Europe and of Germany and
of Berlin, but would do nothing to risk upsetting it. As for the
Vietnam War, Russian policy was similar to their Korean one: do
little or nothing, don't risk anything.

Now the interesting--and, at least in some ways, lamentable--thing to
notice is that the highest tide of American anti-Communism (which
many people at the time equated with American patriotism), the
highest peaks of American military and nuclear preparations, the
greatest burgeoning of an American military-industrial state,
occurred precisely in those periods when the Soviet Union was in
retreat: in the 1950s in the Eisenhower years, and again in the 1980s
during the Reagan era, propelled by the ideology of anti-Communism.
In the latter period the Russians gave up Communism and their East
European empire and their presence in Germany and Berlin; and not
because Reagan forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy but because no
one believed in Communism any longer--something that, with all of its
fabulous intelligence apparatus, even the CIA was unable to foresee,
as indeed was admitted when it came to the demolition of the Berlin
Wall.

But then this article is not meant to be a one-sided or potted
summary of the Cold War. Its purpose is to argue the yawning failures
of the ideology of anti-Communism. So let me close this portion of it
with what I think is a trenchant observation. In 1945 many thousands
of Germans committed suicide. Many of those who killed themselves
were not National Socialist party leaders, some of them not even
party members, but all of them believers. But I know not of a single
instance, in or around 1989, when a believing Communist committed
suicide because of the collapse of Communism, in Russia or elsewhere.
Dogmatic believers in Communism had ceased to exist long before, even
as dogmatic anti-Communists continued to flourish.

One argument that may be raised against the historical overview I
have sketched is that, in the United States at least, Communists were
more influential in the interwar period than were American
pro-Fascists or pro-Nazis. This, too, may be arguable: for it can be
said that in the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt's most dangerous popular
challengers came from the Right, not from the Left: from Huey Long
and Father Coughlin, for example. Still, the influence and the
intellectual appeal of Communism in America was considerable, an
influence that spread well beyond the limited number of American
Communists. Again there is one statement that sums up the matter
succinctly and precisely--a sentence in the first volume of George
Kennan's Memoirs:

The penetration of the American governmental services by members or
agents (conscious or otherwise) of the American Communist Party in
the 1930s was not a figment of the imagination. It really existed:
and it assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also
not trivial.

There is no need to rehearse the history of the CPUSA during the
crucial second quarter of the twentieth century. There exists a
sufficiency of serious studies about the topic, including the
sociology--more precisely, the sociography--of immigrant and native
American Communists. But, again, there is a written passage (ignored
by the authors of the aforementioned studies) that I find especially
telling. It is germane to the history of the 1930s, when some
American Communists and Communist sympathizers succeeded in advancing
themselves to certain governmental and bureaucratic positions in
which they were no longer mere members of a revolutionary and largely
uninfluential fringe group. The author of this passage is Edmund
Wilson, who, like many other American intellectuals, had not been at
all intelligent, or even perceptive, about what Communism meant. (In
1935, after a journey to Russia in the midst of Stalin's purges, he
wrote that while there he had been "at the moral top of the world.")
But in 1953, in his new foreword to the paperback edition of his 1929
novel, I Thought of Daisy, he wrote:

Some time in the late thirties, at the time when . . . [the Soviets
were] coming to seem respectable and Communism a passport to power in
an impending international bureaucracy, I thought of doing a brief
sequel to Daisy, in which some Washington official would be giving
himself a sense of importance and enjoying a good deal of excitement
through an underground connection with the Communists. . . . [Their]
set would go on drinking, playing bridge and making passes at one
another's girls with the conviction that these activities had been
given a new dignity by being used to cover up operations which would
eventually prove world-shaking and land them somehow at the top of
the heap.

I consider this passage to be the best, and most perceptive,
description of a certain kind of American Communist agent--to wit,
the Alger Hiss type. In certain positions, and in certain
circumstances, their influences, as Kennan put it, were "never
overwhelming" but "also not trivial." They were able to do harm.
Still, marked by their fateful immaturity, most of these people were
playing at spying--not unlike most of the "revolutionaries" of the
1960s, who were only playing at being revolutionaries.

This should also reduce--or at least qualify--the importance of the
recent "revelatory" documents from Moscow. In the first place, an
agent must make work for himself, to prove that he is doing his job
well. This was particularly true of members of the Soviet secret
services when they reported that they had succeeded in recruiting X
or Y, and when they listed others as "agents"--which, in many cases,
was a vast exaggeration. (In the same way, many of the victims of the
internal Soviet purges in the 1930s were the victims of overzealous
secret policemen.) In the second place, at least in the 1930s, the
materials their American collaborators provided to their Soviet
contacts were not always valuable, for example the few pieces that
Alger Hiss seems to have typed and given to his Soviet "drop" in
1938. I never doubted that Hiss was one of these sorry birds; but
looking at some of these "documents" with the eye of a diplomatic
historian, I found them of little or no value whatsoever. But then
consider what every experienced historian knows (or at least ought to
know), which is that documents do not make history, but rather it is
history that makes documents: who wrote them and when and why and
how? intended for what and for whom?

However, as I have said, a fair amount of harm was done: perhaps less
by the passing of American state or nuclear secrets to the Soviets
than by the protracted influence of Communist sympathizers in
American publishing, as well as other academic and opinion-forming
activities in the 1940s. While on the one hand we have the new
revelations of Moscow documents (sometimes of questionable value), we
also have the special pleading of nostalgic reminiscences about
American Communists under siege in the climate around 1950--as for
example in Philip Roth's recent novel, I Married a Communist, or the
protracted attempts at a rehabilitation of the Rosenbergs. I have no
sympathy for such views and arguments, for the simple reason that, at
the latest by 1945, those American Communists and their sympathizers
ought to have known better. By that time there was enough evidence
about the brutalities of Stalin and of Communists, not only in Russia
but in many other places of the world. Factual accounts of such
conditions, acts and events were available in a great variety of
books and articles, there for anyone who could read. Yet many
thousands of Communists and their sympathizers refused to give them a
thought. And here we meet with what seems to be the most essential
weakness of the human mind, leading straight to a corruption of
character, something that has nothing to do with Intelligence
Quotients or with functions of the brain: for it involves, not an
inability to think about certain matters, but an unwillingness to do
so.

In June 1848, less than a year after Marx had written his Communist
Manifesto, Alexis de Tocqueville walked across a Paris in the throes
of the first "Red" revolution in history. Here and there he talked
with the troops of General Cavaignac, gathering before the
barricades. The Russian émigré Alexander Herzen (hero of many
liberals ever since, including Isaiah Berlin) wrote that he despised
Tocqueville for that. Yet it was the same Tocqueville who soon saw
that the new danger for France and freedom was the popularity of
anti-Communism, leading to the dictatorship of Louis Napoleon. "The
insane fear of socialism", Tocqueville wrote in 1852, "throws the
bourgeois headlong into the arms of despotism. . . . But now that the
weakness of the Red party has been proved, people will regret the
price at which their enemy has been put down."

"In this sense", I wrote in 1959, "I do not hesitate to say that
Tocqueville was an anti-anti-Communist." And so am I. Allow me to sum
this up as briefly as I can. There are variations of
anti-anti-Communism. There are those anti-anti-Communists who
convince themselves that all enemies of freedom are to be found on
their Right and not on the Left: their colors are, plainly, pink. And
there is another kind of anti-anti-Communist who has no sympathy for
Communism but who is appalled by the errors and dishonesties of
anti-Communist ideology and of its propagation. (Such a posture does
not necessarily imply moderation; "moderation in everything,
including moderation.") Mathematically thinking, of course, an
anti-anti-Communist is a pro-Communist. But we neither speak nor
think mathematically. "Numbers", said Kierkegaard, "are a negation of
truth."

There are variations of anti-Communism too. Again, as with many
documents, they depend on the when and the where and the how. I have
nothing but admiration for the slightest evidences of courageous
anti-Communist acts or words in Stalinist Russia; or under whatever
Communist regime; or even within Communist parties or pro-Communist
conventicles anywhere in the world. But I have hardly more than
contempt for those who think it best to adopt anti-Communism as an
ideology when that is not only safe, but popular and even profitable
for themselves.

Of course, this tendency is apparent not merely among intellectuals
but among statesmen. Churchill and Hitler were both anti-Communists,
even as both of them recognized that the dominant impulse of the
century was nationalism, not Communism. Both knew that Stalin was
much more of a Russian nationalist than an international Communist.
But Churchill would, on occasion, publicly say so, while Hitler never
would. What Hitler recognized was the popular respectability of
anti-Communism--among "conservatives" but also among the working
classes. (The wish for respectability among the masses was one of the
many things that Marx had completely failed to recognize.) It was the
respectability of Hitler's anti-Communism--not the respectability of
his anti-Semitism--that brought him to power in Germany. In November
1932 he said to President Hindenburg, "The Bolshevization of the
masses proceeds rapidly." He knew that this was not true; but he also
knew that this kind of argument would impress Hindenburg and the
German conservatives. Less than three months later they installed him
in power.

Another eight months on he said, "The Red revolt could have spread
across Germany like wildfire. . . . We have been waging a heroic
struggle against the Communist threat." This at a time when the
Communists in Germany had been annihilated, with their leaders in
prison or in exile. To Germany's Catholic bishops he said, "The
defense of Europe against Bolshevism is our task for the next two or
three hundred years." That was the argument that inclined many
(though not all) European, British and American conservatives not to
oppose Hilter. In 1941 Archbishop (later Cardinal) von Galen spoke
out openly from the pulpit of his church against the Nazi policy of
euthanasia, a rare and perhaps unique public statement of opposition
during the entire history of Hitler's Reich. Hitler thought it best
not to move against or to restrain Galen, for in the same speech
Galen had welcomed the German invasion of Russia, that crusade
against atheistic Bolshevism. (And he did not say a word about the
German persecution and murdering of Jews.) There, in a nutshell, we
may find the essence of the Germans' tragedy.

In the history of the United States, too, the ideology of
anti-Communism long predates the Second World War, not to speak of
the Cold War. As early as 1854, George Fitzhugh, an intellectual
defender of the South, wrote that the enemies of the Southern order
were "Communists." The history of the first Red Scare in 1919-21 is
well known. Less well known are the statements of members of
Coolidge's cabinet, including the otherwise moderate Secretary of
State Frank B. Kellogg, to the effect that the troubles in Mexico in
the 1920s, and in Nicaragua, were due to "Bolsheviks." In December
1941, three days before Pearl Harbor, Senator Robert A. Taft (a hero
of many of today's conservatives) proclaimed that while "Fascism"
only appealed to a few, Communism was a much greater danger because
it appealed to many. (This when Hitler's armies stood fifteen miles
from Moscow.)

Between 1947 and 1955 the Second Red Scare--admittedly, with more
justification than the first--swelled into an oceanic tide, leading
to the entire identification of anti-Communism with American
patriotism. We need not list its many excesses here, except to note
two matters. One is that the ideological vision of International
Communism obscured and compromised the very perceptions, and the
conduct, of American foreign policy. The other is the
then-contemporaneous emergence of an American conservative movement,
the composition and ideology of which was as anti-Communist as it was
anti-liberal. Men and women who had been isolationists but a few
years before now became extreme internationalists, arguing not only
for the containment but for the conquest of the Soviet Union.

The consequences of this mutation of the political and ideological
climate were considerable. They included the opportunism of President
Eisenhower, who in 1945 had chosen to reject Churchill when it came
to Anglo-American political and military strategy in Central Europe,
preferring to approach Stalin directly instead. Less than eight years
later, the same Eisenhower refused Churchill again (privately
referring to him as senile and naive) when the English leader
proposed an attempt to negotiate a revision of the division of Europe
with the Soviet leadership, after Stalin's death. Or there was Henry
Luce's Life magazine, which in 1942 printed a full-page photograph of
Lenin with the caption: "This was perhaps the greatest man of the
century." Nine years later it editorialized that while Communism was
a Mortal Sin, McCarthyism was but a Venial one. The ultimate
beneficiary of this ideological revolution was of course Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s--when, for the first time in American history,
more Americans identified themselves as "conservatives" than as
"liberals."

And, as so often, intellectuals were quick in climbing onto the
bandwagon. There was Hannah Arendt, in her Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951), a flawed and fraudulent book from beginning to end. Flawed,
because her analysis of "totalitarianism" was nonsense; fraudulent,
because, after her manuscript had been rejected by publisher after
publisher, she quickly added two chapters about Stalin at the end.

Whittaker Chambers, who deserves our sympathy, was not fraudulent;
but he certainly was wrong in attributing to International Communism
the ability to engineer "mankind's decisive transformation . . .
about to close its 2000-year experience of Christian civilization."
Of course, these were the inclinations of an honest man to attribute
all of the evils of the world to the wrong from which he had, after
great inner troubles, escaped. Still, both Chambers' sense of
proportion and his perspective of history were flawed.

Some of the shrillest prophets of anti-Communism in the
"conservative" camp (Chambers did not identify himself as
"conservative") were former Communists or Trotskyites. Then in the
late 1960s, the wave of neoconservatism arose--composed mostly of men
and women for whom it had taken fifty years to discover that the
Russians were anti-Semitic. Since then, all of the dishonest and
imbecile Revisionists and Revolutionaries of the 1960s
notwithstanding, and all of the lamentable presence of Political
Correctness in American universities notwithstanding, the influence
of these so-called neoconservatives has become more and more evident,
and in certain areas of public discourse even prominent. Are they
more honest, or better, than the pinkish Lib-Lab intellectuals of the
Twenties and the Thirties? In some instances, perhaps yes; generally,
alas, no.

"Totalitarianism", as understood by Hannah Arendt, had certain
recognizable general characteristics. First, all totalitarians tended
to be anti-Semitic. Second, totalitarians aimed at the conquest of
the entire globe. Third, totalitarian rule was bound to become not
only broader but stricter and stricter as time went on. A mere few
years after her magnum opus appeared, events proved that all of this
was nonsense. Was Castro, or Pol Pot, or Ho Chi Minh anti-Semitic?
Was Khrushchev aneven greater tyrant than Stalin? All of this in no
way harmed her reputation, but that is not the point.
"Totalitarianism", not only to Hannah Arendt, but to libertarians and
to all kinds of conservatives, means the overall power of the state.
But look at Russia now, when the danger is the exact opposite: the
weakness, not the power, of the state.

We have experienced a phenomenon unparalleled in history, and there
are not many things unparalleled in history: a great empire giving up
its possessions--without external pressure, and without a bloody
revolution in its midst. By the 1980s the only people who believed in
the existence of International Communism--though there were, alas,
still many of them--were the conservatives and neoconservatives and
their plethora of timeservers in Reagan's administrations. Compared
to them the number of believers in Communism in Russia, or in the
Communist states of Eastern Europe, were a minuscule remnant. And now
we have the promoters of wild Capitalism in Russia, Harvard savants
such as Jeffrey Sachs--a successor of another Harvard illusionist
eighty years ago, the then-celebrated John Reed. It is at least
possible that the consequences of the Ten Days That Shook The World
may have been nothing compared to the consequences of the Ten Years
That Are Now Shaking Russia.

I fled my native country in 1946, fifty-three years ago, when I knew
that sooner rather than later it would fall under Communist rule. But
I did so not because Communism was strong, nor because Communism was
the ideology taken up by masses of my people. On the contrary:
Communism was unappealing; it was antiquated; it was unpopular,
except with a few. The reality was the presence of Russian armed
forces, not Communism; and that, I believed, would stay in my part of
Europe for a long time, perhaps fifty years. (I was ten years off,
thank God.) This distinction between Russian armed power and the
ideology of Communism was something that many Americans did not
comprehend--or perhaps did not wish to comprehend--or, perhaps more
precisely, were made not to comprehend by politicians, ideologues and
propagandists of all kinds. To illustrate this would take an entire
volume, and not a small one. Alas, the history--including the
psychology--of anti-Communism is yet to be written.

William F. Buckley, Jr.:

John Lukacs delights to provoke, and succeeds wonderfully in doing
so. This time around his launch is my having named 1917 and the
Communization of Russia the principal political event of the century.
"In 1917 history changed gears", to quote myself. In passing, Mr.
Lukacs bemoans the "weirdness" of the "mechanical metaphor"--"as if
history were an automobile." It's a lucky thing Lukacs was not around
when the Romans came up with deus ex machina.

What is he saying? That the Communist threat was ephemeral; that, as
a matter of fact, the Communist state dissolved ten years earlier
than he had predicted. He goes on to recite Soviet setbacks in Korea,
Berlin, Yugoslavia and China, which is on the order of telling us of
all the battles Napoleon lost. He is disdainful of the neocons'
efforts to mobilize a movement around the premises of the Committee
on the Present Danger. He mocks what others have thought an operative
distinction: "the struggle between International Communism and the
Free World (whatever that is)." "That" is the term used to describe
those nations in the world whose governments were not controlled by
Moscow or Peking.

The working distinction was entirely serviceable, guiding
geostrategic thought and action. In 1965 President Johnson sent the
Marines to the Dominican Republic to preempt what he feared would be
a coup by pro-Communists. If such a coup had succeeded, it would have
meant one more Castro in the Caribbean. At the time the Marines
arrived at the eastern end of the island, Baby Doc Duvalier was
lording it over the western half of Hispañola, presiding over as much
misery as Castro brought to Cuba; but in the global perspective,
Duvalier was nothing. Johnson was not engaged in a Wilsonian venture;
he waswatching over the ramparts.

Much of what Lukacs says is obvious, and not threatened by the
generality about 1917 that so aroused him. Yes, if Germany, not
Russia, had been Communized, that would have been more serious. Yes,
the true believers in Communism diminished significantly in number as
the oppressive emptiness of the Marxist regimes transpired. But it
wasn't pro-Communists we had so much to worry about, rather an
amalgam of defeatists, pacifists and accommodationists, on whom
successive regimes in Moscow banked to undermine the Western will.

The act of 1917 was less than critical historically? It fueled
Stalin's ideological imperialism in 1945. Here is a personal
perspective: I was nineteen years old when the bomb fell on
Hiroshima; I was a senior citizen when the Wall came down in Berlin.
My entire adult lifetime was spent during the period that Eastern
Europe was in chains. How critical Communist faith--sincere or
feigned--was to the leaders of the Soviet superpower we are free to
deliberate. But they thought it critical, even as one must suppose a
pope considers it critical to affirm Christianity. Gorbachev
reaffirmed his faith in Communism in January of 1987, the second year
in which he held power. The workers' banner had to be held high, he
thought, on pressing the war in Afghanistan, even if it rested on
philosophical, historical and sociological junk. He sought to justify
a mission that would otherwise have been denounced in the same
accents used to discredit British colonialism. Fidel Castro saw the
need to make this reaffirmation on the last day of 1998.

It's all very strange, given that dilettantes with minimum historical
ingenuity can argue discrete events as historically critical, e.g.,
the birth of Einstein; Hitler; Lenin. John Lukacs for years has
labored to dissociate himself from the credenda of us cold warriors,
who labored so hard to protect his liberties: One more fruit of
victory.

Robert Conquest:

John Lukacs seems to have abandoned his usual critical stance on a wide front; this note covers only some of his many points.

He quotes William Buckley, Jr., as saying that history changed gears in 1917, and insists that it really changed gears in 1914. But all this is metaphorical; and anyhow, if we stick to the metaphor history might be allowed more than one change of gear. And even if we accept that the outbreak of World War I was the beginning of the century's Gadarene rush, it can be argued that but for the Bolshevik Revolution that rush might yet have been stopped.

Odder yet are Lukacs' notions, first that Buckley was speaking ex cathedra, and second that he has formal authority over the views of anyone else.

This is all of a piece with his extraordinary listing of Nazism, Communism and antiCommunism as three "ideologies." Ideology is, to be sure, a word used variously by different people. But Lukacs' implication here is clearly that these three isms are comparable mindsets. They are not. First, as against Nazism and Communism, "anti-Communist" does not describe anyone's thought except on the issue of the nature of Communism. Whereas in the case of Communism, even if various of its sects interpreted it differently, they were all committed to a single and comprehensive world view. Anti-Communists were not; they included Catholics and atheists, conservatives and social democrats, Republicans and Democrats, Ernst Reuter and Arthur Koestler, George Orwell and Ernest Bevin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, Scoop Jackson and Ronald Reagan, and so on and on.

I think I too can claim to figure as an "anti-Communist" (anti-Stalinist, anti-Maoist, anti-Castroist) of long standing. The reasons for, and the nature of, my anti-Communism have not changed in the least over the decades. My political and philosophical opinions have changed in a number of ways - even to-ing and fro-ing more than once between the major American and British political parties. Most, but not all, serious anti-Communists are equally anti-Fascist. That is, they are anti-totalitarian: or, to put it another way, we reject all closed systems of political and social thought, all supposedly infallible historical predictions, in favor of pluralism, pragmatism, short views, trial and error.

In Lukacs' account of the Cold War's development, the USSR is shown as repeatedly withdrawing, or considering withdrawing, from Eastern Europe. One would hardly guess from this that, except for a few marginal territories, Soviet power in Europe stood on much the same lines in 1990 as in 1945. The only significant exception was Yugoslavia - which in any case remained Communist, and the independence of which from Moscow was more than offset by the almost simultaneous Sovietization of Czechoslovakia (never mentioned by Lukacs).

Again, Lukacs says that there was only one Communist state in 1945, as if to diminish the significance of its threat. Some of the temporarily independent states of the former Russian empire were reconquered and reintegrated into the new empire in 1918-20, so that there was only one Communist state because it had swallowed others (though even this omits Mongolia, for instance). To assert such a thing as of 1945, moreover, is simply to ignore the absorption of the Baltic States in 1940!

Lukacs rightly notes that some anti-Communists could legitimately be accused of hysteria. So could plenty of anti-antiCommunists, in America as elsewhere. Indeed, as one who remained in Europe after Lukacs left (and, in fact, lived in a Communist country until 1948), I note that in Britain and France virtually all the hysteria was from the anti-anti-Communist side - as Orwell pointed out long ago.

Meanwhile, surely we can be spared the logic of "Father Coughlin was a half-crazed fanatic. Father Coughlin was antiCommunist. Therefore all anti-Communists are half-crazed fanatics."

Robert Conquest is a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His Reflections on a Ravaged Century will be published by W.W. Norton later this year.

Nathan Glazer:

John Lukacs' "The Poverty of Anti-Communism", like so much of his writing, is filled with obiter dicta, some of which strike one as well taken, some of which seem nonsensical (Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism "fraudulent"?; her analysis of totalitarianism "nonsense"?), and others of which are just mystifying.

To reduce the significance of anti-Communism, it is necessary to reduce the significance of Communism, and Lukacs does this in three ways: he concentrates on Russia and the Soviet Union as the chief, indeed the only significant, carrier of Communism; he ignores the role of Communism in Western Europe; and he just about ignores the role of Communism in China - after all, the largest country in the world - and in much of the Third World.

One problem in getting to grips with his essay is that while we have a clear idea of two of the three great forces that according to Lukacs competed for world dominance in the second quarter of the twentieth century, we have no clear idea of what this third force, Communism, was, and of what Lukacs conceives it to be. Parliamentary democracy and National Socialism can be specifically described, in terms of their ideology and their political and economic institutions. But what is the Communism that competed with them and that according to Lukacs was the weakest of the three? He treats it basically as Russian nationalism and imperialism. Indeed, Russia was economically and in the end militarily weaker than either Germany under Hitler, or the United States. Fears of this Communism could in many quarters be described as excessive and exaggerated. But Communism had a specifically ideological content, as did parliamentary democracy and National Socialism, and this ideological content - its philosophy of history, its criticism of capitalism, its utopian hope in an ideal and final condition of society to be constituted by the proletariat - is not so easily dismissed. It had a robust history, and one which is not yet at an end, despite the collapse of the Russian empire.

It may well be the case that hardly anyone believed in Communism in Russia as its economy disintegrated, and as its people experienced Communism in practice, as realized by the dictatorial leaders of an authoritarian party. But the West was confronting a closed society where one could not conduct opinion polls, in possession of very powerful armed forces and atomic weapons, and an ideology that demanded fulfillment through expansion. It is too easy after the fact to dismiss the serious concern that this situation required. Possibly no one believes in Communism in China now too, and we deal there with more conventional issues in foreign policy and strategy, and the fact that the posters of Marx and Engels are still to be found there may not matter much. But North Korea, which gives us much concern, is an avowedly and formally Communist state. Would it be just as troublesome if it were simply a nationalist North Korea without Communist ideology? I do not think so.

In Italy and France there were huge Communist parties, Communism had great influence among the intellectual classes, and we feared a possible Communist victory in those countries in the wake of World War II. The heirs of these parties still play a large role in the politics of these countries. What do we make of this? Was Communism simply an epiphenomenon? Was it simply to be shrugged off? Or did it not require continual battle, in various spheres, from the academic and intellectual to the electoral, to keep the spread of Communism in check?

There is no reference to Latin America or Africa or South Asia in Lukacs' essay. Was the appeal of Communism in those areas simply a calculated ploy by cynical leaders to see how much poor countries could get from the Cold War antagonists, by threatening to go over to the other side? That was part of the story of the surprising strength of Communism in many poor countries. But a larger part was the attraction of a fully formulated ideology that explained why poor people became and remained poor, and why poor nations became and remained poor. In the universities of Latin America, of Africa, of South Asia, that ideology is still dominant in the social sciences and the humanities. It plays no small role still in the universities of the Western World.

Just as Communism came in many versions, so did anti-Communism. Anti-Communism, in practice, was simply hardheadedness and common sense as to just what was happening in Communist-ruled countries to political rights and the exercise of freedom of thought, resistance to the romanticization and glorification of Communism, awareness of the threat posed by the expansion of Communism. In the United States and Western Europe, anti-Communism was specifically a fight against the illusions that captured Edmund Wilson in 1935, and that he had outgrown by 1953. A good number of people, and particularly those who became the neoconservatives (who, Lukacs incorrectly writes, "had taken fifty years to discover that the Russians were anti-Semitic"), had known about Communism all along, and had no romantic illusions about it at all. They did not need Solzhenitsyn, as apparently French intellectuals did, to tell them about Soviet labor camps and the fate of political dissidents.

There may have been problems with antiCommunism, in some of its versions, but on the whole it performed a key intellectual task of the post-World War II world, and compared to the significance of that task its errors and excesses were venial.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University and co-editor of The Public Interest.