Free Revolutionaries by Eric J. Hobsbawm

national politics, merely to ally with communists was fatal, since for them the object of any alliance was to control and then destroy the allies. (This was a not implausible supposition, but the corollary that they would inevitably succeed was patently at variance with the evidence.) Internationally, perhaps even domestically, it could only be resisted by adopting its own ruthless methods, even at the cost of suspending the political freedoms of liberal democracy. And so on. While these beliefs, more usually held by ideologists than by practical politicians faced with mass communist parties – de Gaulle, Mitterand, De Gasperi, Andreotti – were reinforced by an entirely legitimate and justifiable horror of regimes such as that of the USSR , they had no visible relationship to the actual danger of communism. Indeed, one might even argue that the excesses of anti-communism were inversely correlated to the degree of the communist threat. In Germany and the United States the two democracies which limited or abolished the legality of communist parties, the political appeal of the local parties was negligible.
    In short, myth and counter-myth, illusion and counter-illusion in the twentieth century wars of (secular) religion, can no more be separated by the historian of our century than the Protestant Reformation and Catholic reactions to it can be by the sixteenth-century historian. That Furet fails to do so, throws serious doubt on his historical project.
    A sympathetic, though not uncritical, reviewer has written: ‘Despite being confined to one dictatorship and a few intellectuals . . . [this book] is the first stab at a twenty-first-century history of our time.’ 5 In my view this is exactly what it is not. It isa book by a highly intelligent Western intellectual unsympathetic to communism, which could have been written at any time in the past thirty years, or – apart from references to later works – in the past half-century. Yet any history of our times which hopes to survive into the next century must, after 1989, which clearly marks the end of an entire historic era, begin by trying to take a tentative step away from the ideological and political battlefields of that era. Anyone who has tried to do so knows how enormous an effort of intellect and imagination this requires, and how great the obstacles are. Nevertheless, it has now become possible to try, and the attempt must be made. It does not require us to abandon our sympathies and convictions. Claudio Pavone’s remarkable
Una guerra civile
(1991) has made the effort to see the Italian Resistance of 1943–45, not as most ex-resisters and the official legitimation of the Italian Republic are inclined to present it, as a simple nationalist rising against foreigners and fascism, but as a conflict between two minorities of Italians – one, admittedly, much larger than the other – in which most Italians were not involved until the last moment, except in a few mountain areas. His work is in no way intended as a critique of or attack on the Resistance. Pavone was and remains an anti-fascist and loyal to the Resistance in which he took part. It is simply now possible for him to see his own political choices and commitments in some historical perspective.
    Strangely, Furet begins to approach some kind of historical perspective in his treatment of fascism with which he has never been associated. This is evident in his treatment of Italian fascism, though he makes far too many concessions to Nolte’s attempt to exonerate the Nazis, which is not to be confused with the necessary effort, however much we may recoil from it, to remove the history of Nazism from the realm of moral theology and to reinsert it into German and global history. Unfortunately, this is not the case with his approach to the history of communism. What one criticizes is not his comprehensible oppositionto communism, even though it sometimes leads him to turn an