WALTER LAQUEUR
309
therefore was bound to clash with Soviet ambitions in Europe and else–
where. In Italy those who had been part and parcel of the fascist cultural
life (which included, for instance, the entire Italian film industry) rushed
into the Communist camp. It is doubtful whether Orwell would have
found a publisher in France and Italy at the time; translating Orwell,
once he had been published elsewhere, was a different story.
In 1950
Partisan Review
published an essay by Raymond Aron on
the French intellectuals, which was part of his
Opium of the Intellectu–
als-an
important book
to
this day, even though its political impact at
the time was quite limited. Most French intellectuals bitterly opposed
him not because he was wrong but because they suspected that he was
right. Aron tried to account for the anti-Americanism then prevalent in
France and for the fascination with Soviet Communism of so many of
his Parisian contemporaries,
To explain anti-Americanism was not at all difficult. Which super–
power has ever been popular? Certainly not the Roman Empire, not
Spain and Portugal at the height of their power, not the British Empire
nor France under Napoleon, not Russia nor China nor the Japan of the
Coprosperity Sphere. There is an unending literature about the subject:
superpowers are always dangerous even when polite and considerate.
They are threatening simply because they are strong. They cease
to
be
unpopular not when they try to make friends but when they cease to be
powerful. Aron's analysis, in any case, cannot account for American
anti-Americanism.
Nor does the ideological situation in 2003 resemble in any way that
of 1948. The Soviet Union no longer exists; the attraction of commu–
nism is now limited to a few sects with hardly any intellectuals. The var–
ious relativist postmodernist, postcolonialist fashions can account
perhaps for anti-Westernism, but they are no more an opium of West–
ern intellectuals than bin Laden's fundamentalism. Anti-globalism ral–
lies radicals of many countries and doctrines from the far Left to the
extreme Right, but it is infinitely stronger on rejection than on a vision
of a better world. And it is not a movement of the intelligentsia, except
perhaps of the very young.
PARATAXIC DISTORTION: Back to 1948-there were other reasons, as
well, for the rejection of communism. Important sections of the Ameri–
can intelligentsia, including the founders of
Partisan Review,
had been
through the Marxist school in the 1930S, whereas in France and Italy
Marxism was discovered only after the war. In some respects Marxism
was a good school (it is easy
to
imagine what Marx and Lenin would
