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have made of postcolonial studies), and it also preached the unity of the–
ory and practice. But there could be little doubt that there was in the
real world a great and growing distance between the theory and prac–
tice of communism-such as Stalinism with its purges and the many
unattractive features of post-Stalin regimes even after the thaw. Com–
munism as a doctrine lost virtually all attraction decades before it
ceased to exist as a political system.
With Vietnam and its aftermath attitudes changed. Pro-Sovietism was
no longer in fashion, but it was replaced first by third worldism and
later by various political-intellectual fashions in the academic world
which had shared the belief that in world affairs America was seldom if
ever right. Harry Stack Sullivan developed a concept called parataxic
distortion.
In
less fancy terms this means that a cat having burned its
behind on a hot stove will not sit on another stove, even if it is cold. This
is an insight of considerable wisdom in understanding political attitudes
of the intelligentsia . The fact that-as some saw it-the wrong side had
won the Cold War (triumphalism!} only caused further embitterment.
It
was considered either a temporary victory only or an unfortunate his–
torical accident.
Developments in Western Europe proceeded on different lines.
In
France fellow traveling had been the prevailing fashion during the
1950S and' 60S, but then Sartre went out of fashion, and it was reluc–
tantly accepted that Raymond Aron had been right.
In
part it was a gen–
erational issue, with young philosophers discovering the crimes of
Stalinism and the writings of Solzhenitsyn (whose impact was greater in
France than in any other country), which proved that there had been a
thing called the Gulag.
In
Britain it took another thirty years for this
message fully to percolate.
POLITICAL PREDICTION: Orwell once wrote that some ideas are so crazy
that only an intellectual can believe them. But this does not account for
the reasons why.
It
frequently seems
to
be correct not just with regard
to litterateurs, but also to "clerks" such as regional specialists, as the
balance sheet of academic area studies tends
to
show.
In
the field of Chi–
nese studies up to the 1960s, there was a great deal of sympathy for
Maoism even though it should have been clear that many things had
gone wrong in Communist China .
In
Soviet studies in the 1970S and
'80S, "revisionism" was the leading fashion, and the same is true
(to
give but one specific example) for the study of Communist East Ger–
many in West Germany. Not only was there sympathy for these regimes,
they were also thought to be far more deeply rooted and popular than
