Friends who belonged to no party were also unsympathetic. But how did the atrocities of Vietnam make Soviet Communism more loveable? he kept asking. The answer was clear. In the bipolar Cold War, communism was the lesser of two evils. To attack it was to sustain the grisly project of capitalism and US imperialism. To ‘bang on’ about abuses in Budapest and Warsaw, to remember the Moscow show trials or the imposed Ukrainian famine was to ‘align’ himself with political undesirables, with the CIA and, ultimately, with fascism.
