NEW YORK — Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the collapse of communism in Europe. Liberated from the complexity of knowing too much about the cruel past, the young people of Eastern Europe's postcommunist generation seem uninterested in what their parents and grandparents endured.
Yet the recent revelation of the Czech writer Milan Kundera's presumed complicity in the face of Stalinism is but the latest of the long half-life of a toxic past. Other examples come to mind: the accusations of collaboration with the secret police raised against Lech Walesa, Romania's public controversies surrounding Mircea Eliade's fascist past, and the attacks on the alleged "Jewish monopoly of suffering" that equate the Holocaust with the Soviet Gulag.
Friedrich Nietzsche said if you look in the eye of the Devil for too long, you risk becoming a devil yourself. A Bolshevik anticommunism, similar in its dogmatism to communism itself, has from time to time run riot in parts of Eastern Europe. In country after country, that Manichaean mind-set, with its oversimplifications and manipulations, was merely refashioned to serve the new people in power.