When the Facts Change, Essays 1995-2010, Tony Judt, edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans, William Heinemann, 2015, £25 (hardcover)

Ours is an age of bullish anti-intellectualism, communal apathy and hostility towards any form of behaviour reversal, or ‘new way’. In this situation, Tony Judt’s voice resounds with eloquence, truthfulness and sanity. Judt was a great writer gifted with foresight, and accepted, at least initially, as a great historian. But he became an arguably even greater essayist and memoirist, whose lingering sense of despair at ill-conceived global events and intractable international enmities never compromised his clear-sighted writing. Nevertheless, it was the rigorous historian in Judt that formed the cornerstone of his subsequent literary achievements.

Since his cruel death in 2010, at the age of sixty-two,  from the rare and devastating Lou Gehrig’s disease, Judt’s name has steadily advanced into a wider public consciousness from the privileged enclave of the New York Review of Books, where he  published much of his finest work. Descended from East European Jewry and brought up as a secular Jew in Putney, London, in his youth Judt adopted left-wing Zionist sympathies, even volunteering as an army translator in the Six  Day War. His ascension from that to an impeccably credited free-thinking, European-leaning intellectual at first glance seems unlikely. However, Judt, whose life was to be marked by illuminating periods of travel across the European hinterlands, was educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the École Normale Supérieur in Paris, and later taught at Oxford, Cambridge and Berkeley. By the time of his death he had produced some fourteen books. At the end of the 1980s, he was best known as a commentator on the French left, producing the cleverly named Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956, a book which endorsed his scholarly reputation. His wilful tearing into Sartre and others over their communist sympathies revealed the terrier to come. Ironically, it was the treacherous bog of Israel and Palestine that also made Judt’s name, though this time due to his controversial criticism of Israel’s serially blinkered Zionist regime three decades later.

Some years ago I came to Tony Judt by chance, picking up a book called Reappraisals, which claimed to have been written because its author was exasperated with the current political trend for conveniently jettisoning recent history, and then forging on with ’the new’ (if policies and events are ever really new), hurling what went before onto the scrap heap of failure. These essays from the New York Review of Books centred on memory and history in twentieth-century Europe, each with a rather witty and endearing postscript by Judt as to how they were received by some of those they criticized. Judt did not take sides. He was above all a man of principle, whose arguments and opinions were always refreshingly free of the dogma and intransigence that marked so many of those he held to task. One always feels that there is a silent gathering rage behind his statements, but one held in check by enforced discipline to focus on the pertinent fact within the confusing slurry of history. Reappraisals bore all the Judt hallmarks, including brilliantly written portraits of figures such as Arthur Koestler, an essay which must rank as one of the greatest restoration portraits of a once highly visible thinker.

Judt’s masterwork has to be Europe: A History post 1945, a breeze block of a work whose sheer scale and consistent levels of perspicacity leave one reeling with admiration – not least at his command over such a sprawling subject. He ranges boldly across European states and periods, filleting out the key events and developments from the Cold War period and beyond to give a much clearer picture of how each political or ethnic disaster – and on occasion, rare triumph – lead into further labyrinthine challenges for the continent. Judt felt that no proper history of this period was available and so set out to fill the gap himself. Clearly critical of Norman Davies’s Europe: A History, which had been hailed as a ‘masterpiece of historical narrative’, Judt felt compelled to embrace the entire period, to set the record straight as he saw it.

The demolition of Davies in ‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ is surely one of the most protracted and precise hatchet jobs in history and constitutes just one of the electrifying pieces in this posthumous round up of essays fittingly entitled When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. The collection begins with an at once fascinating and moving introduction by Judt’s widow Jennifer Homans, in which she attempts to reveal something of Judt’s existential make-up through the intricacies of his daily working life, latterly amid the challenges of illness. The collection contains key essays on Israel and the Middle East, including the infamous ‘Israel: The Alternative’, which predictably caused a storm of outrage on its publication in the New York Review of Books in 2008. Other essays explore US policy in the post 9/11 world, the tragic illusion of European economic union, and portraits of a triumvirate of intellectuals whom Judt held dear, particularly the Polish writer Leszek Kolakowski. There is also a powerful argument for social democracy, two wonderful clarion calls for the railway, and a sensitive study of Camus’s The Plague, an author whose portrait was said to adorn Judt’s desk.

In his attempts to find a civilized passage through the impasses which bedevil our times, Judt looks to the future as well as back in these essays, ruffling a few feathers on the way.. Exasperated by stagnation, he concluded that the Israel situation was intractable and that a ‘new way’ had to be found beyond the putrefying corpse of the peace process, still propped up at the negotiating table. But this ‘fact’ that the opposing groups had to compromise, step back and find a new solution – Judt’s idea being a bi-national state with the two players sharing equal rights – was met with outrage, vitriol and even cries of ‘traitor’ from the Jewish nationalists.   

In his essay on proposed increases in European integration, written some two decades ago but so prophetic in terms of the current crisis, he again digs behind the rigid views and convictions of those who glibly conjure a hallucinatory paradise ahead for the successfully integrated nations. Judt exposes the fault lines in the European economic fantasy, ominously suggesting rich countries will surge ahead of the losers and Germany irresistibly rise to control events. In 2015, pretty much exactly what Judt warned of has happened. Most impressively, he makes the salient point, now justified, when speaking of the disenfranchised second-class countries in regard to the rise of nationalism:  ‘The risk is that what remains to these Europeans is ‘the nation’, or more precisely, nationalism … we should recognize the reality of nations and states, and note the risk that, when neglected, they become an electoral resource of nationalists.’ Judt goes on to suggest that simply chanting ‘Europe’ as some kind of mantra for the cure that will heal all our national wounds just does not wash, and concludes sensibly: ‘’Europe’ is more than a geographical notion but less than an answer.’ Again one senses Judt as the brakeman, stepping back to ‘reappraise’, suggesting realistic alternatives whilst in his heart knowing they will not come to pass. But most important for him is to present the facts and the ‘possibility’ of change, to be expertly instructed by historical precedents and their possible worth as a prefiguration for present and future.

In the essay ‘The New World Order’, Judt unsurprisingly lambasts George Bush and his cronies over the Iraq war and its aftermath. The essay, published in 2005, ominously sums up with the line, ‘I see a bad moon rising’. That moon we now know was Syria’s meltdown and its toxic fallout, ISIS. Judt explores the consequences of the ‘shadow falling across the American Republic’ through the 1990s and the decay of the country’s self-appointed and eminently self-serving role as world policeman, which had begun to fail before the Millennium and was dealt a lethal blow through 9/11 and the ensuing cataclysm of Iraq. He states unequivocally that this shadow ‘has nothing to do with the contradictions or paradoxes of humanitarian undertakings. It is the consequence of the discrediting of the United States’. Judt argues that at least in the past Washington’s choices had a veneer of logic in whom they supported and propped up with a view to Cold War strategy, but that today all is fluid and chaotic. Although we are familiar with this current of chaos now due to a succession of extraordinary ‘events’, Judt is speaking from at least a decade ago, the first stage of the corruption of Iraq’s entrails.

Judt clearly relishes railing against explicit American hypocrisy. ‘Today we align ourselves with the world’s most brutal, terrorizing tyrants in a war ostensibly against brutal terrorists and tyranny. We are peddling a simulacrum of democracy from an armoured truck at fifty miles per hour and calling it freedom.’ Now, a decade on, we live with the inexhaustible Syrian bloodbath and its fallout, the publicly revealed weakness and dithering of American policy. We see that exemplified in the recent switching back and forth of tyrants such as President Assad as enemies to be deposed, then reluctant allies to be harnessed, as the West desperately tries to stem Islamic State. With the growing sense, even to the layman, that the captain’s hand is no longer on the tiller, Judt’s analysis is tellingly prescient.

On a lighter note the brace of essays concerning the railways and our relationship with them are refreshingly honest and thought-provoking. Interestingly, Judt attests that the railway, which symbolized modernity in the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, was in a sense disabled by its own initial success. By moving people during the nineteenth century from rural communities to the city, the railway eventually emptied the countryside, so that people now permanently re-lodged in urban centres did not need to travel back and forth as much. Urban expansion during the twentieth century meant that people now needed either very long journeys or very short ones, which they preferred to make by plane or car. Then there was the cheapening of road freight and Beeching’s draconian line closures of the sixties which all served to exacerbate the woeful situation. But as Judt explains, the culture on the continent of railways as a public provision stayed the rot, at least there. Ironically, poverty and backwardness in poorer countries actually preserved trains and today we see a resurgence in the prestige of certain stations across Europe, updated into ‘cathedrals of modern life’. We also see the renovation of railway infrastructures, as sheer numbers of people needing to be moved by train as well as by plane increases and even the better-heeled are forced onto the rails. Judt rightly sees the railways as ‘the natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society’ and rightly confirms that they are a collective project for individual benefit, which is why of course the market cannot manage them. As if to hammer this home, Judt drily points out that Margaret Thatcher made a point of never travelling by train.

‘What then is to be done?’ Judt asks in the essay ‘What is living and what is dead’, from his final public lecture in October 2009. Whatever its failings, Judt, who has clearly ranged through all the less savoury options, is for social democracy and senses that it is crucial at the heart of the state, something we must safeguard if we are even to entertain the idea of ‘a language of optimistic progress’. In an age of insecurity, one ever more chronic after recent events in the Middle East, obviously then unknown to him, Judt argues that in order to face our  threats, we must assess the responses our grandparents’ generation made to threats in their own time, in their own age of insecurity. As in Reappraisals, Judt urges us to delve into the storehouse of the past to glean answers which might fit some of our current questions. According to him, it is the failure to see the detail of history, and instead to package it coveniently into memorials and commemorations – special days to ‘remember’ the Holocaust, for example – which leads us down blind
alleys. Instead Judt seems to suggest, we should be reappraising, sifting and sorting, whittling away at the facts to reach the sharpest point.

Rightly, Judt places Nazism and the Holocaust at the epicentre of the twentieth century’s barbaric excesses, but he treats the Stalinist crimes with equal tenacity and rightly nails those western intellectuals who turned a blind eye, unwilling to allow the butchery of millions to disturb their disastrously embedded youthful love affair with Communism. But Judt understood above all that people are at the heart of events, and the ludicrous unwillingness of certain individuals in powerful positions to change their rigid viewpoints would always necessarily mean misery for the majority. Judt clearly despised nationalism, xenophobia, extremism and religious fundamentalism, not because he was a liberal or a humanist or was of left-wing persuasion, but because he was sane.

As Jonathan Freedland points out in his review of this book in the New York Review of Books, it is the moral equation at the heart of all he writes which perhaps best explains Judt’s appeal. Shorn of ulterior motive or agenda, Judt’s urgent explorations into the landscapes of historic fact, and the meaningful finds he retrieves, serve to anoint his works posthumously with a prophetic lustre, and we should read them now and understand better how we arrived at this point. As we watch our current leaders cobbled by deliriously fast-moving global events, as if trapped in the hull of a stricken ship, we Europeans can only listen as the dull thud of the ram of nationalism within and that of religious fanaticism beyond grows ever more insistent upon Europe’s no longer impregnable walls.

By Will Stone