He was of course a fool. If communism had come to his country, his name would have been high up on the list of those to be shot. Listening to him, though, it was impossible not to feel something of what he felt, to see nobility in him”€”nobility in the service of a bad cause.

To properly place the word “communist” and apply it fairly, we need to distinguish between three cases:

“€¢ Communists in countries where a Marxist-Leninist party is in power.
“€¢ Communists living in countries where it is dangerous to be a communist.
“€¢ Communists living in countries where it is not dangerous to be a communist.

In the first category, once the first flush of revolution has passed and the idealists have all been killed off, communism is just conformism. To become a party member is just a career move, as in the case of my wife’s Fifth Uncle.

To be a communist where it is dangerous to be one is to put your life on the line for an ideal”€”the ideal of a future society of justice, equality, and peace.

In every known case of communism having been put into practice, the result has been a mountain of corpses and the crushing of all thought. It is nonetheless possible to maintain some sympathy for the idealist, as I did when listening to that Guatemalan revolutionary and when reading the memoirs of Victor Serge or the exploits of the Red Orchestra. As Yogi Berra is supposed to have said, theory and practice match up well in theory, though it doesn’t always work out like that in practice.

Most of my own loathing of communism is for Category Three: communists living in countries where they are free to be communists. Such a one was Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian who died recently at age 95.

Asked by the Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff on television whether the deaths of 20 million people in the USSR “€“ not to mention the 55 to 65 million victims of Mao’s Great Leap Forward “€“ might have been justified if this Red utopia had been realised, Hobsbawm muttered in the affirmative.

Hobsbawm was a major celebrity. The Queen offered him a knighthood, and he won numerous academic prizes, one worth a million Swiss francs. Reading the obituaries, I found myself thinking he deserved some kind of award for chutzpah.

I doubt Fifth Uncle will do that well with his party membership. If you want to be a communist, live to 95, and attain the highest national honors, you had better live in a liberal democracy.

Even then, you won’t get to be the president of the United States. Our nation has not fallen that far…yet.