Tony Judt dead at 62

Sad to see that Tony Judt, one of the sharpest and best informed intellects writing in English, has succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS). I just gobbled up his masterful opus Post-War in its massive entirety despite the threat of developing tennis shoulder from carrying it down to the subway.

Judt was highly sensitive to the sufferings of eastern Europeans crushed by the post-Stalinist states from Poland to Bulgaria and wrote movingly about their struggles as well as the tepid sympathy for them from the western European neo-marxist left. But, trust me, the obituaries will focus on his failure to toe the Likud line on Israel, which will earn him monikers like ‘polemical’ and ‘controversial’ even from sympathetic reviewers.

Post-War is 800 pages long and full of wisdom from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. He has much of interest to say about how a political and economic system like those of the Soviet satellites survived and how they suddenly collapsed like an auditorium of folding chairs.

He is sympathetically dismissive of ‘reform’ communists like Dubcek, arguing that the one-party, command economy systems could not be fixed. (One topic I never saw him address was how the Chinese seem to be managing exactly that.) Like many observers, Judt was stunned by the revelations of how vast the internal spying system was in places like East Germany and Czechoslovakia—the one thing those inept governments really knew how to do.
But Judt writes eloquently about how little it all mattered in the end that the state knew how many potted plants its dissident citizens had in their apartments or what their elderly aunts had for breakfast. In the end the animal rotted from inside out.

That’s what the obit writers should be exploring when they take a look at his life’s work. But tune in to the NY Times later to see if I’m right, and his criticism of Israel trumps everything.