This massive scholarly undertaking, meticulous in its research andincontrovertible in its findings, was instantly greeted with fury bymuch of the French intelligentsia, which refused to accept that its owneyes-wide-shut apologetics for the likes of Mao, Mengistu, Stalin andPol Pot were no less a form of complicity in mass murder than Holocaustdenial.Nor could this same intelligentsia acknowledge that the collapse ofcommunism was the supreme vindication for Cold War anticommunists suchas Revel, long reviled as a political paranoid and closet fascist.Instead, the left's new refrain was that, whatever the excesses ofcommunism, they were as nothing next to those of "liberaltotalitarianism" and "savage capitalism." Communism, in this view, morethan redeemed itself through its aspirations for social justice. And tothe extent that actual Communist regimes—namely, all of them—fell shortof that ideal, it merely proved that they hadn't been Communist tobegin with!