"I don't think that Sartre's worst shortcoming was his failure to see straight in World War II. However, I do think that his political myopia during the occupation years should be understood in the light of his completely apolitical worldview hitherto. This is a man, after all, who managed to live through the 1930s with no apparent political engagement or response of any kind, notwithstanding a year spent in Germany and the remarkable upheaval of the Popular Front in France. There can be no doubt that, in retrospect, Sartre—like many of his friends—felt uneasy about all this. Some of his later moral writings, on the subject of good faith, bad faith, responsibility and the like, are perhaps best understood as retroactive projections of his own bad conscience. However, what has always troubled me about Sartre was his continuing failure to think straight, long after the ambiguities of the 1930s and 1940s had dissipated. Why, after all, did he so insistently refuse to discuss the crimes of communism, even to the extent of remaining conspicuously silent about anti-Semitism in Stalin's last years? The answer, of course, is that he made a deliberate decision not to think of those crimes in ethical terms, or at least in a language which would engage his own ethical commitment. In short, he found ways to avoid a difficult choice—while insistently claiming that avoiding hard choices was precisely the exercise of bad faith which he so famously defined and condemned. It was this unforgivable confusion—or, more bluntly, dissemblance—that I find unacceptable in precisely Sartre's own terms. It is not as though his generation was unusually confused or mystified: Jean-Paul Sartre was born within a year of not just Hannah Arendt but also Arthur Koestler and Raymond Aron. That generation, born around 1905, was without question the most influential intellectual cohort of the century. They reached maturity just as Hitler was coming to power and were drawn willy-nilly into the historical vortex, confronting all the tragic choices of the age with little option but to take sides or have their side chosen for them. After the war, young enough in most cases to avoid the discredit that fell upon their seniors, they exercised precocious intellectual and literary influence, dominating the European (and American) scene for decades to come."