Following the collapse of communism in Europe and the conversion of China from Marxism-Leninism to an unpleasantly authoritarian version of Market-Leninism, the reputation of Wilfred Burchett, the most controversial and influential communist in Australian history, seemed destined gradually to sink. Oddly enough, this has by no means been the case. At present two Australians, Ross Fitzgerald and Simon Nasht, are reported to be making films on Burchett. In the past three or so years, Melbourne University Press has published a long pro-Burchett biography, Tom Heenan's From Traveller to Traitor; the University of New South Wales Press, an enormous unabridged autobiography, Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist; and Cambridge University Press, an anthology of Burchett's work, Rebel Journalism: The Writings of Wilfred Burchett. The reception to these publications revealed that Burchett is, in general, still supported by leading Australian left-wing academics, like Stuart Macintyre, Gavan McCormack and Ben Kiernan; by some of its most prominent expatriate left-wing journalists, like John Pilger and Phillip Knightley; and by some talented student Leftists as well (last year a stridently pro-Burchett thesis won a University of Sydney undergraduate prize).

The recent rise in Wilfred Burchett's reputation is not difficult to explain. Part of the reason lies in the determination of George Burchett, who has been an intrepid defender of his father's literary legacy and political standing. Part of it lies in the rise of anti-American sentiment among the Australian intelligentsia, following the unlawful and catastrophic invasion of Iraq. Part of it lies in the parochialism of many members of the Australian Left, who seem to be more shocked by the injustice of the Menzies government's denial of a passport to Burchett after his exploits during the Korean War than they are by Burchett's lifelong apologetics on behalf of a string of murderous regimes.

But there is more to it than that. The Burchett revival is founded upon a distinctive form of post-Cold War intellectual inertia, an unwillingness to re-examine judgements made during the Cold War. There are three main reasons for this inertia. The first is vanity or pride. Those who have once been utterly convinced of a cause do not find it easy to admit they were wrong. The second is rancour. Many people find it galling to make retrospective concessions to old enemies over matters on which they had once dug in. The third concerns the peculiar nature of political friendships formed in times of intense ideological dispute. People feel that breaking ranks with old political comrades on whom they once relied involves betrayal or breach of faith. For these reasons many of Wilfred Burchett's supporters seem unwilling to reconsider the Burchett question, despite everything they know about the human catastrophe of communism, the cause on which Burchett gambled in his youth and to which, despite the pyramids of corpses, he clung for the entirety of his adult life.

This kind of inertia is not, of course, restricted to the Left. Many of Burchett's enemies seem incapable of reassessing their support for indefensible causes, like the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists in the mid '60s, or the war in Vietnam, where opposition to American behaviour turned out to be right. The unwillingness of politicians like John Howard, or journalists like Greg Sheridan or Gerard Henderson, to confront the military failure and the human cost of Australia's earlier involvement in Vietnam helped make possible our enthusiastic participation in the even more disastrous invasion of Iraq. In the US, the intellectual inertia of the Right has been of real historical significance. The members of the group most responsible for the Iraq invasion - the neo-conservative intelligentsia - were united in their belief that the Vietnam War was just and that America had been defeated only because of left-wing treachery on the home front.

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Wilfred Burchett is not well known to a younger generation of Australians. His far from uninteresting life can be outlined like this. Burchett was a self-educated country lad from Victoria whose family was radicalised by the Great Depression. In 1936 he and his brother travelled to London, where Wilfred worked for some time with the Soviet Travel Agency, Intourist, and where he married a German-Jewish refugee, Erna Hammer. In 1938 Burchett and his wife entered Germany. Having witnessed post-Kristallnacht Nazi anti-Semitism, he sought to help Jews escape to Australia. In 1939 Burchett returned home and became a journalist. During the war, he worked as a correspondent for several newspapers in Australia and Britain, reporting from Burma and China. He also published several left-wing but not obviously communist books. At the end of the Pacific War, Burchett followed the Allied troops to Japan. He and a fellow Daily Express journalist, Henry Keys, went to see what had happened at Hiroshima. The report Burchett wrote there, which was published in London as a warning to the world, and which is uncontroversially the most important piece of journalism he ever wrote, did not endear him to American military authorities.