‘A Believer in the Red Utopia to the Very End’
British historian Eric Hobsbawm died on Sunday at age 95. As Michael Moynihan wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal, “It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn’t much care:”
One wouldn’t know it from “How to Change the World,” but Mr. Hobsbawm wasn’t always convinced that the Soviet Union, along with its puppets and imitators, was misunderstanding the essence of Marxism. He never relinquished his membership in the Communist Party, even after Moscow’s invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Indeed, he began his writing career with a co-authored pamphlet defending the indefensible Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. “To this day,” he writes in his memoirs, “I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.” There was some ugliness in the socialist states occupied by Moscow, he admitted in 2002, but “leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall,” East Germany was a pleasant place to live. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn’t much care.
And he’s far from alone among left-wing intellectuals in preferring the comfort of intellectual abstractions, long after they were proven to be false, as I wrote a year ago, when I linked to Moynihan’s column on Hobsbawm. For example, here’s Paul Krugman of the New York Times, September 14th, 2001:
It seems almost in bad taste to talk about dollars and cents after an act of mass murder. Nonetheless, we must ask about the economic aftershocks from Tuesday’s horror. These aftershocks need not be major. Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.
And here’s Mark Steyn in After America on President Obama’s similarly aloof take on 9/11:
He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them. When he addresses the monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru. There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11. During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities. Ask the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.
At The Blaze earlier this month was this item: “Militant Environmentalists Call for Executions and ‘Decisive Ecological Warfare:’”
“Do we need a militant movement to save the planet (and ourselves)?”
That was the question posed in recent article on the left-wing site Alternet when it interviewed a group of radical environmentalists who are allegedly endorsing “Decisive Ecological Warfare.” And in order to realize their goal of ridding the planet of industrial civilization — even modern agriculture — the group intends to employ tactics “of both militaries and insurgents the world over.”
One of the activists, Derrick Jensen, allegedly even believes those who destroy the environment should be summarily executed: “If it were up to me, all the people associated with the Gulf oil spill, which is murdering the Gulf, would be executed. That would be part of the function of a state,” said Jensen.
In addition to Jensen, the two other environmentalists interviewed in the article – Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay — have spearheaded a fringe movement called the “Deep Green Resistance” (with a book of the same name) that calls for “direct attacks on infrastructure” and an annihilation of civilization as we know it.
According to the far-left triumvirate, humanity must devolve into living primitive, “indigenous” lifestyles. To this end, Keith targeted a litany of ills that must be stopped, declaring: “We need a culture that is self-consciously oppositional to things like corporate power, capitalism, industrialization and ultimately civilization, because that is the arrangement of power on this planet right now.”
As The Blaze notes, they’re currently flogging a book, and they have a Website, so presumably they only wish to take civilization back to 1440 or 1969, respectively. So they’ve got that going for them, at least.
And presumably, sufficient destruction of the planet should really help to jump start the economy, right?
(Via The Brothers Judd.)
“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.” – Albert Camus
The sad fact is there are too many idiots willing to take liars like Hobsbawm and Obama at face value.
“he’s far from alone among left-wing intellectuals in preferring the comfort of intellectual abstractions”
Among the multitudes of examples is Obama’s “bump in the road” characterization of the murder of Americans in Benghazi.
Perhaps the most dangerous abstraction of all is the belief in the identity between the state’s mission and the leader’s personal, political ambition. L’etat, c’est moi.
The death of even one person in the service of the leader’s political ambition then becomes an agenda of the state. The end is all that counts. Death becomes morally “comfortable”.
After one person’s death, more death is merely repetition.
“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.”
As far as I am concerned, there is NO moral difference whatsoever between apologists for democides&genocides in the name of Marxism or of National Socialism — and the consequences of such apology should be the same in both cases.
The man getting a neck shot or getting gassed (after being worked to death first) cares little whether it’s because he’s a class enemy or a racial enemy.
The Left is decidedly anti-life, and every single policy prescription positively screams that fact. How anyone can miss it is beyond me.
The left has always had a “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” attitude towards the remaking of society in the way they believe it should be. And their supporters feel the same way — imagine if a news organization had come up with a story that the Bush Administration had allowed guns to enter Mexico not just to be used by drug gangs on each other and on adult citizens, but had also been used to stage a massacre at a children’s birthday party. And there are pictures of the blood and carnage at the birthday party scene — the kind of ghastly images modern TV journalism loves to show and tout in sensationalist fashion.
Katrina/Abu Ghirab times a thousand if Bush was president or if Fast & Furious was Bush’s program. Complete disinterest in the Univision report from the major American networks and print outlets here, outside of a couple of web posts by ABC over the weekend (which partnered with Univision and their main anchor, Jorge Ramos, five years ago, when he was a way cooler dude attacking the Bush Administration over its immigration policies). The dead children images would go against the narrative of re-electing the president, so their deaths being tied to U.S. policies is a non-issue.
The media is to the point where it would be an interesting hypothetical — if you could somehow send out a report that Obama has issued an executive order suspending parts of the First Amendment or even arrests of people similar to Nakoula Basseley Nakoula for alleged ‘hate speech’ — to see how many big media types would reflexively come out immediately in support of whatever suppression of free speech effort they thought the administration was doing, simply because it was ‘their’ administration suppressing the rights of the people who should be suppressed.
I’ve long believed that if the hard-core enviromentalists came up with an ‘enviromentally nuetral’ means of killing off 90% of humanity they’d implement it without a qualm. To them humanity is a plague that must be contained.
JOURNALIST Michael Ignatieff? Don’t you mean the last Canadian Lie-beral party leader also promoting a version of “Marxist paradise” lethal nonsense?
I hear he came back to safe Marxist territory after his failed bid in Canada…..teaching again at Harvard!
Has’nt this already been tried in Cambodia?