Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012
In the annals of moral idiocy, the Marxist British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died yesterday at 95, will ever enjoy a conspicuous place. A gifted and prolific writer, the Egyptian-born Hobsbawm was utterly absorbed by the ideology that fired his youthful dreams of utopia. How he must have savored the fact that he was born in 1917, the year of the Bolshevist revolution in Russia which ushered in so much poverty, misery, terror, and freedom-blighting totalitarian oppression. “The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me,” Hobsbawm wrote in his memoir Interesting Times in 2002, “I have abandoned, nay, rejected it, but it has not been obliterated. To this day, I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness.”
Indeed. Hobsbawm was adulated by an academic establishment inured to celebrating partisans of totalitarian regimes so long as they are identifiably left-wing totalitarian regimes. Although he claimed to have been victim of a “weaker McCarthyism” that retard advancement of leftists in the UK, Hobsbawm enjoyed a stellar career replete with official honors, preferments, and perquisites. He was showered with honors and academic appointments at home and abroad. His books won all manner of awards. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honor. But the central fact about Hobsbawm, as about so many doctrinaire leftists, was his willingness to barter real people for imaginary social progress. If he “abandoned, nay rejected” the “dream” of the October Revolution, he never abandoned its animating core: an almost reflexive willingness to sacrifice innocent lives for the sake of a spurious ideal.
The philosopher David Stove once identified “bloodthirstyness” as the motivating force of Communism and its offshoots. Scratch a socialist and you discover a fondness for the gulag. This describes Hobsbawm to a T. In 1994, the venerable historian discussed the former Soviet Union with a television interviewer. What Hobsbawm’s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, “is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm: “Yes.”
I think that says us all we need to know about this repellent figure who has at last gone to his reward.
He was often quoted by my history teacher in south London,late 1970′s. We called this teacher “Pov” cause he talked about poverty all day. Cured us of any left wing sympathies by the age of 15 although I doubt that was his intention!
Hobsbawm will have been looking forward to his reward. He wanted to be be reunited with Lenin and Stalin the betrayers of humanity in their frozen ninth circle. He probably thought it would like his lying version of Siberia.
The only McCarthyism in British Universities was directed against those who publically attacked Hobsbawm. You can be investigated and sacked for being politically incorrect but not for backing left-wing murder and tyranny. That he got a government award under Mr Blair tells you everything you need to know about Blair
“Hobsbawm…wanted to be be reunited with Lenin and Stalin the betrayers of humanity in their frozen ninth circle.”
Funny thing: When you stop to think, you realize that most of the circles of hell would fit him and his friends, because the Left embraced most of the deadliest sins.
Ah yes, I see that the Times published an obituary extolling Hobsbawm. He fits right into their obit-extolling requirements – liberal, radical and preferably, Marxist. So predictable……
“Scratch a socialist and you discover a fondness for the gulag.” Indeed. I’ve been saying that for years. There is a deep and abiding hatred of the individual in socialism and it always ends up being expressed in increasingly coercive ways.
First it’s punitive taxation and regulation, sold with sniffing morality, then more of taxation and regulation, with accusations against dissenters of being “mean-spirited.” Then political dissent is quelled, then punished. The opposition press is silenced. And of course the soil of political correctness has been fertilized, making many perfectly sensible comment beyond the pale for “civilized” behavior.
Thomas Sowell, I believe (could be Walter Williams) said that the difference between a liberal and a communist is one of grasp and not of reach.
Utterly right and typically pithy.
the difference between a liberal and a communist is one of grasp and not of reach.
could you explain this please ?
Mitt is surging Mr Kimball!!!!
Have you not felt the change???
Where ever Mitty goes one day, less and less people trust him.
He visited Ohio a couple of days ago… He looks rather helpless in the state polls conducted during his stay in the state or immediately after his departure..!!!
He is visiting Nevada right now where he is trailing by a significant margin at the latest local polls. Let’s see the impact of his visit in tomorrow’s state polls…
If Mitt loses Nevada & Ohio he’s gone! Do you not know Mr Kimball..???
A few hours before the first debate in Denver the prospects of a Romney survival look pretty gloomy indeed!!!
Mitt is doing just fine. You might want an Rx for Xanax on 11/7. Maybe Obama can give you some of his.
Hobsbawm’s deluded driveling is less significant than the tolerance liberals almost invariably extend to Stalinists and Stalinoids.
Eric Hobsbawm, in an interview for the progressive webzine In These Times, marveled at the Arab Spring, thus:
“The Arab Spring is encouraging. I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime a genuine, old-fashioned revolution with people going on the streets and overthrowing regimes, something like the 1848 revolution, which is actually the origin of the name Arab Spring.”
He obviously developed a defensive mental block about communism, and its victims whom he sided against during his long career. I’m sure he saw the anti-communist revolutions of 1989-91. But just as victims of emotional trauma sometimes lose their memory of disturbing events, so too did he seem to blot out the end of the Cold War, when his side lost.
Any word on who gets his money? Made a fortune with his one narrative quickly fitted to countless contexts.
I had no idea moral idiocy had its own annals. Where can I go to read the rest?
Agree with your overall evaluation of him but his arguments about social banditry make a lot of sense. How else to explain the admiration given to people like the James brothers, Gregorio Cortez, and myths of Billy the Kid, Robin Hood and the like? The songs extolling the drug lords of Mexico are yet another example of a phenomenon which H first described in detail.
A person can have a bad ideology and still make very valid points at times. Consider Roger Kimball, for example.
This is why PJM is my favorite conservative site, because of articles like this. Thanks Roger Kimball.
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“What Hobsbawm’s position comes down to, the interviewer suggested, “is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm: “Yes.”
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Dostoyevsky saw this coming. There are two connecting chapters in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Rebellion’ & of course, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. In Rebellion, Ivan asks Alyosha, if it were possible to be the architect of a perfect society, to bring peace and happiness to every human being on earth, would he do it, if the price was to torture one child?
Alyosha said ‘no’. But the Twentieth Century and maybe every other century has given us a multitude of little men, like Hobsbawm, who would all say ‘yes’. There is no shortage of them even today.