The Case of Eric Hobsbawm: Can a Stalinist Be a Good Historian?
At first glance, the question of whether a self-proclaimed Marxist historian, a member in good standing of the Communist Party, can be a good historian seems self-evident. After all, anyone who in this day and age still defends the Marxist-Leninist project and the reign of Lenin and Stalin in the the 20th century must be somewhat self-deluded.
The late Eric Hobsbawm, who died two weeks ago, was such a historian. A member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to the end and a founding member of the Communist Party Historians Group (and an editor of its journal Past and Present), Hobsbawm was heralded in obituaries and memorial statements as one of the best historians writing in our own time.
The mainstream media went out of its way to sing Hobsbawm’s praises. Last week’s Time, for example, ran a short piece by Ishaan Tharoor, who wrote that “though the Cambridge-educated Briton was an unrepentant Communist who refused to quit the party even after the horrors of Stalin became clear, his work showed little trace of dogma. As a historian, he was interested less in the actions of great men than in the lives of ordinary people.” Or, to put it in clearer terms, Tharoor is saying that Hobsbawm may have supported totalitarianism and the regime of the Gulag, but he cared about the real people and their “struggles.” And, moreover, his “taut, lucid prose” was written in “Marxism’s most ideal form: cosmopolitan, humanist and rooted in the study of societies from the bottom up.”
I bet you weren’t aware that to Time, Marxism was cosmopolitan and humanist. PJM’s own Roger Kimball sees Hobsbawm a bit more accurately. Roger said it best in these words:
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.
Hobsbawm himself made this quite clear in a now famous and much quoted interview with Michael Ignatieff that conducted in 1994. What you are saying, Ignatieff asked, is “that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm immediately gave a one-word answer that says it all: “Yes.” No wonder Roger Kimball refers to him as a “repellent figure.”
Naturally, writing in The Nation, the left-wing’s most prominent historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner lauded Hobsbawm in very different terms. Playing the old Popular Front game, Foner ignored Hobsbawm’s defense of the old Soviet Union and of Stalin’s terror. Foner simply called him a “life-long advocate of social justice.” Obviously, in Foner’s eyes, anyone supporting Stalin and the old Soviet cause was simply revealing his concern for the peoples of the world and their persistent struggles for equality. Hobsbawm never gave up his beliefs, Foner writes. Of course, Foner never tells readers what these were, saying only that Hobsbawm stayed firm “out of respect for the memory of comrades who had suffered persecution or death for their political beliefs.”





And yet social democrats today mimic Marxists while defanging them, substituting “middle class” (a life-style choice, in their argot) for what used to be the working class. That transformation is tracked here: http://clarespark.com/2012/06/03/connecting-vs-connecting-the-dots/. Hobsbawm had a liberal side to him, for instance in his conception of liberal nationalism, which deviated from the anti-bourgeois line of many of his contemporaries. I wish others had brought this out, as it at least suggests a connection to the Enlightenment.
Most of us would sacrifice millions of lives in a good cause. Our attitude to World War Two demonstrates that.
However, we see that war as putting a stop to destruction.
And we see Hobsbawm as supporting a war against innocent people.
Whereas he probably saw it as a war that was necessary and just, just like WW2.
It is entirely the case that radical revolutionaries always cover for one another, regardless of their horrific crimes.The morphing of the RED/GREEN alliance is proof positive of their DEADLY symbiosis.
And the amount of dead and buried under their watch is nothing more than gum under their shoes.
To be sure, much of western academia has become complicit in many such crimes, particularly those who hail from the dept of (in)humanities. The revisionist historians are atop the list of ‘enlightened’ criminals, mostly because they indoctrinate generations of kids into their foot soldiers!
Therefore, instead of eulogizing him, a moral person would do the opposite.They would say – let him get his just desserts among all those he aided in killing!
The following is only a partial indictment of the havoc they have wrought -
http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/21/the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-in-a-time-of-immoral-relativism-the-havoc-wrought-by-leftist-academia-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
May he, and the rest of his ilk, just spin in his grave, from time immemorial!
Adina, AMOUNT of money, but NUMBER of people.
Gibson, seem like the difference between open and vacant is not readily apparent to you
Of course, how foolish of us. Resisting a nazi takeover of Europe is morally equivalent to slaughtering your own citizens in order to implement communism …
I didn’t say that defeating the Nazis and the Communist take-over of Cambodia is the same thing.
I was just pointing out that most of us would be willing to kill millions of people if we had to.
It’s surprising to realize that and something we must take into account when we judge others.
The reflex response is probably that anyone who would consider killing millions of people is a monster, period. But you and I would consider it and approve of it if we thought it was necessary.
Hobsbawm, like every other Marxist throughout history, was a depraved misanthrope. The promise of the better future under communism was never anything more than a way for communists to delude others into allowing them to seize power.
“depraved misanthrope” I like that. Short and to the point.
You mention Eric Foner. He’s best known as the author of the standard (don’t ask me why) history of Reconstruction in the United States, but the book of his that I read was an essay collection titled “The Battle for History” or some such. In it, he recounted some of his early life and background. His father taught (if I remember right) history at Columbia, and lost his job during the height of the McCarthy Red “Scare” for what Foner thought were completely bogus reasons. Anyway, after telling you of this, the author recounts that he was at an awards dinner with Gabor Borritt, a reasonably well-known Civil War historian who was born in Czechoslovakia, participated in the “Prague Spring” as a teenager, and fled in the aftermath, winding up in the United States. Borritt tells Foner that he grew up in a totalitarian state where freedom of expression was brutally suppressed, and Foner responds that he was brought up in such a country, too…
‘Nuff said…
Foner was a red-diaper baby who still sees the world through the blood-red lens of Marxist orthodoxy. His work is unreadable for any non-Marxist with an analytical mind. A much more interesting historian working in the Marxist tradition is Genovese, who tussles with how the facts of the real world interact with theory. Not all Marxists are intellectual crooks, but Hobsbawm was.
A response from Christopher Hitchens is desperately needed.
I’d be much more curious to hear the words of Robert Conquest, another Brit and a former Marxist who eventually came back around to reality and has written some of the best regarded histories about the Soviet Union. His book, The Great Terror, first written in 1968 and then revised 30 and 40 years later, is full of information about just how vicious Stalin and his sycophants really were.
Conquest is 95 now but Wikipedia says he published a book of poetry this year so he is apparently still active. I must Google to see if he commented on Hobsbawm’s death….
There is no material or moral difference between a “simple Marxist academic” and an outright Soviet spy. Nor is there any moral, material difference between the most brutal Chekist and the Western apologist for same. A short rope and a long drop are the only solution for any such creature. Hobbsbawm lived far too long and died far too peacefully. He should have felt ten thousand fold of what he sentenced millions of men and women to but one ten-thousandth would have sufficed to turn him, publicly, into the simpering lickspittle coward he and all his ilk are in the dark privacy of their shriveled hearts.
Tell it like it is. All we river-rats agree.
A few years ago I read Eric Hobsbawn book _Bandits_. I wasn’t impressed with it. His prose style is dry. More importantly, his thesis about social bandits is wrong. He thought some bandits were social revolutionaires.
Bandits, and I would also include pirates, and also 20th Century urban bandits, such as John Dillinger, are thieves and murderers. They are in it for themselves.
Here is an excellent paper I came across demolishing Hobsbawn’s thesis on social bandits.
http://www.ncsu.edu/acontracorriente/spring_04/Slatta.pdf
Superb article. I have downloaded and will read it thoroughly tomorrow. Everybody should make a copy of Ron Radosh’s analysis of Eric Hobbsbawm’s works.
Hobsbawm is one of the “Great Historians” of the 20th century, if one means “Great” in the sense of “influential”. He definitely had the major failing of all Marxist historians, which is to interpret everything in history (and I mean every last little thing) through the lens of class conflict and economic determinism. However,at the professional level, history is a matter of interpretation and Hobsbawm’s interpretations, while I generally disagree with them, are based on a solid respect for the historical method. In my own PhD dissertation, I simply had to address Hobsbawm’s contentions regarding nationalism being exclusively an “invention of tradition” by political elites instead of a more organically occuring phenomenon. I could not simply ingnore his work, he is just that influential in the field. This makes him light years ahead of that other leftist historian who passed away in 2010, Howard Zinn. Zinn has alot less influence in the field of history, on a professional level, than Hobsbawm due to the fact that his historical method was to twist and distort the historical record and to ignore anything that would contradict his thesis. If one reads “A People’s History of the United States” it is a clear piece of propaganda, while Hobsbawm’s series on the “long 19th century” is a work of scholarship, albeit one that is informed and interpreted through the lens of Marxist theory. Although I found Hobsbawm the human being to be an unadmirable person (to say the least) I do have respect for his contributions to the field of modern European history. I would place him in the same category as another “man of the left” who wrote the history of modern Europe, A.J.P Taylor, although to Taylor’s credit he was never a doctrinaire Communist or a Stalinist apologist, both of which sins Hobsbawm was certainly guilty of.
Unfortunately, Howard Zinn may have had a far more negative impact on the world that Hobsbawn since Hobsbawn is read largely by a smallish number of intellectuals. Zinn’s detritus seems to be found in every history course in the land, meaning many millions more people read it. Surely at least some of its readers – very possibly millions of impressionable minds – were seduced by Zinn’s view of history to believe his nonsense. I’d rank that as far more dangerous overall.
more Proof erudite big boys are wacko. What to do? Think about it. they seem to conclude what the True God concluded about the human race in Genesis 6 . “The Nephilim were on the earth…they were heroes men of renown….The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth and his heart was deeply troubled so the Lord said:….”
But God has given us Abraham , Issaic and wormy Jacob the Three Abraham faiths ,diamonds in the rough today that could keep the world from seeing God’s wrath this time not by water but by fire.
As far as elite they must come from the three when they become pure diamonds and historians have eyes to see what must be rejected as we see in today’s New york Times article : The Self Destruction of the 1Percent
Just more examples of the Marxist fevers that beset the West presently. Recently there was a very good book written about the transplanted neo-Marxist Frankfurt School at Columbia University, home of the Teachers College, the School of Journalism, James Hansen’s watermelon science and Columbia’s midwifery of the American new left. Then we ask why journalism and education is in it’s present dismal and pernicious state. Everybody should make sure they own and read “The Black Book of Communism”.
whatever he could to make sure that less fortunate people would not have the privileges and freedom he himself enjoyed.
That was the line that really hit at Marxism as it exists in the 21st Century. It is designed to alter consciousness and minimize the independent conceptual mind that would nurture individualism. It seeks to make emotion and instinct the cultivated basis for response.
It makes Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of group primacy and social interaction as the creator of the self the mandated basis for K-12 and higher ed in the West. It calls itself systems thinking or systems dynamics instead of Marxism but it still functions the same. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-systems-thinking-to-retie-the-psychological-umbilical-cord-to-our-environment/
Like that quote said, it takes every opportunity to use the coercion powers of government to turn ordinary people back into mere cogs.
I had 3 different events this week, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, that were expensive, official, technically unconnected events. All were laying out elements of the same collectivist, no freedom, political and economic vision. It functions as communism in terms of control over the masses but offers greater revenue for the connected in its Mercantile, Dirigiste economic vision built on a Green Economy now going under the name “Low Carbon.”
Hobbswam cannot be rejected if variations on the same broad theme remain so active in the 21st Century. Where so few of us seem to remember or recognize what we are looking at after mere name changes.
These columns of Ronald Radosh are gems. I keep all of them and read them again from time to time. America is afflicted with the same mindset from our “elites”. All delusional but hell bent on wielding power, even if it kills. Sometimes, especially so.
Congratulate them for speaking plainly: “life-long advocate of social justice.” Communism = social justice.
You should read Barry Loberfeld’s essay “Social Justice: Code for Communism.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guides/Z-Social%20Justice-Code%20for%20Communism.htm
“So I must agree with Harris’s closing remarks, that what Hobsbawm’s long life shows is that “even men of great intelligence and vast erudition can deceive themselves into believing that crimes of the most unimaginable horror are a small price to pay for the fulfillment of their no doubt deeply humanitarian dreams.”
Marxists are always more than happy to sacrifice millions of OTHER people to achieve their own goals. The apologists for these Marxists rave about the selfless dedication of the Marxists while completely ignoring that the apologists may be among their first victims.
The disconnect here is just staggering. Many thousands – perhaps millions – of Stalin’s own defenders were annihilated in the Soviet purges as their faction fell out of favor and were replaced by other factions. And yet our Western “intellectuals” fall all over themselves to endorse the bloodletting if it only moves us a step forward to their Golden Utopia. Don’t these fools – nay buffoons – understand that they too will likely be shot or be worked to death if their ideological heroes ever come into power? Marxism serves no one EXCEPT Marxists. Everyone else is expendable.
Great article Ron. I think many of us on the right fail to recognize the influence guys like Hobsbawn have had on our lives.
Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.
–Heinrich Heine
In his screechy article A. N. Wilson gives what he calls examples of Hobsbawmn’s “blatant lying”:
He quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland in 1939-40, saying it was merely an attempt to push the Russian border a little further away from Leningrad.
This is more or less how it was. The Soviets tried to change the border first through negotiations. That failing, they invaded. To state the purpose of the invasion is not to “underplay” it or justify it in any way.
He also omits any mention of the massacre of 20,000 Polish soldiers by Russian Secret Police at Katyn.
Whether or not this qualifies as a “lie” (or more precisely a dishonest omission of the truth) depends on the context. Wilson doesn’t give one. Does Wilson believe that anyone writing about World War II must mention the killings of the Polish officers at Katyn, lest he should be guilty of “blatant lying”? Or does he apply this standard to leftist historians only?
In the same book, he dismisses the appallingly violent suppression by the Nazis of the Polish resistance in the 1944 Warsaw uprising – when a complacent Soviet army ignored desperate pleas to come to the Poles’ aid – as ‘the penalty of a premature uprising’.
The readers who will not be manipulated by all those emotional adjectives and adverbs will not be convinced. Hobsbawm attributes the failure of the Warsaw uprising solely to its premature timing, which is tendentious. But it’s not more tendentious than all those blanket assertions about the “victims of Communism,” a category that deliberately erases all destinctions of historical context, geography, motives and purposes of the rulers, and the widely different circumstances of those “victims.”
So where is that “blatant lying”?
So, are you saying that you think some of the victims of Communism got what they deserved? Which ones?
“What you are saying, Ignatieff asked, is “that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?” Hobsbawm immediately gave a one-word answer that says it all: ‘Yes.’”
Mass-enslavement and mass-murder is justified under Communism because it is required to bring about equality of economic outcome. Forced equality of economic outcome is the Marxist definition of “Social Justice.” Never mind that forced equality of economic outcome requires mass-enslavement and mass-murder. Never mind that the “Social Justice” of forced equal economic outcome requires mass-violence. As a Marxist you must say over and over to yourself that what you are doing is “moral” and “just.” All I can say is that one man’s morality is another man’s immorality.
“Proceeding from a critique of a given society, accusing it of injustice, inequality and lack of freedom, socialism proclaims–in the systems where it is expressed with the greatest consistency–a far greater injustice, inequality and slavery! … The revolutionaries who drew up the “Conspiracy of Equals” understood equality in such a way that they alone formed the government, while others were to obey implicitly–and those who did not were to be exiled to certain islands for forced labor. In the most popular work of Marxism, the Communist Manifesto, one of the first measures of the new socialist system to be proposed is the introduction of compulsory labor… But how to understand a teaching which in its ideal version includes both an appeal to freedom and a program for the establishment of slavery? Or how to reconcile the impassioned condemnation of the old [Feudal] order and quite justified indignation at the suffering of the poor and the oppressed with the fact that the same teachings envisage no less suffering for these oppressed masses as the lot of whole generations prior to the triumph of social justice? Thus Marx foresees fifteen, perhaps even fifty years of civil war for the proletariat, and Mao Tse-tung is ready to accept the loss of half of humanity in a nuclear war for the sake of establishing a socialist structure in the world. A call for sacrifices on this scale might sound convincing on the lips of a religious leader appealing to a truth beyond this world. But not from convinced atheists. It would seem that socialism lacks that feature which, in mathematics, for example, is considered the minimal condition for the existence of a concept: a definition free of contradictions.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
Never mind that forced equal economic outcome is destructive of equal property rights, and as it requires great force, it requires a superior class of not-to-be-equalized Marxist equalizers. Marxist forced equality of economic outcome is an Orwellian contradiction since the goal of Marxist “Social Justice” is equal economic outcome within a supposedly utopian “Classless Society,” but a classless society is impossible when a small group of Marxists – at the top – use force on the great mass of “little people” at the bottom in order to keep their economic outcome equalized. Make no mistake, the first order of business of the Marxist equalizers, as they have the power to collectivize and control the people’s property, will be to feather their own nests.
“The usual understanding of “equality,” when applied to people, entails equality of rights and sometimes equality of opportunity. But what is meant in all these [Socialist] cases is the equalization of external conditions [social and economic outcome] which do not touch the individuality of man. In socialist ideology, however, the understanding of equality is akin to that used in mathematics, i.e., this is in fact identity, the abolition of differences in behavior as well as in the inner world of the individuals constituting society. From this point of view, a puzzling and at first sight contradictory property of socialist doctrines becomes apparent. They proclaim the greatest possible equality, the destruction of hierarchy in society and at the same time a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy which would engender an incomparably greater inequality.” Igor Shafarevich
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” [Communist Manifesto] meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it [The Socialist Party of Oceania] was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
This is one of the best articles ever written for PJ media. I applaud Dr. Radosh on his effort.
Let us suppose that there was a Nazi intellectual who made equivalent statements about the Third Reich. Would anyone heap honors upon him? My instinctive response would be “you have got to be kidding right?” But on further review there are two such people who have been so honored. Martin Heidegger and his disciple Paul de Man. Honors have been heaped upon both by the same leftwing intellectuals who praise Dr. Hobsbawm..
“Can a Stalinist Be a Good Historian?”
If we just substitute for Stalinist, “Hitlerian-Nazi” the question would never, ever be posed.
So why is the question posed at all?
Because there has always been a double standard when the an individual is considered a leftist.
Let me provide an example.
Suppose that a US President met with a country’s leader who was a KNOWN and documented right wing, mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of millions of people – not unlike, say a Hitler.
Well, no president would consider this and if he did, it would be met with universal condemnation; as it should.
Yet, Nixon had a few with Mao (the worst mass murderer in world history), Madeleine Halfbright had a few with Kim Jong and she commented on his sense of humor, and FDR decided that Stalin’s USSR should receive formal US “diplomatic recognition” despite the Stalin’s mass murder of 20 to 30 million people.
The above is no different than if FDR decided in November 1941 to meet with Hitler and discuss better relations, greater economic, military and diplomatic ties.
The stupidity of the intellectual, academic and political elites simply has no boundaries. They are suckers, dupes for ANYBODY that states they are for “workers rights,” “equality for all,” ” against greed and unearned wealth,” etc.
Hobsbawm, like all historians presented HIS view of history – just like all historians. But since leftists are given a free pass by the ruling elites, academics and intellectuals – because THEY AGREE WITH THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEOLOGY OF LEFTISTS – they did not and will not criticize Hobsbawm’s writings.
“FDR decided that Stalin’s USSR should receive formal US “diplomatic recognition” despite the Stalin’s mass murder of 20 to 30 million people.”
I’m afraid you’ve got the cart before the horse.
The United States recognized the USSR diplomatically in December 1933. Stalin’s only major act of genocide at that point had been the famine in the Ukraine (and parts of Russia) that had been caused by his policy of forced collectivization. That famine is reckoned to have killed between 5 and 9 million people by most experts TODAY. (Mind you, that famine was still ongoing as the US recognized the USSR and an honest accounting of the number of victims was not known until much later due to the efforts of Stalin’s statisticians and the dishonesty of journalists like Walter Duranty.)
The Purges, which some historians believe killed anywhere from 20 to 60 million people didn’t occur until AFTER the US had granted diplomatic relations to the USSR. Even then, the staggering volume of deaths was not widely known – and was sternly refuted by the Soviets and their apologists – for many years thereafter.
Vladimir Lenin had Joseph Stalin appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922. Lenin died in 1924. Stalin’s Dictatorship started around 1928 when he took command of Soviet industry and ordered forced collectivization of agriculture.
“Lenin and his comrades initially found themselves embroiled in a merciless “class war,” in which political and ideological adversaries, as well as the more recalcitrant members of the general public, were branded as enemies and marked for destruction. The Bolsheviks had decided to eliminate, by legal and physical means, any challenge or resistance, even if passive, to their absolute power… The “deKulakization” of 1930-1932 repeated the policy of “de-Cossackization” but on a much grander scale. Its primary objective, in accordance with the official order issued for this operation was “to exterminate the kulaks as a class.” The kulaks who resisted collectivization were shot, and the others were deported with their wives, children, and elderly family members. Although not all kulaks were exterminated directly, sentences of forced labor in wilderness areas of Siberia or the far north left them with scant chance of survival. Several tens of thousands perished there; the exact number of victims remains unknown. As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population’s resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.” The Black Book of Communism
http://theblackbook.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/excerpt-from-introduction-the-crimes-of-communism-by-stephane-courtois/
JA 20: “Suppose that a US President met with a country’s leader who was a KNOWN and documented right wing, mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of millions of people – not unlike, say a Hitler.”
The phrase “right wing mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of millions” is an oxymoron – an internal contradiction – because the term “right wing,” in relating the individual to government, means individualism, where the power of an individual is self-evidently limited. No individual, and no group of individuals outside of collectivist government, has enough power to murder millions of people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7M-7LkvcVw
In reality the term “right wing” means power to individuals – the power of unobstructed action according to the individual’s will within limits drawn around them by the equal rights of others, i.e.: the power of rightful individual liberty – the power of individuals to keep the fruit of their own labor – the power of individuals to keep and bear arms in defense of their life and the fruit of their own labor. In reality the term “right wing” means Power to the People.
“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” Thomas Jefferson
“With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others, the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name – liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.” Abraham Lincoln
The term “left wing” means collectivism – the power of massed humanity under the control of a few at the top – the power of massed humanity under the control of an oligarchy. By definition, since “left wing” means collectivist government power over individuals, only a “left wing” government possesses the power to murder millions of people. Obviously Marxism (Communism) is left wing because it represents direct collectivization of the people’s property, and thereby the people’s power, into the hands of a few. Fascism and Nazism are also left wing (not right wing) because power is also concentrated into the hands of a few through centralized law and regulation which, in the end, has the same effect as direct Marxist collectivization. We should therefore refer to Marxism (Communism) as the Marxist Left, and Fascism (or Nazism) as the Fascist Left – they are both “left wing.”
“Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective – society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. – is the unit of reality and the standard of value. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it – or its representative, the [Marxist or Fascist] State – deems it desirable… Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation’s economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property – so long as the state reserves to its self the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property. If “ownership” means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed… which conferred no rights on its holder. Under Communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.” Leonard Peikoff
http://www.peikoff.com/lr/review_rand.htm
Stonewall is more right than he may think. If Communism and Nazism/Fascism were both socialistic ideologies then certain people in Southern Africa and the “Deep South” of the USA should have taken a hard look at themselves. After all, an ideology that disqualifies someone from improving his lot for no better reason than the skin colour of himself or that of a distant forbear is just as much a “socialistic” ideology as anything that Marx wrote!
Even the ancient Mosaic economy could be branded as being at least “quasi-socialist”. Why? Because it had built-in safeguards that would have been the envy of any framer of anti-trust lawmakers you in the USA have ever known. And if the “dictatorship of the proletariat” sounds an abomination to anyone who loves freedom, what about the stranglehold that super- and hypermarkets can exert?
If the word “sin” is viewed unmentionable in public discourse it is because we in the West have lost the world-view of our mediaeval forbears, who saw man as a siful creature, doomed to the grave and hell unless the grace of God intervened. The concept of pride as the most cardinal of the “seven deadly sins”, having its root in the fall of Lucifer to became Satan—something that was deep-rooted in moset mindsd till recently—furnished another warning. Let mere mortals come to see themselves as gods, or even demi-gods, and it can be taken for granted that such will be brought face to face with their own mortality—and that applies as much to us in the 21st century West as it did to Kaiser Bill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, or anyone else who has such overweening ideas – “hubris”, as the Greeks called it – about themselves.
Slavery in the Old South, and slavery everywhere else, now and in the past, is akin to Fascist Socialism. The Fascist Left invariably murders and/or enslaves one or several of its minorities, whereas the Marxist Left murders and/or enslaves its majority population (the dreaded middle class bourgeoisie – the Kulaks who resist collectivization). Obviously it requires a tighter and more robust form of despotism in order to pull off a Marxist Dictatorship, and that is why they enforce total collectivization of property (the abolition of private property) and guns which gives them total power, even over the middle class majority. Fascist Dictatorships require less power to suppress a minority, so that is why they opt for control via national laws and regulations which do not directly fly in the face of the majority population.
In any event, Alexander Solzhenitsyn believed most governments in the history of mankind have been Socialist.
“World socialism as a whole, and all the figures associated with it, are shrouded in legend; its contradictions are forgotten or concealed; it does not respond to arguments but continually ignores them–all this stems from the mist of irrationality that surrounds socialism and from its instinctive aversion to scientific analysis…. The doctrines of socialism seethe with contradictions, its theories are at constant odds with its practice, yet due to a powerful instinct–also laid bare by Shafarevich–these contradictions do not in the least hinder the unending propaganda of socialism. Indeed, no precise, distinct socialism even exists; instead there is only a vague, rosy notion of something noble and good, of equality, communal ownership, and justice: the advent of these things will bring instant euphoria and a social order beyond reproach…. The author also convincingly demonstrates the diametrical opposition between the concepts of man held by religion and by socialism. Socialism seeks to reduce human personality to its most primitive levels and to extinguish the highest, most complex, and “God-like” aspects of human individuality. And even equality itself, that powerful appeal and great promise of socialists throughout the ages, turns out to signify not equality of rights, of opportunities, and of external conditions, but equality qua identity, equality seen as the movement of variety toward uniformity…. It could probably be said that the majority of states in the history of mankind have been “socialist.” But it is also true that these were in no sense periods or places of human happiness or creativity.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
The attitude of ancient Chinese Dictators seems to support Solzhenitsyn’s contention that all forms of despotism are in fact Socialist, and ultimately they all rely either on direct Marxist Collectivization or indirect collectivization via Fascist (or Monarchist) laws and regulations. Even Medieval Christian Feudalism meets this definition of Socialism because it was also based on a system of property collectivization; it was closer to the Fascist Left than the Marxist Left because minority populations were often suppressed.
“Only he who has conquered his own people first can conquer a strong enemy… When the people are weak the state is strong; when the state is weak the people are strong. Hence the state that follows a true course strives to weaken the people.” Shang Yang – Ruler of Shang Province, 4th Century, B.C.
I want to comment on the last two paragraphs, where RR says that people like Tony Blair didn’t want to criticize Hobsbawm, because he and they are people of the Left.
I kinda had a different take.
I think that a big factor here is the broad long-term decline in (Judeo-) Christianity. (Yes I know Blair converted to Catholicism, and I am aware of history, but bear with me.)
What I mean by this is that in the modern world, a lot of people have a real problem thinking about good and evil. The human heart (yes, a metaphor) has largely been taken out of the debate.
On the Marxist left, people were recast as something like worker ants, carrying history forward. But also in the more centrist world of social science, we operate with a reduced sense of moral agency. It’s hedonic this or special interest that.
By way of a partial digression, think of the freak out response that people had, when George W. Bush would talk about evil or the evil-doers, etc. Why? I mean flying an airplane into a building is kinda evil, isn’t it?
But for many in educated circles, that’s just not a concept that they are comfortable with. In the past, on the other hand, I think that lots of people would have been comfortable with that. They would have defaulted to thoughts about Satan, serpents, etc., when confronted by Stalinism, et al.
In literature and drama, we still think in these terms. But when we put on a political hat, all of a sudden that’s not permissible.
So, yes, I agree that modern liberalism does really owe much of its Weltanschauung to communism. And since the liberal left kinda knows that, they are uncomfortable with acknowledging the connection.
But I also think there are some additional causes as well.
Thank you Ron Radosh for bringing to our attention the topic of this moronic historian’s death, and for guiding your readers to realizing the mere stupidity inherent in all “marxist” analysis, not just their perspective (interpretation or view) of ‘History.’ All comments stimulated by and following your article are also quite noteworthy.
Thank you Ron Radosh for another illuminating & chilling article. I wasn’t familiar with Hobsbawm but read up on him after seeing all the tributes to him upon his death. My cognitive dissonance (BS) meter was on full alert every time I read “great Marxist historian”. It is good to finally get some answers – you are a true treasure & a strong voice for freedom. Thanks to you & PJM.
Reading comments all these Boromis here who believe they will do it better than I begin to think of God’s great mercy on the soul of seduced by the demons as a boy innocent Mormon creator Joe smith to take his life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aUvrJ7wUUc
Then I begin to think about the genuis of Christain Hitler to bring about his version of the 1000 year reign of Jesus Christ if only God made the Russian winter milder Hitler would have converted all Russia to the faith and Winstin Churchill adding more whisky on his tonue would have slured his speech and the cripple by polio FDR would have lost to the Great Nephlim hero Charles Linberg
But what did God see when the King of Babylon throw the faithful into the fire how this King say he will serve the True God but God already find out through Israel the corruption and stick with only the Jews bringing in the one that will free them from Bablyon the chosen for the arrival of the sone of god on the earth and not these poor Borimos who are not raised from the dead like Jesus was
Wow, this wins my award for the most incoherent post I have ever seen in PJMedia or indeed anywhere else.
He is also quite delusional. Hitler as a Christian? That gave me a laugh at least which was this posts only saving grace.
Almost time to clean out the Marxist cesspool.
Ronnie: The big picture histgorians? Sounds like Howard Zimm. I imagine he’s one of those responsible in England for ostracizing Israeli historians.
This is an issue dear to my heart. When I was in history grad school, I was forced to read tome after tome of Marxist drivel. I read the assigned books closely and pointed out where the authors had made factual errors. The automatic reply: “It’s not the facts that matter, it’s the interpretation.” My response: an interpretation should be the result of applying a specific theory to a given set of facts. If the facts are wrong and the theory is wrong, then how could the “interpretation” be of interest to any serious historian? Needless to say, I was persona non grata in the graduate student lounge. Eric Hobsbawm, by the way, was considered the greatest living historian by most of my professors, and I had to read a lot him, although my field was American history.
“Can a Stalinist Be a Good Historian?”
If a man proclaims mass murder, lies, deception and denial are legitmate tools in a poltical means to form a structure of goverment, how can they be relied to accurately portray history?
There was never any truth in him and he has gone to his father.
I was made to read him in Brit Hist. classes at a commonwealth university during the 1970′s. B O R I N G. His work didn’t encourage me to take up the study of Socialist History — correction — Social History.
Raymond Aron (1950s, France), summed it up:
“There are some people who are willing to countenance the worst crimes, provided only that they are committed in the name of the proper doctrine.”