Hobsbawm was an unrepentant Communist who never wanted to subject himself to Communism by actually living in his beloved Stalinist Russia.
David Thompson
In my experience, Marxists prefer to be judged, if judged at all, by their theories and rather fanciful abstractions, and by their pretensions of moral elevation - all conveniently bleached of realism and messy human detail. And so, when not simply lying, their conversation turns to the potential of communism - communism in theory - never actual communism, i.e., communism in power. But the practical and psychological implications of egalitarian utopias aren’t exactly hard to fathom. Unless, that is, one takes care not to notice certain things or think in certain ways, and then goes on not noticing with growing sophistication. And I suspect that sophistication – a practiced unrealism - is driven by something very nasty indeed.
There are of course those who read Marx and Engels while somehow ignoring the salacious references to “revolutionary terror,” the “murderous death agonies of the old society” and the “complete extirpation” of “reactionary peoples” – i.e., thee and me - as if the horrors that followed had nothing at all to do with the urges to which they give intellectual license. An abstracted, sanitised belief in Marxism – detached from its consequences - isn’t just an oversight. It requires colossal bad faith, especially among the intelligent. To read Marx and Engels - to say nothing of Trotsky and his enthusiasm for guillotines and the prospect of beheading people who didn’t wish to be communists – to read such material and somehow not grasp where that thinking goes isn’t just a failure of critical wherewithal. It’s a contrivance. Hobsbawm, like many others, traded his probity for vanity. He chose to be seduced. And if people still want to play at Angry Marxist™ - and it seems some youngsters do - they might at least be honest about it.
Should someone appear today to discuss Nazi Germany with a focus on economic recovery from the Great Depression, the Autobahn, the rebuilding of German spirit after the crushing defeat of WWI while telling us that World War II and the Holocaust can be discussed in another venue; that person would deserve contempt and a feeling of disgust. Yet that is exactly what Hobsbawm is, an white washer of Communist atrocities that exceed those of Hitler. Yet he is hailed by many among the treasonous intellectuals. Today the world is a cleaner place for his death.
Glenn Reynolds: Communists are morally no better than Nazis, they just have more sympathizers in journalism and academia.
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