Alan Johnson has a good piece in today’s Telegraph: The Left ignores the victims of Soviet terror; instead, it pays lavish tributes to Eric Hobsbawm
Here is an extract:
Alongside Hobsbawm’s urbane brilliance sat the very ugly world of political religion and sacred terror. Right there, next to his deserved academic prizes and his oh-so hypocritically accepted Order of the Companions of Honour, were all those corpses memorialised by Vassily Grossman in Forever Flowing, with their “crazed eyes; … infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues”. Still, it seems, we struggle to feel a visceral commitment to those corpses (or a visceral hatred for those who defended their executioners). Still, even now, with the dearth of feeling.
Isn’t that the trouble with vicarious revolutionaries in the democratic West? They’re the long-distance thrill-seeking who can embrace ideologies without having to deal with the consequences. They can defend the ruthlessness of so-called ‘progress’ without having to live the reality. Well, that’s the generous view.
The real question one is left with is whether they likes of Hobsbawm (and their successors in the various far-left factions today) would have had the steel balls and matching psychopathy to inflict similar horrors on our people if the reigns of power had ever fallen into their hands. It’s a sobering thought.
Fortunately for them, no one really takes this thought too seriously and they’re treated as harmless eccentrics – even lovable contrarians – rather than the monsters they would be if they had the slightest chance of realising their ambitions.
