Eric Hobsbawm was a disgraceful man, who had little shame. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1991, the year it dissolved.
Oliver Kamm has a short piece on him here, in which he observes:
On my only meeting with him, I found him a man of deep intellect, humility and charm.
Kamm describes him as “a talented historian who outshone his Marxist ideology”.
That may be so. However, while anti-fascists were struggling against the Nazis, Hobsbawm busied himself defending the Soviet invasion of Finland: authorised by Stalin’s pact with Hitler.
Roll forward 60 years, and had this man’s love affair with mass murdering totalitarianism weakened? No, it had not.
Ignatieff: In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?
Hobsbawm: …’Probably not.’
Ignatieff: Why?
Hobsbawm: Because in a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing… The sacrifices were enormous; they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.
Ignatieff: What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?
Hobsbawm: Yes.
Amazing isn’t it, that active and even repentant Nazis are treated with opprobrium. However the likes of Hobsbawm are awarded the Order of the Companions of Honour.
