ERIC HOBSBAWM APOLOGIST FOR MASS MURDER
During the 1970’s history
was dominated by Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, E P Thompson and
Eric Hobsbawm; some, like Hobsbawm never left the Communist Party. Being
politically educated by Orwell this meant that I could never, as we used to
say, ‘get into’ Hobsbawm, a funny smell came of his books for me and
consequently I tended to steer clear of him as an historian. I am perfectly
willing to concede that I have been the poorer for it, still one has one
standards and I draw the line at apologists for mass murder. Now he is dead and
the eulogies have commenced, starting last night on Radio 4 with a tribute
headed up by a nauseatingly gushing Simon Scharma.
One of the most chilling
parts of this, at times embarrassing love fest, was a clip from Desert Island
Discs when Hobsbawm is confronted by Sue Lawley about his failure to leave the
Communist Party in the face of the horrors of Stalinism. At first he trots out
the old lie, we didn’t know, then more truthfully, we didn’t want to know and
finally, with the chilling ‘well the dead are dead!” Certainly there is no
disputing this last profound fact; when Sue Lawley breaks of her line of
questioning with, “your next record please,” you can hear in her voice, a
basically decent British journalist, that the atmosphere in the studio has
changed profoundly.
When it is time for
Scharma to confront the old apologist for Stalin with the same question he is
audibly reluctant to do so, whilst Hobsbawm admits that he wishes the question
would just go away, (I bet he did), before stating that “to Hell with all of
them, let them take responsibility for what went on in their watch.”[1]
This is a bit rich from someone who never took responsibility for his own
tawdry apologia for murder.
I am sure many will argue
his merits as an historian and lover of jazz and that my position is too severe.
So be it, for whatever other qualities he may have possessed Mr Hobsbawm has
been rewarded by a dignified death in his own bed, something that his Marxist intellectual
contemporaries who sought refuge in Soviet Russia, not to mention the other
millions of innocents, were denied.
[1] One wonders to what he
refers, Vietnam, the Congo, Chile, Nicaragua, the post fascist South American
dictatorships, it may have escaped Mr Hobsbawm’s notice that it was possible to
fight against these evils whilst still opposing soviet communism, as even the
most compromised followers of Trotsky could have informed him.
