He was, in fact, a refugee from Hitler, but imagine, just for a moment that British ‘historian’ Eric Hobsbawm was a not so former Nazi, instead of a not so former Communist, do you think that he would have received this sort of profile in the New York Times?

For a more accurate assessment of this repulsive apologist for mass murder, it’s better to read this piece by David Pryce-Jones in the New Criterion, and understand that Hobsbawm has yet to abandon his savage creed. Unlike the Times journalist, Pryce-Jones decides to include this rather relevant anecdote:

“Not long ago, on a popular television show, Hobsbawm explained that the fact of Soviet mass-murdering made no difference to his Communist commitment. In astonishment, his interviewer asked, “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?” Without hesitation Hobsbawm replied, “Yes.””

Pryce-Jones’ conclusion deserves to be nailed to the door of every history faculty:

“The Soviet Union collapsed with hardly a sigh, like gas going out of a balloon, because it was all a lie. Hobsbawm and his supporters will never admit their share in the central intellectual and moral failure of the times. They lost out in the real historical process, but they hope to win the historiography by turning Communism into some spectral romantic myth shimmering tantalizingly above the surface of things, out of range of truth, and therefore fit to be started up all over again. All it takes is what it always took—an unscrupulous character, lack of interest in the world of people, and well-crafted lying to the credulous.”

For a rather different view of the communist experience, try another profile – also in the Times– of one Alfred Kaarman, a former Estonian ‘forest brother’ who somehow survived the horrors that the Twentieth Century was to bring to his country. To Hobsbawm, doubtless, this man would just be a statistic.