Free Republic

Leading Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm left more than £1.8million in his will, it has been revealed. Hobsbawm, who died aged 95 in October 2012, was one of Britain’s most eminent historians, but he was widely criticised for his defence of communist regimes. He was accused of being an apologist for the totalitarian evils of Soviet communism and labelled a ‘useful idiot’. According to records held at the Brighton probate office, Hobsbawm – who joined the Communist Party at 14 and once described himself as an ‘unrepentant communist’ – left an estate with assets totalling £1,835,341. The bulk is to be...

The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm has been the subject of a lot of fatuous eulogies since his death a few weeks ago. Ron Radosh asks whether an intellectual – a man of ideas — who dedicated his whole life to the defense of the most murderous regime on human record, and to lying in defense of that regime – can be a good historian. The question, if put right, is self-answering. Yet even worthy conservatives like Niall Ferguson apparently get it wrong. Hobsbawm may have been a brilliant writer and an intelligent man. Yet he was morally defective, and that...

On Monday evening, the BBC altered its programme schedule to broadcast an hour-long tribute to an old man who had died aged 95, with fawning contributions from the likes of historian Simon Schama and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg. The next day, the Left-leaning Guardian filled not only the front page and the whole of an inside page but also devoted almost its entire G2 Supplement to the news. The Times devoted a leading article to the death, and a two-page obituary. You might imagine, given all this coverage and the fact that Tony Blair and Ed Miliband also went out...

The renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm has watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement -- and notes that it's now the middle class, not the working class, that is making waves... He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of revolutions. Born just months before the Russian revolution of 1917, he was a Communist for most of his adult life -- as well as an innovative and influential writer and thinker. He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an advocate of revolutionary change. "Today's most effective mass mobilisations start from a new modernised middle class...

Earlier this week, the journal Proceeedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study on climate change that is at the same time scary, comforting, insightful and a statement of the obvious.To be more accurate, I should probably say that the paper is capable of being interpreted in all of those ways, rather than risk implying that the authors intended to do more than run the numbers and see what popped up. What they're talking about is climate change in Europe, specifically between 1500 and 1800 AD - a period that encompasses the so-called Little Ice Age. It...

The 10 Worst Hyper-Inflation Horror-Stories Of The Past Century Mamta Badkar Oct. 18, 2011, 9:36 AM Inflation numbers have been heating up. U.S. PPI just came in higher than expected at 0.8%. UK's CPI also jumped. In India and China, food inflation has been stubbornly high. Hyperinflation is more of an extreme. Over the weekend, John Mauldin wrote that he doesn't expect hyperinflation in the U.S. because the Fed can print loads of money without bringing about inflation. But a crucial aspect of hyperinflation is mounting deficits that are financed by printing money as he explains. When prices start jumping...

Winter is bleak enough as it is. This year the gloom was deepened by the publication of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s most feted historians, and, oh yes, a man who stuck with the Communist party until 1991 despite a global killing spree that took perhaps one hundred million lives. Naturally Hobsbawm’s new book has triggered the usual hosannas from the usual congregation for, to quote the Guardian, this “grand old man.” There had, of course, been that minor unpleasantness back in the 1990s when Hobsbawm had appeared to...

My generation created the sexual revolution - and it has been wrecking the lives of women ever since By Bel Mooney 02nd December 2009 I experienced first-hand the impact of the sexual revolution, and the sweeping changes it wrought between men and women. The sexual pressure that came with free love has gone from liberation to degredation. I'm always amazed at the way the liberal Left is eager to make excuses for any dubious results of their progressive ideas. Yet the damaging consequences of that Sixties revolution are obvious in the society we now live in - ranging from the...

Part I:     How Important is the Left's Influence on American Politics? May 6, 2005Part II:    How Left is the Left, and How Important? May 9, 2005 Part III:   How Significant is the Left? What is Legitimate Dissent? May 10, 2005   How Important is the Left's Influence on American Politics?This is the first of a series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an LA Times editorial writer and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism, and David Horowitz to discuss the themes of Horowitz’s book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left and DiscoverTheNetworks.org. -- The Editors. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17974 Jacob Heilbrunn:Dear...

America's imperial delusion The US drive for world domination has no historical precedent Eric Hobsbawm Saturday June 14, 2003 The Guardian The present world situation is unprecedented. The great global empires of the past - such as the Spanish and notably the British - bear little comparison with what we see today in the United States empire. A key novelty of the US imperial project is that all other empires knew that they were not the only ones, and none aimed at global domination. None believed themselves invulnerable, even if they believed themselves to be central to the world -...

Columbia University's announcement to its alumni reads innocently enough: Eric Hobsbawm To Deliver History Department Lecture on Monday, March 31. Then follows this text: "Noted British historian Eric Hobsbawm, emeritus professor of economic and social history at the University of London and emeritus professor of the Graduate Faculty at the New School University, will deliver the history department's distinguished lecture on Monday, March 31, at 4 p.m. in 103 Jerome Greene Hall. Hobsbawm, who is currently president of Birkbeck College at the University of London, will lecture on 'Politics, Memory and the Revisions of History at the Start of the...