'Interesting Times': Eric the Red

New York Times ^ | August 23, 2003 | CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

[liberallarry]

n March 1950 there was a public debate in New York City, moderated by the eminent radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. The motion before the meeting was: Is Russia a socialist community? Proposing for the ayes was Earl Browder, a loyal Stalinist who had nonetheless been removed by Moscow (for some minor deviations) from the leadership of the American Communist Party. Opposing him was the mercurial genius Max Shachtman, later to become a salient cold warrior but then the leader of the Trotskyist (or Trotsky-ish) Workers Party. Reaching his peroration against Browder, Shachtman recited the names of the European Communist leaders who, for their own minor deviations, had been liquidated by Stalin. Turning to his antagonist, he pointed and said: ''There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!'' Eyewitnesses still relish the way in which Browder turned abruptly pallid and shrunken.

Eric Hobsbawm has been a believing Communist and a skeptical Euro-Communist and is now a faintly curmudgeonly post-Communist, and there are many ways in which, accidents of geography to one side, he could have been a corpse. Born in 1917 into a diaspora Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent his early-orphaned boyhood in central Europe, in the years between the implosion of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. This time and place were unpropitious enough on their own: had Hobsbawm not moved to England after the Nazis came to power in 1933, he might have become a statistic. He went on to survive the blitz in London and Liverpool and, by a stroke of chance, to miss the dispatch to Singapore of the British unit he had joined. At least a third of those men did not survive Japanese captivity, and it's difficult to imagine Hobsbawm himself being one of the lucky ones.

For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In ''Interesting Times,'' he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. Willing as I was to be repelled by such reasoning (blood is not to be rated like milk, after all), I found that I was instead rather impressed by its minimalism. If you wanted to teach a bright young student how Communism actually felt to an intelligent believer, you would have to put this book -- despite its rather stale title -- on the reading list.

[liberallarry]

Excerted because it's long.

[Justin Raimondo]

Fascinating. I am struck by the last paragraph, in which Hitchens is discussing the obliteration of the British far left as the dominant force in the Labor Party:

"After a long and arduous shakeout, this has culminated in the near obliteration of the Tory Party and the rise to power of Tony Blair, at once the most radical and the most conservative of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right, the doctrines of which might be termed Hobsbawmian. Thus a long life devoted to the idea that history was inexorable has, as its summary achievement, the grand recognition that irony outlasts the dialectic."

Ah, "the Marxist Right" -- a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in recent years. Hitchens has coined, here, a very useful phrase, one that paleoconservatives should immediately expropriate.

[Scenic Sounds]

"the Marxist Right"

Impossible! How can that be anything but an oxymoron? ;-)

[Justin Raimondo]

It may be moronic, in many ways, but nonetheless truly descriptive of a new development. After all, look at the rhetoric of the "Right" in the foreign policy realm. We hear much about the "liberation" of Iraq, but when I hear the word "liberation," I think of the National Liberation Front of the Vietnam war era. Then there's the various "liberation" movements in the U.S.: "black liberation," chicano "liberation," women's "liberation," and the Symbionese Liberation Army come to mind. Where have we heard all this before?

What's interesting is that Hitchens, of all people, knows perfectly well what it's all about: he is the living embodiment of the Marxist Right. He supported the war, and all the future wars of conquest to come, because he believes the American legions will "liberate" women, secularize a region dominated by religious obscurantism, and implant the seeds of "democracy" so that that Iraqi Communist Party can be invited to join the Iraqi "Governing Council." Freepers will be glad to know that the Commies, after the briest hesitation, decided to accept the invitation.

Eric Hobsbawm would surely approve.

[Scenic Sounds]

What's interesting is that Hitchens, of all people, knows perfectly well what it's all about: he is the living embodiment of the Marxist Right.

Well, you know, I'm not much inclined to want to either agree or disagree with that assessment. For some time now, I've been struggling with the question of how much is gained and/or lost by trying to describe our twenty-first century world in terms designed during and for prior centuries. I still see folks calling one another Stalinists, Trotskites, Maoist, Nazis, etc. and yet (maybe it's just that I live a sheltered life) I don't know anyone who would describe themselves in these terms anymore. I suppose there are a few out there who still call themselves nazis or Trotskyites, but how many?

I recognize that some of these labels can have a certain utility as shorthand, but I certainly don't think that they get more valuable as time passes.

[liberallarry]

If Hitchens is interested enough to write a review, I'm interested enough to read it.

[okie01]

"If Hitchens is interested enough to write a review, I'm interested enough to read it."

The coinage "Hobsbawmian" alone made it worthwhile.