Posted on 08/25/2003 7:59:31 AM PDT by WaterDragon
HOBSBAWM IN HIS OWN WORDS [Peter Robinson] In an email composed after reading Christopher Hitchens’s kind treatment of Eric Hobsbawm in today’s New York Times, Arnold Beichman points out the following exchange, which took place in an interview published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1994. Hobsbawm’s interlocutor is the journalist Michael Ingatieff, who began by asking Hobsbawm how at this late date he could possibly continue to justify his Communism. HOBSBAWM: You didn't have the option. You see, either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future and this [the Communist Party] was the only thing that offered an acceptable future.
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: This is the sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible...I don't actually know that it has any bearing on the history that I have written. If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, '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. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. 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. “You have to read this exchange twice,” Arnold writes, “because it is unbelievable that anyone could today defend Stalin's terror in the name of a socialist revolution that never was.” Unbelievable indeed. Posted at 05:47 PM
Immorality, pure and simple. It's "might make right" expressed in a different way.
...the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile."Only marginally worthwhile"...bollocks. This man is blind, as were (and are) those others that allowed the evils of communism to go unchallenged or for that matter still won't acknowledge its true nature.
Also, I interpret the interview which constitutes the body of the article you posted quite differently than you and the other posters. Hobsbawn believes that human society as presently and previously constituted is terminally murderous and self-destructive. He thought - and apparently still thinks - that Communism offers the only escape. He abandoned the Soviet Union upon realizing that it was not "the beginning of world revolution". Presumably, he would rally to the banner of any group which was.
Possibly under utilitarianism, but modern ethical systems do not allow people to be treated as means.
Me too. Sin and evil are facts of human society. The 20th century was the most bloody in human history, showing that the human race is not evolving or progressing down some dialetic to a higher state.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.