Free Republic

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]...

The case of Christopher Hitchens is emblematic of so many things: how success can ruin a writer, how far an aristocratic British accent can get you on the American scene, how Trotskyism can morph into Rumsfeld-ism without any visible exertion. The former features editor of the Socialist Worker newspaper is today the Court Polemicist of the War Party, whose jeremiads now grace the glossy pages of Vanity Fair magazine. His evolution, more clearly and interestingly than any other figure, maps the progress of a new ideology, a political phenomenon unique to our time, one that is neither "left" nor "right."...

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...