t is a strange and unwelcome feature of political discourse today that double standards frequently apply when it comes to passing judgment on Nazism and Communism. Nazis are seen as criminals of evil intent while Communist crime, though greater in the number of victims, is only idealism gone astray. All sorts of opinion-makers who ought to know better subscribe to this degradation of history and morality, and Richard J. Evans turns out to be one of them. Formerly the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, he has written firmly and fairly about Hitler and the Third Reich. He was the expert whose evidence in the courtroom confirmed that David Irving, the premier Nazi apologist in the United Kingdom, was guilty as charged of Holocaust denial. No self-respecting thinker or writer was afterwards going to try to rescue the reputation of David Irving.
A cast-iron member of the British academic elite, with a knighthood to prove it, Evans has now published a book, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, that makes him look either a dupe or a fool of the higher sort, in any case earning him a reputation no historian would want to have.1 Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), the foremost Communist apologist in the Britain of his day, is the counterpart of David Irving. Had Hobsbawm been a Nazi, Evans surely would have thrown his doctrine back into his face. Instead, he defends the indefensible with this hagiography of more than seven hundred pages, complete with the whole apparatus of references and footnotes.
Joining the Party in Cambridge in the 1930s, Hobsbawm never deviated from the Party line, however misguided or self-contradictory it might have been. The record speaks for itself. Stalin's close colleagues confessed in a series of show trials to crimes they could not possibly have committed, but Hobsbawm nonetheless believed they were guilty. Every Soviet invasion of territory and suppression of other nation-states from the Baltic Republics and Finland at the beginning of the Second World War to Hungary in 1956, and then the Prague Spring afterwards, delighted him. He accused Mikhail Gorbachev of the wanton destruction of the Soviet Union, staying in the Party right up to its dissolution. Not long before he died, he caused a scandal by proclaiming in a bbc interview that the murder of fifteen or twenty million people would still now be justified if it led to the creation of a radiant Communist tomorrow. The omissions from his books amount to wholesale falsification. The secret police, Beria, the Gulag, slave labor and the White Sea Canal, the mass execution of Poles at Katyn, deportation of the Chechens and other minorities, enforced famines, riots—all are either met with silence or a half-sentence with grudge in it.
Hobsbawm was undoubtedly intelligent, and the surrender of his critical faculties is a most troubling character trait. Searching for a convincing explanation, Professor Evans turns into outright fellow-traveler. The Hobsbawm he hopes to establish is not a hardcore Communist but a variant: a Euro-Communist, a member of the New Left or some other Marxist group. This alternative Hobsbawm demonstrates “remarkable political independence of mind, as well as impatience, even perhaps disdain” for everyday Party tasks; he is “frequently at odds with the Party in these years,” and supposedly “kept his distance from Stalinism.” In the face of all the evidence he himself has provided, Evans can still write this utter absurdity: “there was no sense in which [Hobsbawm] was an active or committed member of the Party.”
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