Stalin's Professor - The awful, influential career of E. J. Hobsbawm - communist and historian

National Review, Oct 15, 2001 by David Pryce-Jones

Fellow-traveling has evidently worked through to some consummation here. When once I put it to his fan Noel Annan that Hobsbawm was a bad man and a bad historian, he replied that anti-Communism was worse than Communism. We are supposed to admire those whose declared intention is to destroy us as they destroyed everyone else within their reach. We are invited to define murder and oppression as progress. What is this? Self-hate, fear, appeasement, a failure of will or of intellect, or all at once?

Hobsbawm, it is true, can no longer do much harm. Events have emptied his Communism of meaning, to leave a residue of odious kitsch on a par with those novels about heroic Red tractor drivers. We may be grateful, though, that in the safety of liberal democracy we were spared from discovering the point at which this liar would turn into a policeman.