On the passing of Eric Hobsbawm

Last of the Sentimental Stalinists

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Eric Hobsbawm, who died Monday at 95, was the last of the sentimental Stalinists. 

• He was one of the most famous British historians of the twentieth century, and his books sold worldwide by the hundreds of thousands. In Brazil, for example, he achieved an astonishing celebrity.
• He was a gifted prose stylist and very learned. 
• His principal and most significant characteristic, however, was intellectual dishonesty characteristic of the age in which he grew to maturity. 
• He made the choice for Soviet Communism, for perhaps understandable personal reasons, at 14, and remained true to his choice for 81 years, long after there ceased being any possible excuse for doing so. 
• At least no one could accuse him of being a turncoat: he supported a radical form of evil from his early adolescence to his late senescence.
• ........
• A man who could think until late in his life, as Hobsbawn did, that the murder of 20 million people would be justified if it brought about a socialist utopia....

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