Even you Charles would have run afoul of Article 75 of the, "Most democratic, " Soviet Constitution on, "Anti-Soviet Agitation."
A provacation, since Proyect and y'all consigned Eric Hobsbawm to the Dustbin of History after the New Press published a short book of his a few yrs. ago. Needless to say, you and your ilk (ilk alert!!!) will view this excerpt from the reactionary, pro-capitalist Richard Pipes review of Hobsbawm's autobio from the April issue of Commentary as some backhanded Pugliese apologia/defense of imperialist, monopoly capitalist murder. Heh and aargh. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ <URL: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/bk.pipes.html > Hobsbawm formally joined the Communist party in 1936 while a student at Cambridge, when the USSR stood on the brink of Stalin’s Great Terror. Yet there is no evidence in his memoirs that he had any inkling of what was happening there: thus, he ignores the show trials of the mid-1930’s, never alludes to the fate of Lenin’s close associates Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, and indeed has no entry in his index for either the Cheka or the KGB. The horrors of Stalinist Russia seem to have been irrelevant to one who treated Communism as a kind of private religion that required not knowledge but only total faith and commitment. Hobsbawm remained a Communist through thick and thin, refusing to opt out, as did many other intellectuals, whether in reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact (which goes unmentioned in his memoirs), Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s crimes in the 1956 “secret speech” (which, Hobsbawm relates, had a shattering effect on him), the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, or any other outrage. He spent his life in a world populated by other Communists or fellow-travelers and felt at home only in their company. He confesses that in his youth he could not conceive of marrying a woman who did not share his political faith, adding that when, later in life, he arrived at the point where he could contemplate “a real relationship” with a person who was not a potential recruit for the party, he realized he was no longer a true Communist. And yet he seems to have concluded some time ago that Communism had no future. “Communism is now dead,” he writes at one point, leaving behind “a landscape of material and moral ruin.” It has “collapsed so completely . . . that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start.” In The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914- 1991, his most popular work of history, published in 1994, Hobsbawm goes even further, saying that the tragedy of the revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power was “that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism.” In Interesting Times, he hails Gorbachev for destroying the Soviet Union.
WHY, THEN, did he join the party, and how does he explain his remaining a faithful follower? To the latter question, Hobsbawm provides several muddled answers. One, familiar from apologists for another totalitarian regime, is that he did not know. Thus, he admits to feeling “genuine grief” on Stalin’s death, a grief “unsullied by knowledge.” “Of course,” he adds, “we did not, and could not [!], envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet people under Stalin.” Until Khrushchev revealed them, he had “underestimated” the horrors of Stalin’s Russia. On another occasion, he justifies his Communism by reference to his sympathy for the world’s poor. But if that really were his concern, then he should have been an enthusiastic apologist for capitalism. In the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, after six decades of the command economy, 57 percent of the population had to live on less than $10 a month. In North Korea, the last truly Communist dictatorship left on earth today, the annual GDP is less than $1,000 per capita; in its unabashedly capitalist southern neighbor, it is $18,000. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese, Kautskyite Scalawag, Inc.