So says one not altogether repentant defender of totalitarian savagery given the star treatment in this interview by the BBC:
The renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm has watched the revolutions of 2011 with excitement – and notes that it’s now the middle class, not the working class, that is making waves.
“It was an enormous joy to discover once again that it’s possible for people to get down in the streets, to demonstrate, to overthrow governments,” says EJ Hobsbawm at the close of a year of revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world.
He has lived his life in the shadow, or the glow, of revolutions.
Born just months before the Russian revolution of 1917, he was a Communist for most of his adult life – as well as an innovative and influential writer and thinker.
He has been a historian of revolution, and at times an advocate of revolutionary change.
Yup, he’s been an “advocate” all right, but:
Books about jazz – he was once a jazz critic – jostle for space on the shelves with works of history in several languages.
As a reminder, here’s what Oliver Kamm had to say about Hobbsbawm a few years back:
According to the historian Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Michael Ignatieff in a BBC interview in 1994: “What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?” He replied: “Yes.”
[snip]
Moving to more recent panegyric, Hobsbawm remarks in On History (1997): “Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even nominal, use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.” He means the 27 Soviet divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to snuff out political reform.
Just for a change, maybe the BBC should drag up some old Nazi and get him to comment on current affairs. If the Beeb tries hard enough it may even be able to find a hepcat who like the sainted Eric, and, indeed, old Andropov (it was said), is fond of jazz.