William Grimes – Useful Stooges

Yesterday we started exploring the legacy of the late British historian E. J. Hobsbawm, a hero of the British and American cultural elite – and a lifelong Stalinist.

As we’ve already begun to see, most of the eulogies in “respectable” media touched on Hobsbawm’s Communism, but offered little in the way of judgment of this detail. New York Times writer William Grimes, for instance, admitted that Hobsbawm, unlike many others, “stuck with the Communist Party after the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and the Czech reform movement in 1968.” But Grimes then put a benign spin on this fact, quoting Hobsbamw’s 2003 statement, in an interview with the Times, that Communism “was a great cause, the emancipation of humanity. Maybe we got into it the wrong way, maybe we backed the wrong horse, but you have to be in that race, or else human life isn’t worth living.”

Not until the very end of Grimes’s very long necrology did he – briefly – address Hobsbawm’s refusal “to recant or, many critics complained, to face up to the human misery it had created.” (Note, indeed, how Grimes makes the objective fact of the mass human suffering caused by Communism to an opinion held by “many critics” that the ideology had caused “misery.”) Grimes mentioned a notorious 1994 television interview on the BBC (see clip below) in which Hobsbawm, in Grimes’s words, “said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result.” (Note, again, that Grimes turns the murder of millions by Stalin into deaths occurring under Stalin.)

Even here, Grimes cast Hobsbawm not as an unrepentant admirer of totalitarian genocide but as a victim of history. It was Tony Judt, another historian, who provided Grimes with the perfect quote with which to conclude the obit: “The greatest price he will pay is to be remembered not as Eric J. Hobsbawm the historian but as Eric J. Hobsbawm the unrepentant Communist historian,” Judt said. “It’s unfair and it’s a pity, but that is the cross he will bear.” Yes, that’s right: Hobsbawm supported the murder of millions, but in the end he was the victim.

In a lengthy testimonial for the British daily The Independent, Professor Sir (yes, “Professor Sir”) Roderick Floud called Hobsbawm “one of the greatest British historians of the 20th century.” Floud, too, took the “yes, but” approach to Hobsbawm’s Communism: yes, he was a lifelong Marxist, longtime Communist Party member, and inveterate apologist for Stalin, “but his influence as an historian and political thinker far transcended those allegiances.” After several detailed paragraphs about Hobsbawm’s career, Floud returned to the subject, writing as follows:

It would be overly cynical to suggest that Hobsbawm’s success as an historian stimulated jealousy. But the esteem in which he was held evoked hostility from those who could not forgive his Communism. An intellectual adherence to Marxism can, some argue, be explained in terms of the times in which he grew up; but to continue to defend the Communist Party long after the evidence of atrocities became known, is to some inexcusable.

Check out Floud’s wording there. First, see his reference to “those who could not forgive his Communism.” One might have been prepared to forgive Hobsbawm’s Communism if he had ever repented of it; but he never did. And, again, as with Higham’s reference to “Marxist ideology,” imagine The Independent running an article containing the phrase “those who could not forgive his Nazism.” Note also Floud’s words “to some.”

But Floud isn’t done trying to relativize and contextualize Hobsbawm’s Communism: “Hobsbawm’s adherence to the Communist cause stems from the circumstances in which, as a Jew, he was recruited in Berlin in 1932….Living in different times, the extremity of that passion sometimes seems hard to understand.” Yet millions of European Jews chose not to respond to Nazi totalitarianism by embracing Soviet totalitarianism.

Floud even found a way to make Hobsbawm’s tenacious Stalinism look potentially praiseworthy: is it possible, he asked, “that some part of his reluctance to disavow Communism even when it was failing stemmed from a wish not to betray the memory of former comrades”? Again, would anyone try to defend a stalwart Nazi in this fashion?

More tomorrow.

When the British historian E. J. Hobsbawm died on October 1, 2012, at the age of 95, the “respectable” media on both sides of the Atlantic joined in a chorus of hosannas to his memory. The BBC broadcast an hour-long retrospective. The Guardian ran thousands of words about him, including an exhaustive obituary by Martin Kettle and Dorothy Wedderburn, whose first few sentences made him sounds like something just short of a god:

E. J. Hobsbawm

Had Eric Hobsbawm died 25 years ago, the obituaries would have described him as Britain’s most distinguished Marxist historian and would have left it more or less there. Yet by the time of his death…he had achieved a unique position in the country’s intellectual life…he became arguably Britain’s most respected historian of any kind….Both in his knowledge of historic detail and in his extraordinary powers of synthesis…he was unrivalled.

No less fulsome was Hobsbawm’s New York Times obituary, by William Grimes, which overflowed with words like “masterwork,” “incisive,” “eloquent.” Nick Higham’s piece for the BBC website was equally fawning.

Kotkin at Harriman Institute in February 2015 — Stephen Kotkin

And the New Yorker ran a cozy tribute by historian Stephen Kotkin, who, calling Hobsbawm “refreshingly serious—intellectually curious and politically engaged—yet un-full of himself,” proceeded to celebrate Hobsbawm’s books, which “put considerable empirical flesh on the classical Marxist bones,” and closed with the admiring observation that “having embraced and never relinquished the passionate early Marx, E. J. Hobsbawm…was in it to change the world.” Hobsbawm, Kotkin concluded, had “long ago become probably the world’s best known living historian, with books translated into some forty languages.”

As those last few sentences suggest, to be sure, there was one ticklish little fact about Hobsbawm: he was a lifelong Stalinist. Most of those who extolled him in the “respectable” media did acknowledge this detail, but they all found curious ways to, shall we say, diminish its importance.

While admitting, for example, that critics saw Hobsbawm as “an apologist for Soviet tyranny,” Higham was quick to add that the late, great Kremlin toady “was too shrewd, too open-minded to pursue a narrow Marxist approach in his work or his politics.” The Guardian obit proffered a strikingly similar “yes, but” formulation on Hobsbawm’s Communism: “Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement….Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party’s ranks.”

Higham, indeed, referred neutrally and without irony to Hobsbawm’s “Marxist ideals” (can one imagine a writer for the BBC ever citing in this way someone’s “Nazi ideals”?) and quoted then Labour Party leader Ed Miliband’s praise for Hobsbawm as “an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of his family” and as a man who “cared deeply about the political direction of the country.” Kettle and Wedderburn, for their part, even saw Hobsbowm as a victim – a man whose university career was hampered by “a very British academic McCarthyism” (read: a disinclination to allow a Stalinist to indoctrinate students).

More tomorrow.

Useful Stooges

Useful Stooges

Tag: William Grimes

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