The Incremental Coup – How the Labour Right Successfully used ‘anti-Semitism’ to attack Corbyn

Lansman’s Momentum Hoists the White Flag and Surrenders to Chuka Ummuna’s narrative

When the General Election was called last year I was one of the few people to predict that Corbyn might achieve a hung parliament.  This at a time when the Tories were ahead by up to 24% in the polls. On 20^th April I posted a blog Labour Can Win if Corbyn is Bold.  On 3^rd June I followed this up with Is Labour on the threshold of victory? the subtitle of which read ‘No one has been more disappointed with the success of Labour’s campaign than the Labour Right and Zionist Jewish Labour Movement.’

In view of my successful prediction of Corbyn's victory at the election, I wrote to Kath Viner, Editor of the Guardian, saying that I would replace both Nick Cohen and Owen Jones for half the salary - amazing as it seems she rejected this offer. 

This was at a time when the Observer’s sage Nick Cohen wrote ‘Will there be 150, 125, 100 Labour MPs by the end of the flaying? My advice is to think of a number then halve it.’  Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn

Corbyn doesn't realise that however a 'militant' opponent of antisemitism he is he will not be acceptable to the Zionists because their real concern is defence of Israel not antisemitism

I will therefore make another prediction.  The revitalised ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign we have seen in the past 6 weeks, is just the beginning. It is a weapon of mass expulsions. As long as Corbyn accepts that there are ‘pockets of anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party, then he will be at the perpetual mercy of those whose real goal is his removal. Until Corbyn is gone the ‘anti-Semitism’ crisis will not abate.

It is important to understand that there is nothing that Corbyn can do to satisfy his accusers.  Every tweet, every blogpost will be ‘proof’ of anti-Semitism.  As long as Israel commits its war crimes in the name of the Jewish people so long will there be people who are fooled by this and use anti-Semitic terminology.  They are wrong to do so but the blame lies with the apologists for Israel’s war crimes. The only answer to this campaign is to stand up to it, to rebut its assumptions and to declare openly that Labour is opposed to an Apartheid State of Israel.

Chuka Ummuna and the Labour Right set out to damage Labour's prospects in the local elections.  There is no doubt that they had some success, not least in London. It is understandable that people want to spin the local election results but we should admit that they weren't as good as they could have been.

Jewish Labour Movement Campaigns Officer and ex-Councillor Adam Langlaben, this racist Zionist was defeated when he convinced his electorate that he and his fellow Zionists were antisemitic!!  He went down to defeat in West Hendon

Langleben toured the TV studios with his message that 'antisemitism' had defeated - strangely enough no other defeated councillor was offered the same facilities - media bias?  perish the thought

Ironically the Labour Right's greatest success was in Barnet, where Labour failed to take control of the Council on a small swing. Labour's Zionist councillors, in particular the Jewish Labour Movement’s [JLM] Campaigns Officer Adam Langleben and friends in West Hendon succeeded in convincing the electorate that Labour was ‘anti-Semitic’.  The result was they lost! In a classic display of Chutzpah Langleben complained that voters had been put off by Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism’!  Langleben it was who secretly filmed Jackie Walker at the ‘training’ session at Labour Party Conference 2016 which resulted in her suspension.

Unless Corbyn begins fighting back against the Israel’s supporters and the Zionist lobby he will never become Prime Minister.  It is worse than useless, when Labour is accused of being ‘riddled’ with anti-Semitism to say that he is a militant opponent of it. He and Israel’s apologists are talking about two different things. Corbyn means hatred of Jews when he talks about anti-Semitism.  Jonathan Arkush and the Zionists mean hatred of Israeli Apartheid and Zionism. That is why, after their recent talks, Arkush expressed his dissatisfaction because Corbyn couldn’t agree to his simple requests.

The Zionists wanted ‘a swift resolution of party disciplinary cases such as that of Ken Livingstone and Labour adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.’  None of these things have anything to do with anti-Semitism.

Jess Phillips - one of the lynch mob that accompanied liar Ruth Smeeth MP to Marc Wadsworth's hearing

Livingstone stated that Hitler supported Zionism.  Whether he was right or wrong is immaterial. The fact is that he spoke about Zionism not Jews or Judaism.  Unless you believe that Jews and Zionism are synonymous then the attack on Ken makes no sense and if you do believe that Jews and Zionism are the same thing then what you are saying is that anti-Semitism equals anti-Zionism, which is in itself an anti-Semitic statement!

This simple piece of logic entirely has entirely escaped Corbyn and his advisers.  The demand that Jackie Walker, a Black-Jew be expelled is obviously on account of her anti-Zionism. Even stranger is their demand for the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism when there is a very simple 21 word definition of anti-Semitism from an academic expert on anti-Semitism, Dr Brian Klug:

antisemitism is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews are perceived as something other than what they are.

The full IHRA definition, including 11 examples, comes to 450 words.  Why?  Because it takes that many words to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism!  Thus anyone who says the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign isn’t about Israel and Zionism is either a liar, a fool or both. 

Sir Stephen Sedley, a Jewish former Court of Appeal Judge wrote that

‘the IHRA definition offers encouragement to pro-Israel militants whose targets for abuse and disruption in London have recently included the leading American scholar and critic of Israel Richard Falk’

Sedley described how the definition

‘gives respectability and encouragement to forms of intolerance which are themselves contrary to law, and higher education institutions in particular need to be aware of this.’

If we don’t learn the lessons of what happened in the past 6 weeks then we should not be surprised at the consequences which are Corbyn’s removal.

Ever since Corbyn was elected as Labour leader in September 2015, the Right has made it clear that he is unacceptable at any price and in any form.  This should not be a surprise. The Labour Rights is devoted to the ‘special relationship with the US. The US spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the CIA and its Intelligence agencies.   Their purpose is to keep the world safe for US interests.  You can imagine their shock when one of Britain’s leading left-wing politicians, anti-NATO, anti-Trident, anti-US invasion of Iraq and bombing in the Middle East was elected as leader of Britain’s second largest party. 

The idea that the CIA and and related agencies, in co‑ordination with their Israeli allies, would do nothing is absurd. The CIA are not paid hundreds of millions of dollars for nothing. Our own MI6 have a Domestic Subversion section.  Have people forgotten how the Police sent officers into environmental groups and even had children with female activists?  This is the deep state.

Ruth Smeeth - an agent of influence

There is no doubt that the campaign about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Labour Party originates is a state sponsored campaign dirty tricks programme placed in friendly newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Guardian.  Jonathan Freedland has been particularly assiduous in spreading this state sponsored propaganda. We know for a fact that Ruth Smeeth is a US asset because Wikileaks got hold of US cables.

The demonstration in the summer of 2016 called by Momentum to defend Corbyn against an attempted coup this time Momentum or rather Lansman chose to be absent as Corbyn came under attack from Israel's supporters

At first the Labour Right were inclined to challenge Corbyn head on. There was Hilary Benn’s treachery with the staged resignations from the Shadow Cabinet in Summer 2016 and then the challenge from Angela Eagle and then Owen Smith.  Momentum rose to the occasion, with a demonstration on College Green outside the House of Commons as 172 Labour MPs, treated to the soaring rhetoric of the Welsh Windbag Neil Kinnock tried, in Dianne Abbot’s words, to ‘break the man’.  I went up with my son Tom, a young Corbynite and the atmosphere was heady.

The Zionist Demonstration - Harry Markham, a Jewish fascist is in the bottom right with the hat

Friends of the fascists Jonathan Hoffman and Harry Markham (in hat and bottom  right) are also against 'antisemitism'

Jonathan Hoffman (left) with Paul Besser, former Intelligence Officer of Britain First and Gemma Sheridan of the Jewish Defence League is in between them

Contrast this with today and the reactionary ‘Enough is enough’ demonstration under the auspices of the Board of Deputies. This is an openly Zionist organisation led by right-wing Tory Jonathan Arkush who welcomed Donald Trump and the anti-Semitic alt-Right to power in America. This despite the fact that Trump’s campaign employed anti-Semitic stereotypes and themes, see Anti-Semitism is no longer an undertone of Trump’s campaign. It’s the melody

At the Battle of Cable Street as Jewish workers confronted the fascists the Zionists and the Board of Deputies told Jews to stay indoors and keep their heads down

This was billed as an ‘anti-racist’ demonstration but it is must be the first time that the sectarian homophobic bigots of the Democratic Unions Party attended such a demonstration! Not only the DUP but that well known anti-racist Norman Tebbit, Michael Foot’s ‘semi-house trained polecat’ was also in attendance.  It is fortunate that didn’t devise a Jewish version of his notorious ‘cricket test’  (Asians who supported the Indian/Pakistani cricket teams were held not to really be British). It was the first anti-racist demonstration that the Board has organised. In 1936 when the British Union of Fascists tried to march through the Jewish East End of London, the Board vociferously opposed any counter demonstration.  Stay inside they advised and ignore the anti-Semites. Thousands of Jewish demonstrators ignored them and successfully stopped the fascists together with non-Jewish workers in the Battle of Cable Street.

The main chant at the Zionist demonstration, which included openly fascist Zionists such as Harry Markham and Jonathan Hoffman, was ‘Jeremy is a racist’. The demonstration was attended by numerous Tory and right-wing Labour Right MPs. Yet where was Momentum ? Completely absent. Jon Lansman’s refusal to mobilise any opposition to this anti-Corbyn demonstration was an act of treachery.

This demonstration was a reaction to the synthetic furore over a 6 year old mural, long erased, which Corbyn had defended on free speech grounds. It was claimed that it was anti-Semitic but on any objective viewing it depicted bankers not Jews, dining on the back of Black sweated labour. It was anti-banker not anti-Jewish and if you think bankers are all Jewish well you are anti-Semitic!

This mural was the pretext for the insertion into the election campaign of the false ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative. This was a weapon that had already been tried out even before Corbyn was elected when it was alleged he associated with holocaust deniers. It surfaced in January 2016 in the Oxford University Labour Club affair, which Asa Winstanley debunked. The most dedicated anti-racist Labour MP who was arrested outside the South Africa  High Commission in Trafalgar Square in the days of Apartheid was now being called a racist.

In the 2½  years since we have had a non-stop diet of ‘anti-Semitism’. It is no coincidence that nearly all the victims of this campaign have been Jewish, Black anti-racists – Tony Greenstein, Jackie Walker, Marc Wadsworth, Cyril Chilson. It is obvious that the ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign is not about anti-Semitism.

Jackie Walker was subject to what I described on 17^th September 2016 to a political lynching even before the 2016 Labour Conference where she attended a secretly taped ‘training event’ run by the JLM. Shortly after Jackie was suspended for saying that groups other than Jews should be included in Holocaust Memorial Day and that she hadn’t come across a definition of anti-Semitism that she could work with. This was the cue for Lansman to remove Jackie as Momentum Vice-Chair. Shortly afterwards Jackie was suspended. Cyril, Marc and I have since been expelled. Having the JLM take a training session on antiracism was like Nick Griffin of the BNP lecturing on multi-culturalism!

The JLM is the ‘sister party’ of the Israeli Labour Party, an openly racist party that supports Netanyahu’s attempts to deport 40,000 Black African refugees from Israel because, in the words of Prime Minister Netanyahu they threaten Israel’s Jewish identity. [See The violent roots of Israel's Labor party]

The Zionists react angrily to any suggestion that their concerns about ‘anti-Semitism’ have anything to do with Israel. They complain that the ‘victim’ is being denied the right to define their own oppression (though Jewish anti-Zionists are never seen as victims). But when you read what they say it is clear that they are incapable of differentiating between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. In their Open Letter to Corbyn, Arkush and Goldstein stated that:

“Again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has sided with anti-Semites rather than Jews. At best, this derives from the far left’s obsessive hatred of Zionism, Zionists and Israel. At worst, it suggests a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy.”  (my emphasis)

They can’t help themselves. If there was any doubt about this then Arkush put it to bed when he described Jewdas, a group of Jewish anarchists, as a ‘source of virulent anti-Semitism’.

Lucianer Berger ex-headof Israeli dirty tricks PR group BICOM

That is why the decision of Corbyn to accept that Labour has an ‘anti-Semitism’ problem is so stupid and counter-productive.  What he is doing is accepting the bona fides of a campaign whose sole purpose is to get rid of him. When the whole of the right-wing press, the same press that attacks George Soros using the anti-Semitic stereotype of a ‘puppet master’, is adopting the ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative then it is absurd for Corbyn to throwaway his defences. 77% of Labour Party members refuse to accept that the Labour Party is full of anti-Semites.

What we saw in the election was a determined campaign by right-wing Labour MPs to use anti-Semitism as a weapon to attack Corbyn by damaging Labour’s chances in the local elections. When the Tories staged their debate on anti-Semitism in Parliament it gave the chance to Labour’s right-wing– Smeeth, Luciana Berger, John Mann – to attack their own leader. These creatures would prefer Labour to lose to the Tories than win under Corbyn. It is important to grasp this essential truth.

Most Black anti-racist activists see Chuka Ummuna as politically White

Chuka Ummuna has been waging a one man war against Corbyn over anti-Semitism. Here is an MP, who is nominally Black and yet has next to nothing to say about the Windrush scandal.  It is incredible.  Anti-Semitism is not a form of state racism, racism against Black people is.

Jewish people aren’t being hauled out of their beds and put on the next plane out of the country. Jews aren’t being denied hospital treatment or loss of benefits or being told to ‘go home’. Jews don’t face deaths in custody or synagogues being firebombed or worshippers run over outside the synagogue. These are the experience of Black and Muslim people. 

Anti-Semitism is largely confined to social media. No one has died from a tweet or a Facebook post. In the Independent less than two weeks before the elections, he wrote an article attacking Labour over ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst playing down the racism of the Windrush Affair which has seen Black citizens of this country for 70 years deported. 

Ummuna wrote that ‘We can’t attack the racism that may lie behind the Tories’ mistreatment of the Windrush generation when we don’t get our own house in order on hate’.  Note that  ‘racism may lie behind the Tories’ mistreatment’.  He isn’t even certain whether the ‘hostile environment’ policy of the Tories is racist and he describes denying cancer treatment to someone as ‘mistreatment’ rather than say racist abuse or attempted murder.

You couldn’t get much gentler but then Ummuna was among those Labour MPs who abstained, i.e. supported the Government’s 2014 Immigration Act.  Only 8 Labour MPs voted against this Act including Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbot.

John Mann- rent a mouth MP demonstrates that he is a  racist bigot whose concerns about antisemitism are entirely bogus

John Mann, the rent-a-mouth MP for Bassetlaw is a racist viper. In his speech in the ‘anti-Semitism’ debate he alleged that Momentum had something to do with his wife being sent a dead bird in 2012, three years before Momentum was even formed! This is an MP who produced a legal guide to Anti-Social Behaviour which has sections such as ‘‘loitering by youths’, ‘graffiti’, ‘neighbours from hell’, ‘alcohol’ – and ‘travellers’.

In the section on ‘Travellers’, there is a big, bold strapline “the Police have powers to remove any gypsies and travellers” (sic).  Mann’s concern with ‘anti-Semitism’ contrasts with virulent racism when it comes to the Roma, who were also victims of the Holocaust.

Lansman's Momentum is similar to the Mountain troll in Harry Potter's The Sorcerer's Stone - brawn without brain

Lansman’s Momentum resembles the Mountain Troll in Harry Potter’s The Sorcerer’s Stone.  It is 40,000 strong and yet politically it is ineffective and inarticulate.  In its statement on anti-Semitism, after having maintained radio silence for two weeks, it spoke of the ‘numerous cases of antisemitism in the Labour Party’ as being the product of an ‘unconscious bias’. It went on to state that ‘accusations of antisemitism should not and cannot be dismissed simply as right wing smears nor as the result of conspiracies.’ 

Momentum, because of Lansman openly Zionist politics, has run up the white flag over the Right’s ‘anti-Semitism’ attack. When the main, left-wing Corbyn group accepts their bogus narrative then this demonstrates that the pro-Corbyn movement is politically weak.  

Momentum rode the crest of a wave at the last general election but this time it was different. The Right controlled the narrative and Corbyn was unable to break free. So when Momentum pushed hundreds of people into Wandsworth they didn’t get the massive swings they expected. Indeed they may have been counter-productive. Momentum has been seduced by the myths of its own achievements last June just as New Labour believed that its spin machine won it the 1997 General Election. 

Roma child in the hands of a Nazi soldier

It doesn't matter whether Momentum is 40,000 or 100,000 strong. Politically it is at the mercy of Lansman's caprices. Its lack of any democracy is crippling it.  It is incapable of responding to the attacks of the Right because its membership are disenfranchised.

We face a situation where 60+ Labour MPs, led by Mann, Ummuna, Smeeth and Berger are making it crystal clear that they will not, under any circumstances support  Corbyn for Prime Minister if he were in a position to form a government.  If these Red Tories are not removed then we can say goodbye to a Corbyn government.  The easiest way would be through the removal of the whip or reselection but Lansman is also opposed to this.

Not only do we need to reject the false anti-Semitism narrative but to oppose the witchhunt which is back to the proportions it was under McNicol. Jennie Formy is now presiding over the same undemocratic Compliance Unit.  Christine Shawcroft was stabbed in the back by Lansman and Corbyn. We need to build Labour Against the Witchhunt.

The false antisemitism campaign in the Labour Party has made people afraid of raising the issue and succeeded in stopping support for the Palestinians

The ‘anti-Semitism’ narrative is responsible for people being afraid to raise the question of Palestine and Zionism. The false anti-Semitism campaign is importing Israeli ‘democracy’ into the Labour Party and having a chilling effect on free speech.

Above all we need to say that the days of the Labour Friends of Israel and JLM are over.  What other party allows a foreign party to affiliate to it. We didn’t have a Labour Friends of South Africa during the days of Apartheid and we don’t need a Labour Friends of Israeli Apartheid either. The JLM should have their privileges as a socialist society removed.

Tony Greenstein

A letter from an Israeli History Professor Shlomo Sand to the President of France

Why I Cannot be a Zionist: an Open Letter to Emmanuel Macron

 Photo by OFFICIAL LEWEB PHOTOS | CC BY 2.0

This is a powerful open letter to the French President Macron by Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand.  Macron a few weeks ago made a particularly stupid statement, even for a French Blairite, when he declared that anti-Zionism was the new anti-Semitism.  This of course has been the message of Zionism for the last 30 years.

You wonder why people who are, at least on the surface, superficially intelligent, repeat this vacuous nonsense.  Anyone with any understanding of Zionism would know that it was Jewish people who were always its fiercest opponents.  Jews saw in Zionism the validation of anti-Semitism.  It was a Jewish form of anti-Semitism.  Anti-Zionism rejected the idea that Jews could not live with non-Jews, that anti-Semitism was part of the non-Jewish psyche and could never be eradicated.  Zionism was racist even in its attitude to Jews.  It was no wonder that an ideology that was transfixed by the racist nostrums of its day should, in turn, treat the Palestinians in the same way as the Jews of Europe were treated.

Please read!

Tony Greenstein

France's increasingly unpopular and intellectually lightweight President Macron

To President Macron

As I began reading your speech on the commemoration of the Vel d’Hiv round-up, I felt grateful toward you. Indeed, in the light of the long tradition of political leaders, both Left and Right, past and present, who have denied France’s participation and responsibility in the deportation of Jewish-origin people to the death camps, I was grateful that you instead took a clear position, without any ambiguity: yes, France is responsible for the deportation, yes there was anti-Semitism in France before and after the Second World War. Yes, we must continue to fight all forms of racism. I saw these positions as standing in continuity with the courageous statement you made in Algeria, saying that colonialism constitutes a crime against humanity.

But to be wholly frank, I was rather annoyed by the fact that you invited Benjamin Netanyahu. He should without doubt be ranked in the category of oppressors, and so he cannot parade himself as a representative of the victims of yesteryear. Of course, I have long known the impossibility of separating memory from politics. Perhaps you were deploying a sophisticated strategy, still yet to be revealed, aimed at contributing to the realisation of an equitable compromise in the Middle East?

Shlomo Sand - history professor at Tel Aviv University

I stopped being able to understand you when, in the course of your speech, you stated that “Anti-Zionism … is the reinvented form of anti-Semitism.” Was this statement intended to please your guest, or is it purely and simply a marker of a lack of political culture? Has this former student of philosophy, Paul Ricoeur’s assistant, read so few history books that he does not know that many Jews or descendants of Jewish heritage have always opposed Zionism, without this making them anti-Semites? Here I am referring to almost all the old grand rabbis, but also the stances taken by a section of contemporary orthodox Judaism. And I also remember figures like Marek Edelman, one of the escaped leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, or the communists of Jewish background who took part in the French Resistance in the Manouchian group, in which they perished. I also think of my friend and teacher Pierre Vidal-Naquet and of other great historians and sociologists like Eric Hobsbawm and Maxime Rodinson, whose writings and whose memory are so dear to me, or indeed Edgar Morin. And finally I wonder if you seriously expect of the Palestinians that they should not be anti-Zionists!

Nonetheless, I suppose that you do not particularly appreciate people on the Left, or, perhaps, the Palestinians. But knowing that you worked at Rothschild Bank, I will here provide a quote from Nathan Rothschild. President of the union of synagogues in Britain, he was the first Jew to be named a lord in the United Kingdom, where he also became the bank’s governor. In a 1903 letter to Theodor Herzl, the talented banker wrote that he was anxious about plan to establish a “Jewish colony”; it “would be a ghetto within a ghetto with all the prejudices of a ghetto.” A Jewish state “would be small and petty, Orthodox and illiberal, and keep out non-Jews and the Christians.” We might conclude that Rothschild’s prophecy was mistaken. But one thing is for sure: he was no anti-Semite!

Of course, there have been, and there are, some anti-Zionists who are also anti-Semites, but I am also certain that we could find anti-Semites among the sycophants of Zionism. I can also assure you that a number of Zionists are racists whose mental structure does not differ from that of utter Judeophobes: they relentlessly search for a Jewish DNA (even at the university that I teach at).

But to clarify what an anti-Zionist point of view is, it is important to begin by agreeing on the definition of the concept “Zionism,” or at the very least, a series of characteristics proper to this ter. I will endeavor to do so as briefly as possible.

First of all, Zionism is not Judaism. It even constitutes a radical revolt against it. Across the centuries, pious Jews nurtured a deep ardour for their holy land, and more particularly for Jerusalem. But they held to the Talmudic precept intimating that they should not collectively emigrate there before the coming of the Messiah. Indeed, the land does not belong to the Jews, but to God. God gave and God took away again; and he would send the Messiah to restore it, when he wanted to. When Zionism appeared it removed the “All Powerful” from his place, substituting the active human subject in his stead.

We can each give our own view on the question of whether the project of creating an exclusive Jewish state on a slice of land with a very large Arab-majority population is a moral idea. In 1917 Palestine counted 700,000 Arab Muslims and Christians and around 60,000 Jews, half of whom were opposed to Zionism. Up till that point, the mass of the Yiddish-speaking people who wanted to flee the pogroms of the Russian Empire preferred to migrate to the American continent. Indeed, two million made it there, thus escaping Nazi persecution (and the persecution under the Vichy regime).

In 1948 in Palestine there were 650,000 Jews and 1.3 million Arab Muslims and Christians, 700,000 of whom became refugees. It was on this demographic basis that the State of Israel was born. Despite that, and against the backdrop of the extermination of the European Jews, a number of anti-Zionists reached the conclusion that in the name of avoiding the creation of fresh tragedies it was best to consider the State of Israel as an irreversible fait accompli. A child born as the result of a rape does indeed have the right to live. But what happens if this child follows in the footsteps of his father?

And then came 1967. Since then Israel has ruled over 5.5 million Palestinians, who are denied civil, political and social rights. Israel subjects them to military control: for part of them a sort of “Indian reservation” in the West Bank, while others are locked up in a “barbed wire holding pen” in Gaza (70% of the population there are refugees or their descendants). Israel, which constantly proclaims its desire for peace, considers the territories conquered in 1967 as an integral part of the “land of Israel,” and it behaves there as it sees fit. Thus far 600,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers have been moved in there… and this has still not ended!

Is that today’s Zionism? No!, reply my friends on the Zionist Left — which is constantly shrinking. They tell me that we have to put an end to the dynamic of Zionist colonisation, that a narrow little Palestinian state should be created next to the State of Israel, and that Zionism’s objective was to establish a state where the Jews would be sovereign over themselves, and not to conquer “the ancient homeland” in its entirety. And the most dangerous thing in all this, in their eyes, is that annexing territory threatens Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

So here we reach the proper moment for me to explain to you why I am writing to you, and why I define myself as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, without thereby becoming anti-Jewish. Your political party has put the words “La République” in its name. So I presume that you are a fervent republican. And, at the risk of surprising you: I am, too. So being a democrat and a republican I cannot — as all Zionists do, Left and Right, without exception — support a Jewish State. The Israeli Interior Ministry counts 75% of the country’s citizens as Jewish, 21% as Arab Muslims and Christians and 4% as “others” (sic). Yet according to the spirit of its laws, Israel does not belong to Israelis as a whole, whereas it does belong even to all those Jews worldwide who have no intention of coming to live there. So for example, Israel belongs a lot more to Bernard Henri-Lévy or to Alain Finkielkraut than it does to my Palestinian-Israeli students, Hebrew speakers who sometimes speak it better than I do! Israel hopes that the day will come when all the people of the CRIF (“Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France”) and their “supporters” emigrate there! I even know some French anti-Semites who are delighted by such a prospect. On the other hand, we could find two Israeli ministers close to Netanyahu putting out the idea that it is necessary to encourage the “transfer” of Israeli Arabs, without that meaning that anyone demanded their resignations.

That, Mr. President, is why I cannot be a Zionist. I am a citizen who desires that the state he lives in should be an Israeli Republic, and not a Jewish-communalist state. As a descendant of Jews who suffered so much discrimination, I do not want to live in a state that, according to its own self-definition, makes me a privileged class of citizen. Mr. President, do you think that that makes me an anti-Semite?

Eric Hobsbawm - An Obituary

 

Eric Hobsbawm was someone who stayed with the Communist Party till the end.  Whereas many intellectuals deserted the CP at the time of Hungary, Hobsbawm stayed the course.  He was, of course, criticised for his attitude toward Stalinism but whatever faults he had he was a great historian and equally importantly, he didn’t abandon class politics in the way that the Blairites under Nina Temple and Marxism Today did. 

Below is an Obituary on one of the greatest historians of the present age and also a reference to a contrary view of Hobsbawm.
 
Tony Greenstein

Remember us with forbearance: the unrepentant Eric Hobsbawm, an obituary

In his study

Donald Sassoon [1] , 5 October 2012

A fellow historian celebrates the life of one of the greatest British exponents of one strand of the tradition of European Marxism: a pessimism of the intelligence barely tempered by an optimism of the will.

Eric Hobsbawm outlived his short twentieth century [8] (1917-1991) by more than twenty years. And right to the end he was still the object of scandal for having been far too long a communist. ‘You see’, he might have said, (‘you see’ was one of his habitual linguistic tics) ‘there have been many communists among major historians, but they left. Some stayed on the left (E.P. Thompson), some moved right (Annie Kriegel, François Furet). I stayed until the end, the bitter end.’

Since even the popular media agree that Hobsbawm was a remarkable historian, a great historian, and some even say that he was the greatest living historian (something which he found rather unconvincing and a little embarrassing), it begs the question: how can an impenitent communist be a great historian? Indeed, whenever Hobsbawm was interviewed, especially in Britain or the United States, sooner or later, the utterly predictable questions would pop up. And why did you support the USSR? And why did you stay so long in the communist party? (the sub-text here being ‘the producer insisted I should ask you this because it would look odd if I didn’t’). The interviewer would offer a challenge: Here is the opportunity to denounce your past, to repent, to say sorry. Take the chance. Admit it: you were wrong!

Although he has consistently refused to abjure, he freely admitted mistakes, erroneous interpretations, his belated realization of the gravity of Stalin’s crimes (Khrushchev’s speech was to him a revelation). However, on the substance: ‘are you sorry to have been a communist?’ he always remained unrepentant.

Peter De Francia, *Eric Hobsbawm* (c.1955) James Hyman Fine Art, currently on public display in Room One of the stunning curation of art and archives connected to John Berger, 'Art and property now' [9] at the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing, King's College London, the Strand, WC2R till November 10, 2012. Monday-Saturday 13:00 - !9:00

What kind of communist was he? He belonged, he explained in his autobiography, Interesting Times [10], to the generation for whom the hope of a world revolution was so strong that to abandon the communist party was like giving in to despair. But he must have been tempted. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary a letter was sent to the Daily Worker, then the party daily. It was signed by Hobsbawm as well as other party intellectuals such as Christopher Hill, E.P Thompson, Ronald Meek, Rodney Hilton, Doris Lessing, and the remarkable Scottish poet [11] Hugh MacDiarmid (who, in a somewhat eccentric way, is supposed to have rejoined the party over Hungary on the grounds that one does not desert friends in need). The letter declared that, ‘We feel that the uncritical support given by the Executive Committee of the Communist Party to the Soviet action in Hungary is the undesirable culmination of years of distortion of fact, and failure of the British communists to think our political problems for themselves...The exposure of grave crimes and abuses in the USSR and the recent revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary, have shown that for the past twelve years we have based our political analyses on the false presentation of the facts....’. Of course the party refused to publish it, so it appeared instead in the New Statesman. Other statements made at the time suggests that Hobsbawm, unlike perhaps the majority of his co-signatories, thought the intervention was a regrettable necessity, a kind of humanitarian intervention ante litteram (we know the formula: if the USSR had not intervened, fascism would have prevailed).

By then Hobsbawm had already lost any admiration he might have had for Russian society. In Interesting Times he explains that his first trip to the ‘socialist camp’ in 1954-55 had proved disappointing. He found the USSR and the system depressing and though he continued to defend the party line his scepticism grew as supporters were increasingly asked to believe the unbelievable. Communists of his generation regarded themselves, as he says, ‘as combatant in an omnipresent war’. Like their counter-parts on the anti-communist side they were prepared to disregard human rights in order to stop what they regarded as a greater evil. But then, how else can one tolerate evil if not by believing that something worse would have happened? This does not justify anything, but it explains much. And it explains Hobsbawm’s fondness for Brecht’s famous poem written in the 1930s An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born After Us):

Ach, wir/ Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten für Freundlichkeit/ Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein./    Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird/ Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist/ Gedenkt unsrer/ Mit Nachsicht.

Alas, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when the time comes
Where man can help his fellow man
Remember us
With forbearance.

Be that as it may, the question of why he decided to remain in the CP is, ultimately, a question of personal psychology. It was perhaps a desire not to give in, an affirmation that he preferred to remain loyal to the choice of his younger days when the international fight against fascism was the main motivation. After all he could have easily joined the establishment. In a way he did: he was made Companion of Honour in 1997 joining national treasures such as David Attenborough, Alec Guinness, and David Hockney and less treasurable treasures such as Tebbitt and Heseltine.

In the autobiography he alludes to the ‘pride’ of having gone so far without conceding an inch almost as if to say ‘If I can “make it” as an old commie, imagine what I could have achieved as an ex-commie?’ There was, after all, not the slightest personal advantage in remaining in the CPGB, a tiny party irrelevant in almost all areas of British life, unlike France or Italy where a large communist party offered some form of collective protection to a besieged community.

Though not really involved in the everyday politics of the CPGB (except as a student at Cambridge) he was always more than willing to give talks, write in the party press (such as Marxism Today) and be generally available provided no-one told him what to say.

Britain in the 1950s was overwhelmingly anti-communist. Even being a Marxist constituted a problem. To give the younger readers an idea of what was at stake I should perhaps mention that when I was at University College London in the 1960s, I took a course in British economic history. The lecturer in charge (whose name I have forgotten, so undistinguished he has remained) distributed a lengthy bibliography at the beginning of the academic year. He invited us to turn to a particular page and warned us: ‘Note on p. xxx: E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. Now Hobsbawm is a perfectly good historian, but be careful: he is a Marxist. Turn now to page yyy: E.P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson too is a good historian, but be on your guards: he too is a Marxist.’ He mentioned no-one else. At school I had not heard of either of them. Of course, when the lecture was finished many of us trooped to the bookshop Dillons across the road to acquire Hobsbawm and Thompson with the excitement of teen-agers buying dirty books.

From the 1970s onward Hobsbawm’s closest allegiance was with the Italian communist party, probably the only party in which he could have been entirely comfortable, a party of which, as he explained, he had become a ‘spiritual member’. He could have joined the Labour Party in the 1980s, during the heydays of Thatcherism and when Neil Kinnock had made it clear that he would have liked to use a prestigious personal guru like Hobsbawm (everybody on the left, and not just on the left, had been reading his 1978 Marx Memorial Lecture ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’). But Eric kept his independence.

Hobsbawm did not really join the CPGB except in the technical sense. The CPGB was the local branch of an international movement which, when Eric joined, in the 1930s, was at its most centralized, but it was also the time when the threat of fascism was at its most vivid and when communists had gone beyond their more sectarian phase and espoused the policy of the Popular Front. Once he told me, that’s the kind of communist I am: a popular front communist.

As events unfolded after 1945 the movement began to disintegrate with increasing speed as soon as it extended itself. First there was Tito’s great refusal (1948), then the uprisings in East Germany (1953), in Poland (1956), and in Hungary (1956), then the break with Albania and the Great Schism with China (1960), then the Prague Spring (1968), then Romania’s nationalist declaration of independence from the USSR (1968), and finally eurocommunism (1976). Far from being a monolithic movement, world communism was less and less international once Moscow ceased to be ‘home’. Someone like Hobsbawm could stay in the movement, and take any position he liked without having to leave.
Past and Present and haute vulgarization

His works, which I started reading at university, were certainly not ‘communist’ whatever that may mean. Industry and Empire [12] was not the call to arms I had hoped. Hobsbawm’s contribution to the then raging debate on whether the standard of living of the working classes declined or improved during the industrial revolution – conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in journals such as the Economic History Review - was unimpeachably academic. The only slightly ironic tone Hobsbawm used was in his persistence in calling those who held the view that the conditions of life of the working class improved throughout the period of industrialization, ‘the cheerful ones’. This was a highly specialist querelle. It was somewhat outside what was then the dominant trend in British historiography whose chief concern was with political and diplomatic history rather than social and economic, with the short-term rather than the long-term, with the conjuncture rather than with structures.

This is why communist and Marxist historians made a common front with others who were close to the French Annales school. The outcome was the creation of the journal Past and Present [13]. Like Annales the group around Past and Present were committed to a study of structures, analysis and synthesis. They liked comparisons. They liked the long term, the longue durée [14]. Originally non-Marxist historians were reluctant to join the journal or to publish in it, but eventually they did. Distinguished scholars such as Moses Finley, Lawrence Stone, and John Elliott joined Marxists such as Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, E.P. Thompson and others. Hobsbawm supported the journal indefatigably [15] even managing to attend a meeting of the board in Oxford at a time when his mobility was seriously impaired.

Hobsbawm, at least in his scholarly production, remained was quite distant from the preoccupation of so many ‘organic’ communist intellectuals. In his historical work he wrote nothing about the USSR (until the Age of Extremes [16]) and little about communist history. When he did he was fiercely independent. I remember a scathing review he wrote in New Left Review (March-April 1969) of the first volume of the ‘official’ history of the CPGB by James Klugmann (History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formation and early years. 1919-24) accusing him of being ‘paralysed by the impossibility of being both a good historian and a loyal functionary’ and contrasting it unfavourably with Paolo Spriano’s history of the PCI ‘a debatable, but serious and scholarly work’.

Unwilling to defend communism - at least, not when the integrity of historical research was at stake - he did defend Marx and Marxism. Such defence, however, was seldom intransigent and he acquired his earliest renown and a distinctive voice as a historian on a subject with which traditional Marxist historiography (or, indeed, any historiography) had not dealt. I am thinking of his works of the late 1950s and 1960s on social banditry and pre-capitalist rebellions: Primitive Rebels [17] (1959) and Bandits [18] (1969) as well as Captain Swing [19] (with George Rudé) in 1968. Since then the scholarship on these themes has increased enormously yet it is difficult to encounter a book or an article on pre-capitalist social unrest or social banditry or millenarian movements without some reference to Hobsbawm. These references were initially deferential, then, with the passing of time, less so - yet his work could not be ignored, something he recollected with some satisfaction in the interview, one of the last, he gave to Simon Schama for the Archive on 4 [20] on the BBC.

Given the success obtained with bandits, primitive rebels, anarchists and other adorable creatures, other, lesser historians would have continued to plough that particular furrow, producing further articles and books on a theme of such wide interest. Hobsbawm was more intent in scattering ideas on a far broader canvas. And he did. His four volumes on the history of capitalism from 1789 to 1991 will remain a monument of haute vulgarization (a term occasionally used as a pejorative, but Eric gloried in it: it meant that he was not writing just for the academy). His Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality [21] (1990) echoed his profound dislike of nationalism and of identity politics. His Echoes of the Marseillaise [22] (1990) was levelled against Alfred Cobban whose revisionist The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (1964) had preceded the better known work of François Furet (Penser la Révolution Française 1978) which had become all the rage as France prepared to celebrate the Revolution.

Blessed with an uncommon facility of expression, a lively style and an ability to synthesize complex events, these works made him known in wide circles of non-specialists.

Alongside these works he produced a myriad articles ranging on a variety of topics in journals ranging from Marxism Today to New Left Review, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books (to mention only the English-language journals). In all of these we see one of the strands of the tradition of European Marxism: a pessimism of the intelligence barely tempered by an optimism of the will. As he said, as the hopes of a socialist future waned, and as he got older, all one had left was pessimism of the intelligence.

The last book published while he was still alive (he was preparing a volume of his writings on cultural matters), How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism [23], collects many articles and essays published elsewhere and many that had been published in Italian but not in English. Some were new. All were centred on Marx (and Engels) except for two on Gramsci.

Hobsbawm’s last Marx is not the theoretician of the world revolution and of the leading role of the proletariat. This Marx is the theorist of globalization and of crises, a Marx finally emancipated from the USSR. It is a Marx for a world in which few parties of significance are anti-capitalist, in which the hopes generated by the events of 1968 (events which had left Hobsbawm fairly sceptical) have not materialized, a world in which many advocate a retreat from the Enlightenment, a world in which the last great social revolution was led by an Islamic fundamentalist, the Ayatollah Khomeini. The triumph of neo-liberal economic policies, particularly in the west, had also constituted a defeat for traditional social democracy since this required, for the accomplishment of its ‘minimum’ programme a strong state. As Hobsbawm puts it: neo-liberalism attempted to destroy not communism (whose stagnation had become clear) but the kind of gradualist reformism advocated by Eduard Bernstein and the Fabians.
Cultural crisis

Hobsbawm located the crisis of Marxism in the crucial decades after 1980. The crisis was not purely political and economic but cultural as well. Increasingly, the possibility of understanding the structures of human society was being challenged by post-modern attitudes; there was a return to mere narrative history, a disdain for generalizations and for the study of reality, a new relativism. He saw the retreat from Marxism as part of a wider change in the social sciences where intellectuals were giving up rationalist attempts to produce a global picture of our times. Here Hobsbawm attributes great importance to the revolt of the intellectuals of the 1960s of which he was quite critical. He disliked their anti-centralism, their love of spontaneity and localism, their third worldism.

This could be seen as the complaints of an old Marxist generationally separated from the generation of the 1968. But this generation is now old and perhaps it should begin to come to terms with itself. During one of our last conversations he noted that it was rather strange that that generation (mine) with such a commitment towards intellectual pursuit and culture should have produced so little historical analysis of its own itinerary. While he probably over-estimated the importance of post-modern irrationality in the cultural crisis of the last thirty years, I think it is true that totalizing explanations have been put in the attic, along with Marx, but mainly among the intelligentsia. If we look elsewhere, totalizing explanations rule OK. The enemies of the west are seen either in terms of irrationality (Islamic fundamentalism, fanaticism, terrorists dreaming of restoring the Caliphate) or in terms of a defence of vested interests (states and institutions) against the individualism of the market. Market fundamentalism is just as over-comprehensive as the statism of the old left. It declares, along with Hayek, that the decisions of millions of consumers are more ‘rational’ than those taken by planners and elites.

Where Hobsbawm is right is when he points out that what has disappeared (for now) was a belief, shared by all the protagonists of the great revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth century (the French, the American and the industrial) that it was possible to change the existing social order and to substitute for it one which is better.

We may have lost, he wrote, but the supporters of ‘let the market rip’, so hegemonic in the years 1973-2008 have lost too. Was there an element of consolation in his belief that the stage is set for a return to Marx, the theoretician of capitalism? Possibly. But one should take seriously Eric Hobsbawm’s injunction to take Marx seriously and, let me add, take history seriously, and rescue it from those who simply use history as if it were a supermarket where one gathers some useful facts, piles them on the trolley and uses them to justify whatever policies one likes.
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Obituary: Unrepentance of Eric Hobsbawm

Harley Filben casts an eye over Hobsbawm's legacy

Neil Kinnock’s ‘favourite Marxist’

The death of Eric Hobsbawm was greeted, for the most part, with highly respectful eulogies. Across the bourgeois political spectrum, many a good word was found for the man who, until October 1, was the officially designated ‘greatest living Marxist historian’.

It was perhaps not a surprise to find tributes on the pages of The Guardian and the lips of Ed Miliband - who, after all, is something of a ‘red diaper baby’ himself. Others were slightly more surprising - such as the fond farewell to a “good friend” that came from Niall Ferguson, the perpetual Tory boy charlatan. “He and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era,” Ferguson wrote. “The fact that he sided with the workers and peasants, while I side with the bourgeoisie, was no obstacle to friendship.”1

Others of Ferguson’s general stripe were less amiable. The irrepressible Michael Burleigh castigated Hobsbawm for being a “believer in the red utopia to the very end” in the Torygraph,2 while AN Wilson rather juicily suggested in the Daily Mail that Hobsbawm may have recruited agents for the Soviet Union at Cambridge University - a charge, alas, unsullied by anything resembling evidence.3

Communist

The bourgeois commentariat is united on one point - Hobsbawm was, to his death, an unrepentant Marxist. His commitment to the communist cause is a rather more complicated beast than that, but it is certainly true that his subjective commitment to the movement that, in Britain at least, predeceased him by over two decades, was tenacious.

This was in the main a consequence of the circumstances that brought him into that movement. Born to Jewish parents, he was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power; his family immediately decamped to England. The young Hobsbawm witnessed Hitler’s rise first hand, and saw from a relatively safe distance the shadow of fascism spreading over Europe. At the head of those struggling against that barbarism, for better or worse, were the communist parties.

Hobsbawm returned from military service in World War II to the political freeze of the cold war; he was one of many communist intellectuals to promptly bury himself away in academia, ducking the intensifying anti-communist mood more or less successfully (although, unsurprisingly, the secret services kept a substantial file on him). It was in this capacity - as a lecturer and professor at Birkbeck College in London and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge - that he made his most lasting mark on British intellectual life.

Hobsbawm rapidly came into the Communist Party Historians Group, whose influence both within and without the left is well known; the group launched his career, and those of comrades such as Christopher Hill, EP Thompson and John Saville. The watchword for the group was ‘history from below’; history was no longer to be thought of as the playground of Great Men or an abstract sequence of events that culminates in bourgeois society as the apogee, but rather as a field in which the toiling masses are key agents.

Hobsbawm’s central contribution to this project was the three-volume history of what he called the “long 19th century”, joining up two decisive events in modern European history - the French Revolution of 1789 and the great war of 1914 - through a complex intervening narrative. He hewed closer to economic-technological explanations for historical change than, say, Thompson - but always in the context of popular life and struggles.

All of Hobsbawm’s major writings postdate the major crisis-point in the Historians Group - the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. That year is well known as having plunged the ‘official’ communist movement internationally into a serious internal crisis, as activists and intellectuals struggled both with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and with the crushing of the Hungarian uprising. Hobsbawm, almost uniquely among his colleagues, stuck with the CPGB, approving “with a heavy heart” and not without criticisms of the Soviet intervention.

He would later look back on the 1950s cold war atmosphere in academia as oppressive, but not intolerable: “You didn’t get promotion for 10 years, but nobody threw you out.” Something similar was on offer to intellectuals of a Stalinist persuasion in the communist parties. Hobsbawm’s interventions in the CPGB were characterised throughout by a certain academic distance from the cut and thrust of factional struggle. He was able to praise presumptively the French student revolts of 1968 - provided he kept from criticising the French party when it abdicated its responsibility.

Eurocommunist

But 1968 was not a turning point to the left, as it may first have appeared, in ‘official’ communism. Discontent with another Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia sped up the crystallisation of so-called Eurocommunism - in the western parties; by the late 1970s, the Euros were a well-established and influential faction in the CPGB.

Hobsbawm’s sympathy for this trend was plain for all to see. In 1977, he published a volume of interviews with Giorgio Napolitano (then leader of the Communist Party of Italy; now the country’s president), which had, the previous decade, been the crucible for Eurocommunism, the great “triumph” having been the “historic compromise”, which saw a coalition government between the PCI and the Christian Democrats (as comrade Toby Abse has put it, the Christian Democrats made the history, while the communists made the compromise).

The following year, he delivered the annual Marx Memorial lecture, the text of which became the infamous essay, ‘Forward march of labour halted?’ His argument was simple and somewhat statistics-heavy: the CPGB’s focus on developing its ranks through the trade unions and the traditional labour movement left it vulnerable to ongoing changes in the structure of the British labour force. The extension of women’s employment, the declining overall share of manual workers in the total workforce - all pointed to the unsustainability of the view that the labour movement was on a perpetual forward march to social dominance. Hobsbawm concludes by suggesting that we need a less economistic vision of the working class.4

The essay is in fact an object lesson in how the history of ideas works. There is very little in it that is, at face value, objectionable from the point of view of revolutionary Marxism - even its vague conclusions. The meaning it took on in the context of 1978 - the year of the ‘winter of discontent’, that rounded off a decade of militant labour struggles - was unmistakable. Soviet-loyal centrists in the CPGB, such as the Straight Left faction, were also the most enthusiastic advocates of work in the unions and labour movement as a whole; dismissing this period of industrial militancy as, in a sense, the last gasp of that movement, fired a shot across the bows of such elements, and emboldened the Euros.

It became the opening sally, if you will, of the ‘long 1980s’ in the CPGB, a period of decay and dissolution; seized on (as was intended) by the Eurocommunists to justify not a less economistic working class politics, but an ever more intense disavowal of class politics altogether, culminating in the formal liquidation of the CPGB in 1991.

Hobsbawm’s political activity in the 1980s was of this character. It was not only Martin Jacques, the Euro editor of Marxism Today, who seized on ‘Forward march ...’, but Neil Kinnock, who described Hobsbawm as his “favourite Marxist”. Hobsbawm provided the intellectual meat for the wholesale decimation of the Labour left by the Labour Party bureaucracy. The ultimate result was the Tony Blair government, which at different times included a number of former Euros.

Unrepentant?

The greatest irony of Eurocommunism is that it promised a ‘third way’ between social democracy and pro-Soviet communism, but ended up on the ‘third way’ as we now recognise it - that is, a political project radically to the right of the social democratic mainstream of the 1980s.

It is to Hobsbawm’s credit that his drift to the right stopped well short of certain former ‘comrades’ (“I used to be a Marxist,” sneered former Blair-era home secretary John Reid once - “I used to believe in Santa Claus”). In a rogue’s gallery that includes not only Jacques and Reid, but also Jack Straw and the prince of darkness himself, Peter Mandelson, Hobsbawm stands out as the most principled of a pretty unprincipled bunch.

He continued to avow a commitment to the Marxist method - as he understood it - to his death. He scandalised the good people of the BBC by affirming that, in his view, 20 million deaths would have been justified if they had genuinely ushered in a communist society. Despite having abandoned more or less every direct political commitment to communism, he refused to lower the flag.
In the end, this was an emotional problem for him, rather than a political one. His writings on the 20th century are slippery and evasive, in order to keep open the possibility that ‘official communism’ was a legitimate - indeed, the only correct - political choice for progressive individuals of his generation.

We may grant Hobsbawm his unrepentance - but that sentimental attachment to Stalinism did not, in the end, strengthen the cause to which he committed almost his whole adult life. Rather it led him to prepare the ground for Blair.

Notes
1. The Guardian October 1.
2. The Daily Telegraph October 1.
3. Daily Mail October 1.
4. www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/78_09_hobsbawm.pdf.