2012 AO Deadpool Update: Eric Hobsbawm

[Hyfler/Rosner]

Jim Thornton, bless his heart, did not like Eric Hobsbawm, but at least
he gave him a fair shake. And a poem. My hit. (Duh.) I get 7 points.


http://ao-deadpool.com





Eric Hobsbawm
The world’s worst historian.

Eric Hobsbawm became a communist at the very start of the century in
which communism killed millions and impoverished its followers, while
the capitalist democracies lifted unprecedented numbers out of poverty
for the first time in human history. He is remembered today as the last
Party apologist standing. For an ignorant peasant without access to
books this might be forgivable. For a professional historian it was a
tour de force of pigheadedness.

Hobsbawm’s support for the Nazi Soviet pact of 1939 which set in train
the Second World War, on the grounds that it was “an anti-capitalist
war” made him a slow learner. But when he called the Russian invasion
of Hungary a “revolt of workers and intellectuals against the
pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and
Hungary”, he was clearly wilfully blind. By the time he labelled, the
Prague Spring suppression by 50,000 Soviet tanks “only a limited, even
nominal, use of armed coercion” he was to all intents mad. If he hadn’t
lived so long no-one would have taken much notice.

But he refused to die, and never changed his views. Most notoriously, in
1994 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when asked by Michael Ignatieff
if the 15 to 20 million dead at Stalin’s hands would have been justified
if communism had achieved its aims, he answered with the single word:
‘Yes’.

Even in his later books he omitted inconvenient facts, the Russian
massacre of Polish officers at Katyn, and tried to exonerate Stalin from
blame for the suppression of the Warsaw uprising. There were few
communist dictators he couldn’t find a good word to say about. He
called Honecker and Ceaucescu “far from unimpressive”.

The general public ignored him – his books never sold outside academia,
and to the working class he was an irrelevance. In 1978, after he had
criticised the Labour leadership for failing to progress socialism, the
left-wing MP Dennis Skinner said “the writings of bloody ’Obsbum were as
relevant to the Labour party as Sporting Life”.

His views had become a joke, but not his hypocrisy. He never made any
effort to live in the countries he so admired – in later life he did the
opposite and took up university posts in the United States. Despite
arguing for redistribution of wealth he failed to redistribute that bit
which he had control over; he lived in a nice house in Hampstead and
maintained a second holiday home in Wales.

But at least he was a left winger, so the chattering classes never
disowned him, Tony Blair made him a Companion of Honour, and obituaries
in the Guardian and New York Times praised him as a historian, although
they couldn’t spell his name. And ugly as he was, he still got laid
occasionally - he had two wives, two children by the second one and a
third illegitimate son.


Eric Hobsbawm saw a lot happen,
But whatever it was, his mind did not open.
Stalin’s great purges, even Prague Spring,
He’d started a Commie, to his faith he would cling.

It wasn’t too hard to see the problem with fascism
And he had a good eye for the flaws of capitalism
But his books had no room for communist sin
For the murdered officers in the graves of Katyn

The people ensured that he stayed unread,
Apart from homes in leafy Hampstead.
While communist victims languished in jails.
Hypocritical Eric kept another in Wales.

The lesson of all this - some never learn.
We’ll never make people like Hobsbawm turn.
It’s no good trying to persuade ‘em.
The best we can hope for - to outlive ‘em.



1. Eve Arnold
2. Frederica Maas
3. Malam Bacai Sanhá
4. Bill Janklow
5. Arfa Karim
6. Johnny Otis
7. Etta James
8. Eiko Ishioka
9. Joe Paterno
10. Dick Tufeld
11. Robert Hegyes
12. Kevin White
13. Don Cornelius
14. Ben Gazzara
15. Norton Zinder
16. Peter Breck
17. Gunther Plaut
18. Trent Frayne
19. Whitney Houston
20. John Severin
21. Gary Carter
22. Frank Sanders
23. Sheldon Moldoff
24. Leonardo Cimino
25. William Heirens
26. Robert B. Sherman
27. Bugs Henderson
28. Jock Hobbs
29. John Demjanjuk
30. Shenouda III
31. Jim Stynes
32. Larry Stevenson
33. Bert Sugar
34. Warren Stevens
35. Earl Scruggs
36. Miguel de la Madrid
37. Leila Denmark
38. Gil Noble
39. Bingu wa Mutharika
40. Mike Wallace
41. Jonathan Frid
42. Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller
43. David Peat
44. Dick Clark
45. Charles Colson
46. Amos Vogel
47. Moose Skowron
48. Fred Allen
49. Edward Short
50. Adam Yauch
51. Denny Fitch
52. Vidal Sassoon
53. Evelyn Bryan Johnson
54. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi
55. Robin Gibb
56. Doc Watson
57. Kathryn Joosten
58. Richard Dawson
59. LeRoy Ellis
60. Ray Bradbury
61. Nolan Miller
62. Frank Cady
63. Henry Hill
64. LeRoy Neiman
65. Richard Adler
66. Yitzhak Shamir
67. Andy Griffith
68. Ernest Borgnine
69. Donald J. Sobol
70. Celeste Holm
71. Jon Lord
72. Kitty Wells
73. Tom Davis
74. J.P. Patches
75. R.G. Armstrong
76. Geoffrey Hughes
77. Tony Martin
78. Gore Vidal
79. Bernard Lovell
80. Ray Harding
81. Michael Dokes
82. Gregory Powell
83. Helen Gurley Brown
84. Johnny Pesky
85. Harry Harrison
86. William Windom
87. Phyllis Diller
88. Dom Mintoff
89. Steve Van Buren
90. Steve Franken
91. Neil Armstrong
92. Max Bygraves
93. Hal David
94. Tom Green
95. Sun Myung Moon
96. Art Modell
97. Steve Sabol
98. Andy Williams
99. Herbert Lom
100. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
101. Turhan Bey
102. Eric Hobsbawm
103. Paddy Roy Bates
104. Norodom Sihanouk
105. Arlen Specter
106. Lincoln Alexander
107. George McGovern
108. Russell Means
109. Hans Werner Henze
110. Maxim of Bulgaria