Posted on 12/26/2011 8:38:11 PM PST by SunkenCiv
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...
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.
"Today's most effective mass mobilisations start from a new modernised middle class -- particularly the enormously swollen body of students"
Now in his mid-nineties, his continuing passion for politics is reflected in the title of his most recent book How to Change the World -- and in his keen interest in the Arab Spring.
"I certainly felt a sense of excitement and relief," he says, talking to me in his north London home, which is strolling distance from Hampstead Heath.
Books about jazz -- he was once a jazz critic -- jostle for space on the shelves with works of history in several languages.
"If there is to be a revolution, it should be a bit like this. At least in the first few days. People turning up in the streets, demonstrating for the right things."
But, he adds: "We know it won't last."
The historian in him draws a parallel between the Arab Spring of 2011 and Europe's "year of revolutions" almost two centuries earlier, when an uprising in France was followed by others in the Italian and German states, in the Hapsburg Empire, and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Modern history topic / current events, but it fits under Longer Perspectives, hence, I'm pingin' it. |
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It does not get much more damning than this statement.
“...he was a Communist for most of his adult life ...”
Not much of a historian then, or a judge of good governments.
It does not get much more damning than this statement.
“...he was a Communist for most of his adult life ...”
Not much of a historian then, or a judge of good governments.
It does not get much more damning than this statement.
“...he was a Communist for most of his adult life ...”
Not much of a historian then, or a judge of good governments.
You can say that agsin.
And again.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/14/biography.history
[snip] Eric Hobsbawm was a schoolboy in Berlin when Hitler came to power. He knew he stood at a turning-point in history. “It was impossible to remain outside politics,” he says. “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist.” They may also have shaped his moral universe. When asked on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1995 whether he thought the chance of bringing about a communist utopia was worth any sacrifice, he answered “yes”. “Even the sacrifice of millions of lives?” he was asked. “That’s what we felt when we fought the second world war,” he replied.
Martin Amis in his new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, discussing a perceived “asymmetry of indulgence” in attitudes towards Hitler’s crimes and Stalin’s Great Terror, characterises Hobsbawm’s “yes” as “disgraceful”. Interesting Times, Hobsbawm’s autobiography, also out this month, offers an insight into the adherence to communism of many of the brightest of his generation, from an “unrepentant communist”: Hobsbawm, who joined the party in 1936, remained in it until he let his membership lapse not long before the party’s dissolution in 1991. His book - taking its title from the Chinese curse - traces his communist faith in “the most extraordinary and terrible century in human history”.
“I’ve never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia, though the sheer extent of the massacres we didn’t realise,” says Hobsbawm. “In the early days we knew a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine - we knew of the Volga famine of the early ‘20s, if not the early ‘30s. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing.”
He says of Stalin’s Russia: “These sacrifices were excessive; this should not have happened. In retrospect the project was doomed to failure, though it took a long time to realise this.” Yet he appears to argue that some goals are worth any sacrifice. “I lived through the first world war, when 10 million-to 20 million people were killed. At the time, the British, French and Germans believed it was necessary. We disagree. In the second world war, 50 million died. Was the sacrifice worthwhile? I frankly cannot face the idea that it was not. I can’t say it would have been better if the world was run by Adolph Hitler.” [/snip]
Just another Fabian fool...
;’)
It is a family tradition that the Revolution of 1848 was one of the reasons my ancestors left Prussia and came to the US. I wonder if the inevitable failure of the liberal elements of the ‘Arab Spring’ will send a similar wave of new emigrants out of the Middle East to the West.
It is a family tradition that the Revolution of 1848 was one of the reasons my ancestors left Prussia and came to the US. I wonder if the inevitable failure of the liberal elements of the ‘Arab Spring’ will send a similar wave of new emigrants out of the Middle East to the West.
It reminds ME of 1859.
Frankly it reminds me of the scenes from “The Life of Brian” where various small political sects argued viciously and endlessly over small issues while the bemused Romans looked on.
Their worst epithet for their opponent: “Splitter!”
His books are unreadable, his history is appalling, and his influence is nil.
It takes a peculiar sort of long term intellectual inbreeding to be stupid enough to still be a commiescum piece of s^&t.
Commiescum. Even more murderous, more disgusting, more degraded than naziscum.
Commiescum. Worthy only of being closed with and destroyed, absolutely, irrevocably, and without mercy or compassion.
Commiescum. An enemy of The Constitution of the United States of America to even a greater degree than the jihadiscum.
That’s interesting. My most recent immigrant ancestors left during the Kulturkampf, but not because of it.
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