Monday 12 June 2006

Are they getting worried?

Geoffrey Levy wrote the following in the 2 March 2009 edition of The Daily Mail.

"The Marxist historian who's crowing about the crash of capitalism and SAYS STALIN WAS RIGHT TO MURDER MILLIONS is demanding to see his MI5 files. Imagine how the KGB would have treated him! The voice, though old and crackly, trembled with self-justification. 'Globalisation, which is implicit in capitalism... not only destroys the heritage and tradition but is incredibly unstable'...

Imagine the pomposity and satisfaction with which Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who lives in a large house in the fashionable North London suburb of Hampstead Heath, regurgitated his old argument to listeners of Radio 4's flagship Today programme.

In the current world crisis, who better for the BBC to exhume for its listeners than THE WEST'S GREATEST 20TH-CENTURY APOLOGIST FOR SOVIET COMMUNISM AND EXCUSER OF ITS TOTALITARIAN EVILS.

Professor Hobsbawm has been all over the airwaves since the credit crunch crisis began, crowing about capitalism's demise. But then, should one expect anything else from AN INTELLECTUAL WHO HAS NEVER APOLOGISED FOR EXPRESSING HIS APPROVAL OF STALIN'S MASS MURDERS?

But now the Professor's progress has been suddenly halted. Hobsbawm, 91, who knew Soviet spies such as Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess at Cambridge in the Thirties (though he says he had nothing to do with their activities), has been denied access by MI5 to the file on him which, he says, it must have. Insisting he has never been involved 'in anything of a security interest', he applied to see his file under the Data Protection Act and believes access was denied because 'the security people don't want to give away who snitched on me to the authorities'.

Since he protests innocence with such certainty, the obvious question, surely, is: Snitched about what? Whatever it is, it hasn't prevented him becoming ONE OF ONLY 45 PEOPLE IN BRITAIN WITH THE DISTINCTION OF BEING COMPANIONS OF HONOUR, AND PRESIDENT OF BIRKBECK COLLEGE, LONDON.

On the BBC2's Late Show in 1994, while being interviewed about the fall of the Berlin Wall five years earlier, he defended 'what had to be done'. Interviewer Michael Ignatieff asked: 'What (your view) comes down to is that, had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, THE LOSS OF 15-20MILLION PEOPLE MIGHT HAVE BEEN JUSTIFIED?'

HOBSBAWM'S UNHESITATING ANSWER WAS A SINGLE WORD: 'YES.'

That monstrous response seems to have been forgotten in recent times as the BBC fawns and flatters the aged academic, who has been described as a historian who 'refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by its name'. On Radio 3 and 4, and even on the BBC World Service, Hobsbawm continues to be wheeled out as EITHER 'ONE OF BRITAIN'S MOST RESPECTED' OR 'ONE OF OUR MOST DISTINGUISHED' HISTORIANS.

This is a man who implacably refused to give up his Communist Party card even when Marxist friends and colleagues were tearing up theirs in disgust as squadrons of Russian tanks rumbled into Budapest to crush Hungary's cry for freedom in 1956. Indeed, he supported the brutal action.

As the dead were being mourned and flowers brought to the fresh graves of the hundreds of brave Hungarians shot and, in some cases, hanged, and as Russian tanks patrolled the dishevelled streets, this 'distinguished' historian was writing in the Communist Daily Worker: 'WHILST APPROVING, WITH A HEAVY HEART, OF WHAT IS NOW HAPPENING IN HUNGARY, we should also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as possible.'

His view had not changed by the time, a dozen years later, some 27 divisions, 6,300 tanks and 400,000 troops stormed into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stamp out moves for political reform.

Years later, in 1997, Hobsbawm set down his warped view of these events in his book On History. With a level of obfuscation that, surely, assumed his readers (in 40 languages) were intellectually challenged, he wrote: 'Fragile as the communist systems turned out to be, only a limited, even minimal use of armed coercion was necessary to maintain them from 1957 until 1989.' The year 1989, of course, was when the Berlin Wall came down… For any historian, least of all one who is regularly deferred to in the pages of The Guardian newspaper quite apart from the BBC, this was mind-boggling stuff.

Just how 'minimal' were Stalin's massacres, the Soviet prison camps and secret police, its systematic intimidation and torture, its suppression of free speech, its crushing of freedom in Hungary and Czechoslovakia?

For Eric Hobsbawm, all of this was a case of 'doing what had to be done' and despite everything, he still has an almost sentimental view of the fall of communism as 'an unbelievable social and economic tragedy'.

As for his lingering nostalgia for communism, and unremitting disgust at capitalism, he blames this on spending part of his upbringing in Germany. HE WAS BORN INTO A JEWISH FAMILY IN 1917 - 'THE YEAR OF THE SHINING LIGHT OF OCTOBER' AS HE PUTS IT, WHEN LOCAL SOVIETS WERE 'SPRINGING UP SPONTANEOUSLY EVERYWHERE LIKE MUSHROOMS AFTER THE RAINS'.

Growing up in Vienna and Berlin, his father died when he was 12, and his mother two years later. He and his sister were adopted by an aunt and uncle and in 1933, as Hitler assumed power, the youthful Eric Hobsbawm marched with the socialist youth in a futile response to a mass parade by Nazi stormtroopers.

Later that year, the family moved to London and after grammar school he won a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. He joined the Communist Party there in 1936 and, although they were older than him, the duplicitous spies Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean became friends. Communism was seen as fascism's political opposite and natural enemy and Hobsbawm attributes his lifelong belief in it to Hitler.'

Anybody who saw Hitler's rise first-hand could not have helped but be shaped by it politically,' he wrote. 'This is still there in me. That boy is still inside, always will be.'

This blissfully ignores the fact that many historians believe THAT HITLER'S RISE WAS A RESPONSE TO THE GROWTH OF COMMUNISM...

Hardest to fathom is how he, A JEW who witnessed the ruthless rise of Nazi Germany with its horrendous political justification for the extermination of millions, CAN FIND JUSTIFICATION FOR STALIN'S EXTERMINATION OF EVEN GREATER NUMBERS TO FURTHER HIS POLITICAL AMBITIONS.

Presumably, IN HOBSBAWM'S DISTORTED POLITICAL MIRROR, ONE HOLOCAUST IS NOT TO BE COMPARED WITH ANOTHER. What we do know, because he said so, is that TO HIM THE POSSIBILITY OF CREATING A COMMUNIST UTOPIA WAS INDEED WORTH THE SACRIFICE OF MILLIONS OF LIVES. Pathetically, he offers an excuse: 'Of course, we did not, and could not, envisage the sheer scale of what was being imposed on the Soviet peoples.’

Does that mean 20 million is OK, but 50 million is too much? INCREDIBLY, INSTEAD OF BEING REGARDED AS A DANGEROUS AND ECCENTRIC ACADEMIC, ERIC HOBSBAWM WAS FETED AND REWARDED WITH A PROFESSORSHIP (AND NOW THE PRESIDENCY) AT BIRKBECK COLLEGE, LONDON, AND AN IMPRESSIVE STRING OF HONORARY DEGREES ALL OVER THE WORLD.

DISGRACEFULLY, HE WAS MADE A COMPANION OF HONOUR IN THE 1998 NEW YEAR HONOURS (FOR SERVICES TO HISTORY) JUST A FEW MONTHS AFTER TONY BLAIR CAME TO POWER, A GARLAND WHICH SOME INTERPRETED AS A NEW LABOUR SOP TO THE LEFT. HIS DAUGHTER JULIA, OF COURSE, USED TO BE THE PARTNER IN A PR FIRM WITH GORDON BROWN'S WIFE, SARAH.

Hobsbawm continues to be oleaginously fawned over at Hampstead dinner parties. His 90th birthday in June 2007 was celebrated with not one but three parties, all organised by admirers. Famous friends from around the world are always heading for the large Hobsbawm semi to pay their respects and drink in the latest views and ideas of the great man.

Even now, Hobsbawm remains unrepentant and unapologetic about the Soviet Union. He still believes that, with a bit of luck, it could have worked…

Still, capitalism is in a bit of a mess. Eric Hobsbawm may have backed the wrong horse for the past seven decades, but he can at last tell his credulous admirers - USEFUL IDIOTS Stalin called them – 'What did I tell you’?"

Hobsbawm has never pointed out, of course, that US capitalism paid for the Russian Revolution.

Or, to put it another way, Jacob Schiff, a naturalised German Jew, paid for it. Along with one or two other Jewish capitalists of the time.

The most important and illuminating sentence in all of the above was, in my opinion, this one: 'He was made a Companion of Honour in the 1998 New Year Honours just a few months after Tony Blair came to power.'

For those of you who ever needed proof that the New Labour version of capitalism wasn't just very Jewish, it was very Communistic as well, there it is.

Geoffrey Levy is Jewish himself. As I wonder in this thread’s title, could the fact that a leading on-message hack is now feeling the need to condemn his own so publicly be proof of the depth of Jewish anxiety? As all the dark truths emerge apace, are some of the most aware now trying to score the odd brownie point with the Gentile before the New World Order's house of straw comes a-tumbling down?

I left this message in the Have Your Say section underneath Levy’s article:

"Well done, Mr Levy. You are catching on! It's funny, you know, my comments are almost never published in The Daily Mail and yet here we have one of its most respected reporters, perhaps coincidentally, lifting almost an entire essay from my web site! Check out 'Intellectuals, Philosophers and Historians' at the I AM AN ENGLISHMAN web site.

And guess what? I'm delighted! Whichever way the truth emerges, let it shine, Comrade, let it shine! Whichever way the mainstream journalist comes to glory, let him come, Brother, let him come!

Grab the kudos, Mr Levy. For telling such dangerous tales on the most brutish members of your own tribe, even at this late stage, you deserve it!"
They didn't publish it, of course. But some sweaty trembler will have read it. And it will be passed on to a few others. To tremble in their turn. As they wonder how many are now aware of what they've been up to all along.

P.S. Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian immigrant who interviewed Hobsbawm back in 1994, is also Jewish.

The Chosen do like to keep the most sensitive info in house wherever possible.

Check out the essay Intellectuals, Philosophers and Historians, which I wrote six years before Levy's article saw the light of day.

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