The literary elite is cool with apologists for mass murder so long as it's the left sort of mass murder

I've just finished reading a review of Richard Evans book about Eric Hobsbawn in the London Review of Books. It's fair to say I have a problem with it - not the review but the very fact of the review. I appreciate that the LRB is a sort of house journal for lefty London luvvy types but it really amazes me that such reverence is given to a man who, without irony, was an abject apologist for mass murder:

"Evans doesn't sugarcoat the intellectual gymnastics Hobsbawn performed to defend the Stalinist show trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, or the Soviet invasion of Finland, but neither does he underplay the vibrant and intellectually heterodox spirit that animated the Communist Party Historians Group..."

It makes me want to throw up when a major journal allows for an essentially hagiographic book about a man who never retracted, let alone apologised for, supporting one of the biggest mass murders in human history - Stalin's Soviet Communism. It's as if the sake of the revolution exonerates Hobsbawn - and those who write about him as anything other than evil - from being treated with the same sort of contumely as we might treat an uncritical book about David Irving.

Communism, in all its forms, up to and including the cool modern version given far too much air time by a lefty London luvvy dominated media, depends entirely on coercion, oppression, violence and, most usually, murder to sustain its power. Like its evil twin, fascism, communism visited on the 20th century more death and destruction than any other ideology. Sadly, while fascism is most of the time beyond the pale, communism remains, as this uncritical review of an 600 plus apologia for Hobsbawn tells us, an idea that intellectuals feel able to embrace and promote without criticism from their peers.

The list of communism's obscenities is long and foul - the rape, the murder, the starvation, the gulags and concentration camps, the summary executions, the lies, the corruption and the silencing of all but laudatory voices. It is an evil creed but we still allow it space to breathe because, like some sort of warped religious cult, its adherents want to believe that next time communism will succeed in perfecting man, in creating the ideal society on top of the skulls of its enemies.

Frankly, the London Review of Books - and all the others who've indulged books like this one about Hobsbawn and given time to people declaring "I'm literally a communist" - should be ashamed. I read the journal because it gives me an insight into how the left's intellectual elite thinks (and is very well written as well) but today I'm reminded that that elite is quite happy to explain away mass murder so long as that mass murder is the left sort of mass murder.

By way of postscript, the same issue of the LRB contains a review of two books on the populism phenomenon in Europe - one by Eric Kaufmann ('Whiteshift') the other by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin ('National Populism) and not only frames the books as 'racist' but concludes that the writers "...fail to see the danger in what they are proposing." Two considered academic reviews of the reasons for Europe's populism dismissed as, in essence, simplifying racism. What a contrast to the hagiographictreatment of Hobsbawn.

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