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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Quote of the day - On the British elite...

Hard to think of a better summation of the braying, negative politics now prosecuted by Britain's establishment elite:

A large part of the political class, and seemingly a sizeable proportion of the country’s educated elite, have distanced themselves from the majority of the country. Never in modern times has there been such an overt and even contemptuous attempt to deny the legitimacy of a popular vote. Edmund Burke in the 1790s gave credit for our freedoms to ‘the wisdom of unlettered men’; William Ewart Gladstone believed that ordinary voters ensured the morality of government; the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville realised that everyday experience enabled people to make sensible choices. But today, some prominent voices imply that only those with university degrees have opinions worth listening to. We might be back in the 1860s, when the Liberal MP Robert Lowe, who opposed giving working men the vote, sneered that ‘you should prevail upon our future masters to learn their letters’.

Absolutely - the rest of the article's good too.
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The freakish elite...

Great article in New Geography:

The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be: More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools. It is only natural for them to generalize from their own highly atypical life experiences and propose that society would be better off if everyone went to college — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Most of the jobs in advanced economies — a majority of them in the service sector — do not require higher education beyond a little vocational training. Notwithstanding automation, for the foreseeable future janitors will vastly outnumber professors, and if the wages of janitors are too low then other methods — unionization, the restriction of low-wage immigration, a higher minimum wage — make much more sense than enabling janitors to acquire BAs, much less MAs and Ph.Ds.

Do read the rest - a telling analysis.

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Hey pleb, are you voting the right way?

There has been a whole pile of stuff written about how the poor deluded and misinformed - even ignorant - voters make the wrong choices. Much of this relates to the rather splendid decision of the British electorate to ignore the views of the great and good in voting to leave the European Union.

I was quite taken by Brendan O'Neill talking about the NME in a Spectator blog:

The rebels have become the squares, the youths have become the authoritarians, and the spirit of rock’n’roll no longer lives in the middle-class music scene or leftish activist circles, but in the hearts and minds of the little people.

The very location of this blog - given its subject - shows a world upside down. A former Marxist writing in the establishment's political journal about how the New Musical Express, the edgiest of music magazines from my youth, has sold out on the spirit of punk. But it's worse than this - we're in a world where the errors of voters need correcting, where the choices of plebs need nudging, directing, managing in order that they concur with the opinions of a self-appointed clique of educated, metropolitan sophisticates.

Here's O'Neill again:

What we have here is ordinary people, including vast swathes of the working class, saying ‘No’ to the status quo, sticking two fingers up at an aloof elite, channelling Rotten and Vicious to say screw you (or something rather tastier) to that illiberal, risk-averse layer of bureaucracy in Brussels.

Today I went to a meeting of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority where we received and discussed a report on the implications of Brexit. The report wasn't very good (it described 'long term' in its response to Brexit plan as January 2017-January 2018 - seriously) but it wasn't this that made my eyes widen. Rather it was the idea that, had we only communicated better - EU flags on pens were mentioned - then it would have all been different. Talk was of how we could, in the future, 'communicate' the poor, ignorant voters into voting the right way.

Bear in mind that these were, in all but one case, senior Labour councillors talking - the tribunes of the people spoke and told us that the people, bless 'em, didn't know what they were doing. The poor dears simply weren't aware of all the wonders that the EU had brought them (as they struggled to pay for the mortgage, find a reliable job, get the children off to a decent start, build up a nest egg for retirement).

It seems that everywhere people like this think democracy is rubbish. At least when people make decisions you don't like. I remember one of those same Labour leaders sternly suggesting that a balanced representation on votes cast meant 'they'd have representation, you know" - she meant UKIP but, like Voldemort, couldn't quite name the evil thing.

And this snobbish, 'voters should be shown how to vote properly' view isn't limited to the UK. Here's Tyler Cowan from Marginal Revolution:

It might have been a better situation when the elites, acting with some joint collective force, directed more of their energies to shaming the less elite voters than to shaming each other.

You've got this haven't you, darlings? This undoubtedly elite commenter writing on a blog with tens of thousands of readers thinks we should try to make ordinary working class voters ashamed of not voting the same way as their betters. It's little better than the squire visiting his workers to make sure they understood why they should vote for his son as the MP.

Instead of bribing, shaming or nudging perhaps the answer lies in actually sitting down and listening to these voters. Finding out what bothers them, understanding why they think government is run for the elites and that it is too far away, too complicated and too secretive for them to stand a chance of liking what is does - or, more importantly, what it represents.

If you start with the premise that the plebs have voted the wrong way, then you've already lost the argument. It you think attacking them, embarrassing them or shaming them is the way forward, you've lost that argument. And if you think the answer is for the great and good to decide everything then you're no democrat but a nannying authoritarian.

Two-thirds of Wakefield's voters chose to leave the EU. They didn't do this because they're 'left behind', 'excluded', 'ignorant', 'racist' or any of those other interpretations of "plebs, you voted the wrong way". They voted to leave because the EU was - and still is - an elite project run by and for the elite. A means - somewhat like too much international aid - of channelling cash from the productive in successful places to an unproductive elite in less successful places. A system where posh students get subsidised gap years paid for with the taxes of low paid workers and where grand European-funded offices filled with patronising middle-class development workers fail to make any difference to the communities they're supposed to be helping.

No-one voted the wrong way and the great and good need to get this into their thick skulls. People had a choice - a contested choice - and opted, in sufficient numbers to win, for the one that said Leave. To understand this you don't need to insult those voters or pretend that poor communication was the problem. What you need to do is realise that the EU is the biggest of all the elite projects - patronising, self-serving, suited, shiny-officed, out of touch, nannying, hectoring, bossy.

The problem is that all those people who benefited from the EU - and their friends, fellow travellers and useful idiots - think the answer to the problem is more bossiness, more nudging, more lectures and a mission to make anyone voting ashamed of voting their conscience, their feelings and their thoughts. It seems the elite still think the plebs are voting the wrong way and that this should be stopped.

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