The Radical Visions that Shaped Some Leading Historians

Re: Eric Hobsbawm

The continuity between the generations of the Communist and Neo-Communist Left is, in fact, seamless. It is the product of a leftist culture that embraces the political traditions and anticapitalist perspectives of the discredited Communist past.

An illustrative example of this mentality is provided in the career of Eric Hobsbawm, an icon of the contemporary intellectual Left. Hobsbawm was a lifelong Communist who joined the party in 1930, letting his membership lapse only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. An unremitting apologist and devoted servant of the most oppressive and repellent empire in history, Hobsbawm is today one of the most honored professional historians in the universities of Europe and America.

Hobsbawm's last historical work, The Age of Extremes, is probably the most highly praised effort to understand the twentieth century and the events about which he was so profoundly wrong. Hailed as the final volume of his tetralogy on industrial capitalism--"a summa historiae of the modern age"--it has been published in thirty-seven languages. This in itself is a testament to the vitality of Neo-Communism in the contemporary political culture.

The Age of Extremes appeared in 1995, four years after the fall of Communism, and is an elaborate defense of the twin illusions in whose name the Communist Left wreaked so much havoc during the twentieth century: the inherent evil of capitalist democracies and the humanitarian promise of the socialist future. The Age of Extremes is in fact an elaborate and perverse defense of the very illusions that sustained the Communist cause.

Although this cause left a greater trail of victims than any other in historical memory, Hobsbawm's attitude toward its enormities remains, revealingly, one of sadness and "nostalgia" rather than outrage and guilt. In an autobiography published in 2002, Hobsbawm told his readers, "To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." These are his feelings toward a regime that enslaved and slaughtered tens of millions, and reduced hundreds of millions to lives of inconceivable misery. Imagine a historian expressing the same sentiments toward the memory and tradition of Nazi Germany, which inflicted its damage over a twelve-year period rather than seventy years. Such an intellectual would be a moral pariah in the world of letters. Yet the opposite is true of Hobsbawm, to whom tribute is paid in the highest reaches of the academic culture, while his denial and nostalgia are, in fact, the widely shared attitudes of the intellectual Left.

It was in Berlin in the 1930s that the young Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party and embraced a faith that has never left him. "The months in Berlin made me a lifelong Communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I know now, was bound to fail. The dream of the October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me."

Re: Gerda Lerner

An illuminating parallel to Hobsbawm's perspective is found in the work of historian Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of radical feminism and a bridge between the New Left and the Old. Like Hobsbawm, Lerner began her political career as a Communist in Central Europe, but emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s to escape Nazism. Unlike Hobsbawm, she eventually withdrew her membership from the Communist Party twenty years later and joined the New Left to become one of its intellectual leaders. As a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Lerner was a shaping influence on New Left feminism, writing one of its canonic texts, The Creation of Patriarchy and in 2003, during the conflict in Iraq, one of the founding members of Historians Against the War.

Lerner abandoned the Communist Party in 1956 following Khrushchev's revelations about the crimes of Stalin (which were, of course, revelations only to Communists). But awareness of these crimes--monstrous as they were--did not cause Lerner to rethink her commitment to the revolutionary cause itself. Instead she continued her radical career as an "anti-anti-Communist." She went on condemning the democracies of the West, opposing the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and pursuing the same revolutionary agendas she had before.

Lerner's career is especially instructive because it spans three radical generations and, because, unlike Hobsbawm, she made the transition to each new revisionist version of the progressive cause. Thus, more than thirty years after being apprised of Stalin's crimes and joining the New Left, she experienced a second metaphysical lurch when the entire socialist enterprise collapsed. In 1991, the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Soviet archives forced her to examine the lies that had governed her life for more than fifty years. In a memoir, published in 2002, she acknowledged this: "Had I written this account twenty years ago, I would have focused on the rightness of my position and on explaining to the post-Vietnam generation that the Old Left has been unduly maligned and its achievements have been forgotten. That still seems partially true to me, but now everything has become far more complex and disturbing."

As a historian Lerner felt she could not simply shrug off the complexities that recent events had created. "I have striven to lead a conscious, an examined life, and to practice what I preach. It now appears that, nevertheless, I failed in many ways, for I fell uncritically for lies I should have been able to penetrate and perceive as such." But like others who went through the same crisis and did not give up their political faith, Lerner is unwilling to confront the lies she has lived by for so long. When it comes to what she refers to as "disturbing" realities, her text becomes minimalist and fails to make any serious attempt to deal with them. The entire passage of her self- examination occupies a mere four pages of her 373-page book, which she describes as a "political autobiography."

Re: Howard Zinn

The perspective on view in the nearly seven hundred pages of A Peoples.History is a plodding Marxism supplemented by the preposterous idea that nation-states are merely a fiction, and only economic classes are "real" social actors:

Class interest has always been obscured behind an all-encompassing veil called "the national interest." My own war experience [in World War II], and the history of all those military interventions in which the United States was engaged, made me skeptical when I heard people in high political office invoke "the national interest" or "national security" to justify their policies. It was with such justifications that Truman initiated a "police action" in Korea that killed several million people, that Johnson and Nixon carried out a war in Indochina in which perhaps 3 million died, that Reagan invaded Grenada, Bush attacked Panama and then Iraq, and Clinton bombed Iraq again and again.

This passage illustrates the continuity of left-wing myths in shaping the consciousness of radical generations. ... Zinn retains into his seventies the same ideological blinders he wore as a young man. America's defense of South Korea against a Communist invasion from the North was not initiated by the United States, as the Communist propaganda machine maintained at the time. It was a response to the Communist aggression, initiated by Stalin himself, according to most recent historical accounts.

The war and subsequent American support for the South Koreans resulted in their liberation from both poverty and dictatorship. South Korea was, in 1950, one of the poorest Third World countries, with a per capita income of $250, on a level with Cuba and South Vietnam. Fifty years of American protection, trade, and investment has made South Korea a First World industrial nation with a reasonably stable democracy. By contrast North Korea, which was the industrial heart of the Korean peninsula and which the American armies failed to liberate--thanks to Zinn's political allies at the time--is an impoverished totalitarian state that has starved more than a million of its inhabitants in the last decade, while its Communist dictator hoards scarce funds to build an arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. The rest of Zinn's examples are equally tendentious and amount to little more than a rehash of Communist propaganda.