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Fury of the philistines
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| Contributor | New Jerusalem |
| Last Edited | New Jerusalem Mar 14, 2009 08:03am |
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| Category | Commentary |
| Media | Newspaper - Guardian |
| News Date | Saturday, March 14, 2009 02:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
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* Comment is free
Fury of the philistines
What makes the Mail dump buckets of bile on one of Britain's most venerated historians?
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* Tristram Hunt
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o Tristram Hunt
o The Guardian, Saturday 14 March 2009
o Article history
Few people send the Daily Mail into greater paroxysms of rage than Eric Hobsbawm. And all this week it has been frothing at the mouth following the Guardian's revelation that the communist historian has been denied access to his MI5 files. "Why do we honour those who loathe Britain?" the Mail demanded. More than a decade after the Queen made Hobsbawm a Companion of Honour, the right cannot bring itself to admit that he remains one of the towering intellects of postwar Britain.
But first things first: Hobsbawm does not hate Britain. Indeed, as an author he places himself within a peculiarly English tradition committed to writing history for the general public. Similarly, as a Jew who fled Berlin in the 1930s, Hobsbawm has long appreciated the relaxed, mongrel makeup of the United Kingdom with its historic avoidance of blood-and-soil nationalism.
Yet what the Mail's pundits really want to "get" Hobsbawm on is his communism. Through a litany of dubious quotations and illogical leaps, Hobsbawm is painted as the defender par excellence of Soviet totalitarianism: Stalin's man in the UK who thought Uncle Joe was right to murder millions.
But any of his recent pronouncements show the redundancy of such charges. In my Observer interview with Hobsbawm in 2002 he denied any such admiration for Stalin and, with regard to the Soviet Union, was adamant that he was not interested in defending "the record of something which is indefensible". He went so far as to agree with his late friend Isaiah Berlin that the USSR revealed the troubling dangers of any attempt at Enlightenment perfectibility, as it produced "very bad results".
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