Those darn communists
28th February 2011
Apparently Eric Hobsbawm is at it again.
It is a deeply puzzling thing. The grip, that is, of Marxism on the minds of so many evidently intelligent people. I think I understand the appeal of Marxism on the brain of the early twenty something, having suffered through it, not to mention my poor father, myself. (That is, he suffered through my infatuation with Marxism.) But it goes way beyond that. You have to think that if our planet were ever to be discovered by some moderately ethical star faring race, and they were able to appreciate along with everything else the history of communism and all its acolytes, the case against just sterilizing the muddy ball on which we live would be made considerably weaker. What an appalling, nasty, weak-minded and heartless batch of insects it makes us look. And even that’s unfair to insects — ant colonies work well at least. They don’t set up little ant gulags. If the aliens arrive, somebody will have to make sure Hobsbawm STFU. He merits the dubious distinction of having made scholarship a crime against humanity.