http://www.chequerboard.org/2011/02/marxists-i-hate-these-guys/Do read before going all kerflooey.
The occasion of the author's discomfiture is a fawning paean to Eric Hobsbawm, which he finds nauseating. The author then provides an anti-emetic in selections from folks critical of Hobsbawm's decades-long promotion of and excusing of the vilest mass-murderers and torturers this world ever saw.
". . . can we please have an end to fawning interviews with the unrepentant Moscow-liner Eric Hobsbawm? He is not, as the BBC argued this week, perhaps our greatest living historian. He’s an apologist for totalitarianism and when I think of the millions who were killed and tortured in Marxism’s name, from the Polish officers shot in Katyn forest to those brave dissidents who endured the gulag, I am convinced that only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to."
----Michael Grove
"Hobsbawm’s prose is always at a distance from reality. He writes of “the hecatombs of the Stalin era,” not torture chambers and concentration camps. An old Hungarian Communist, Tibor Szamuely, “claimed to have had the usual spell in a camp during the dictator’s final lunacies.” Note “claimed,” as if it’s probably not true; note “lunacies,” which is another glideover."
----David Evanier
"He loves to describe himself as a professional historian, but someone who has steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth, is nothing of the kind, neither a historian nor professional. "
"The man who sets dogs on concentration camp victims or fires his revolver into the back of their necks is evidently a brute; the intellectual who devises justifications for the brutality is harder to deal with, and far more sinister in the long run."
----David Pryce-Jones
Here is the complete article by D P-J, "Lying to the Credulous":
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Eric+Hobsbawm:+lying+to+the+credulous.-a096501359
