Au sujet de l’historien Eric Hobsbawm
Les complaisants
Le Devoir 2 octobre 2002
«Pour cet historien réputé pour sa rigueur et son style, il convenait toujours de combattre les injustices. »
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«Voilà une autobiographie passionnante d’un historien qui a contribué à façonner l’histoire et qui continue encore, à 94 ans, à combattre l’injustice. »
Parcours d’un franc-tireur dans le siècle: Eric Hobsbawm
Comeau, Robert
Le Devoir – 11 février 2006
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«Hobsbawm fait partie de ces hommes qui ne supportent pas l’injustice, qui ne s’en accommodent jamais et qui pensent que l’on ne peut se contenter de l’atténuer par la charité ou la solidarité. Cette conviction est une boussole morale qui fait la fidélité et la constance d’une vie. »
Robert, Jean-Louis. Le Monde diplomatique, février 2006, p.21.
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Les autres
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How did such an intelligent man become a communist?
Niall Ferguson is Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford.
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« Eric Hobsbawm : “The Party… had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow ‘the lines’ it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with it…We did what it ordered us to do…Whatever it had ordered, we would have obeyed… If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so.”
Consider some of the “lines” our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. He accepted the excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary.
In 1954, just after Stalin’s death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party. »
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« George Orwell’s methods might not have guaranteed the victory of the Spanish Republic, but Stalin’s assured its defeat. Eric Hobsbawm ought to know this… more». Knowing that Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz is a leading expert on the Spanish Civil War, fluent in the Catalan tongue and culture, and that his scholarship has helped turn post-Soviet revisionism into the accepted narrative of how Catalonia was lost, I’ve asked him to submit a rebuttal to the Hobsbawm piece. Here it is. »
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Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh (Yale University Press, 288 pp., $30)
Le résumé ici
« But Hobsbawm has stated quite openly that, had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning and prosperous socialist society, 20 million deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay; and since he didn’t recognize, even partially, that the Soviet Union was not in fact on the path to such a society until many years after it had murdered 20 million of its people (if not more), it is fair to assume that, if things had turned out another way in his own country, Hobsbawm would have applauded, justified, and perhaps even instigated the murders of the very people to whom he was now, under the current dispensation, being amusing, charming, and polite. In other words, what saved Hobsbawm from committing utter evil was not his own scruples or ratiocination, and certainly not the doctrine he espoused, but the force of historical circumstance. His current moderation would have counted for nothing if world events had been different. »
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Libération, no. 7700
LIVRES, jeudi 9 février 2006, p. 7
« Qu’Hobsbawm restât membre du Parti communiste jusqu’en 1989, l’intéressé en parle longuement. Pour se justifier, mais surtout pour donner à comprendre le bonheur qu’il eut à être communiste. Dans un passage étonnant, il décrit la dernière manifestation légale du Parti communiste allemand, à Berlin, le 25 janvier 1933, et la sensation d’extase physique qu’il en a gardée soixante-dix ans plus tard : «Avec le sexe, la seule activité combinant l’expérience corporelle et une émotion intense au plus haut degré est la participation à une manifestation de masse à un moment de grande exaltation politique», écrit-il en ajoutant que, «contrairement à l’orgasme», le plaisir de manifester peut être prolongé pendant des heures. Tout son récit découle de cette matrice. Comme dans une manif, Hobsbawm nous promène parmi les silhouettes bigarrées de la gauche européenne des années 40 à nos jours, des intellectuels anglais, un espion hongrois, tel futur ministre indien, le philosophe György Lukacs ou encore Louis Althusser dépressif en week-end à Londres. C’est délicieux. »
Très très longue critique trotskyste
Disparition d’un «communiste tory»: Eric Hobsbawm.
Enzo Traverso, À L’encontre
« Il fut un des rares représentants de l’historiographie marxiste britannique à ne pas quitter le Parti communiste en 1956 [26]. Son regard complaisant vis-à-vis du stalinisme évoque le souvenir d’un autre grand historien, Isaac Deutscher, qui avait vu en Staline un mélange de Lénine et d’Ivan le Terrible, à l’instar de Napoléon qui résumait en lui la Révolution française et l’absolutisme du Roi Soleil [27]. Deutscher nourrissait l’illusion d’une possible auto-réforme du système soviétique, tandis que Hobsbawm le justifie après sa chute. Il ne pouvait qu’échouer, mais il fallait y croire. En novembre 2006, Hobsbawm se livrait encore à une justification de la répression soviétique de 1956 en Hongrie, et même à une apologie de János Kádár [28]. »
Eric Hobsbawm
Standpoint, Décembre 2008
« He (Eric Hobsbawm) describes the suppression of the Warsaw rising in 1944, as “the penalty of premature risings”, without mentioning that Stalin deliberately left the bourgeois Polish Home Army to its fate. Later on, he suggests that the great achievement of the Russian Revolution was to frighten Western capitalists into reform, completely neglecting the fact that more humane alternatives had been available long before the murderous utopianism of the communists appeared on the scene.
Despite or perhaps because of all this, the collapse of the Soviet Union did not much cramp Hobsbawm’s style in The Age of the Extremes.
Hiding behind the death-bed words of the Polish socialist economist Oskar Lange, he once again denied that there was any alternative to the murderous brutalities of the Soviet system: “I wish I could say there was, but I cannot.”
For Hobsbawm to have written anything else, of course, would have been to admit that the most persistently dangerous “extreme” of the 20th century had been his own. »