It is interesting that Richard Burden thinks that Eric Hobsbawm is worthy of praise, this being a man who:
' .. in 1994, in an interview with Canadian author and politician Michael Ignatieff on British television, Hobsbawm responded in the affirmative to the question of whether 20 million deaths may have been justified had the proposed communist utopia been created. The following year, when asked the same question on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, that is if "the sacrifice of millions of lives" would have been worth a communist utopia, he replied: "That's what we felt when we fought the Second World War". Hobsbawm has similarly argued that, "In a period in which, as you might imagine, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing".
I have mused before about the weird double-standards of the left who use 'Nazi' as a term of abuse to close down debate and would never allow any praise of any aspect of Adolph Hitler, yet will defend aspects of Soviet Russia or Mao's China.
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