Which is more sinister - The Swastika or the Hammer and Sickle? Some thoughts on the death of Professor Eric Hobsbawm

Sometimes I see a young person wearing a hammer and sickle badge, or some other trinket of Communist kitsch. And I say to him or her ‘would you wear a swastika? They look at me, baffled. I explain to them that the badge that they are wearing was also worn by guards in terrible, deliberately murderous concentration camps. They look at me blankly, or swear at me. Maybe one day I’ll get through. But I continue to be amazed at the way in which our educated classes – who most certainly know better – excuse the apologists of Stalin when they would never excuse the apologists of Hitler.

 

 I’ve mentioned before that Alan Bennett could write an acclaimed play about the traitor Guy Burgess,(An Englishman abroad’) which was quite sympathetic to Burgess. Imagine what would happen if he did something similar about John Amery, a traitor from the same class who offered his services to Hitler. I think Mr Bennett’s status as National Treasure might be called into question. Not, of course, that it would ever cross his mind to do so. So why did it cross his mind to write the Burgess play? And why did Eric Hobsbawm get a free pass, when he never abandoned his faith in Joseph Stalin? Whereas his sort of equivalent on the other side of the 1930s dogmatic chasm, David Irving, is a reviled outcast. Well, it’s true that Hobsbawm is a better writer and a better historian than Irving. But that’s just not enough. Hobsbawm did at one stage say that Stalin’s murders were ‘shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification’. But on another famous occasion, discussing the matter with Michael Ignatieff, he said the achievement of Communism’s aims would have been worth millions of deaths. Of course, its aims were and are unachievable.

 

Like all such Towers of Babel, they are built on corpses and cemented with human blood, and invariably collapse in horror and failure (usually including the savage deaths of their own designers). It is amazing that any educated, intelligent person born into the 19th or 20th or 21st century could not by now have grasped this. But, leaving that aside, I think the reason why old Communists get a free pass from academia and most of the media is much more straightforward. Stalinist Communism, for all its faults, is seen as the force which ‘saved’ us from Hitler’s National Socialist tyranny. In the end, they turned out to be all right. The trouble is that this is not true. I marked the death of Eric Hobsbawm firstly by boycotting the BBC’s syrupy radio tribute to him , hosted by Simon Schama, who made such a sycophantic twerp of himself that I shall now feel able to ignore his thick works with a clear conscience; secondly by reading the memoirs of Margarete Buber-Neumann ( variously published as ‘Under Two Dictators’ and ‘Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler’); thirdly by taking a trip up to the British Library newspaper library in the wastes of Colindale, there to study the files of the ‘Daily Worker’. I thought I would share this with you. You will see why later.

Margarete Buber-Neumann was the girlfriend (today some people would say ‘partner’) of a prominent German Communist, Heinrich ('Heinz’) Neumann. As such, she was an early and militant opponent of Hitler, though thanks to Stalin, the German Communists had a mad policy of hostility towards the Social Democrats, who should have been their allies, which almost certainly helped Hitler into power. Leaving that aside, Margarete and Heinz ended up in exile in Moscow, where first Heinz and then Margaret were arrested by the NKVD for imaginary thought-crimes, and dragged off to prison in conditions of miserable brutality . Heinz was later murdered, after a secret ’trial’ which of course was no such thing. Margarete (who never found out in her lifetime what had happened to Heinz) was sent off to the vast camp empire of Karaganda, where she toiled as a flea-ridden, half-starved slave labourer among violent convicts and prostitutes. But after the Stalin-Hitler pact, and the erasure of Poland, she was suddenly cleaned up, given proper clothes, fed properly, taken back to Moscow and generally smartened up so as to make her publicly presentable. After several months, she found out why. Along with several other German Communists, she was to form part of a prisoner exchange between Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo. The exchange was made on a bridge over the River Bug at Brest-Litovsk, that most fascinating and ill-omened city. I believe the Gestapo sent some of its prisoners over in exchange, because Stalin wanted to murder them himself, but Margarete did not see them passing.

 

After some months of confused imprisonment, while the Gestapo wondered what to do with her, she found herself in a striped prison uniform marching in bare feet round the National Socialist concentration camp for women at Ravensbrueck. She faced nearly as much hostility from Communist prisoners (who quickly realised that she had broken with their cause, but refused to believe her accounts of what life was really like in the USSR) as she did from the SS Guards. I won’t recount the whole book. Please find it and read it yourselves. We must thank God that she survived to write it. It really ought to be on every school and college reading list. It illustrates perfectly the bankruptcy of all utopian dogmas, and especially the cesspit of utter moral filth, too foul for the gentle English language to describe without a descent into profanity, which lay beneath the grandiose towers and spires of Communism. Communism is , paradoxically, even worse than National Socialism, because of its gross pretence to be a force for good. At least the National Socialists were open about their murderous intentions and about their pagan hatred of the gentleness of Christ. Nobody could really have been surprised when they turned out to be mass murderers. The Communists mocked God and Christianity, but claimed they were better and kinder.

 

Now to the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as it then was. It wasn’t a bad piece of work, technically, given how short of money they must have been. The design in 1939 was quite snappy and modern (and I’m told the racing tips were among the best available) . Apart from the obvious bits of propaganda, it looked pretty much like a real newspaper. But during August and September 1939 it went completely mad, first slowly, then rapidly. In late August (21st), a headline cried out ‘Get on with that Pact’, but it was in fact a plea for an alliance between the USSR, Britain and France, then being negotiated unsuccessfully in Moscow. What a shock to the comrades, then, that on that very day Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s servile Foreign Minister, flew to Moscow to sign a pact with their hero, Joseph Stalin, and his servile foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. If Israel’s Premier, Benjamin Netanyahu turned up in Teheran tomorrow, posing for a smiling photo-opportunity with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, it might provide about one tenth of the frisson of shock that this meeting caused round the world. These people genuinely hated each other. Now they were allies.

 

Struggling to absorb this information, the Daily Worker wrote ‘Soviets’ dramatic peace move to halt aggression’. They claimed it was ‘ a victory for peace and socialism against the war plans of fascism and the pro-fascist policies of Chamberlain’ (suddenly you could see why the Comintern (Communist International) always insisted that Hitler was described as ‘fascist’ rather than ‘Nazi’ or ‘National Socialist’. A ‘victory for peace and socialism against the war plans of national socialism’ wouldn’t have sounded quite the same. But by this stage the full criminal foulness of the Stalin-Hitler pact had yet to become apparent. It was just a non-aggression pact, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Just buying time? And so, when Hitler invaded Poland, the Daily Worker forgot the rule about ‘fascists’ and roared patriotically ‘Nazis plunge world into war'. The leadership of the Communist Party equally patriotically published ‘an appeal to the British people to secure military victory over fascism… we are in support of all measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism’ On the 4th September, after Chamberlain had actually declared war on Germany, the Worker declared it was ‘ a war that can and must be won’ . Not much happened for a bit. On 11th September, the Daily Worker urged ‘a strong attack in the West can save Poland’. It recorded that the Nazis (that word again) had inflicted ‘mass bomb terror over Polish territory’.

 

Then everything went completely haywire. For on 17th September, the Glorious Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army rolled over Poland’s eastern borders and snapped up the parts of the country that Hitler had not already grabbed. Their brains seething with pain, the Daily Worker sub-editors concocted the headline ‘ Soviet counter-blow against Nazis’. Maybe they believed it. Maybe they just desperately hoped it was true . Either way, it wasn’t. One feels for them. They were beginning to discover what it was they had been supporting all these years. But by the 19th, they were printing reports (which may even have been true) that the advancing Red Army was being cheered (some national minorities in Poland were by no means keen on rule from Warsaw, though whether they had any idea what rule from Moscow would mean, who can say?).

 

‘Advancing Red Army Cheered’ said the headline. Beneath, a report spoke of ‘Rapid progress on a 3500 mile front. Millions look East to a new hope of deliverance from terror and war, before the Nazis can reach them’. It may not yet have dawned on them that the Nazis , soon to be ‘fascists’ again, had agreed a demarcation line between the two invading armies, and that then they would hold a joint victory parade in (yes) Brest-Litovsk on 25th September. I could find no account of that parade in the Daily Worker. Maybe it was there, but just not prominent. Reading old newspapers on microfilm is not ideal. On the 20th, the headline shouted ‘RED ARMY TAKE BREAD TO STARVING PEASANTS’ . Maybe they did that too. They were ‘greeted everywhere by the cheers of the working population’ . Maybe they were. By this time, the NKVD secret police squads were already rounding up potential opponents, for deportation and murder, a mirror image of what the Gestapo were doing in the west of the country. You might well cheer, if you thought it would keep you safe from that.

 

And Margarete Buber Neumann, though she probably did not know it, was inching towards the day when she would be handed back to Hitler. 

 

On the 22d September, a headline said ‘Red Army liberates Polish troops’. Having liberated them, it promptly disarmed them, which is not usually what you do to liberated allies. On 25th September ‘Warsaw cries for aid in her agony’ (as indeed it did, but no aid was coming from the USSR, which was busy digesting Eastern Poland into the Soviet system). But this contradictory, confused piffle is at least a sign of people puzzled and dismayed by events they are unwilling fully to understand. The real shock is yet to come. On 30th September the Daily Worker reports ‘an offer of immediate peace', a Soviet-German declaration, seeking the ‘liquidation of the present war between Germany on the one hand, and Great Britain and France on the other’. A statement attributed to the paper’s editorial board said ‘To talk of war to the end, which means wholesale slaughter to the youth of Europe, would be sheer madness’ .

 

By the 5th October they were bolder still ‘We are against the continuance of the war’, said a Communist Party statement. We demand that negotiations be immediately opened for the establishment of peace in Europe’. Britain, in short, should leave the war and sue for peace with Hitler, just a month after declaring war on him. It is hard to think of a more foolish policy, inviting a humiliating peace settlement. It continued ‘We are against the continuance of the war and for immediate peace negotiations’ . In the midst of all this is a pathetic little article, supposedly penned by Harry Pollitt, the relatively honest boilermaker who had been leader of the Communist Party until that point, but who was unable to stomach this policy. Comrade Pollitt actually wrote (or allowed it to be written beneath his name) ‘the decision to remove me [as leader] was correct’. The mental contortions of Marxism-Leninism are here very well expressed. This is a near as you can get to a confession at a show trial, in a free country.  This, remember, was the official newspaper of the Party to which Eric Hobsbawm *at that time* belonged and voluntarily continued to belong, also in a free country. Eric Hobsbawm spoke German, had lived in Berlin and knew in detail what Hitler was.

 

From September 1939 until Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941 (an attack Stalin refused to believe was coming in spite of many reliable intelligence reports), Communists were against the war. Stalin gave shelter to German naval warships in Russian ports (ports later used by my father when the Royal Navy was convoying supplies to the USSR after 1941) .he also supplied vital oil and other war materials to Hitler, right up to the eve of the invasion. If he was ‘buying time’ she showed little sign of it. The deployments of the Soviet defences in June 1941 were hopelessly inadequate, and there is little sign that any serious effort was made to prepare for a German attack. Stalin actually believed in the pact. That’s why he sent Margarete Buber Neumann (and plenty of others) to the Gestapo. Why shouldn’t he have believed in it? Unlike modern British leftists, he knew exactly what Communism was. He saw, in Hitler, a kindred spirit. Why, then, are Communists credited with their purely opportunistic support for the war against Hitler, after June 1941, when their deliberate opposition to it, from 1939-41, is forgotten? Eric Hobsbawm is said to have changed his mind earlier than June 1941, when , after joining the British Army, he found his views being laughed at by working class soldiers. Well, perhaps. He’d certainly have learned to keep quiet in such company. His mind can be known only to him, and he’s not around to explain.