Via Kate, Michael Moynihan on the reprehensible fantasist Eric Hobsbawm:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn’t much care.

Readers of How to Change the World will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that “Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB.” Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

Similar sleight-of-hand and attempts to isolate Marx from the practical fallout of his totalitarian blueprint can be found here. And for sheer tragicomic delusion, this is tough to beat. As is this.

KC Johnson on the difficulties of juggling Designated Victim Groups:

The contemporary academic majority worships the trinity of race, class, and gender. Class is clearly the third wheel – unsurprisingly given that most tenured professors are well-off financially and secure in employment, and therefore don’t have a personal connection to the preferred ideological viewpoints on the issue. The competition for primacy between race and gender, however, is less clear-cut. In a matter like the lacrosse case, where the preferred viewpoint on class, race, and gender all dictated a rush to embrace false accuser Crystal Mangum’s wild claims, the result – as we all saw with the Group of 88’s activities – can be vicious. But the rape of Katie Rouse, a white Duke student, by a local black man was met with utter silence from the Group. As I noted at the time, they seemed desperate to avoid making a politically difficult choice.

Armed and Dangerous finds affirmation in a flash mob Bolero:

Ravel could not even have imagined the cellphones the musicians used for coordination; our capacity to transvaluate old forms – and our willingness to do so – is unparalleled in human history. What I saw in that video is that embracing this process of perpetual reinvention is what being “Western” means. We have developed more than any previous or competing civilisation the knack of using our past without being limited by it. I looked at those musicians and that audience, and what I didn’t see was decadence or exhaustion or self-hating multiculturalism. I felt like pumping my fist in the air and yelling “This is my civilisation!” It lives, and it’s beautiful, and it’s worth defending.

And Laban Tall notes a lesson in cultural contrasts:

From time to time, I fly to Stockholm from Manchester. On arriving at Arlanda, I’m greeted by giant posters of Stockholmers saying (in English), “Welcome to my town!” On return to Ringway, I’m greeted by posters warning me not to assault airport staff. A few months ago I flew to Munich for the first time. On arrival I was greeted by a Bluetooth message from BMW, promoting their cars. Returning to Manchester, I was greeted at luggage reclaim by a giant poster offering me a test for chlamydia.

As always, feel free to add your own.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Because Men Have Abortions Too.

Gender activist Jos Truitt tells us about reality and how it really is.

Jos Truitt can be seen here educating an audience with tremendously deep and radical thought, thereby confirming Hampshire College’s status as a “radical space.” We learn, shockingly, that sex change surgery from female to male typically entails the patient losing the ability to bear children. This is described by Ms Truitt as “an issue of eugenics” and an affront to “reproductive justice.” Rather than, say, an obvious consequence of choosing to have the necessary organs removed in order to become more like the gender that, by definition, doesn’t bear children. Presumably a woman who feels male and wishes to undergo extreme surgery to gain some semblance of physical maleness should also retain a functional uterus and associated organs, perhaps cleverly connected to a decorative penis. An intriguing challenge for any ambitious surgeon.

It’s Protest So It’s Righteous.

Alexander Vasudevan says radical people are entitled to “seize” your property.

Readers who wish to reclaim the belongings of Mr Vasudevan – say, his laptop or his phone – should head for the University of Nottingham. As Mr Vasudevan is keen to excuse the “seizure and reclamation” of other people’s belongings as a “potent symbol of protest,” it seems only fair – and important – to bring that sentiment back to his own doorstep, or that of his employers, if only rhetorically. Of course our academic radical has little to worry about. Readers of this blog are likely to have strong inhibitions regarding the invasion or theft of other people’s property, unlike some enthusiasts of the “radical politics” that Mr Vasudevan finds so exciting.

Socialist Hearts Are Just Bigger Than Ours.

Zoe Williams objects to philanthropy by people richer than herself. Because giving money away “creates inequality.”

Normal salaries won’t of course cut much ice at an Ark Gala, where ticket sales alone raise millions of pounds. Even Zoe, whose former school sends well-heeled little socialists on trips to Rome, Morocco and Barbados, would be out of her league. Still, Zoe’s personal resentments are the important thing and these “obscenely” rich people should stop “creating inequality” while giving money away. Given time, the orphans of Romania will doubtless learn to do without while sharing in Ms Williams’ moral satisfaction.

Abduct the greatest hits and probe them thoroughly.

Further to this, some post-riot rumination. Of variable quality.

First up, Daniel Hannan on criminal opportunism:

Potential criminals will always outnumber police officers. Law enforcement works on the theory that not all potential criminals will go on a spree at the same moment – just as banking rests on the assumption that we won’t all simultaneously withdraw our deposits. When potential criminals realise that the forces of order are overstretched – during a blackout, for example, or in the aftermath of a natural disaster – looting usually follows. What happened earlier this week was that potential criminals made precisely such a calculation. The trigger was not a power cut or an earthquake, but the television images of police in Tottenham standing by while shops were plundered. Even the dimmest hoodie was capable of making a cost-benefit analysis. If the police were unwilling to defend property on one London high street, they would be quite overwhelmed by more widespread disorder. All that was needed was numbers and, thanks to Blackberry and Twitter, numbers could now be concentrated.

Next, Theodore Dalrymple on dependence and degeneracy:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor – quite likely – any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognise this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

And finally, here’s a podcast of the BBC’s World Tonight, in which Laurie Penny offers her “intelligent analysis.”

The comedy starts around ten minutes in, shortly after one self-declared rioter says he wants “more things for the community” and “less tax.” The same gentleman also thinks the police should have “more power” to “clamp down” on rioters… i.e., on people such as himself. I kid you not. Swollen with righteousness and keen to interrupt, Laurie tells us, “there’s been no attempt to understand” the rioters, which is a typically bold and puzzling statement, not least given the acreage of commentary attempting to do precisely that. Ms Penny also tells us that what frightens her isn’t the delinquent nihilism, the mugging of children or the attempts to burn people in their homes, but the use of the word “feral” to describe the people doing so. It seems we, not the rioters, are the ignorant ones. “Violence,” she repeats, “is rarely ever mindless.” And so, if your home or business was burned to the ground by people who don’t have an explanation for why they did it, besides it being “a laugh” and an opportunity to steal or smash your stuff, then you really should try harder to understand our society’s “social divisions.” And do please note the implied redefinition of the word understand, which now means agree with Laurie Penny.

“Nicking trainers,” Laurie tells us, is a sign of “desperation” and “a political statement.”

“A disorientated and bleeding teenager on the streets of London. A gang pretend to help him, and then mug him.”

Captures the ethos, I think.

Meanwhile, our pocket-size revolutionary Laurie Penny – who of course has “no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence’” – is telling her readers: “Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.” Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own. She is, after all, keen to see the emergence of a “radical youth movement” – “a movement not just for reform but for revolution” – one that “requires direct action” and “upsetting… our parents, our future employers… and quite possibly the police.” Ms Penny also thinks that spitting on women she doesn’t know is pretty rad too.

Elsewhere, while Mothercare burned to the ground and female fire-fighters were dragged from their vehicles and punched insensible, a number of leftist anti-cuts groups announced their “solidarity” with the thugs, thieves and predators. “London,” we learn, “is the world’s biggest Black Bloc.” While student “activist,” chronic liar and Independent blogger Jody McIntyre was busy using his new media profile to urge further rioting and arson. No doubt the Indie, the Guardian and the New Statesman will be swollen with pride at the doings of their latest protégé. But remember, people. As the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal told us recently, setting fire to occupied buildings – resulting in this – isn’t “real” violence. Not when compared to “hypocritical language.”

Update, via the comments:

Jeff Goldstein quotes Victor Davis Hanson on matters inexplicable:

Another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. […]

That [raises] the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well-off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.

The mysteries of the millionaire leftist have been pondered here quite often. It seems reasonable to suppose that our leftwing elite aren’t vehemently opposed to their own status, influence and unusual wealth, which often exceeds that of those whose “unjust rewards” they publicly denounce. It seems they merely object to the wrong kind of rich people. Which is to say, people whose views and backgrounds may differ from their own. Maybe Alan Rusbridger, Jeremy Irons and Polly Toynbee, for instance, imagine themselves as part of an exempted nomenklatura – as consultants and advisors, clearing the road to our egalitarian utopia, where their influence and status will grow accordingly. Or maybe they’ve simply managed to construct personalities that are impervious to their own kleptomania and colossal hypocrisy. Which would also explain why Rusbridger, Irons and Toynbee are so comically unprepared for having their own affairs considered in any way relevant.

Nearly ten years on, Johnathan Pearce, Nick Gillespie and Tim Sandefur reflect on terrible events and inadequate art:

What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Centre at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.”

And Jan Blits revisits the University of Delaware’s infamous “social justice education” programme: 

At every opportunity students were told that their identity, first and foremost, is not “human,” but this or that ethnic, racial, religious or sexual group: “Native American,” “Hispanic,” “black,” “Asian,” “white,” “male,” “female,” “Muslim,” “Hindu,” “gay,” straight,” and so on. Whites and males were singled out and publicly shamed for their “privilege.” […] Students were also forced to behave like bigots and spew forth stereotypes about members of other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups. When students objected that they were being forced to say things they didn’t mean, the [resident assistants] told them that they were saying what, deep down, they really thought. The obvious purpose of this exercise was to shame whites in general, and white males in particular. But, in fact, minority students especially hated the exercise, because it was in their name that other students were being unfairly shamed and abused.

Details of the pathological race fantasies at the heart of Delaware’s “social justice” programme can be found here, including the belief that “the term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States.” Students’ accounts of their tribal indoctrination – referred to by its proponents as a “treatment” intended to leave “a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness” – can be found here: “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate. The long-term effect is to teach conformity.” And if you believe such behaviour must be a one-off aberration, better think again.

As usual, feel free to add your own.