Even Stalinist's Mother Admitted He Was Crazy

October 2, 2006; Page A11
The Wall Street Journal

In Abheek Bhattacharya's review of Paul Hollander's book "The End of Commitment" (Bookmarks, Weekend Journal, Sept. 15¹), he writes about British historian Eric Hobsbawm: "As late as 1994, Mr. Hobsbawm told an interviewer that, even if he had known in the mid-1930s that 'millions of people were dying in the Soviet experiment,' he would have still supported it, for 'the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing.'"

My mother was a friend of Eric Hobsbawm's mother and I visited the Hobsbawms with her, where I listened to Eric's arguments. He supported the sabotage of the British army and the war against Germany because his messiah, Joseph Stalin had a pact with Adolf Hitler. I argued that the Nazis would not only kill him but also his mother and his sister Rita. He quoted Joseph Stalin to me: "You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs."

I was horrified; only years later did I realize that he was a Jewish Adolf Eichmann. I repeated his views to his mother, and she was succinct. "Er ist meshugganah" ("He is crazy").

A few years later I was in the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry when in the spring 1945 we liberated Bergen Belsen concentration camp; there, I saw the real-life consequences of the megalomaniac musings of so-called historians. It is a shame Eric evaded reality so that he did not have to acknowledge what his stupidity helped bring in blood and bones.

Bernard Landsman
London