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HOBSBSAWM: We've all been engaged, for most of the 20th century, | 0:00:09 | 0:00:13 | |
in a sort of war of religion. | 0:00:13 | 0:00:15 | |
All of us. | 0:00:15 | 0:00:17 | |
PATRIOTIC ANTHEM | 0:00:17 | 0:00:20 | |
We didn't believe in radiant tomorrows. | 0:00:20 | 0:00:24 | |
If you believe you are living in a world | 0:00:24 | 0:00:27 | |
which is crashing about your ears, your choice is a future or no future. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:32 | |
CHEERING | 0:00:32 | 0:00:35 | |
I am not the only person who ends the 20th century | 0:00:36 | 0:00:40 | |
with a feeling that things could have been different and better. | 0:00:40 | 0:00:44 | |
I think that very few people who end the 20th century | 0:00:44 | 0:00:48 | |
are not looking back with a certain amount of... | 0:00:48 | 0:00:53 | |
melancholy, and forward with a certain amount of unease. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
Eric Hobsbawm is one of our most original historians. | 0:00:59 | 0:01:03 | |
His trilogy on the 19th century, | 0:01:03 | 0:01:05 | |
Age of Revolution, Age Of Capital and Age Of Empire, | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
has been acclaimed as one of the great achievements | 0:01:09 | 0:01:12 | |
of historical writing in recent decades. | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
Together with fellow Marxists E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, | 0:01:15 | 0:01:19 | |
Hobsbawm's work changed the way we think about British history. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:24 | |
Now Eric Hobsbawm has turned for the first time to the 20th century | 0:01:24 | 0:01:28 | |
in his new book, Age Of Extremes The Short 20th Century, | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
published this week. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:34 | |
This is a history Eric Hobsbawm has not only written about, but lived. | 0:01:34 | 0:01:39 | |
He was born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
He's a Jew who was forced to flee from Hitler's Germany, | 0:01:42 | 0:01:47 | |
a communist through the Stalin years, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:50 | |
he stayed in the party in 1956 and he lived to see 1989 | 0:01:50 | 0:01:55 | |
and now in the 1990's he sees the threat of a return to barbarism. | 0:01:55 | 0:02:02 | |
Eric, you've written important books | 0:02:02 | 0:02:04 | |
about the history of the 19th-century | 0:02:04 | 0:02:07 | |
about imperialism, about labouring men. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:09 | |
What are the challenges of writing the history of your own century, | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
the times you yourself have lived? | 0:02:12 | 0:02:15 | |
Well, one thing that makes it difficult to write | 0:02:15 | 0:02:19 | |
contemporary history, is that you need, it seems to me, | 0:02:19 | 0:02:22 | |
a certain amount of distance. | 0:02:22 | 0:02:24 | |
Emotional distance as well as chronological distance from it. | 0:02:25 | 0:02:29 | |
It's possible to do this now since the end of the '80s, | 0:02:30 | 0:02:34 | |
beginning of the '90s, because you can look back | 0:02:34 | 0:02:37 | |
and see the period from 1914 or thereabouts | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
to 1989, '91, thereabouts, | 0:02:41 | 0:02:43 | |
as something belonging together, | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
as not simply a tract of time but something which has its unity. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:51 | |
What then is the shape of that period, the short century? | 0:02:51 | 0:02:56 | |
I think the shape is | 0:02:56 | 0:02:58 | |
it begins with the breakdown of 19th-century society. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:03 | |
The breakdown, the reconstitution of capitalist society | 0:03:04 | 0:03:10 | |
on a different basis. | 0:03:10 | 0:03:13 | |
One of the by-products of this breakdown was the October Revolution | 0:03:13 | 0:03:19 | |
and the enormous effects, globally, which it had. | 0:03:19 | 0:03:24 | |
Now, this period is over | 0:03:24 | 0:03:31 | |
and we find ourselves in another of the... | 0:03:31 | 0:03:36 | |
at another of the historic moments | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
when we find the existing world system if you like, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:43 | |
the world economy, the world civilisation, working up towards - | 0:03:43 | 0:03:49 | |
or perhaps in the process of - a major restructuring, a major change, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:55 | |
in a direction which may not be easy to predict, impossible to predict. | 0:03:55 | 0:04:01 | |
What I noticed in your introduction to the book was a sense | 0:04:01 | 0:04:06 | |
of historical change destroying the continuity between generations - | 0:04:06 | 0:04:12 | |
erasing the past as it progresses | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
so that what's truly terrible about this century | 0:04:14 | 0:04:17 | |
is that people can't remember and it makes a historian's job more difficult, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:21 | |
it makes a historian's job more important, | 0:04:21 | 0:04:24 | |
but this there's this continual sense of the tape | 0:04:24 | 0:04:27 | |
of the historical past being erased from people's memory | 0:04:27 | 0:04:29 | |
by the sheer pace of change. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
I think this applies to the younger generation, | 0:04:32 | 0:04:37 | |
the post-war generation, more than anything else and I think it happens | 0:04:37 | 0:04:41 | |
not so much because of the pace of change | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
but because of the change of character of society | 0:04:44 | 0:04:47 | |
which concentrates on the individual | 0:04:47 | 0:04:54 | |
rather than the individual as part of a community, a society, | 0:04:54 | 0:04:59 | |
a continuum between generations, and on the now, | 0:04:59 | 0:05:04 | |
namely buying things, enjoying things, here and now. | 0:05:04 | 0:05:10 | |
And that's the enemy of historical continuity and historical memory. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:14 | |
Yes, because for one thing, you see, the mechanisms...in the past | 0:05:14 | 0:05:19 | |
there are always mechanisms by which the young generation is linked | 0:05:19 | 0:05:24 | |
with the older generations. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
-For instance, Marc Bloch... -The great French historian. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:33 | |
..the great French historian, once pointed out that in actual fact | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
in agrarian societies continuity is maintained by jumping generations. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:44 | |
Children are brought up by grandparents | 0:05:44 | 0:05:47 | |
because parents go out and work in the fields | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
and so consequently children immediately get introduced | 0:05:50 | 0:05:54 | |
to what grandparents remember about their past and so on in turn. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:59 | |
And that's been broken up in our century. | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
This has been broken completely for a variety of reasons, | 0:06:01 | 0:06:06 | |
for one thing, indeed, the experience of the past is quite often | 0:06:06 | 0:06:11 | |
no longer relevant, or no longer seems relevant | 0:06:11 | 0:06:15 | |
to the younger generation | 0:06:15 | 0:06:17 | |
and consequently it becomes something different. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
The only past which people, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
very young people, really recognise, is their own personal past. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
The rest is something like olden times. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:32 | |
I wanted to now shift tack and talk about the ways | 0:06:32 | 0:06:37 | |
in which your own life intersects with the history | 0:06:37 | 0:06:43 | |
because I think this is what makes it such an unusual book, the sense | 0:06:43 | 0:06:47 | |
in which your own life is implicated in the story you are telling. | 0:06:47 | 0:06:51 | |
I mean, if you begin right at the beginning - you're born | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
in Egypt, your father works for the Post and Telegraph Company. | 0:06:55 | 0:07:00 | |
It's a very imperial beginning, in a sense. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:03 | |
Your own life begins in the British imperial twilight. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:08 | |
I mean, is that how you see your own beginnings? | 0:07:08 | 0:07:12 | |
I have been conscious of, as it were, living in history | 0:07:12 | 0:07:16 | |
for a very long time, but that is essentially because | 0:07:16 | 0:07:21 | |
at a crucial stage, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:22 | |
you know, when I was, whatever it is, a young teenager, | 0:07:22 | 0:07:28 | |
I was lucky... | 0:07:28 | 0:07:30 | |
Yes, lucky enough, to live in Berlin just in the last years | 0:07:30 | 0:07:35 | |
when Hitler came to power | 0:07:35 | 0:07:38 | |
and if you don't feel that you are part of world history | 0:07:38 | 0:07:42 | |
at that time, you never will. | 0:07:42 | 0:07:44 | |
So you are a very odd case, in fact. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
You're an English, Jewish boy, | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
growing up in the Berlin in which Hitler comes to power. | 0:07:51 | 0:07:55 | |
That's where we are. Now, at 14, you do something extraordinary - | 0:07:55 | 0:07:59 | |
you join the Communist Party. Why? | 0:07:59 | 0:08:01 | |
It isn't extraordinary, I can assure you that in 1931, '32, | 0:08:01 | 0:08:07 | |
it was not at all extraordinary for somebody to become a Communist. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
Why? | 0:08:11 | 0:08:13 | |
Because you can't understand anything | 0:08:13 | 0:08:16 | |
about the first half of the 20th century - | 0:08:16 | 0:08:18 | |
at least from 1914 until the Second World War right in the middle - | 0:08:18 | 0:08:23 | |
without grasping that most people believed | 0:08:23 | 0:08:28 | |
the old world was coming to an end. | 0:08:28 | 0:08:31 | |
Inevitably. The old world was crashing, | 0:08:31 | 0:08:34 | |
we were living in the crashing of an old world. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:39 | |
And you had to look for an alternative. | 0:08:39 | 0:08:42 | |
It was either the fascist alternative or it was a socialist alternative | 0:08:42 | 0:08:47 | |
which in Germany in 1931, '32, would have meant Communism. | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
THEY SING PATRIOTIC ANTHEM | 0:08:52 | 0:08:54 | |
But Hitler is just about to take power. This is 1933. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:08 | |
Is it becoming dangerous to engage in student activity? | 0:09:08 | 0:09:13 | |
Obviously we had... | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
We knew that this was a major catastrophe. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:23 | |
I mean, I can still remember to this day, | 0:09:23 | 0:09:26 | |
the afternoon when I was walking back from school and saw the headline | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
"Hitler as"... you know, "Reich Chancellor." | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
Personal danger in the sense of being personally afraid, | 0:09:36 | 0:09:39 | |
that's a completely different matter. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:41 | |
Whether you are personally afraid or not is a private matter, | 0:09:41 | 0:09:46 | |
but, as it were, that you know that what is happening | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
is something dramatic and for a long period at least irreversible, | 0:09:50 | 0:09:54 | |
that we knew. | 0:09:54 | 0:09:56 | |
Is that a moment when you become conscious of Jewishness | 0:09:56 | 0:09:59 | |
or had you always been conscious of Jewishness? | 0:09:59 | 0:10:01 | |
There's no way in which you can be brought up in Central Europe | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
without being conscious of Jewishness if you are a Jew, | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
even though I wasn't that conscious of anti-Semitism, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:12 | |
because in some ways I was being treated as a foreigner, | 0:10:12 | 0:10:16 | |
an English boy, rather than anything, | 0:10:16 | 0:10:18 | |
but there's no way in which you can avoid | 0:10:18 | 0:10:21 | |
the consciousness of being a Jew, which I've always had. | 0:10:21 | 0:10:26 | |
You leave in 1933 for England, | 0:10:26 | 0:10:29 | |
but you don't leave because of thing Hitler. | 0:10:29 | 0:10:32 | |
-No, not because of Hitler. -You're not Jewish refugees from Hitler. -No. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:37 | |
We were really refugees from the slump, you might say. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:41 | |
Do you leave behind Jewish relatives in Austria and Germany? | 0:10:41 | 0:10:46 | |
-Yes, of course. -What happens to them? | 0:10:46 | 0:10:48 | |
Some get out, some get into concentration camps and die. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:52 | |
At about this period, '33, '34... | 0:10:56 | 0:11:01 | |
..the kulak class is being liquidated | 0:11:03 | 0:11:06 | |
and millions of peasants are dying, starved or being deported by Stalin. | 0:11:06 | 0:11:11 | |
'33,'34, we're in the midst of the Five-Year Plan, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:15 | |
or the second Five-Year Plan, I can't remember. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:17 | |
But in any case millions of people are dying in the Soviet Experiment. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:22 | |
If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you | 0:11:22 | 0:11:26 | |
at that time? To your commitment to being a Communist? | 0:11:26 | 0:11:29 | |
This is a sort of academic question | 0:11:33 | 0:11:35 | |
to which an answer is simply not possible. | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
Erm... | 0:11:38 | 0:11:40 | |
I don't actually know that it has any bearing | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
on the history that I have written. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
If I were to give you a retrospective answer, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:57 | |
which is not the answer of an historian on something... | 0:11:57 | 0:11:59 | |
..I would have said probably not. | 0:12:02 | 0:12:05 | |
Why? | 0:12:05 | 0:12:06 | |
Because... | 0:12:09 | 0:12:11 | |
..in a period in which, as you might say, | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, | 0:12:16 | 0:12:24 | |
the chance of a new world being born in great suffering | 0:12:24 | 0:12:29 | |
would still have been worth backing. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:32 | |
Now, the point is, | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
looking back as a historian... | 0:12:35 | 0:12:37 | |
I would say that it was probably not. | 0:12:39 | 0:12:45 | |
The sacrifices which were made by the Russian people | 0:12:45 | 0:12:50 | |
were probably only marginally worthwhile. | 0:12:50 | 0:12:54 | |
Their sacrifices were enormous, | 0:12:54 | 0:12:56 | |
they were excessive by almost any standard, and unnecessarily great. | 0:12:56 | 0:13:02 | |
But I'm looking back on it now | 0:13:03 | 0:13:05 | |
and I'm saying that is because it turns out | 0:13:05 | 0:13:08 | |
that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:12 | |
Had it been... | 0:13:12 | 0:13:13 | |
I'm not sure. | 0:13:15 | 0:13:17 | |
After all, do people now say, | 0:13:17 | 0:13:20 | |
"We shouldn't have had World War II | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
"because more people died in World War II than died in Stalin's Terror?" | 0:13:23 | 0:13:29 | |
So what that comes down to is saying | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, | 0:13:32 | 0:13:37 | |
the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:41 | |
Yes. | 0:13:41 | 0:13:43 | |
Which is exactly what people said about World War I and World War II. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:47 | |
Most people ended up by saying, "We think it was wrong in World War I." | 0:13:47 | 0:13:51 | |
Very few people ended up by saying, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:53 | |
"We think it was wrong in World War II." | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
But isn't there some sense | 0:13:58 | 0:14:00 | |
in which the radiant tomorrow can't, in principle, be built at that cost? | 0:14:00 | 0:14:06 | |
Because it can't then be a radiant tomorrow, | 0:14:06 | 0:14:08 | |
because human beings have memories | 0:14:08 | 0:14:11 | |
and what they remember is desolation. | 0:14:11 | 0:14:13 | |
In the first place, I think, you see, | 0:14:14 | 0:14:16 | |
a radiant tomorrow was rhetoric. | 0:14:16 | 0:14:19 | |
It was the rhetoric of the people that I believed in, too, that's true, | 0:14:19 | 0:14:24 | |
but it was pure rhetoric. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:26 | |
We didn't believe in radiant tomorrows. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:29 | |
We believed in A world rather than NO world. | 0:14:29 | 0:14:32 | |
We hoped that that would be a far better world. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:36 | |
We hoped that it would be, quote-unquote, "a perfect world", | 0:14:36 | 0:14:41 | |
in which, you know, | 0:14:41 | 0:14:43 | |
in some of us, when you're young enough, | 0:14:43 | 0:14:45 | |
you believed that there wouldn't be any unhappiness, | 0:14:45 | 0:14:48 | |
there wouldn't be any unhappiness in love in this new world, | 0:14:48 | 0:14:51 | |
but that isn't true, | 0:14:51 | 0:14:53 | |
even if, rationally, one knew that this wouldn't be the case, | 0:14:53 | 0:14:57 | |
nevertheless, the real secret of the whole business was, | 0:14:57 | 0:15:01 | |
if you believe you are living in a world | 0:15:01 | 0:15:05 | |
which is crashing about your ears, | 0:15:05 | 0:15:07 | |
your choice is a future or no future. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
And it was that. | 0:15:11 | 0:15:13 | |
If you remember, and I quote it somewhere in my book, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:16 | |
the famous phrase by Walter Benjamin about the angel. Huh? | 0:15:16 | 0:15:21 | |
The angel of history. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:23 | |
The angel of history, you see? | 0:15:23 | 0:15:25 | |
That what the angel of history sees as he moves backwards into progress | 0:15:25 | 0:15:32 | |
is precisely the ruins | 0:15:32 | 0:15:34 | |
that are being accumulated by the process of history. | 0:15:34 | 0:15:38 | |
So, in a curious way, | 0:15:40 | 0:15:42 | |
even though we, as Communists, | 0:15:42 | 0:15:48 | |
and other Socialists, if you like, | 0:15:48 | 0:15:51 | |
were committed to an upbeat view of the future, | 0:15:51 | 0:15:56 | |
we really, living through the period in which we did, | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
we knew we weren't living through a period in which all you have to do | 0:15:59 | 0:16:04 | |
is to push the right kind of button | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
and turn the right kind of switch, | 0:16:07 | 0:16:09 | |
and everything's going to be lovely. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:12 | |
I don't think any serious left-winger | 0:16:12 | 0:16:16 | |
even believed that the Soviet Union, | 0:16:16 | 0:16:19 | |
that everything in the Soviet Union was lovely. It was an awful place, | 0:16:19 | 0:16:23 | |
even if you underestimated the number of people who were killed | 0:16:23 | 0:16:28 | |
and imprisoned in it. | 0:16:28 | 0:16:31 | |
You come to England in 1933. | 0:16:34 | 0:16:35 | |
-By 1936, you're in Cambridge. -Mm-hm. | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
Right through your Cambridge years, and then in the post-war years, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
you're very actively in the Communist Party. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:45 | |
What did it mean to be a party member in those years? | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
Those of us who stayed in and committed ourselves, | 0:16:51 | 0:16:56 | |
I suppose the only thing to do is, it's a lifetime commitment | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
and a total commitment. It was the most important thing for us, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
because... | 0:17:04 | 0:17:06 | |
..again, I've got to return to what we said earlier on, | 0:17:07 | 0:17:11 | |
you didn't have the option, you see? | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
Either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future | 0:17:14 | 0:17:18 | |
and this was the only thing that offered an acceptable future. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:22 | |
-So... -When you say total commitment, I mean, how total? | 0:17:24 | 0:17:27 | |
If the party told you to do something, | 0:17:30 | 0:17:33 | |
it would have priority over everything else. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:36 | |
I mean, if the party said, | 0:17:36 | 0:17:38 | |
-"You can't be going out with that woman..." -Yes. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:41 | |
-Really? That far? -Mmm. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:43 | |
It dictated your personal life | 0:17:43 | 0:17:46 | |
as well as your political convictions, completely? | 0:17:46 | 0:17:49 | |
In theory, at any rate. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:50 | |
Whether it always did so in practice, we don't know, | 0:17:50 | 0:17:53 | |
but in fact, to a surprising extent, | 0:17:53 | 0:17:57 | |
I mean, yes, | 0:17:57 | 0:17:59 | |
you know, I mean... | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
It would have complete priority. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:07 | |
You see, what I find very difficult to square here is | 0:18:07 | 0:18:10 | |
your obvious restless independence of mind | 0:18:10 | 0:18:16 | |
with this party belief. I can't see how someone like you | 0:18:16 | 0:18:20 | |
could remain within a kind of organisation of military Jesuits. | 0:18:20 | 0:18:25 | |
I think if you found | 0:18:25 | 0:18:27 | |
you couldn't actually hold still for what you were supposed to, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:32 | |
you just kept quiet. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
You dealt with something else. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:37 | |
For instance, I never professionally wrote anything or said anything | 0:18:37 | 0:18:43 | |
about the Soviet Union or the Russian Revolution | 0:18:43 | 0:18:46 | |
because it was perfectly clear to me | 0:18:46 | 0:18:48 | |
that what you were officially supposed to say about it | 0:18:48 | 0:18:51 | |
was just not so, or at any rate, | 0:18:51 | 0:18:55 | |
contained large chunks which were simply not defensible. | 0:18:55 | 0:19:01 | |
When did you know that to be the case? | 0:19:01 | 0:19:03 | |
Oh, I mean, from the moment that | 0:19:06 | 0:19:09 | |
they started saying, whatever it is, | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
that Trotsky had been an agent of the British intelligence service | 0:19:12 | 0:19:16 | |
going back to 1918, that kind of stuff, | 0:19:16 | 0:19:18 | |
which was even before the war. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:20 | |
Well, if you did that, | 0:19:22 | 0:19:24 | |
the option was, either you wrote about the Soviet Union, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
in which case you couldn't be in the Communist Party, | 0:19:28 | 0:19:31 | |
or you kept quiet and wrote about something else. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:34 | |
Did you ever go to the Soviet Union in this early period | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
and what impression did it make on you if you did? | 0:19:37 | 0:19:41 | |
I went to the Soviet Union | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
for the first and the only time, really, | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
except for relatively short trips, which don't count, | 0:19:47 | 0:19:51 | |
in the year after Stalin died, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:54 | |
when they were just beginning to open up. | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
It made a very poor impression on me, | 0:19:57 | 0:19:59 | |
not so much because you could tell | 0:19:59 | 0:20:01 | |
about all these awful things which had happened - you could merely see | 0:20:01 | 0:20:06 | |
that it was an extraordinarily poor and backward country, | 0:20:06 | 0:20:09 | |
but one knew that after the war and the destruction. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:12 | |
It was a country in which one didn't recognise any Communists. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:18 | |
Meaning? | 0:20:18 | 0:20:19 | |
Meaning we knew what Communists were like | 0:20:19 | 0:20:23 | |
and the only thing that one could see in Russia | 0:20:23 | 0:20:26 | |
were people who lived in a Communist country | 0:20:26 | 0:20:28 | |
and made their career in a Communist country. | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
Now, of course, this was untypical in the early '50s | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
because the guys had yet to come back from the camps | 0:20:34 | 0:20:38 | |
and later on... Or from exile, and later on, | 0:20:38 | 0:20:42 | |
one came across, again, people who were recognisable, | 0:20:42 | 0:20:47 | |
-but whereas in... -What you're saying there is interesting - | 0:20:47 | 0:20:51 | |
that is, the people who actually burned with an original faith | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
had been put in prison, in fact. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
-I don't know, but you didn't come across them. -Right. | 0:20:57 | 0:21:01 | |
Whereas, for instance, | 0:21:01 | 0:21:03 | |
in the "People's Democracies," quote-unquote, | 0:21:03 | 0:21:06 | |
you did recognise these people. | 0:21:06 | 0:21:09 | |
You may have thought, you know, | 0:21:09 | 0:21:10 | |
"These have now become bureaucrats" or this, that or the other | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
but you could recognise how they worked, how their minds worked. | 0:21:13 | 0:21:17 | |
They worked the way we worked. Not in Russia. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
What's it like to be in a church, | 0:21:21 | 0:21:24 | |
assuming that Communism is a kind of secular religion, | 0:21:24 | 0:21:27 | |
when you know, having seen with your own eyes, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
that the central mystery at the centre of the church, | 0:21:30 | 0:21:33 | |
that is, the state of the Soviet Union, is rotten? | 0:21:33 | 0:21:36 | |
How do you live with that? | 0:21:36 | 0:21:38 | |
The Soviet Union...you see, for us, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
in the West, was not the central mystery. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:45 | |
Socialism, Communism, were the central mystery. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
The Soviet Union is where it started | 0:21:51 | 0:21:53 | |
and for practical purposes, you absolutely had to work with it | 0:21:53 | 0:21:58 | |
because that was...between the wars, that was the only game in town. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:02 | |
There was no other kind of socialism. | 0:22:02 | 0:22:05 | |
If that had gone, there would be no chance at all. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
In effect, you couldn't get anywhere without the Soviet Union. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:15 | |
And, you see, that was true. | 0:22:16 | 0:22:18 | |
Without Stalin, without the Red Army, | 0:22:18 | 0:22:23 | |
we wouldn't have won the war. | 0:22:23 | 0:22:24 | |
A couple of months ago, | 0:22:26 | 0:22:28 | |
I was at a conference in Italy about Nazi atrocities during the war, | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
the memory of World War II, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
and there were people there from Russia too | 0:22:35 | 0:22:38 | |
who regarded the entire subject as merely a conspiracy | 0:22:38 | 0:22:42 | |
to stop people talking about the awfulness of Stalinism | 0:22:42 | 0:22:47 | |
and one of the Italians got up and said, "You must realise, | 0:22:47 | 0:22:52 | |
"Stalin was terrible for YOU. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:54 | |
"For US, it meant liberation." | 0:22:54 | 0:22:58 | |
Let me tell you... Let me tell you a story, Eric, | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
-that I grew up with about Claud Cockburn, who was in the party. -Yes. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:06 | |
And they asked Claud Cockburn | 0:23:06 | 0:23:07 | |
what the experience was of being in the party | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
and he told the following, admittedly very sexist, joke, | 0:23:10 | 0:23:14 | |
about a southern belle in a rape trial | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
who is asked by the judge, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:19 | |
"When," he asks the southern belle, "did the rape actually occur?" | 0:23:19 | 0:23:25 | |
And the belle says, "Judge, it was rape, rape, rape all summer long." | 0:23:25 | 0:23:29 | |
But I mean, wasn't being in the party, | 0:23:29 | 0:23:32 | |
to an intelligent intellectual like you, at a certain point, | 0:23:32 | 0:23:35 | |
rape, rape, all summer long, | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
in the sense that you had '56, the Hungarian invasion. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
You then had Prague, '68, the Soviet invasion again. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
You had one constant thing, that was just unjustifiable, to justify. | 0:23:45 | 0:23:52 | |
'56 was the real turning point. | 0:23:53 | 0:23:56 | |
This was when the international communist movement went to pieces. | 0:23:56 | 0:24:00 | |
Until that time, it didn't. | 0:24:01 | 0:24:04 | |
In fact, it was held together, probably by the Cold War, | 0:24:05 | 0:24:10 | |
which prolonged, actually, the existence of the Soviet Union | 0:24:10 | 0:24:13 | |
and the existence of the international Communist movement. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:16 | |
So before that, | 0:24:17 | 0:24:20 | |
you had a number of things which were increasingly implausible, | 0:24:20 | 0:24:27 | |
not so much the actual terror, | 0:24:27 | 0:24:30 | |
because we really did not know, | 0:24:30 | 0:24:33 | |
nobody knew, how many people were killed. | 0:24:33 | 0:24:36 | |
Even now, they don't know. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:38 | |
Even the anti-Stalinist outsiders don't know | 0:24:38 | 0:24:46 | |
because the estimates about everything in the Soviet Union | 0:24:46 | 0:24:50 | |
are pure speculation. I mean... | 0:24:50 | 0:24:52 | |
Are you actually seriously telling me | 0:24:52 | 0:24:56 | |
that the Stalinist crimes are much exaggerated? | 0:24:56 | 0:25:00 | |
No, I'm not telling you that. I'm simply saying that nobody knows. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:04 | |
What we say about Stalin so far is... | 0:25:04 | 0:25:07 | |
Depends very largely on | 0:25:07 | 0:25:10 | |
the attitude of the people | 0:25:10 | 0:25:12 | |
who are making the estimates. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:16 | |
For instance, on the gulags, there is a difference. | 0:25:16 | 0:25:19 | |
All the estimates are terrible and indefensible | 0:25:19 | 0:25:22 | |
because they all run into millions. | 0:25:22 | 0:25:24 | |
But the estimates range from between | 0:25:24 | 0:25:27 | |
3-4 million to between 13-14 million. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
And with a range like this, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:32 | |
they are not serious estimates, | 0:25:32 | 0:25:34 | |
they aren't even orders of magnitude. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:38 | |
All you can say is that whatever actually turns out in the end, | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
it was inhuman, indefensible, | 0:25:42 | 0:25:44 | |
and there is no way in which | 0:25:44 | 0:25:47 | |
you can minimise it. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
GUNSHOTS | 0:25:49 | 0:25:52 | |
What happens in '56 to you? | 0:25:54 | 0:25:57 | |
Do you leave the party over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, or not? | 0:25:57 | 0:26:00 | |
No, we protested, all of us. I protested. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:04 | |
Others did too, but I personally didn't leave, | 0:26:04 | 0:26:07 | |
but most of the others did. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:09 | |
Why didn't you leave? And why didn't you leave for so long after? | 0:26:09 | 0:26:13 | |
It's very different for people who became | 0:26:17 | 0:26:21 | |
communists in Berlin | 0:26:21 | 0:26:24 | |
between 1931 and 1933. | 0:26:24 | 0:26:27 | |
Even though for most of us, | 0:26:31 | 0:26:32 | |
in this country and elsewhere, | 0:26:32 | 0:26:36 | |
the basic historic experience is that of the 1930s. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:40 | |
The broad popular front one. This is still the way I think about politics, | 0:26:40 | 0:26:46 | |
effectively and politically. | 0:26:46 | 0:26:48 | |
In fact, the commitment goes earlier. | 0:26:48 | 0:26:53 | |
And in a way... | 0:26:54 | 0:26:56 | |
..I, in the first place, | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
I never wanted to belong to the people | 0:27:02 | 0:27:05 | |
who had left and turned against. | 0:27:05 | 0:27:08 | |
I don't want to be in that company, | 0:27:08 | 0:27:10 | |
I didn't want to be in that company. | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
In the second place, | 0:27:13 | 0:27:15 | |
I did not want to betray the people I knew | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
who had actually | 0:27:19 | 0:27:21 | |
sacrificed their lives and lost. | 0:27:21 | 0:27:26 | |
You see, a lot of people, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:28 | |
people like myself, | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
had very easy lives, by and large. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:33 | |
But there were others of my friends | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
and comrades who haven't. | 0:27:35 | 0:27:37 | |
And, you know, I can show you | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
photographs of people and say, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
"This man was killed | 0:27:43 | 0:27:45 | |
"in the Resistance. | 0:27:45 | 0:27:47 | |
"This man was killed..." | 0:27:47 | 0:27:50 | |
These were my contemporaries. | 0:27:50 | 0:27:53 | |
And I do not wish, I did not wish, | 0:27:53 | 0:27:58 | |
by renouncing this past, to diminish | 0:27:58 | 0:28:06 | |
the enormous commitment for the good | 0:28:06 | 0:28:11 | |
which this movement represented | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
and I still believe represents. | 0:28:14 | 0:28:17 | |
It just so happens that those of us | 0:28:17 | 0:28:19 | |
who were Communists in the West | 0:28:19 | 0:28:22 | |
never had anything much to, er, | 0:28:22 | 0:28:24 | |
shall we say, reproach ourselves with. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:27 | |
We fortunately never became governments | 0:28:27 | 0:28:29 | |
and were expected to do the things | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
which Communists in government in the East were expected to do. | 0:28:31 | 0:28:36 | |
We were on the right side. | 0:28:36 | 0:28:38 | |
What we did was, on the whole, on the right side in this country. | 0:28:38 | 0:28:42 | |
Very few... | 0:28:42 | 0:28:44 | |
All we can say is that when we talked about Russia, | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
which was neither here nor there | 0:28:47 | 0:28:49 | |
as far as I was politically concerned, | 0:28:49 | 0:28:52 | |
we were either fools, | 0:28:52 | 0:28:53 | |
or liars, or naive, | 0:28:53 | 0:28:56 | |
but that's quite a different thing | 0:28:56 | 0:28:58 | |
from saying that God failed. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:00 | |
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
In what sense do you still feel | 0:29:08 | 0:29:11 | |
there is something left to communism as a project? | 0:29:11 | 0:29:14 | |
Because it's not clear to me in the book what you think is left | 0:29:14 | 0:29:19 | |
that's viable politically about the communist project. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
Communist Party - no, nothing. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:26 | |
Communism as something... | 0:29:29 | 0:29:33 | |
a state and society | 0:29:33 | 0:29:34 | |
organised on the model | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
on which it was in the Soviet Union | 0:29:36 | 0:29:38 | |
and on the model of the Soviet Union - | 0:29:38 | 0:29:41 | |
no, no future. | 0:29:41 | 0:29:43 | |
I believe - as I try to show in the book - | 0:29:43 | 0:29:47 | |
that, in a sense, this was a peculiar historical freak, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:53 | |
if you like, | 0:29:53 | 0:29:54 | |
that for understandable reasons, | 0:29:54 | 0:29:58 | |
the revolution triumphs in a country | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
in which communism... | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
or socialism as Marx and other socialists conceived it, | 0:30:04 | 0:30:09 | |
could not conceivably have been built. | 0:30:09 | 0:30:11 | |
So what is viable? What remains? | 0:30:11 | 0:30:14 | |
What remains is, in fact, that if the world is to have a future, | 0:30:16 | 0:30:23 | |
it will have to be, as it were, | 0:30:23 | 0:30:27 | |
it cannot rely on the spontaneous operations of the capitalist system. | 0:30:27 | 0:30:32 | |
It has to rely on, to some extent, | 0:30:33 | 0:30:37 | |
human communities taking conscious responsibility | 0:30:37 | 0:30:44 | |
for their welfare and their future. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:48 | |
Whether this implies something like... | 0:30:48 | 0:30:52 | |
whether this, that, | 0:30:52 | 0:30:53 | |
or all industries are to be run by the government, | 0:30:53 | 0:30:57 | |
these seem to me to be second-order questions. | 0:30:57 | 0:31:00 | |
But that it cannot be left to simply | 0:31:00 | 0:31:05 | |
the free play of the market, | 0:31:05 | 0:31:10 | |
or some equivalent. That seems to me to be absolutely basic | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
and that remains absolutely basic, it seems to me. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
-Um... -But that just makes you a good left-wing social democrat. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:24 | |
That doesn't make you a communist. | 0:31:24 | 0:31:26 | |
That is probably true that in a sense, | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
becoming a good left-wing social democrat | 0:31:31 | 0:31:35 | |
is the way in which Marxism | 0:31:35 | 0:31:37 | |
was clearly developing | 0:31:37 | 0:31:39 | |
before the Russian Revolution. | 0:31:39 | 0:31:41 | |
Marxism didn't actually have the reputation of being | 0:31:41 | 0:31:44 | |
essentially a theory of | 0:31:44 | 0:31:46 | |
revolution and barricades. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:48 | |
It was anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists which had this. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:52 | |
The idea of the revolution barricades | 0:31:52 | 0:31:54 | |
came back into Marxism | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
via October, you see? | 0:31:57 | 0:31:59 | |
Mmm. But what we come down to | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
at the end of it | 0:32:01 | 0:32:03 | |
is that you made a commitment | 0:32:03 | 0:32:05 | |
when you were 14 which was - | 0:32:05 | 0:32:07 | |
we either have socialism or we have barbarism, | 0:32:07 | 0:32:10 | |
and in a sense, you've remained true to that all your life. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:14 | |
I hope so. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:16 | |
And, alas, we haven't got socialism, | 0:32:16 | 0:32:19 | |
but we do have an increase in barbarism. | 0:32:19 | 0:32:21 | |
What exactly do you mean by barbarism? | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
I mean firstly that, in some sense, | 0:32:24 | 0:32:29 | |
the rules of social behaviour | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
which tend to govern all societies - | 0:32:32 | 0:32:36 | |
must govern them if they aren't to... | 0:32:36 | 0:32:38 | |
disintegrate into some kind of | 0:32:38 | 0:32:42 | |
Hobbesian anarchy - are under threat | 0:32:42 | 0:32:45 | |
or under disintegration | 0:32:45 | 0:32:48 | |
because of the change, | 0:32:48 | 0:32:52 | |
changes in society which we have seen and through which are going? | 0:32:52 | 0:32:57 | |
But, I mean... | 0:32:57 | 0:32:59 | |
Which changes are producing | 0:32:59 | 0:33:00 | |
barbarism within the capitalist world? | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
For one thing, the growth of big cities, | 0:33:03 | 0:33:08 | |
and I suppose I would say... | 0:33:08 | 0:33:13 | |
the fact that the mechanisms | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
for keeping these things under control in the past | 0:33:17 | 0:33:21 | |
are either weakened or may possibly disappear. | 0:33:21 | 0:33:25 | |
Which mechanisms do you mean? | 0:33:25 | 0:33:27 | |
The state, for one thing. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:29 | |
You yourself, if I may say so, | 0:33:31 | 0:33:34 | |
have pointed out that | 0:33:34 | 0:33:36 | |
one of the reasons why, in Yugoslavia, | 0:33:36 | 0:33:39 | |
you find that there is this extraordinary | 0:33:39 | 0:33:43 | |
uncontrolled outburst of almost... | 0:33:43 | 0:33:48 | |
erotic, I think you say, violence | 0:33:48 | 0:33:52 | |
is that these countries have got used, | 0:33:52 | 0:33:55 | |
over a long period, to government and law | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
having the monopoly of legitimate violence. | 0:33:58 | 0:34:02 | |
This now disappears. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:04 | |
There are no other rules about how to treat violence and what to do, | 0:34:04 | 0:34:09 | |
and the result is indeed cruelty, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:13 | |
atrocity, barbarism. | 0:34:13 | 0:34:15 | |
So barbarism means, to use your own phrase, | 0:34:15 | 0:34:18 | |
the democratisation of violence? | 0:34:18 | 0:34:21 | |
That, I think, is one aspect of it. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:24 | |
That's obviously the aspect which we mostly notice. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:28 | |
But at the same time, it seems to me | 0:34:28 | 0:34:31 | |
that barbarism is also much more specifically | 0:34:31 | 0:34:35 | |
the gradual weakening of the standards and aspirations | 0:34:35 | 0:34:43 | |
of 18th-century rationalism | 0:34:43 | 0:34:46 | |
and 18th-century enlightenment. | 0:34:46 | 0:34:49 | |
Finally, the last sentence of your book, as I recall, says, | 0:34:49 | 0:34:54 | |
"Unless we have a changed society, we'll be going into darkness." | 0:34:54 | 0:35:00 | |
A very sombre conclusion, and I wondered if | 0:35:00 | 0:35:02 | |
you could put some flesh and bones on that | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
very tenacious dream of a changed society | 0:35:06 | 0:35:10 | |
that still obviously drives you and still obviously inspires you. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
It's difficult to imagine because we are gradually getting used, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:25 | |
you see, to living under conditions | 0:35:25 | 0:35:28 | |
which, in the days of our parents, my parents, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:32 | |
or grandparents, would have been regarded as intolerable. | 0:35:32 | 0:35:36 | |
And so what is darkness, you see? | 0:35:36 | 0:35:41 | |
Everybody thinks a catastrophe | 0:35:41 | 0:35:44 | |
is something which happens | 0:35:44 | 0:35:46 | |
from one day to the next, like a big earthquake, or something like this. | 0:35:46 | 0:35:52 | |
But what we are not easily used to is a slow-motion catastrophe, | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
such as we can see happening in large parts of Africa today. | 0:35:56 | 0:36:00 | |
GUNSHOTS | 0:36:00 | 0:36:02 | |
GUNFIRE CONTINUES | 0:36:05 | 0:36:09 | |
It is possible for human life to go on and people adjusting themselves | 0:36:10 | 0:36:14 | |
to living in the sort of conditions in which people have been living | 0:36:14 | 0:36:20 | |
for 20 years in Angola and Mozambique, | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
for, whatever it is, ten years or more in Somalia, | 0:36:23 | 0:36:27 | |
for five or six years in Liberia and a number of other places. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:31 | |
No doubt, in some way or other, | 0:36:31 | 0:36:36 | |
something like life, | 0:36:36 | 0:36:38 | |
on the basis of being nasty, brutish and short, | 0:36:38 | 0:36:42 | |
can nevertheless become regularised again. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:46 | |
And yet, looking at it from where we stand | 0:36:46 | 0:36:49 | |
and looking at it not only from our hopes, | 0:36:49 | 0:36:52 | |
but from the experience... | 0:36:52 | 0:36:55 | |
After all, living in Liberia or Mozambique | 0:36:55 | 0:36:59 | |
even in the early 1970s - or Somalia - was different. | 0:36:59 | 0:37:04 | |
Living in Tajikistan was different. | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
It wasn't ideal, it was even bad, | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
but it was better than what there is now. | 0:37:11 | 0:37:15 | |
And I think when to say darkness, | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
it doesn't mean that we shall all, kind of, commit suicide, | 0:37:17 | 0:37:21 | |
it means we shall get used to living under conditions | 0:37:21 | 0:37:25 | |
which should not be tolerated. | 0:37:25 | 0:37:27 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:37:59 | 0:38:04 |