We Lost the West Years Ago
The British Academy is the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. As such, it has tremendous authority and influence over British universities. It holds major advisory and funding influence over the humanities and social sciences across the UK higher education sector.
The British Academy influences U.S. universities primarily through prestige recognition, elite scholarly fellowships, and cross-cultural academic collaborations rather than direct institutional governance or curriculum control. It also influences through visiting professors.
That takes us to a British Academy historian, Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012), who was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism and nationalism. He was a lifelong Marxist, a Stalinist who didn’t think it mattered if 20 million died in establishing a communist country. He didn’t mind that at all.
A Visiting Professor, Eric Hobsbawm
Hobsbawm spent years at Stanford and the New School for Social Research as a visiting professor, one of many just like him.
Krzysztof Szczawinski summarizes:
“You probably think the British Establishment is populated with conservative men – while in fact it is quite the opposite. It is full of guys like Eric Hobsbawm. The establishment’s Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, was a Fellow of the British Academy, President of Birkbeck, and the University of London. He was a Companion of Honor, an order limited to sixty-five living members.
His trilogy on the long nineteenth century sits on every serious history reading list in the English-speaking world.
He Joined the Communist Party in 1936. He never Left. Hobsbawm signed on at Cambridge as an undergraduate. He kept his party card through the Moscow show trials, through the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, through the Soviet crushing of Hungary in 1956, through Prague in 1968.
The Communist Party of Great Britain finally dissolved in 1991. He stayed until the end.
In 1994, He Sat Down with Michael Ignatieff on BBC Television. He was promoting “The Age of Extremes,” his history of the twentieth century. Ignatieff asked the question every serious reader wanted asked.
He asked it in the plainest possible form.
Ignatieff’s First Question
“In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time?” Hobsbawm: “Probably not.” Ignatieff Pressed Him. Why?
Hobsbawm: “Because 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.”
Then Ignatieff Put a Number on It:
“That the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”
Hobsbawm: “Yes.” He Bet Twenty Million Dead on a World Revolution. Hobsbawm added a condition. The deaths were only justified if the Soviet project produced the genuinely communist society it promised. If the world revolution arrived, the graves paid for it.
By 1994, the Soviet archives were open. The famines, the camps, the executions were documented. The revolution never came. He had spent his career reading that documentation. His yes accounted for all of it.
The British Establishment kept the Honors Coming After 1994.
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- 1998: Companion of Honor, four years after the interview.
- 2002 to 2012: President of Birkbeck, University of London.
- 2003: Balzan Prize for European History.
- 2008: Honorary citizenship of Vienna. The interview was not obscure. Everyone with a subscription to the London Review of Books knew what he had said. It did not cost him a title.
The Same Reasoning Justifies Every Tyranny.
Hobsbawm’s argument is that the ends justify the means. It is the logic behind every revolutionary regime that has ever built camps or dug mass graves. Stalin used it. Mao used it. Pol Pot used it. No one can know in advance whether the promised end will arrive. Accepting the trade, marks the point where a system of thought has become a faith, and hands it a blank check for totalitarianism and genocide.”
If you wonder why Stanford is ideologically corrupted, then wonder why Hobsbawm was a welcome visiting professor. He was at the New School for years. New School is basically a communist school.
Hobsbawm helped found the academic journal Past & Present in 1952. He was a visiting professor at Stanford University in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he was appointed professor, and in 1976 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.
Hobsbawm formally retired from Birkbeck in 1982, becoming Emeritus Professor of History, and was appointed as president of Birkbeck in 2002. He remained as a visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan between 1984 and 1997. He was, until his death, professor emeritus at The New School for Social Research in the Political Science Department. A polyglot, he spoke English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently, and read Dutch, Portuguese, and Catalan.
Lives don’t matter; only ideology matters. It is the religion of envy, suffering, and death.
This is how the West is lost.
You probably think the British Establishment is populated with conservative men – while in fact it is quite the opposite – it is full of guys like this:
A “Companion of Honour”
The establishment’s marxist, Eric Hobsbawm was a Fellow of the British Academy, President of… https://t.co/QTq3jZ1Vbg pic.twitter.com/Ruz9LPhVmc
— Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 (@Kristof_Poland) August 29, 2026