Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

order, largely because he is no happier with the nation-states that replaced the empires.
He writes that “ World War I... had made the habitual and sensible process of international
negotiation suspect as ‘secret diplomacy’. This was largely a reaction against the secret
treaties arranged among the Allies during the war... The Bolsheviks, discovering these
sensitive documents in the Tsarist archives, had promptly published them for the world
to read.”
Despite these failures of Communism Hobsbaum remains adamant in his critic of freemarket
capitalism: “Those of us who lived through the years of the Great Slump still find
it almost impossible to understand how the orthodoxies of the pure free market, then so
obviously discredited, once again came to preside over a global period of depression in
the late 1980s and 1990s, which once again, they were equally unable to understand or to
deal with. As it happened, the regimes most deeply committed to laissez-faire economics
were also sometimes, and notably in the case of Reagan’s United States and Thatcher’s
Britain, profoundly and viscerally nationalist and distrustful of the outside world. The
historian cannot but note that the two attitudes are contradictory. It is ironic that the most
dynamic and rapidly growing economy of the globe after the fall of Soviet socialism was
that of Communist China, leading Western business-school lectures and the authors of
management manuals, a flourishing genre of literature, to scan the teachings of Confucius
for the secrets of entrepreneurial success.” [emphasis mine]. We have seen this irony time
and again in the pages of Ovi where entrepreneurs of various stripes have glibly sung the
praises of Chinese capitalistic free-market enterprise without ever explaining the blatant
contradiction of a central command center which remains totalitarian and Communistic.
But ultimately, in world terms, Hobsbaum sees capitalism being just as much of a failure
as state socialism: “The belief, following neoclassical economics, that unrestricted
international trade would allow the poorer countries to come closer to the rich, runs
counter to historical experience as well as common sense. The examples of successful
export-led Third World industrialization usually quoted -- Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan
and South Korea — represent less than two percent of the Third World population.” Food
for thought here for the entrepreneur, selling his tacos for profits and unconcerned with
justice, to chew and muse upon.
Denying fascism’s claim to philosophical respectability, Hobsbaum writes: “Theory was
not the strong point of movements devoted to the inadequacies of reason and rationalism
and the superiority of instinct and will... Mussolini could have readily dispensed with his
house philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, and Hitler probably neither knew nor cared about
the support of the philosopher Heidegger. The popular appeal of fascism lay with its
claims to technocratic achievement. Was not the proverbial argument in favor of fascist
Italy that Mussolini made the trains run on time?” He concludes with this powerful
statement: “Would the horror of the holocaust be any less if historians concluded that it
exterminated not six millions but five or even four?”
Hobsbaum goes on to write that “The cultural revolution of the latest twentieth century
can thus best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather,
the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social
textures”. This for him paralles Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “There is no society, only