BRET STEPHENS: Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History: How can one explain the warm eulogies offered up for a lifelong apologist of Soviet communism?

Hobsbawm, who died in London Monday at age 95, was no Holocaust denier. Nor was he ignorant of the human toll imposed by communism, the ideology to which he remained faithful nearly his whole life. He acknowledged that the victims of Stalin’s tyranny “must be measured in eight rather than seven digits,” adding that the numbers are “shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.”

Yet Hobsbawm did justify them.

Communists are morally no better than Nazis, they just have more sympathizers in journalism and academia.