Rich > Recent Status Updates

If you've not read any thorough histories of the 20th century, then you are at risk to be convinced by Hobsbawm's polemic appeals and ideological apologia. However, if you have, especially on the formation and rise of the USSR, then you will be well armed to consider this tome as a specious eulogy for Marxism-Leninism. The contradictions in this history are numerous, and its evidence is very selectively chosen.

The utopian assumption that there is a world interest in peace which is identifiable with the interest of each individual nation helped politicians and political writers everywhere to evade the unpalatable fact of a fundamental divergence of interest between nations desirous of maintaining the status quo and nations desirous of changing it.

[Peace] in itself is a meaningless aim.... The common interest in peace masks the fact that some nations desire to maintain the status quo without having to fight for it, and others to change the status quo without having to fight in order to do so.