Communists are Nazis with a Better Public Relations Agent.

For the last 40 to 50 years, people have grown up with the sense that there really never were Communists and if there were, they were idealistic "liberals in a hurry."

It is disquieting how an unlimited, pro-bono contribution of unstinting love from generations of writers and producers and directors and intellectuals have managed to put lipstick on the pig of the most evil inventions of the human mind.

And they knew - know - what they are doing. Thomas Woods notes that Marxist Historian Richard Hobsbawm died last Monday with this observation:

The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm died this past Monday. Hobsbawm was far inferior as a scholar to a great many other Marxists, but the British establishment’s lack of discernment made him a celebrity. There is an analogy here with Paul Krugman, who is doubtless viewed with contempt by superior Keynesian macroeconomists who wonder how this polemicist came to be the country’s spokesman for Keynesianism.

Hobsbawm — who later reversed his earlier enthusiasm for Stalin — was asked in 1994 whether, if communism could have achieved its goals with only 15-20 million deaths, he would have supported it. “Yes,” came his answer.

This man was eulogized in the major British newspapers this week.

Except in the Daily Mail, which skewered him, De mortuis nihil nisi bonum be damned.

I just had a conversation with the Widget and the Wadget where I had to explain that there really were Communists, that Communists were spying on us, that Communists were a threat, that they were not an invention of Joe McCarthy's mind, that Stalin had starved and murdered millions, that there were Communists in the media who covered up Stalin's murders, such manufactured starvation of the Ukrainians, and that there really were Communists in Hollywood, Academics and Washington who wanted to hurt the United States. They seemed incredulous and I wanted to know how a 14 and 15 year old had been exposed to the left's version of the Cold War and only the left's version.

Television, apparently.

In any event, Hobsbawm's death and this obituary in the Daily Mail are timely:

He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?

Historian defended the Soviet killing of millions in the name of Communism

When he was at Cambridge in the 1930s he knew Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and other Soviet agents, who were recruited by Marxists

Four years before his death said he wanted to see MI5 files on him to find out who had 'snitched on him'

Read the Daily Mail obituary and reflect on how honored and well-paid Hobsbawm was for telling lie after lie after lie for the Communist cause.