Perhaps nothing in 21st-century culture is so perplexing as the refusal of some segments of the Western elite to acknowledge the evil of Marxism. Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than a decade after access to KGB archives confirmed the worldwide reality of Soviet-backed subversion and terror, and now that even the communist government of China has tacitly acknowledged the superiority of free markets, the irreducible folly and evil of socialist tyranny ought to be an accepted truth.

Are 100 million dead not enough?

Alas, no. The Scotsman offers a softball profile of 90-year-old Eric Hobsbawm, an unrepentant British Marxist who was a stooge for Stalin:

Hobsbawm himself stuck with the Communist Party decades after the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the revelations of the gulag had party intellectuals in the West tearing up their cards in droves - an "unrepentant" loyalty that had critics savaging him after the publication of his autobiography, Interesting Times, in 2002.

Since then (and, in fact, well before) he has condemned elements of the Soviet experiment, especially Stalinism. It's a source of anger, though, what he sees as the demonisation of the philosophy that first electrified him as a Berlin schoolboy in the early 1930s. "There's been a systematic attempt to remove communism or indeed revolutionary socialism from the political agenda and turn it into something like a political pathology or a sin. I have refused to go along with this. This was a good cause, and continues to be a good cause, even though the things they have stood for haven't worked. As a political programme communism is no longer on the agenda, and it's no longer possible to say I'm a communist. But it doesn't mean I don't think it was a perfectly legitimate and indeed admirable thing for people to be."

To repeat: Marxists governments killed 100 million of their own people in the 20th century. And yet Hobsbawn -- who was an active agent of the Soviet menace, and maintains his Marxist loyalties to this very day -- is allowed to dismiss as a transient and trivial matter the bloody history of Bolshevism, while still maintaining that it "was a good cause, and continues to be a good cause."

Bad enough this casual revisionism with which the tragic reality of the communist past is consigned to the memory hole. Unfortunately worse, the Marxist-Leninist vision remains a living nightmare for millions even today. Yet the Scotsman delivers this print equivalent of birthday balloons to Hobsbawm, an ideologist of evil, even while the neo-Stalinist regime in Pyongyang imprisons and starves to death the North Korean masses in pursuit of the socialist utopia.

"Utopia" is the perfect word for the Marxist goal, by the way. The word originally coined by Thomas More is derived from Greek, meaning "nowhere." Because socialism is an economic impossibility (a point made irrefutably explicit in 1920 by the late Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises), those who pursue socialism are quite literally on "the road to nowhere."

The slaughters committed by Marxist regimes have sometimes been defended on the basis of "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," but because socialism is impossible, there is never any omelet -- just broken eggs, and more than a few -- and thus 100 million died for nothing. (An excellent discussion of this point can be found in Joshua Muravchik's "Heaven On Earth," and in "Radical Son" by David Horowitz, himself an ex-Marxist.)

For the Scotsman to let Hobsbawn off the hook so easily is a disgrace to truth, and a disservice to future generations, who deserve to be warned against a repetition of the deadly futility of the vision that inspired Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other bloody-handed dictators. As Richard Weaver famously observed, ideas have consequences, and no idea in human history has had such murderous consequences as revolutionary Marxism.

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times