What I meant were people who went along with things because they had very bad choices and because the circumstances of their lives forced them to do it.
I have huge sympathy for people who lived in, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia in that period. I have much less sympathy for people in the west. There was always information about what was going in eastern Europe. They had plenty of good choices. So I don’t feel sympathy for Eric Hobsbawm and his friends but I do have sympathy for unwilling, half-enthusiastic communists in eastern Europe in the 1950s. They had a tough time.
din New Statesman