Are the poor not real human beings? Of course they are, says Dalrymple. Why then do leftists like Eric Hobsbawm, supposed champion of the poor, say otherwise?

These words to me are chilling, all the more so when you realize that they were uttered by a man who, toward the end of his very long life, said that if the deaths of the 20 million people who died in the Soviet Union (it was probably many more) had brought about true socialism, then they would have been worth it.