ABSTRACT
Eric Hobsbawm’s 1994 Amnesty International lecture in Oxford was entitled ‘Barbarism: A User’s Guide’. In the lecture, Hobsbawm, an eminent British social and economic historian, takes a look at the ‘short twentieth century, 1914-1991’ (see Hobsbawm 1997). According to Simon Targett, who was in the audience, Hobsbawm characterized the achievements of the 20th century as ‘astonishing’. Nonetheless, Hobsbawm (1997: 253) argues that “we have all adapted to living in a society that is, by the standards of our grandparents or parents, even-if we are as old as I am-our youth, uncivilised.” Targett goes on to summarize Hobsbawm’s general assessment, that “we all have become relatively insensitive to human atrocity, our voice of moral outrage has been silenced, things that would once have caused an outcry now pass by without so much as a raised eyebrow. And, in Hobsbawm’s book, this is barbarism” (Targett 1994: 19).
