Studies in a Dying Culture, which takes its title from the 1938 work of the same name by Christopher Caudwell, is a blog by Ralph Dumain, a man after my own heart who likes to quote William Blake, including this bit from the preface to Milton.
"Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.
There, nobody can call me a Philistine now.
The post linked to above contains several paragraphs on Hitch, contrasting the rather crazed figure of fun who appeared on Charlie Rose in May with the charming and entertaining raconteur Ralph saw live a few days later.
"I saw Hitchens on Charle Rose on 4 May was convinced he had lost his mind. I wanted to write a full scale analysis of this performance, but never got around to it. I took a look at his book, but I only gave a quick read to two chapters—one on New Age philosophy based on the thought of the East, and one on the evils of secular dictators like Stalin. Both were written in a scattershot fashion, not up to what once would have been Hitchens’ standard. He was an erudite, historically and intellectually sophisticated man—unlike Sam Harris—up until 9-11-01; then he became politically schizoid, and now he’s lost his sanity as a propagandist for Bush’s wars. My initial thought was: maybe he’s cashing in on the popularity of Dawkins and Harris by tossing off a second-rate book to add to their second-rate books? But this is a hasty judgment, which must be suspended pending further scrutiny.
In person Hitchens was actually terrific, and hilarious. The British are so much better educated and articulate than Americans. He also explained some of his ideas, particularly his take on Stalinism, better than he did in the book. Q & A: the majority of questioners were religious idiots, including a Mormon whose religion Hitchens subjected to ridicule, and a fundie lunatic who used to attend a local philosophy group. Hitchens was actually reasonably gracious while demolishing the shoddy propositions of the religious nuts, but he did have the majority of the audience on his side, so he could afford to be."
The well-known literary theorist, legal scholar and all-round towering intellectual Stanley Fish has weighed into the debate stirred up by The Three Athiests, aka Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and our Hitch, each of whom has published a book against God and/or religion of late. Fish attempts to show that a fair number of the issues raised by these atheists have been asked and answered time and again by believers, and to back up his point he takes dips into Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost. It's a good read if you are into theology and it might make you think again if you are convinced Hitch's arguments on religion are right in substance, but it won't be everyone's cup of tea around here.
"I have imagined this criticism coming from outside the narrative, but in fact it is right there on the inside, in the cries of Christian’s wife and children, in the reactions of his friends (“they thought that some frenzy distemper had gotten into his head”), and in the analysis they give of his irrational actions: he, they conclude, is one of those who “are wiser in their own eyes than seven men that can render a Reason.” What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking; rather than being swept under the rug of a seamless discourse, they are the very motor of that discourse, impelling the conflicted questioning of theologians and poets (not to mention the Jesus who cried, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and every verse of the Book of Job)."
By the way, the blog in question, entitled Behind the Times (subscription wall), provides a way of reading some of the NYT columnists you'd otherwise have to pay for.
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6/28/07 Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton on Hardball
Not so much a boxing or fencing bout, this high-spirited occasion, with the opponents meeting outside in the sun surrounded by a crowd of fired up onlookers, was more akin to a cockfight. In this 10-minute video, not only do we have the Poppinjay going head to head with the Sharptongue—and with the tongues and feathers of both birds flapping in concert—we also get a cameo appearance from Billary! So there's beautiful plumage on display all round!
In an indecisive match that I would award to the Reverend on points, Al got in a good knock at Hitch's frequent attacks against faith by bringing up one of our man's own unshakeable convictions.
Al (sarcastic): "Mr. Hitchens still belives in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So he's a man of faith. He believes in the unseen...That's faith misguided."
They also had a run in over the Law of Gravity.
Hitch (indignant): "Why are you pretending you care about evidence [concerning Iraqi WMD], when you've already said you think that God made the Law of Gravity? You know nothing about either subject!" Al (sarcastic): "You have the great intellect. Then tell me, we in our own mind were born and decided we'd hold ourselves down, Mr. Hitchens?" Hitch (deadpan): "Don't be silly......You are claiming to know more than you can know."
Then Al led Hitch into making a measured response that some may consider a fundamental error.
Al (baiting): "I'm asking you, the mighty brilliant Hitchens, who never answered a question, tell us then what it is that you say brought all of this into being?" Hitch (concentrating under fire): "The atheist does not say that it can be proved that God does not exist; he says it cannot be proved that he does. So those who say that they know are claiming to know more than they possibly can."
Why an error? Because there are several kinds of athiest, some of whom most definitely claim to have proof that God does not exist—such as these guys. That there is an ongoing argument over whether atheism is a belief or the absence of a belief follows partly from the fact that atheism means different things to different atheists, let alone to non-atheists.
Furthermore, many people of religious faith who claim to believe in God, also agree that it cannot be proved that he exists, which would make them, by Hitch's definition, athiests. Hitch really needs to think this atheism thing through a bit more clearly. He may discover that beneath the gruff exterior, he's an antitheistic agnostic at heart.
Slightly off-topic, but as we need some fresh threads, what the hell. The CIA's recent house cleaning has brought to official light some brainwashing, as related by Robert Lusetich at The Australian.
The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium.
I think I'm pretty broad minded, but even I must say I'm truly shocked at these revelations. The agency's behavior has been absolutely appauling.
Lusetich quotes Carol Rutz, a victim who explains:
"The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four. Over the next 12 years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me complain and split my personality (to create multiple personalities for specific tasks). Each alter or personality was created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger, then perform an act and (I would) not remember it later.
"This Manchurian Candidate program was just one of the operational uses of the mind-control scenario by the CIA.
"Your hard-earned tax dollars supported this."
This kid had a tougher childhood than Lou Reed. According to Lusetich,
The US began these experiments after World War II when it made a grab for hundreds of Nazi scientists and doctors who had been researching mind control in concentration camps, fearing they would fall into Soviet hands.
US military intelligence leaders were paranoid that they were falling behind the communist bloc in the brainwashing race.
The programs, though carefully hidden, continued into the 1970s - when [Richard] Helms ordered much of the documentation to be destroyed.
Christopher Hitchens’s range of facial expression doesn’t extend to quite the extremes of cartoonish animation displayed by the “professional Muslim protester” depicted in his superbly entitled Slate piece Look Forward in Anger. But you’ve got to admit our Hitch has his moments, and more to the point, when an appropriate issue rears its ugly head, Hitch and his ilk are even more ubiquitous than Rage Boy and his are.
As a talking head who appears regularly on multiple TV networks and around a dozen newspapers and magazines and who is not above displaying the occasional twinge of outrage himself, for Hitch to complain about Rage Boy’s “few yells and gibberings” smacks a just a little of the sort of folk—or the "ilk" if you prefer— who advocate the smart bombing of terrorist targets causing considerable collateral damage to innocent Third Worlders in the neighborhood, while in the next breath condemning suicide bombers who blow themselves up in shopping malls, and in the breath after that declare that anyone who disagrees with either assertion is on the terrorists' side. Only smacks as yet—Hitch has not gone the whole hog there, but the evening is still young.
Give Rage Boy a regular spot on Fox News and I guarantee we’ll keep his negative emotions within semi-repectable bounds and keep him off the streets, only to have his place taken by Anger Man, The Irate Kid, or a hate-filled chorus supplied by Rentamob Inc. Apparently there's a market this kind of street theater. They may even be being paid by the same media outlets that broadcast them. It has been known to happen.
On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't make that an absolute guarantee. in a good cause, even the most couch-potatoish of the punditocracy can sometimes be lured into cluttering up the sidewalk with their banners, flags and megaphones.
This week, Christopher takes on "Rage Boy" (I'm not making this up) - a bearded, crazed-looking Muslim man who has become a sort of punching bag for the right-wing blogosphere. After opening the piece by linking to some obsure, rather racist website, Hitchens hits on some of his typical themes: Rushdie, the Danish cartoons, you know the litany. And then I had to stop reading in near disbelief at this:
our media regularly make the assumption that the book burners and fanatics really do represent the majority, and that assumption has by no means been tested. (If it is ever tested, and it turns out to be true, then can we hear a bit less about how one of the world's largest religions mustn't be confused with its lunatic fringe?)"
"Our media," as far as I know, never make that assumption. Quite the contrary, as Hitchens himself unwittingly concedes in his parenthetical thought: we are constantly being told that the book burners and fanatics do NOT represent the majority of Muslims. This is one thing "our media" gets right, but perhaps that's just because it's so obvious.
Of the Muslims offended by what they perceive as blasphemy, Hitchens refuses to recognize the real distinction between those who take to the streets to burn embassies and those who voice their discontent peacefully (the majority). And this is what leads him to draw his false conclusions.
He argues that we shouldn't give a shit about 'the offended' because they're all just a bunch of evil Rage Boys who cannot be placated no matter what, and don't deserve to be either. So it'd just be "stupid" to try.
What a waste of time. Once again, Hitchens avoids the real issue. But nevermind, he's always ready for a fight, drawing this thundering conclusion:
Rage Boy keenly looks forward to anger, while we worriedly anticipate trouble, and fret about etiquette, and prepare the next retreat. If taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean living at the pleasure of Rage Boy, and that I am not prepared to do.
Which is why our hero is flying to Kashmir tomorrow to beat the living hell out of the guy. I wish him luck. I think by "we" Hitchens actually means you and I, by the way, all of us weaklings making apologies for fascism.
(Incidentally, Hitchens also appears to have softened his position on the monarchy, referring deferentially to "our majesty the queen".)
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"Ha Ha! You ain't got a chance! *I'm* the hero of this picture! And you know what happens to the villain! "
Yet another thoughtful reviewer has seen through Hitch's flim-flam. Chris Hedges, writing inThe Philadelphia Inquirer doesn't just criticize Hitch's approach; he tears it into ribbons in an assult worthy of Errol Flynn at his finest, along with what little remains of our boy's reputation as one of the world's "top public intellectuals". (Thanks to Angrysoba for the link!)
En Garde!
"Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great has confused religion with religious institutions, and beliefs with dogma. He has used the irrational ravings of fundamentalists against science and dispassionate intellectual inquiry to insist that reason alone is our salvation. Unencumbered by serious theological or biblical knowledge, Hitchens taunts religion with the same bigotry and ignorance that fundamentalists use to delegitimize those who do not submit to their rigid belief system."
Take that, you backguard! And that, and that, and that!
"Hitchens' simplistic assault is itself a dangerous kind of fundamentalism. He externalizes evil, something he shares with the religious fundamentalists he ridicules. He, like them, believes in a binary world of us and them, in this case those who embrace reason, which looks a lot like Christopher Hitchens, and those who do not. He too drinks deep of the elixir of moral superiority. He fails to grasp that the danger is not religion but the human heart - the capacity we all have for evil."
Touché!
"Hitchens, as a secular fundamentalist, endorses the myopic and disastrous imperial agenda beloved by the Christian Right. He does so because he imbibes the same toxic mix of self-aggrandizement and intolerance. He supports the war in Iraq and the waterboarding and torture of Muslim detainees."
And now for the the coup de grace! (with apologies for violating Orwell's prescription)
Hitchens' blind embrace of American imperialism and disregard for the rule of law makes him no better than the apologists for radical Islam and Christianity he seeks to discredit. His moral certitude and arrogance are no different. The consequences are as dangerous.
Well done Mr. Hedges! You couldn't have done a neater job if you ran a copy of God is Not Great through an industrial-use paper shreader.
The lady in question being a real dame — Baroness Shirley Williams in fact. And all she did was to regret the knighting of Salman Rushdie, who, in her words, “deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way.”
To justify his position, Hitch made the point that, “if you say that Muslims are offended by this, and you lump them all together, you immediately grant that they are in fact represented by the most extreme, homicidal, fanatical, illiterate, intolerant people.” Sounds like nonsequiturial bovine excrement to me.
At the risk of ruffling Ollie Kamm's feathers, I've been out googling in unknown waters yet again! And I've come across another less-than-flattering review of Hitch's latest magnum opus, this time from a blogger named Yale at a site called Horsefeathers, which operates from a sort of Marxist viewpoint as you'll see from the masthead.
Yale doesn't mince words, doesn't like the book, and doesn't know why Hitch wrote it. He begins:
"By the time I finished Christopher Hitchens’ new book about his life-long struggle with the various Gods in his life, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” I was sick of it. God, religion, the book, and mostly Hitchens himself. It is the book of a smart ass, an enfant terrible, a book of a man who has been everywhere and found no resting place."
The tone is a bit letter-to-the-editorish, but it has its moments, including an account of the poster's encounter with Michelangelo's Moses, some notes on human psychological development, and a passing reference to Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, but nothing, I sincerely hope, that Ollie Kamm would disapprove of.
Here's one of the more quotable paragraphs:
"Mr. Hitchens, egoist that he is, cannot see humankind as any different from himself—a member of the elect—strong-minded, rational, courageous in the face of death. Let us pray that at the end he will face his final moments as bravely as he presumes. Of the rest of us, he is utterly contemptuous."
What I took out of the show was just how out of his depth our hero looked, it's not difficult to see why he fled the UK for the US, he clearly could not cut the mustard in dear old blighty.
In the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has written an informative piece on God is Not Great that includes a decent potted biography of the author, as well as offering some fresh observations. For instance:
"Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a "dark week." One experienced publishing veteran suggests that Mr. Hitchens will likely earn more than $1 million on this book."
Not exactly up there with the televangelists, but Hitch has deffinitely cracked the mass market with this one. He's well and truly on the gravy train. But who's been buying? Jeff gets an inside angle.
"Part of what is driving the sales of "God is Not Great" falls under the concept of know thine enemy. Conservative-minded customers have been snapping up the book because they want to be familiar with its message, says Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kan. "There is a very strong presence of the religious right, and they want to know what's being said and figure out how to move against it.""
But how has he managed to pull off this coup?
"Booksellers say Mr. Hitchens has helped his own cause by staging colorful confrontations with religious figures and by making incendiary statements about the late Jerry Falwell.
Staging confrontations? Incendiary statements? Surely not. What a cynical lot these book peddlers are! Sadly, however, not everyone is happy to have been an unwitting part of Hitch's self-promotion circus.
"An estimated 1,000 turned out in Miami to listen to Mr. Hitchens challenge a panel that included an Orthodox Jew and a Buddhist nun. "I now wish I hadn't participated," says Nathan Katz, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University. "He was utterly abusive. It had the intellectual level of the Jerry Springer Show.""
What our favorite Antichrister has proved, as so many great showmen have proved before him, is that if you have the chutzpah to shout about religion loudly enough, long enough and lively enough, you stand a fair chance of being handsomely rewarded for your efforts, in this world if not the next. The athiest-twist is what makes Hitch an Elmer Gantry of our day. Didn't I always tell you the devil knows the Bible like the back of his hand?
Or, as Magic-Thighs said to Broomfondle, "That's what I call thinking!"
As regular readers (Sid and Dois Bonkers) will well know, Hitchenswatch provides a handy "comments facility" for you to give us your feedback on the tosh we try and pass off for political analysis.
However one person is just far to important to waste their time on haloscan and prefer to communicate directly, as they also get rather upset when we edit their mails I will print this in it's entirety.
"Your blog has a post entitled "Another slice of yellowcake,anyone?" (http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.com/2007/06/another-slice-of-yellowcake-anyone.html)
It quotes approvingly an attack on Hitch by "Jeffrey Steinberg, reviewing the book in Executive Intelligence Review ... Strong words indeed. Can our Hitch really be such as serial teller of the untruth?"
More fool you. Your contributor evidently has not the slightest notion what "Executive Intelligence Review" is, but has just googled for Christopher's name. It is in fact the organ of Lyndon Larouche's organisation. If you don't know who Lyndon Larouche is, you should find out immediately. Your site's reference to this material makes your earlier quoting of Gilad Atzmon look like sagacity itself.
Oliver Kamm"
He later adds.
"The same "Jeffrey Steinberg", in the same magazine in 1998, wrote: "It has been long-recognized by the City of London-centered financier oligarchical grouping headed by the Royal Consort, Prince Philip, that LaRouche and EIR have been a powerful factor in exposing their dirty machinations worldwide, and have also been an important contributing factor in an eruption of political warfare against the Windsors, even from among the British elites. The LaRouche role in the Windsors' troubles came to the surface in 1994, when EIR published "The Coming Fall of the House of Windsor," a Special Report exposing the role of Prince Philip and his World Wildlife Fund (WWF, now the World Wide Fund for Nature), in triggering the worst genocide in modern history in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Even as EIR's exposés of the Windsors circulated throughout the world diplomatic community and among factions of the British establishment, with rare exceptions, the name "LaRouche" was banned from the British press."
Do you believe that Prince Philip and the World Wildlife Fund head a conspiracy to commit genocide? Do you consider this a sensible and progressive standpoint? Why is your blog treating "Steinberg" as a source of reputable analysis about Christopher Hitchens? Do you welcome a crank fascist's cerebrations on your blog? I would be very interested to have your answers."
Stirring stuff, one is almost tempted not to repost what we quoted in case it turns you all into wild conspiracy mongering, monarchy-haters, but I'll take the risk.
""In a series of e-mail exchanges with the authors, al-Zahawie recounted his mission to Niger; and U.S. Embassy files from 1999 reflected the accuracy of his account. Al-Zahawie made it clear that he had no background on Africa, knew nothing about Niger, and had no idea that the impoverished African state had uranium deposits. Nevertheless, war propagandists like British journalist Christopher Hitchens made a brief splash with accusations that al-Zahawie was Saddam's "main man" on nuclear weapons, and, swimming in the gutter, accused the Iraqi diplomat of being a "Jew-hater." The "proof"? He had attended the Bayreuth Wagner festival with a German diplomat—the same Wagner festival that Hitler had attended in the 1930s."
Now that seems to me to be a simple statement of fact, but as it comes from a "a crank fascist" it must of course be wrong, and we apologise most humbly for ever putting such fascist crankyness into the public domain.
Indeed perhaps this would be the time for Mr Kamm to produce for us all his list of people and organisations that can never be quoted under any circimstances no matter what they are saying at the time. It must be the only "decent" thing to do.
I however would prefer to listen to the wise-words of this blogger.
"The notion that free speech, while important, needs to be held in balance with the avoidance of offence is question-begging, because it assumes that offence is something to be avoided. Free speech does indeed cause hurt – but there is nothing wrong in this. Knowledge advances through the destruction of bad ideas. Mockery and derision are among the most powerful tools in that process...The proper response to those who find themselves offended by the expression of ideas is: "That's tough. You'll live. Get over it."
Great stuff, if you want to read more you can find it here on the blog of a certain, er, Oliver Kamm!
For the week ending June 2, Hitch fans everywhere will be thrilled to learn that GOD IS NOT GREAT has moved back up to third place in the chart. For the man himself though, the pleasure of counting his royalties will pale into insignificance beside the fact that although the book has edged passed Walter Isaccson's EINSTEIN this week, it is still being outsold by Ronald Reagan's THE REAGAN DIARIES in second and THE ASSAULT ON REASON by Al Gore at the top of the list.
On the consolation side, Hitch is consistently outselling the other most popular religious book in the chart these days, Pope Benedict XVI's JESUS OF NAZARETH. (It gladens that heart to hear how well that's selling, doesn't it?) But then again, old Benedict has had to tone down his anti-Islamic tirades and is not allowed to foam at the mouth in public, no matter how much of the altar wine he's been at.
GOD IS NOT GREAT has been in the chart for four weeks including a brief sojourn at the top during the week ending May 19.
As Rachel Sklar points out, "Today, the Washington Post's David Broder joins the crowing media types claiming that the revelation that Richard Armitage was Robert Novak's Plamegate source exculpates everyone else involved.
IT DOESN'T. In fact, it barely has anything to do with it!
Fact: Karl Rove leaked Joe Wilson's wife's identity to Matt Cooper BEFORE Novak published his column.
Fact: Scooter Libby leaked Joe Wilson's wife's identity to Judith Miller BEFORE Novak published his column.
Yet in his column in Canada's National Post this past weekend, "The Washington Scandal That Wasn't," David Frum claims that the confirmation of Armitage's identity lays the matter to rest with "an anti-climactic splat" — yet doesn't even mention what was leaked to Cooper and Miller. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in July that Novak's revelations "exonerated the Bushies" and just a week or so ago that the Armitage-as-leak news proved that there was no "government-sponsored vendetta" against Wilson — yet doesn't even mention what was leaked to Cooper and Miller. Now today, David Broder wags a finger at the press for going to town on Rove, saying that since the original leak came from Armitage, it could not have been "political payback against Wilson by a White House that wanted to shift the public focus from the Iraq War to Wilson's motives." Yet he fails to account for the fact that Rove and Libby leaked to Cooper and Miller before Novak published a word."
And on the comments thread to this piece, a character going by the name The Orwell Observer observed:
"It seems about time for someone to call this man on his "I think I'm the next William Buckley" routine, complete with blue bloodlines, head cocked back 10 to 15 degrees, lots of big words, and complete condescension over anyone who disagrees with him. Considering the real William Buckley recently stated publicly that this war is not winnable, maybe it's time for Christopher to get a new act."
Sounds like a kindred spirit of ours.
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Iraq is the new India and Hitchens is the new Marx (or at least Psmith)
I knew it was coming. In an otherwise thoughtful and informative review of a new book on Karl Marx, Hitchens can't help but reference - about 3/4 of the way down - the war in Iraq, and his own view of it in relation to "unintended consequences."
Arguing as he has in the past that Marx supported British colonialism in India because he understood the theory of unintended consequences and the revolutionary impact an industrialized British economy would have on the subcontinent, Hitchens writes the following (note the sly references to present-day events):
"Marx's appreciation of the laws of unintended consequence, and his disdain for superficial moralism, also allowed him to see that there was more to the British presence in India than met the eye. No doubt the aim of the East India Company had been the subordination of Indian markets and Indian labour for selfish ends, but this did not alter the fact that capitalism was also transforming the subcontinent in what might be called a dynamic way. And he was clear-eyed about the alternatives. India, he pointed out, had always been subjugated by outsiders. "The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton." If the conqueror was to be the country that pioneered the industrial revolution, he added, then India would benefit by the introduction of four new factors that would tend towards nation building. These were the electric telegraph for communications, steamships for rapid contact with the outside world, railways for the movement of people and products, and "the free press, introduced for the first time to Asiatic society, and managed principally by the common offspring of Hindus and Europeans". His insight into the Janus-faced nature of the Anglo-Indian relationship, and of the potential this afforded for a future independence, may be one of the reasons why Marxism still remains a stronger force in India than in most other societies."
The "superficial moralism" sneer against those who opposed British rule in India is intended to double as a slight against those who are morally opposed to the war in Iraq. Their moralism isn't any real type of moralism, Hitchens tells us, it's a naive and short-sighted and ultimately false or amoral way of thinking.
The "Janus-faced nature" comment is an indirect admission that the US government and Bush administration have engaged in a widespread campaign of lies in order to meet their objectives. Janus-faced or "marked by deliberate deceptiveness especially by pretending one set of feelings and acting under the influence of another." And more than that, Hitchens is trying to justify this practice and the war in Iraq on these grounds.
One problem with this not-so-subtle comparison is that Marx's observations on India came at a time when the 'positive' developments Hitchens writes about were already underway. Hitchens, on the other hand, merely hoped that positive (and apparently unintended) consequences would eventually develop in Iraq as a result of a US invasion and occupation. It's a wonder how much longer Hitchens will continue to support US occupation of Iraq so long as no positive consequences result from it.
And is it just me or does not the review read like a comparison between Marx and the reviewer himself? Hitchens, you see, like Marx, and unlike most people, understands the laws of unintended consequences. Marx, like Hitchens believed the American Revolution was the best revolution ever. The book under review focuses on Marx as Journalist, which Hitchens clearly enjoys identifying with. The review features a sustained description of one of my own favorite Wodehouse books, "Psmith, Journalist" (see original cover image) - a story about a suave, English intellectual who comes to New York and rocks the world of American journalism with his wit and arrogance.
Our hero gets his knickers in a twist over a judge's comments in response to those defending Scooter Libby. Words he calls "hair raising" Lets have a look.
"It is an impressive show of public service when twelve prominent and distinguished current and former law professors of well-respected schools are able to amass their collective wisdom in the course of only several days to provide their legal expertise to the Court on behalf of a criminal defendant. The Court trusts that this is a reflection of these eminent academics' willingness in the future to step to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this Court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions even in instances where failure to do so could result in monetary penalties, incarceration, or worse. The Court will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries, as necessary in the interests of justice and equity, whenever similar questions arise in the cases that come before it."
You can almost smell the gulags in this class war rhetoric!
Luckily for us all Christopher is there to respond to this Stalinist hack.
"This low sarcasm (Not sarcasm!) " displays not so much bias against the defendant, but actual animus. What does the number of days have to do with it? In how many cases involving poor defendants is an issue of constitutional law involved?"
That explains much, especially Mr Hitchens' recent excessive fondness for throwing his intellectual weight behind those who have the dreadful misfortune to be, through no fault of their own, rich and powerful.
"Poor defendents" only get involved in humdrum situations where they get framed by police, or railroaded by corrupt lawyers. What about the unfortunate rich who face a couple of months in a white collar prison.
So remember rich people, if you get in trouble, with no-one to turn to (apart from those top legal firms and your friends in high places) there is only one person to call. Indeed when it comes to wealthy people it appears that Mr Hitchens' Slate pieces are the modern day.
Sticking with his crusade to defend the poor and persecuted among us (i.e. Paris Hilton, Paul Wolfowitz), Christopher's latest Slate piece is a rousing call to Liberate...Scooter Libby from the clutches of our sinister legal system. Seriously, how boring and trite is that? I personally don't care about the details of the case, in part because I don't think it's possible to know what really happened or what's really happening. It might be some sort of pissing contest power struggle as Hitchens suggests or Christopher's just written yet another elaborate piece of sophistry. Anyway, I'm sure somebody else will come along to point out the flaws in Hitch's case, should anyone feel the need. He certainly has peculiar tastes in whom he sympathizes with, no?
I was mostly interested in the last two sentences of the article, which read as follows:
"Those who want to "get" someone for "lying us into war" have picked the wrong man and failed to identify a crime. Let them try to impeach the president, who should in the meantime step in to avoid any more waste of public money and time and pardon Libby without further ado."
So if Libby's the wrong guy, who is the right one? The president? Who is responsible for lying us into war? For the first time, Hitchens appears to be admitting that 'somebody' lied us into war. Ah, but of course he left himself some wiggle room, by saying let "them" go after the president. "Them" apparently being the mob of angry Americans who feel perpetually cheated and lied to by their own president. How dare "they" demand any accountability from their representatives or from journalists who serve as mouthpieces for US war.
Mordy, posting at Jew School raps Hitch over the knuckles for that "sex thrrough a hole in a sheet" factoid. Where on earth did he hear this particular rumour, and what could have possesed him to put it on paper and publish it?
"What makes this so disappointing is that so much of the book is well-written, articulate and compellingly argued. I’m not an atheist. In fact, I associate myself with the religion he claims has sex through a sheet hole. Yet until this point, I read with interest and an open mind. So it’s a shame that Hitchens had to eradicate all of his credibility by putting in a false, cheap shot. Particularly, it makes it difficult to trust him when he takes hits on other religions.
The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq by Peter Eisner and Knut Royce New York: Rodale, Inc., 2007 268 pages, hardbound, $24.95
According to Rising Hegemon wrtiting about The Italian Letter (April 4):
"Finally, for you folks who like multiple exposures of fraudulent behavior, you'll really enjoy one section of the book that demonstrates the lengths to which Christopher Hitchens will go to lie and make any claim he shits out into the ether seem like truth. Hitchens is truly exposed, in quick work, as a complete and utter charlatan on the issue of Niger, Iraq and related matters."
"In a series of e-mail exchanges with the authors, al-Zahawie recounted his mission to Niger; and U.S. Embassy files from 1999 reflected the accuracy of his account. Al-Zahawie made it clear that he had no background on Africa, knew nothing about Niger, and had no idea that the impoverished African state had uranium deposits. Nevertheless, war propagandists like British journalist Christopher Hitchens made a brief splash with accusations that al-Zahawie was Saddam's "main man" on nuclear weapons, and, swimming in the gutter, accused the Iraqi diplomat of being a "Jew-hater." The "proof"? He had attended the Bayreuth Wagner festival with a German diplomat—the same Wagner festival that Hitler had attended in the 1930s."
Strong words indeed. Can our Hitch really be such as serial teller of the untruth? You can check it out for yourself here. Or flip through pages 92 ~ 94 when you get to your local bookstore.
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Salman "thrilled and humbled" as Blair insults a billion Muslims
Well, if The News of the World and The National Enquirer can get away with spicing up their headlines, why not I?
I seriously doubt he's "humbled," but the BBC is reporting that Salman Rushdie, the man's whose trials introduced the word fatwa into the everyday English, has been knighted by the Queen.
"Sir Salman, who turns 60 on 19 June, is renowned as a martyr for free speech and purveyor of story as political statement. He takes history and fictionalises it, with imaginative brilliance, and much of his work is set in his native India and Pakistan.
Of his knighthood for services to literature, Rushdie said: "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way."
Good luck to you, Salman, I say. If Mick Jagger can get knighted, you deserve to sit in the House of Lords. But what I'm really looking forward to is seeing what sort of spin Hich puts on his buddy's new honour. Our lad doesn't like the British royals either individually or collectively, and he thoroughly detests the antiquated political system that sustains them. Take this outburst from Larry King Live:
"The problem is not the image. The problem is not the image. The problem is that it is determined by the random selection of heredity. And there's an official absurdity imposed on our country and people, which is that they're the only family left in the land who have -- since the abolition of the Heredity Principal in the House of Lords -- to have political power by right of birth. And who would pick this family to select for that unique privilege? This dysfunctional rabble, who don't look like your mom and dad however much you say they do and never will look like them."
"It wouldn't be a monarchy if it wasn't that absurd. It wouldn't be a monarchy if she wasn't the head of the national church. The queen, I remind you -- let's just face the facts here. The queen by law is the head of government, head of state, the head of the national church, and the head of the armed forces. Can you imagine anything more preposterous than that?"
Then, when the dear old Queen Mum popped off in 2002, Hitch took advantage of the opportunity to attack the lady herself, the family and the institution in a sort of black eulogy in The Guardian that must surely have put paid to his own chances of ever arising Sir Christopher:
The flags that now dip are also standards that have fallen. Much of the emotion of the leavetaking will be genuine (in spite of the yellow-press effort to make it seem bogus by hysterical overstatement). It will be genuine because it is a tribute to longevity confused with a tribute to history. And it will also be genuine because it is a farewell to something that is irretrievably lost - the authority of monarchy in Britain. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short for the elderly Queen and for her arrogant consort and self-pitying son. Republicans should still be modest, because this is not yet their triumph. It was the hereditary concept itself which produced a woman who symbolised and endorsed luxury and idleness in personal life, philistinism in culture, ruthlessness in eugenics and reaction in politics. The mourning will necessarily be brief: no serious people can truly regret the passing of an epoch such as that.
Hitch and Salman have always appeared to get along quite well, but they were on strikingly opposite sides last year concerning Gunther Grass, with Salman providing sympathetic understanding while Hitch played the High Priest Caiaphas (Mel Gibson version). Now that Rushdie has been royally evevated to a status Hitch must necessarily despise, it will be fascinating to see how Hitch handles the public congratulations for his old friend.
Update: Iran has condemned the British government for its decision to give a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie, say's the Beeb.
His book The Satanic Verses offended Muslims worldwide and led to Iran issuing a fatwa in 1989, ordering Sir Salman's execution.
Iran Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the decision to praise the "apostate" put the UK in confrontation with other people.
He said giving him such an honour was a way of fighting Islam.
Note to Mr. Hosseini: Why else would Blair have done it? (See headline above)
Just to show that we are not a totally partisan hate site, I'm going to introduce you to a review that praises god is Not Great to the skies, and I think it's an excellent piece of writing and well worth reading. Indeed, on the strength of this review alone, I would have a much more favorable view of Hitch's book than the one that has emerged through his own efforts to promote it.
To whet your appetite, let me just reproduce the first paragraph:
“I have been writing this book all my life,” Christopher Hitchens observes in God Is Not Great. He does not exaggerate. The book revisits ideas, issues and incidents he addresses in other works. His polemic is the culmination of a career spent arguing against weak-mindedness, which religious belief is by definition. Beyond being disputatious, however, Hitchens does offer an alternative to faith, something he has also advocated elsewhere: in a word, literature.
Leading on from the previous post, remember this Carly Simon song from the 1970s album Another Passenger? I think the lyrics have a tiny bit of resonance with the times we live in. ANd in any case it's a great song. (You may be able to listen to this at the Amazon link.)
Libby
If all our flights are grounded Libby, we'll meet in Paris Dance along the boulevards And have no one to embarrass, Puttin' on the Ritz in style With an Arab and an Heiress, Libby we'll fly away - hey Leave behind our blues Trade them all in For a Paris breeze. Libby we'll fly
See how dark the circles grow In a town that has no light So many eyes just staring out Into the bloodshot night And Libby, I hate you to cry, and I Want to share it all with you, And if it brings us to our knees We'll trade it all in for a Paris breeze. Libby we'll fly.
They say it don't come easy They say that love is blind And if you're afraid to be close Then love is hard to find And if you spend too much time winning love There's no time to be kind And Libby, I'm guilty of your crimes, I'm just another passenger. Travelling on these crazy high seas Very likely be the same In a Paris breeze, Libby we'll fly
If all our flights are grounded, Libby, we'll go to Paris And wish we were back home again Or sailing on the ocean Just a window and a drink To set our dreams in motion But Libby, we'll fly anyway, hey And leave behind our blues Half sung melodies Trade them all in for a Paris breeze, Libby we'll fly.
Convicted traitor Irve Scooter "Lewis" Libby has at least a couple of things in common with heiress Paris Hilton. Firstly, both have been doing their best to avoid having to go to jail despite receiving remarkably lenient prison sentences given the seriousness of their respective offenses. And secondly, and far more interestingly for us at this site, both have been favored by the sympathetic attentions of Christopher Hitchens—a man who does not exactly have a reputation for being tough on crime.
Hitch's Gallahadian side often comes to the fore where damsels are in distress, so his defence of The Crimes of Paris (sorry, I couldn't resist that one!) is totally in character.
But what chivalrous impulse could have prompted Sir Christopher to allegedly pen a letter to the Court begging clemency for Libby? (Let's discount the drunk emails to the judge accusation as a bit of malicious libel.)
If you'll scan that Slate column again, you'll see that Hitch used his Paris piece to link her sad fate (cue the violins!) in the hearts of his readers with that of Libby (break out the man-sized Kleenex!), who commands much less public sympathy.
"Perhaps to compensate for its ridiculous decision to put her on Page One on Friday, the New York Times report shifted from the sobbing, helpless child to the more portentous question of another "high-profile defendant." It cited an even more acid piece of creepy populism, in the form of an order from Judge "Reggie" Walton, who poured his witless sarcasm on those who had filed a brief in support of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Would such "luminaries," sneered Walton, be equally available for other litigants? It's not his job to arbitrate such a question, and he seems not to understand the law, but if his words mean anything, and from a federal judge at that, they appear to mean that to be a public figure is to risk double jeopardy in the courts. No doubt Judge Walton will relish the coming days in which he can order Libby to report to prison. One hopes that his moral superiority, and his keen attention to public opinion, remain as untroubled and secure as those of Sarah Silverman. It seems that this is now the standard. How splendidly we progress."
Indeed, the thought does occur as to whether such luminaries as Hitch would be equally available for the likes of Paris Hilton unless he could exploit her in the effort to get his Neocon traitor buddy off the hook? But then again, I have this horribly suspicious mind.
outside counsel makes the point about the linkage, but doesn't get the poin
