Our good friend and fellow Hitch watcher, the guy who calls himself Hitchwatcher, has assembled a modest shash of Hitch videos on You Tube here.
He describes the purpose of the site as "Keeping an eye on Christopher Hitchens and related Islamophobic "Decents" along with neocons and right-wing nuts in general." Be sure to drop in and encourage him to keep up the good work.
Someone else has noticed Hitch's bad habits. (It's getting like you can't take him anywhere. I'm even too embarrased to let my family and friends know I "watch" the guy. When asked why I'm spending so much time online, I fob them off with hints that I'm addicted to pornography, as the truth would to too shameful for them to bear.)
Today's piece is a reaction to Hitch's recent ticking off of the Prez in The Observer. It's from a blog called Jeffersonwsall, and it starts off like this.....
I have to tell you, Christopher Hitchens really rubs me the wrong way. He is one of those commentators that I sometimes find myself agreeing with; for instance his public stance in support of the separation of church and state is right-on, I hope he keeps it up. Sooner or later though, when the discussion inevitably rolls around to Iraq, Hitchens’ apparent neoconservativism slithers out like a slimy snake from under a rock. What really bothers me about the guy is that he plays so fast-and-loose with history in making his arguments. He appears to be very authoritative but many of his proclamations require one to have more than a surface knowledge of history and politics— references to which many readers, viewers and interviewers just don’t have handy access.
"Jefferson" then goes on to make a list of examples from Hitch's piece in order "to point out where he has taken liberty with historical events and where I disagree with his politics on Iraq." There isn't much in the way of verbal pyrotechnics in this post. But if you are thinking of becoming a Class-A bore at the next cocktail party you attend and you're pressed for material, just imagine the impression you could make on your hostess by trapping her in an alcove and explaining 13 different ways Hitch has been economical with the truth in the space of a single newspaper article!
In which Hitch gloats about Mother Theresa's "atheism" and Bill takes him to task for not putting a single footnote in The Missionary Position.
Favorite Quotes
Hitch: She tried her best to believe. Her atheism was not like mine. I can't believe it. And I'm also glad to think that it's not true—that there isn't a dictator in the heavens. And so the fact that there's no evidence for it pleases me. She really wished that it was true. She tried to live her life as if it was true. She failed, and she was encouraged by cynical old men to carry on because she was a great marketing tool for her church...
Bill: This is kinda laughable. I suppose next week we'll find out that Mother Theresa considered herself to be a sinner as well....
The only people who don't have doubts are millitant atheists.
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"His proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism."
Our latest offering in a long line of reviews of God is Not Great is by Sam Schulman and is published in the June issue of Commentary magazine. To be frank, Sam is not that impressed with Hitch, lumping him in among " today’s crop of professional atheists" who "urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise." Our boy "does not share the worst political faults of the others" in that he at least has the guts to take on Islam in particular before moving on to "take us on the familiar guided tour of monotheistic religion in general and its metaphysical underpinnings." But apart from that, this is a pretty scathing dressing down, not just Hitch's critique of religion, but of his historical understanding, his grasp of human nature, and the deficiencies of his own vision of a better world.
According to some of today’s atheists, like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, religion is no longer necessary because mankind has outgrown it: the knowledge supplied jointly by Darwin and modern neurophysiology has made religion obsolete. For others, like Sam Harris (and Brooke Allen in Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers), it is modern liberal political arrangements that have made God-given laws otiose. Hitchens is distinct. He does not feel that science has made us superior to religion at last. For him, religion is fundamentally flawed—a petri dish for all the vices that flesh is heir to. It is proof of the enormous evil of which mankind is capable.
This might be called the Hitchens version of original sin—a doctrine he of course despises. At heart Hitchens is an unrelieved misanthrope. And, to his credit, he does exhibit a deeper familiarity with human depravity than any of our other anti-religionist authors, whose faith in the perfectibility of mankind is almost comically touching. The question, given his root-and-branch misanthropy, is where on earth he derives his conviction that mankind would be better off without religion.
Sam reminds us that Hitch himself has been a "true believer" in the creed of revolutionary Marxism, and he is none too impressed with Hitch's argument that communism and Nazism are themselves religions:
For Hitchens, in short, everything religion touches is bad, and everything bad is religious—including anti-religion. This is the sort of reasoning that gives syllogisms a bad name.
There's more where that came from, but I shouldn't spoil it for those who may want to read the piece in full by pinching all the best bits. However, I can't resist ripping off the last four lines, which I think it contain a very good rhetorical crescendo, in addition to being right on the money.
Shorn of the culture we have, a culture nurtured and preserved by monotheistic religion, his proffered utopia amounts to just another invitation to barbarism. Hitchens here shows himself to be more credulous and sentimental—and much more insidious—than any of the religious mythmakers he so earnestly despises.
— Illustration from Utopia by Thomas Moore, first published in 1516. The Utopian alphabet is on the right.
A bit of light entertainment with a moral. Wasn't Kirsty gorgeous in her heyday?
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Kirsty is hugely relevant to Hitch in that she demolishes one of his key theses; namely, that women aren't funny. Here's a gal who could do it all—including writing and performing serious and even profound material while keeping it light, breezy, bouncy, and often wickedly comical.
Her Children of the Revolution is a perfect example of her art. Written with Johhny Marr in the early nineties, it takes on the whole sordid paradigm of Third World wars and how parasitic First World bankers and arms companies thrive of the agony, while "decent ordinary people" in teh First World look down their noses at the displaced darkies in their midst.
I couldn't find a video of this one, so let's post the lyric instead. In terms of informational and educational value, this one song is worth a hundred times more than the sum total of Hitch's outpourings this century, and it's a lot easier on the ears and eyes.
Children of the revolution coming out to play Bombers ripped the night apart and blew the school away Some live on the south side and they overlook the water Some live on the north side and they're looking at the border And those children of the revolution see the soldiers come Smiling at the widows as they take away the sons Children of the revolution shot down with a brand new gun They're dropping down like flies and in their eyes The images of war are in their eyes They've seen it all before and know your lies Won't keep their bellies full In love and war there are no rules
Children of the revolution getting off the boat To face the ignorance and prejudice that keep this land afloat Children of the revolution make a brand new start Running through the rubble of a thousand broken hearts and in their eyes All promises are broken in their eyes The words that can't be spoken and your lies Don't keep their bellies full In love and war there are no rules But in their eyes Murder comes by sea and from the skies It's shiny and it's quick to take their lives And it's cruel in love and war there are no rules
Children of the revolution coming out to play Someone sells a gun and someone blows them all away Children of the revolution sold out by the banks Who swap the green upon the dollars for the green upon the tanks Children of the revolution shot down by a brand new gun
On this 44th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, one might take a moment to ponder some of Our Boy's recent comments to Powell's Books
Well, have a look at the crap church [Barack Obama] is involved with in Chicago. Sinister, ethnic-based, cult thing. And this guru he's got. If it was a Republican doing this we'd all be absolutely surging to and fro. They get a free pass. And all this nonsense of Dr. King's dream, and so on, that I attack as well. As if you need a dream to say that African Americans should have civil rights. It's a very material fact, that had already been proved by black secularists. There's no need for a preacher to get involved in this.
Of course, in Hitch's zeal to use King's catch phrase in his dual role as selective anti-thiest and Republican attack dog going after leading Democrats, he forgets that "the dream" was not a religious argument for civil rights or any sort of divine revelation, but King's vision of the future after those rights have been endowed. It also was an effective rhetorical device.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
However, Hitch does have a dream of his own.
[Make] Iraq a killing-field for jihadists and fascists and a training ground for an army that will need to intervene again in other failed state/rogue state contexts.
I think that it's pretty clear which of these noted orators will wind up on the ash heap of history, theist or not.
Regular referrent Flying Rodent got his 2c worth in here here. While new kid on the block(osphere) Malky summed up the whole steaming pile of poo beautifully here
Perhaps realising that the point Iraq is not Vietnam invites the question, "then what the bloody hell is it then"? Our hero returns to the subject of Iraq in his latest blockbuster Slate bit.
Luckily Christopher is here to help, and has helpfully broken down the chaos of Iraq into an easy, cut out and keep guide, to the three wars currently going on. So read carefully, because next time anyone talks about the Iraq war you will be first in your street/blog/newsgroup/pub to be able to say, with devastating effect, "which Iraq war do you mean exactly"?
So without further ado, your Iraq wars in full.
War #1. Those wonderful Brave Kurds defending their happy homeland against Evil Al Queda!!
War #2. America and it's new baathist chums against Evil Al Queda
War #3. Horrible sectarian civil war being caused by bad shite government (which was always going to happen and is nothing to do with us, honest)
Christopher also provides some handy guidelines for the grieving families of the American war dead.
"An American family that lost a son or a daughter in the defense of free Kurdistan or in the struggle against AQM could console itself that the death was in a worthwhile cause. The same could not be said for a soldier who fell in some murky street engagement, shot in the back by a uniformed policeman who was doing double duty as a member of a theocratic Shiite militia."
In summary then, if your father/brother/uncle/sister/mother is killed in war #1 or war #2, fold up that flag, go home and be proud of the sacrifice they made. If however they got killed in Sadr city get out there and protest the futility of it all and perhaps ask for a refund? (Cindy Sheehan please note)
Its all about "murk" you see. When you get that awful telegram get on the phone and get the details
"Can you tell us Major, Josh did not die in some "murky engagement" did he"?
"Dont worry Mr Smith, he died in the bright, shining, not even slightly murky light of a #1/#2 combat situation"
"Oh thats ok then"
We could of course spend the end of this post pointing to Mr Hitchens' not very subtle distancing from Mr Bush and his war, ot point to the self-serving nature of his analysis, leaving as it does none of that inconvienent blood on his ample hands.
However it being a lunar eclipse down here tonight I thought, for a change, to conclude with a poem. One that questions our own complicity in the bloody events we are living through.
Summer in the northern hemisphere is often a period calm before the storms of autumn. In 1914 the action started early, with declarations of war flying around in late July and August. But if at all possible, our leaders prefer to lets us get our vacations out of the way before the action begins. The Second World War in Europe kicked off in September 1939 and the War on Terror was born on September 11, 2001. All of these events were "announced" in advance by rumours in a manner analogous to the way rainstorms are often preceeded by the sound of distant thunder. And as with distant thunder, some people hear the rumours of war while others don't. Moreover, not every thunderbolt is the precursor to a tempest.
This summer again, the rumors of war have be growing louder and sharper. According to the grapevine, is said that the war will be launched by the US against Iran, and that it will be launched on a pretext of responding to Iranian aggression, just as so many wars have been launched against so many nations in the past. But what pretext? Filling the Persian Gulf with US warships in the hope that one or more of them would be attacked hasn't worked. What is to be done?
Some people believe a terror attack on US soil like the ones that occurred on September 11, 2001, only on an even greater scale, would fit the bill nicely. Michael Chertoff's gut has been playing him up for months now about just such an eventuality, and a long list of other elite people and their lapdogs have also been speaking in tongues on this subject. In yours truly's opinion, they would have to be crazy to try to pull off something like this when half the world knows (even if they can't prove) that 9/11 was an inside job. But on the other hand, these people are crazy, aren't they — from an ordinary person's point of view? Their holy books are The Art of War and The Prince, along with the collected works of Leo Strauss. So we can't necessarily ignore the thunder we've been hearing this summer.
Which brings me on to the latest thunderbolt that just echoed its way onto my PC sreen. It's a story about some big put options bets that have been placed by a mystery traders:
The two sales are being referred to by market traders as "bin Laden trades" because only an event on the scale of 9-11 could make these short-sell options valuable.
There are 65,000 contracts @ $750.00 for the SPX 700 calls for open interest. That controls 6.5 million shares at $750 = $4.5 Billion. Not a single trade. But quite a bit of $$ on a contract that is 700 points away from current value. No one would buy that deep "in the money" calls. No reason to. So if they were sold looks like someone betting on massive dislocation. Lots of very strange option activity that I haven't seen before.
The entity or individual offering these sales can only make money if the market drops 30%-50% within the next four weeks. If the market does not drop, the entity or individual involved stands to lose over $1 billion just for engaging in these contracts!
Just rumor mongering or a clear indication of foul play afoot? We'll know in a month or so. The story is here.
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How do I loathe thee? Let's not bother to count the ways.
No kidding? As if 9/11, Katrina, mission accomplished, and bring em' on weren't enough to have the guy impeached at the stocks, with the participants limited to a dozen peaches each.
And why is it that when confronted with Dubya, Hitch will only go as far as to express "dislike" when a far more effective paraphrasing of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's line would have used "loathe"? Has the stout polemicist that feared not to take on Clinton, Kissinger, Mother Therea, the entire anti-war crowd, the Smithites, and over a billion Muslims suddenly come over all gooey at the idea of insulting the US's very own Dear Leader? There's no condemnation of Bush here, only a lamentation that he hasn't been faithul to certain aspects of the Hitchensian creed. Do I detect another example of the phenomenon FGFM has referred to as "praising with faint damns"?
This piece is remarkable chiefly for the amount of dedication Hitch is putting into defending his turf. It is yet another boldfaced attempt to contrast Vietnam, the bad war of US imperialism, with Iraq, the good war against, firstly, Saddamistic-baatho-fascism (not to be confused with the Assadistic variety), and secondly, the Islamofascist global jihad thugs who want to blow us all up because they hate our freedom to make fun of the Prophet. Well, that was the general drift I got.
Hitch does seem to have made a slip up in accessing the respective scales of the Vietnam and Iraq tradgedies on the locals:
It is true that the collapse of the doomed American adventure in Indochina was followed by massive repression and reprisal, especially in Cambodia, and by the exile of huge numbers of talented Vietnamese. But even this grim total was small compared to the huge losses exacted by the war itself. In Iraq, the genocide, repression, aggression and cultural obliteration preceded the coalition's intervention and had been condemned by a small but impressive library of UN resolutions.
Really? So Pol Pot's genocide was "small" compared to the losses extracted by the Vietnam war? I suppose the half a million to a million deaths under Pol Pot was comparatively smaller than the one and a half to two million in and around Vietnam while US troops were engaged there, if you have a mind for such comparisons. But not for want of trying, Pol Pot had a much smaller pool of victims to work on. Shall we throw into the equation the one million or so Iraqis made unalive due to the fallout from the 2003 US invasion and occupation? And the million or so done in by the previous sanctions regime? For a country of around a third of the population of Vietnam, that isn't a bad score. And in Iraq, lest we forget, the cultural obliteration and repression did not stop on the day the Americans secured the Green Zone.
At least the comments provide some sane and reasonable opinion. My favorite so far is from GeeD:
Hitchens has ceased to be a journalist. He has ceased to even be interesting. He has become an apologist. And one of the fanatics that he accuses other people of being. Someone who as Churchill said "won't change his mind and won't change the subject". Its hard to agree with him even when he's right because he twists the facts so badly. The more obvious it becomes that he was wrong the more looney his prognostications get. Beats me why anyone keeps publishing him.
It's Sunday, the day on which we all come together at Hitchens Watch to read something uplifting from the blogosphere about what a miserable blighter Hitch is.
Today's lesson is on Hitch as an anti-intellectual, and is taken from The Fray at Slate last February and posted by a guy called rippon.
By his own admission, Hitchens is a "one issue" man - that's what he boasted at the last election, the Democrats' less hawkish line on Iraq being the reason he supported the Bush regime instead. This is one of the reasons why he is a pseudo-intellectual: He merely uses fancy language but, behind that, and sporadically rearing its ugly face, is his boorish soccer hooligan simpleton thinking: "Bring it on!" "I know what side I'm on!" 'Belief in God is stupid – the anti-God team rules!'
In fact, more than pseudo-, Hitchens is actually anti-intellectual. He is contemptuous of true intellectuals, - Chomsky, Cockburn, Monbiot, Fisk, Johnson ... - who can think multi-dimensionally, take account of complexities (Hitchens merely spits on notions such as 'Blowback'); and discuss Iraq in wider contexts such as global security generally (including climate change and nuclear proliferation), geopolitical motivations and priorities, political institutions (the simpleton Hitchens prefers merely to hurl abuse at, say, the UN), inconsistencies and hypocrisies, et al.
This is why Hitchens is practically silent on Israeli occupation, Turkey's treatment of the Kurds (comparable to Saddam, but a regime expediently supported, not condemned, by his beloved Bush regime), Uzbekistan's human rights record (comparable to Saddam, but a regime expediently supported, not condemned, by the Bush regime), compared to his drum-beating about the evils of Saddam and the necessity of the glorious bombing (which he courageously cheered from the dangerous vantage point of his desk and keyboard), the war-crime illegality of which he is silent about because it ruffles his simpleton's good-against-evil narrative.
Hitchens is a disgusting entity. Perhaps the whisky is how Hitchens helps hide that ugly truth from himself.
Now, wasn't that cathartic?
Oh, incidentally, the Johnson alluded to above is Chalmers, and I wouldn't necessarily agree that all five of the names on that list qualify as "real intellectuals" - I prefer a definition that excludes anybody who can boil a 3-minute egg or make a decent pot of tea — which leaves Bertrand Russell, Bertrum Wooster, John Paul Sartre, and just possibly Noam Chomsky.
Aaron Russo died yesterday of cancer at the age of 64. Part Roderick Spode (he is said to have designed the world's first bikini underwear), part John Bellushi (well for me, anyway - on account of the accent, the wasteline and the mannerisms), part Tom Paine (just watch Mad as Hell or Freedom to Fascism and you'll catch a strong whiff of Rights of Man), and every inch an all-American libertarian hell-raiser.
You lived a good life, Aaron. You did us all proud.
Our Boy touted noted political operative Karl Rove as being one example of an atheist in the Bush administration a while back in New York Magazine.
Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m notfortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
Well, it turns out that Bill Moyers dared to call out Rove as a hypocrite in a recent television broadcast of his Journal
you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a skeptic, a secular manipulator.
It seems like Karl look deep umbrage at this even though Moyers was able to come up with a number of non-Hitchian references to back up his claim.
The San Antonio Express News, which knows Rove well, wrote in an editorial (August 14): “The White House will miss his indubitable political acumen. What other agnostic could have mobilized hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians behind a political banner?” On TheAtlantic.com (“No One Like Karl Rove,” August 13) Marc Ambinder wrote: “I could be wrong here, but I distinctly recall conversations with Rove friends who’ve told me that his struggles with faith did not lead him to Jesus Christ. Yet he knew and understood how to interact with (and manipulate, at times) the standard-bearers of the evangelical Right and the Catholic conservative intellectual elite.....” James Moore (“The Rove Goes on Forever”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com ) wrote that “[Rove] told his friend Bill Israel years ago that he was agnostic and that ‘he wished he could believe, but he cannot.’” In their book on Rove, Wayne Slater, former Austin bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News, and Moore, a veteran journalist write: “Rove once told a colleague that he had no religious affiliation and was ‘not a Christian.’”
But let's leave it to The Great Man's "honest" pal to set the record straight once and for all from his appearance on his favorite network:
I'm a Christian. I go to church. I'm an Episcopalian.
Furthermore, Mr. Honest called up the PBS ombudsman to complain!
If someone says he is a believer, why is that not accepted? [Moyers] has decided he will be the judge and the jury about whether I'm a believer. He attributes this to unknown parties and then defends it in a letter to Chris Wallace, with no personal interface with me at all. How does the San Antonio Express know? They don't. They don't know me well. [Moyers] then relies on a blogger who says 'I could be wrong here.' Well, he is wrong." Rove calls Moore an "incredible left-wing ideologue." Bill Israel, he says, "was once my teaching assistant. He was no more a close friend of mine than the man in the moon. I attend church in my neighborhood and here in Washington. I was married in church, worship in church, tithe to the church. My faith is my business. This is just beyond the pale.
Heck, even that rotund VIAGRA ® fueled radio commentator who Hitch once characterized as a "fat f*ck" (of course, that represented a pre-9/11 mentality) is getting in on the act with another even-handed soliloquy titled Moyers Is Out of His Mind
The interesting thing about this, of course, is that Karl Rove is an Episcopalian and has born witness to his belief and his faith in public countless times and did so on TV over the weekend. So this is insane, the ramblings of a genuine lunatic.
Anyone think that we will get a retraction from Hitch on the matter?
Sunday's NYT op-ed written by 7 US soldiers criticizing the war reminds me, among other things, of something Hitchens wrote comparing Noam Chomsky to the men who, on 9-11, apparently saved thousands of lives by bringing down certain planes before they could reach their populated or strategic destinations:
Only the stoicism of men like Jeremy Glick and Thomas Burnett prevented some such outcome; only those who chose to die fighting rather than allow such a profanity, and such a further toll in lives, stood between us and the fourth death squad. One iota of such innate fortitude is worth all the writings of Noam Chomsky.
Indeed, one might say that this critical piece in the NYT written by 7 US soldiers is worth all the writings of Christopher Hitchens and the rest of the chickenhawk set. If Hitchens and his loyal legion of young supporters had had one iota of courage to back up their rhetoric - by having actually fought in the war they affected (and continue to affect) to believe so strongly in, they might've been able to pen an authoritative op-ed on the war themselves. But such is not the case.
Well, it's a good thing that people who actually know what they're talking about are willing to speak out, too. The NYT piece suggests only two options for the US: withdraw or significantly step up the attack by violating all principles of human rights and just war while waging a brutal, savage counterinsurgency. Fred Kaplan at Slate provides a nice summary of the op-ed and some of the broader questions it raises.
Hitch’s latest Slate column, God’s Still Dead, is not, as one might suppose from the title, a response to Nietzsche, whose character the Madman lamented, “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" It is a pat on the back for Mark Lilla on his latest book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, along with an enjoinder for him to fall sharply into line with the militant antitheist program.
I was going to put my tired worn-out brain through contortions in an effort to say something devilishly clever about why Hitch is wrong in equating religion with totalitarianism, but fortunately I don’t have to, as the first commenter to enter the fray has done a fantastic job—far better than I could have—in accomplishing that already.
Hitch’s offending paragraph runs:
In the second place, it is interesting to find Lilla conceding—though not in so many words—that religion is closely related to the totalitarian. As he phrases it when writing about Orthodox Jewish and Islamic law (and as was no less the case for Christianity in its pre-Hobbesian heyday), divine or revealed teaching is "meant to cover the whole of life, not some arbitrarily demarcated private sphere, and its legal system has few theological resources for establishing the independence of politics from detailed divine commands." How true. Now, there is one thing one can say with relative certainty about the totalitarian principle, which is that it has been repeatedly tried and has repeatedly failed. Try and run a society out of the teachings of one holy book, and you will end with every kind of ignominy and collapse. There is no reason at all to confine this grim lesson to the Christians who were butchering each other between the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War; even the Jews who established the state of Israel and the Muslims who set up Pakistan understood the importance of some considerable secular latitude (as did the Hindus who were the majority in independent India). In other words, while it may be innate in people to be "theotropic," it is also quite easy for them to understand that religion is a very potent and dangerous toxin. Never mind for now what Islamist fundamentalism might want to do to us; take a look at what it did to the Muslims of Afghanistan.
In response, Mark E Haag writes:
Human agency is the impossible idea here, either a salve or a cruel illusion to beings seeking to "liberate" themselves from any hierarchical, "slavish" chain of blind obedience. Scientists, and both Marx and Freud considered themselves to be such an exalted type of thinker, look to nature to discover patterns, rather than to the heavens to find them revealed. But that doesn't mean that a natural pattern, once located, is any more fungible, that one is any less constrained to follow the rules derived from such patterns.
What kind of liberalism, then, would English atheism have us observe, as to our political "practices"? Hitchens' own practice seems to consist merely in raising up an indignant hand and uttering a stately "no" to whatever seems most oppressive to his own instinctive intellectual habits -- fundamentalism, totalitarianism, "theotropism." Merely negating one principle, however, does not obviate the need, indeed, the inevitability of another arising to take its place. He's enough of a dialectician to have realized that.
Science has done far more to shape the modern world than religion. Foucault, among others, tried to describe myriad ways in which "reason" has come to exert a behavioral control as thorough as anything pettifogging clericalism ever did. If "liberation" is your goal, one could almost hope to be confronted with the heavy hand of totalitarian, or at least authoritarian oppression. Then at least one knows right off what one has to say no to, where the path of rebellion lies.
Hitchens' career, and especially his recent success as Scourge of Fundie Terror, indicates a felt need to keep re-discovering and then building up the menace of a return to a pre-modern, purely religious social hierarchy. What results, paradoxically, is a remarkably complacent worldview. As long as the idea of religion is out there, to counterbalance and "frame" the reality of secular modern culture, we can take comfort in the notion that we are "resisting" it by "acting a negative," by simple declarations of unbelief. It's an attitude one might therefore call "pietistic.”
I began at the beginning and I'll end with the end of his piece, where Hitch throws in a pean to progress:
But millimetrical progress has been made even so, and it is measurable precisely to the degree that we cease to believe ourselves the objects of a divine (and here's the totalitarian element again) "plan." Shaking off the fantastic illusion that we are the objective of the Big Bang or the process of evolution is something that any educated human can now do. This was not quite the case in previous centuries or even decades, and I do not think that Lilla has credited us with such slight advances as we have been able to make.
The concepts of progress and advance Hitch has in mind here imply the idea of moving forward in a positive direction, which is something I would have thought any educated and fully-awake human would now be seriously questioning. Although some of our brighter ancestors—including the guy who painted the picture below—have been doing exactly that since time immemorial.
As our regular readers (Oliver Kamm and Iain Hislop) will doubtless recall, our hero was "almost literally" (thanks Ollie) pretty happy about recent events in the benighted nation of Iraq.
And the reason for this, at first sight, counterintuitive conclusion?
In provinces like Anbar, and in areas of Baghdad, even Sunni militants have turned away in disgust and fear from the AQM forces. It's not difficult to imagine why this is: Try imagining life for a day under the village rule of such depraved and fanatical elements.
Of course the "Sunni Miltants" in question are not turning away from "Al Queda" just out of revulsion at their "Depravity"
They are being well paid.
Lets turn to a real journalist, Patrick Cockburn, for the story.
"Just as it was becoming evident in the US that the surge was not going anywhere very fast there came good news from Anbar province in west Iraq. The Sunni tribes were rising against al Qaida in Iraq which had overplayed its hand by setting up an umbrella organisation for insurgents called the Islamic State of Iraq.
In Sunni areas it was killing garbage collectors on the grounds they worked for the government, shooting women in the face because they were not wearing a veil and trying to draft one young man from each family into its forces. Sunni tribal militiamen backed by the US fought al Qaida in insurgent strongholds like Ramadi and attacks on US troops there fell away dramatically...
As with many a development in Iraq portrayed as a sign of progress by the White House, the recruitment of Sunni tribal militias by the US is not quite what it seems. In practice it is a tactic fraught with dangers. In areas where they operate police are finding more and more bodies according to the Interior Ministry. Victims often appear to have been killed solely because they were Shia. The gunmen from the tribes are under American command and this weakens the authority of the the Iraqi government, army and police, institutions that the US is supposedly seeking to foster.
A grim scene showing Sunni tribal militiamen in action was recorded on a cell phone and later appeared on Iraqi web sites. It shows a small man in a brown robe being bundled out of a vehicle by a group of angry men with sub-machine guns who cuff and slap him as he cowers beneath their blows, trying to shield his face with his hands. One of his captors, who seems to be in command, asks him fiercely if he has killed somebody called ‘Khalid’. After a few moments he is dragged off by two gunmen to a patch of waste ground 30 yards away and is executed with a burst of machine gunfire to the chest.
Roadside Justice in Tarmiya Eyewitness to an Execution as Impromptu "Court" Sentences Victim to Die
Eyewitnesses in the city of Tarmiya observed a public execution of an alleged member of al-Qaeda.
Three cars stopped suddenly in the side of the road on Thursday and a man was snatched from one of the vehicles.
According to the eyewitnesses in the small city about 15 miles north of Baghdad on the Tigris River, the men filing out of the automobiles formed an impromptu "court" and the presiding "judge" ordered that the apprehended man be executed on the crime of "treason," with no further explanations handed down.
The masked gunmen ordered a young man, identified as a new recruit, to execute the handcuffed man. The victim’s body fell slack as the volunteer fired his pistol.
The group sped off, leaving the corpse by the roadside.
The whole operation lasted no more than 10 minutes, the eyewitnesses said.
But what has that to do with mild-mannered Christopher Hitchens? Surely that bon-mot making, religion hating, life and soul of the party cannot be in any way associated with this kind of thing? He stands for freedom, justice and the democratic way, not some squalid little Salvador Option?
I'd suggest being less charitible gentle reader, if you crow about a policy, without mentioning what it means on the ground, you are either an apologist or a fool.
Ever wanted to know why Hitchy and Cocky are so contrary? Well, below is a paragraph from Fetters of the Old Contrarians (sounds like a public school cricket team) in which Charles Demers tries shed some light on the "hollow, contrarian parlour tricks that invariably come along with a certain brand of charismatic journalism predicated on personality."
Regular readers of Cockburn’s Counterpunch know that among his favourite targets are the blogosphere (referred to routinely as the “blathersphere,” though discernable from Counterpunch only in that most blogs have far fewer typos), Christopher Hitchens, and now the pointy-headed “grant farmers” of climate science who defy logic and bend backwards to justify their continued employment. The contempt which Cockburn reserves for those who use the space provided by internet ersatz-journalism to natter impotently ad infinitum, or for those who resort to intellectual gymnastics and petty theatrics to keep themselves in work, comes off as a combination of projected self-loathing and, in the case of Christopher Hitchens, professional jealousy. After all, Hitchens is a writer who has done much of what Cockburn has tried to do – which is to say he’s punctuated a vague association to left-wing politics with ‘wacky,’ ‘out-there,’ ‘telling-it-like-it-is’ rightist stunts and postures aimed at improving the salability of books and columns (the best assessment of this tendency of “maverick unpredictability”, to which I’m deeply indebted, is Norman Finkelstein’s ‘On Christopher Hitchens’) – to infinitely greater effect, wealth, popularity and influence than has Cockburn. Whether writing against equal marriage, espousing lunatic politics that require a complete ignorance of the dynamics of racial violence in America – such as defending militias or, more recently, the posse as an instrument of popular justice – Cockburn has yet to attain anything approaching the notoriety of his anti-choice, pro-NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, pro-War on Terror fellow British ex-pat, who just this week received another gushing assessment of his contrarianism in the New York Times review of his book God is Not Great.
In the year 2000, Christopher Hitchens disguised himself as a mortal, took a tour of North Korea and wrote about his experiences there in Vanity Fair.
This summer, Hitchens Watch regular Angrysoba, showered, shaved, packed a big lunchbox, and booked himself the same tour in order to compare notes, check out life under the Dear Leader and see how things have changed over the past seven years.
He's promised this website a scoop, so as long as Vanity Fair doesn't outbid us for the exclusive, you'll be the first to hear the latest unsensored, unexpurgated and unadulterated news from the Hermit Kingdom.
Hitch has finally gotten the sort of recognition he deserves for his part in promoting the glorious war. He's been given his own page at the absolutely brilliant Virtual Yasukuni, an online shrine dedicated to the Brits who who have acted well beyond the call of duty in making Saddam's kleptocracy history and replacing it with the creative chaos that rules the Land Between the Rivers today.
He is in very good company among the likes of heavyweights Blair, Campbell, Reid and Scarlet, not to mention Jeff Hoon ("One day, the mothers of children killed or maimed by British cluster bombs will thank Britain for their use"), Ann Clwyd ("War on Iraq is justified.....remember the plastic shredder where prisoners were forced to watch as others were thrown in alive"), Julie Burchill ("I am in favour of war against Iraq....this war is about freedom, justice - and oil. It's called multitasking. Get used to it!") and the always marvelous Mad Mel!
My one small quibble is over the photo. Hitch looks like a cherrub compared with most of the ugly mugs on view. (Burchill in particular looks like she's doing 15 years for child strangling.) I do hope they upgrade the official Hitch image to something that shows the man's true character—like :
Back on June 5,during the aforementioned tour, the Rev. Mark D. Roberts held a debate of sorts with Hitch on the Hugh Hewit Show.
In the days and weeks following, Roberts, who is particularly well up on New Testement studieds, posted a 10-part response to god is not Great in which he takes Hitch to task for a number of major shortcommings. For instance:
The obvious fact that god is not Great contains many apparent facts, therefore, gives us an advantage in trying to evaluate its overall truthfulness. If Hitchens tends to get his facts right, then we would do well to pay close attention to his claims, even those that are not factual per se. He will have shown himself to be a reliable witness and a careful thinker. If, on the contrary, he gets many of his facts wrong, then we would rightly be inclined to doubt what he writes about many things and chalk it up to sloppy thinking.
The bad news for Christopher Hitchens is that he gets a low mark for accuracy when it comes to his statements about the New Testament and New Testament scholarship. In fact, I found fifteen factual errors in this material. I also identified sixteen statements that show what I consider to be a substantial misunderstanding or distortion of the evidence, even though a few scholars might agree with Hitchens. That's why I distinguish between factual errors and misunderstandings/distortions, in an effort to be clear and fair.
If my evaluation is anywhere near correct, this does not reflect well upon god is not Great, since the New Testament material comprises only about 6% of the whole book. How many other errors fill the pages of this book? I'll let suitable experts answer this question. But the obvious implication of what I discovered is that Christopher Hitchens is not a reliable reporter of facts, probably because has not done his homework adequately. He is, after all, a brilliant man with an inquisitive and well-tuned mind. Given my evaluation of his errors in the field I know best, however, I'm inclined to question his statements of "fact" concerning many other things. And my disbelief is not a belief. It's a reasonable conclusion based on the facts of Hitchens's numerous mistakes and misstatements.
Among the errors Roberts alludes to are some real howlers that show up the essential shoddiness of Hitch's approach to writing, as well as the sorry state into which the publishing industry has fallen for allowing books this full of inaccuracies to be printed. And no, I'm not talking censorship, just craftsmanship. With the technology available today to facilitate research, fact checking, etc., there is no excuse for falling down on the basics.
Hitch, according to Roberts, gets the nature of the Gospels wrong in dismissing them as in any sense a historical record, is wrong about the nature of "Q" (a hypothetical document invented by New Testament scholars to explain the complex relationships between the three synoptic gospels), Jesus and Hell, the dating of the Nag Hammadi "Gospels", and the issue of tampering (repeating Menken's mistake while compounding the error by adding "Menken irrefutably says"). Furthermore, Hitch is also wrong about the census, eyewitnesses to the crucifixion, St. Paul, scholarship, Gospel truth, and Gospel disagreements. Roberts also goes on to explain how Hitch exaggerates the differences among the Gospels, distorts the teachings of Jesus, misunderstands what it means to be a Christian, takes a curiously unscientific approach to the study of religion and much, much more.
By this time, quite a few of you who bought god is not Great, thinking it was a properly researched work containing a coherent argument based on a solid foundation of factual statements, may be wishing you'd invested in the latest Harry Potter instead. So many palpable errors, such a pulpable book, and what an incredible waste Hitch's talent, everyone else's time, and so many reams of of good paper.
Is Hitchens still a leftist like he claims? If so, he should consider taking up the case of Jose Padilla, a man who was just convicted via a Kangaroo Court of supporting terrorism. After being held as an "enemy combatant" for over 3 years without any recourse to seek an attorney, Padilla was finally brought to the dock to face a political execution.
From CNN.com, Jose Padilla's mom Estela Lebron is quoted first:
I'm not surprised by anything in this place anymore," she said. "This is a Republican city."
Lebron blamed President Bush for the outcome of the trial and said there was not enough evidence in the case to convict her son.
Attorneys for the other defendants also vowed to appeal, saying they were "stunned" by the decision.
"An innocent man was wrongly convicted today and we're going to do what we can to clear his name," said William Swor, the attorney for Jayyousi.
What if Mr. Swor is telling the truth? Or consider it another way: would Swor openly lie to the press and risk his entire career and reputation for the sake of someone he believed was guilty?
These questions might seem to throw an annoying wrench into the whole war on terrorism machine, but I don't think they are a distraction. If Bush and his cronies can't even get this right, what does it say about all his other shenanigans?
Revolution convolution Circles around the town Give us all some time to think Please let us all come down
Not what you say and not what you hear Not who you love and not who you fear What you feel is real
— John Martyn
This week, after admitting to spending much of the past few months debating the faithful in “arcane” religious disputes, Hitch has decided to move onto what he feels are more serious matters. Under the headline of Fighting the “Real” Fight, he chides those of us “hair-splitting secularists who cannot accept that al-Qaida in Mesopotamia is a branch of al-Qaida itself.”
Hands up all those who count yourselves among that group. Not very many, I should think. But within the pundocracy, the question has been getting almost as much attention as Michael Chertoff’s gut—I hear that the color of his bile is now being used as a terror threat level indication.
Hitch reckons the conjecture that AQM (it's even got its own acronym!) is a branch of al-Qaida itself is “a self-evident fact.” It's always nice when he stateswhat seems a tenuous assertion this starkly—not only because it makes him look like a bit of a crackpot, but because unlike with his more typical slippery, innuendo-laden prose, he pins himself down. If he's called on and he finds it difficult to back up the claim, although he can always manage to make hissing noises or slither his way out of trouble, he looses face.
On this particular assertion, I've yet to see any hard evidence, but then again, I haven’t been looking very hard, as the question seems to me to be about as arcane as debating how many angels can dance on head of a pin, or whether the Seraphim are working in cahoots with the Cherebim. How so? Well, if one is a member of a fraternity that entertains a belief in angels in the first place, I would imagine such debates can get quite heated. But as I have no such affiliations or beliefs, the question is of no personal interest.
Likewise, for the crowd that stresses the existence of al-Qaida as an Islamic terrorist organization independent of various Western and Eastern state intelligence agencies, it might matter very much whether AQM was independent of al-Qaida, or was a franchise, a 100%-capitalized subsidiary, or a joint venture business between the larger group and its partners. But not having any pressing reason to invest an iota of belief in the tale of an independent al-Qaida, and being more inclined, given the “facts” I have seen, to give credence to the proposition that al-Qaida is itself the creation and tool
