I don't know if the recent Fort Hood massacre was the result of an attack by an Islamic enemy within either inspired by or working for Al Qaida (the Hitchens/official scenario); if it was a false flag attack, as in "remember, remember the fifth of November; gunpowder treason and plot" (the Tarpley patsy scenario), an incident that occurred spontaneously and was then spun into something else by Pentagon propagandists who were ordered by Don Rumsfeld back in 2001 to do just this kind of thing; or if it was down to a soldier off his meds, on his meds, over-vaccinated, stressed out, or driven over the edge by a seemingly endless conflict he never wanted any part in and which has dragged on far too long for any good it may have done for anybody outside of the War Party (this last scenario is favored by our own Mark G). It is not my purpose today to examine any of these potential scenarios or to try to pick a winner from among them. But I would like to continue from my previous post by examining Christopher's attitude both to this incident and more generally to violent death in wartime.
In the one post I've seen by Christopher on the incident there is no explicit statement about whether he condemns or commends the killing and wounding of dozens of US servicemen. But I won't fault him for that. Most contemporary readers who are familiar with the context in which the incident is being talked about generally and who know Christopher's own stance will have no trouble concluding that he condemns the slaughter. This is something that, to quote a cliche, "goes without saying". And before anyone forms the impression that I, as an opponent of the WOT and an occasional critic of US militarism and imperialism, have anything but condemnation for whoever was guilty of this atrocity, be assured that my reaction on hearing the news was one of stoic sadness and grief. I have acquaintances in the US armed forces, including one man who currently works at an Air Force base near San Antonio, and my first reaction on hearing of the tragedy was to pray he was not involved. (This was a reflex action that I don't discourage in myself. I'm extremely doubtful of their being a deity who listens to my prayers and acts on them, but I see no harm in giving it a go.)
In the previous post I pointed out that Christopher's reaction to the Virgina Tech massacre was starkly different from his reaction to Fort Hood. I can't think about his summation of Cho's alleged rampage as "a non-story" without remembering those haunting lines from Macbeth:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
Again, it goes without saying that Christopher must have lamented and condemned what happened at Virgina Tech, but he doesn't waste valuable column inches adding his voice to the crowd who gush silly conventional verbiage (or worse, prayers) on such occasions. For him, joining in with that would be the equivalent of throwing another bouquet of flowers onto the pile outside Princess Diana's residence at Kensington Palace. But he must surely have really felt grief for the victims of that crime, despite its insignificance to him in the overall scheme of things, mustn't he? Actually, we have a bit more of his thoughts on the matter from Holiday Dmitri of Radar:
Radar: Right, as we saw in the recent case of Seung-Hui Cho. What did you think of the Virginia Tech shooting?
Hitchens: I don't think about it. To me it's a non-event. There will always be a tragedy with some little kid falling down a mineshaft some week. Horrible things will always happen, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. We had a moment of silence at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. But why not for the 116 people who were torn to pieces in Iraq, which does have implications for us, because the people who did that want to do it to everybody? Instead, this little nutcase has state power. I hate it!
When I heard about the Virginia Tech event, I thought, This is horrible, because I knew there would be nothing on the television, in the newspapers, or on the airwaves for weeks. Everyone wants the shooting to be about them, the Russian Federation included. If you look through my window you'll see the Russian Federation has its flag half-mast. What does the Russian Federation have to do with Virginia Tech? Nothing! Nor do I. Nor do you.
From this it is clear that for Christopher, the essential difference between Virgina Tech and Fort Hood is that the first is about nothing more than itself and as such has nothing to do with us outsiders, while the second is part of something bigger that has something vitally important to do with us, which we ignore at out peril. Of course, in order for Fort Hood to be as big as Christopher paints it, Major Hasan has to be linked with our Islamic enemies in some way or another. If not, he would be just another little nutcase with state power. And in exercising his prejudice (judgment in advance of all the relevant facts being established) in this matter, Christopher shows once again that rather obvious bias that has been on view at frequent intervals since he first referred to the WOT as "a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." We should not forget that in order to keep fanning the flames of this necessary war, it is incumbent upon him to use any means available to alert his natural allies to the dangers and recruit ever more troops to keep up the fight against his enemies.
The above quotation, given in an interview with Jamie Glazov in 2003, is part of a rather shocking and notorious statement about Hitchens's initial reaction to the events of 9/11. Here's the entire paragraph:
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.
A key word here is "exhilaration". I imagine that few people who have a soft spot for either the United States or for humanity in general would have felt that particular emotion in connection with that awful event, and fewer still would have owned up to the feeling. Assorted misanthropes and critics of America will certainly have felt a dash of schadenfreude alongside the shock and horror, but to feel "exhilaration" at 9/11 is an obvious sign of somebody with serious psychological problems. And naturally, a question that has to cross any inquiring mind is "if Christopher Hitchens felt exhilaration on seeing and hearing about 9/11, did he perchance experience the same sort of emotion, albeit on a smaller scale, at the Fort Hood massacre?
I am assumming for the sake of decency and common humanity more than of argument that Christopher, although he seldom indicates it overtly, is every bit as shocked, horrified, petrified, mortified, etc., as the average normal person would be the thought of people being deliberately killed en mass. Emotionally, humans are a mixed bunch, but I assume Christopher's reactions are within two standard deviations of the center of the bell curve. However, if you were to ask me for evidence to back up this assumption, I would have to concede that I have little to offer. I've heard and read him make short references to "terrible" events and "evil", but I've never seen Christopher go to any great length to show us that he actually feels anyone else's pain. When it comes to pouring out sympathy for the victims of violence, he is as cold a fish as I've seen outside of the dock of a courtroom.
On top of this, he often seems prone to levity in situations where propriety, etiquette and decorum would call for gravity in the form of dignified silence, qualified respect, or at the very least repressed dislike or revulsion. There are times when it is quite out of order to gloat, and yet I've never seen anyone have quite as much fun at a wake as Christopher displayed in the wake of the deaths of Mother Teresa and Jerry Falwell. Compared to those outbursts, his treatment of Saddam Hussein amounted to a eulogy. But all this was nothing compared to the pants-wetting performance quoted by Adam Shatz in the Nation in 2002 in which we capture the Hitch waxing genocidal at the prospect of laying waste to his enemies in what sounds like a fantasizing of just the kind of massacre that Major Hasan and young Cho are accused of perpetrating.
If you're actually certain that you're hitting only a concentration of enemy troops... then it's pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they're bearing a Koran over their heart, it'll go straight through that, too. So they won't be able to say, 'Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.' No way, 'cause it'll go straight through that as well. They'll be dead, in other words.
Were Hitch as brave and daring as his hero Flashman, I wonder would he really have the lack of scruple to pose as one of the Fuzzy Wuzzies, sneak into their camp, share their bread and wine, and then shoot them down like a bunch of rabid dogs while they were unawares? In the context of a war to the finish, would he consider such a feat heroic or even manly?
What emerges from the above record is a man who will not be caught dead shedding tears for the victims of violence, but will be happy to openly cheer on the slaughter when the victims are "enemy troops" and is unashamed to feel an opportunistic exhilaration at the the thought of allies or neutrals being obliterated as long as this can be made to serve the cause. And if it can't be, as in the case of Virginia Tech, he will not shirk from cataloging it as a non-event and hence a distraction and a terrible waste of human death. For Christopher, the "War on Terror" (incorporating the Wars on Iraq, on Afghanistan and on Islam) is fated to be a long ideological as well as military struggle. He is determined to be on the winning side, but as with his comrades and sputniks throughout the Military Industrial Complex, it is by no means clear whether he is more interested in achieving that final victory or in ensuring that this fight goes the distance.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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