Christopher has won himself some well-deserved brownie points with his latest Slate piece, Let Them In, in which he affirms the principle that people should on no account be banned from entering countries on account of foul language. This is a view I am in strong agreement with, although applying it to websites is quite another matter.
It comes as a small surprise to me that Hitch has put forth this view, both because he was very mean to Tony Judt when he had his run in with the Zionist mafia a couple of years back, and because he has quite rightly extended the principle to embrace his old nemesis, that "real thug" George Galloway.
True, the Canadians have said the ban was about supporting, not just a terrorist organization — as most of us do that day-in, day-out, by paying taxes — but a "banned illegal terrorist organization," namely, Hamas. However, nobody takes that excuse seriously. The real reason for George being persona non grata is that the Zionist lobby don't like what comes out every time he opens his great festering gob.
Hitch has, like many others in the blogosphere, put his fingers on a delicious irony — that George has himself called on a well-known loud-mouth French politician not to be allowed into the UK, and that he had not been among those calling on the UK Government not to ban an equally notorious Dutch MP.
Galloway has in the past issued his own calls for foreign politicians to be banned from British soil, as in the case of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France's extreme-right National Front. And he was not conspicuous in protesting in February, when the British government deported Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician whose party holds nine seats in parliament, after the latter's arrival at Heathrow Airport.
In the case of Le Pen, the irony is doubly delicious in that George was actually leading the chorus for slamming the portcullis in Jeam-Marie's face, as this article from the Guardian of 24 April 2004 captures so succinctly:
Calls to ban Mr Le Pen from Britain were led George Galloway, the former Labour MP and cofounder of the Respect coalition, who has insisted that he "should not be allowed to step foot on to British soil at any time".
"If the home secretary allows into this country someone who denies the Holocaust and who is on record as hating all Muslims, he will be siding with the neo-Nazi far-right against multicultural Britain," Mr Galloway said.
The leader of the House of Commons, Peter Hain, yesterday told MPs Mr Le Pen was "seeking to exercise his right to free speech here in a way that he would not be able to exercise his right to free speech if he were to live under the fascist, racist regime that he supports and I think that it is really disturbing that he has been invited".
As Peter Hain is so luke warm about protecting freedom of speech that he can't tolerate the occasional fascist or racist goosestepping across the Channel, then now that South Africa has been liberated from apartheid, I for one wouldn't be the least bit heartbroken if he were to sod off back home. But I digress. Given George Galloway's 2004 stance, I can't help thinking that in being shut out of Canada he has truly been hoist by his own proverbial, and it is big-hearted as well as big-minded of Hitch to have come out in support of not banning opinions as a matter of principles. As Hitch says:
The underlying premise of the First Amendment is that free expression, when protected for anyone, is thereby protected for everyone. This must apply most especially in tough cases that might raise eyebrows, such as the ACLU's celebrated defense of the right of American Nazis to demonstrate in heavily Jewish Skokie, Ill., in the late 1970s. One of the effects of the "war on terror," and of one of its concomitants, namely the attrition between the Muslim world and the West, has been an increasing tendency to make exceptions to First Amendment principles, either on the pretext of security or of avoiding the giving of offense. We should have learned by now that, however new the guise, these are the same old stale excuses for censorship. We might also notice that if one excuse is allowed, then all the others are made "legitimate" also. The risk of allowing all opinions by all speakers may seem great, but it is nothing compared with the risk of giving the power of censorship to any official.
The No. 30 bus blown up in Tavistock Square on July 7, 2005 was fitted with CCTV cameras and HDD recording equipment, but no pictures showing what was going on prior to the outrage have ever been released.
The last time a major summit was held in the UK, three trains and a bus in London were bombed, 56 people were killed and over 700 injured. Also, despite London being the CCTV capital of the world, many of the cameras in the system were found not to be working, including, apparently, some that could have at least shed light on who carried out the attacks. So this time around, with the G20 summit scheduled to take place in the capital itself, you'd expect the authorities to have security as tight as a as tight as a .... Botox smile. (Those of you who thought I was going to mention a nun, duck or camel in a sandstorm, wash your mouths out with soap immediately!) However, from the Guardian of March 30 comes news that other considerations are taking precedence over the need to keep Londoners safe this silly season. It's an intriguing tale of 60 traffic/public order cameras in central London that must be turned off on the very eve of the G20 summit in order to comply with some new legislation that specifies a minimum 720 x 576-pixel recording capability:
The security operation at this week's G20 summit was thrown into chaos last night when it emerged that the entire network of central London's wireless CCTV cameras will have to be turned off because of a legal ruling.
The Department for Transport (DfT) has ruled that Westminster council's mobile road cameras - a third of the authority's CCTV network - "do not fully meet the resolution standards required" and must be switched off by midnight tomorrow.
The blackout begins on the eve of the summit, when world leaders arrive in the capital and protesters take to the streets.
The council only discovered last week that images from its newly installed £15m traffic cameras do not meet the quality required under the Traffic Management Act, which comes into force on 1 April.
It sounds like somebody's playing an April Fool's joke on somebody, and I can only hope that's all it is. Because any would-be assassins, terrorists or practical jokers armed with custard pies are going to be that little bit harder to catch. And we shouldn't forget bobbies with tasers and agent provos among the demonstrating masses. They are going to feel just that little bit less obliged to behave themselves.
The 60 cameras in question use the latest digital technology and transmit images using Wi-Fi. While they are primarily for traffic enforcement, according to the council the cameras are "an essential additional tool" to tackle crime and disorder, and have been fixed to strategic locations across the capital ahead of the summit.
The 24-hour live footage from the cameras, which monitor roads around the West End, Belgravia, Trafalgar Square, Knightsbridge, Oxford Street and London's main bridges, is also accessible to police and the intelligence services.
A further 160 "permanent" CCTV cameras run by the authority are unaffected. However, security officials believe a shutdown of the mobile road cameras could hamper the G20 security operation, which will require police to secure the safe passage of dozens of motorcades carrying delegations VIP diplomats and leaders.
"Frankly, it couldn't have come at a worse time," a source said. "These are not just parking enforcement cameras, they're for public order and we've got the G20 world leaders coming. This is a complete disaster."
It is fascinating, if lamentable, that potential lack of "public order" currently appears to be a greater concern for the powers than potential terrorism, which, as some readers may remember, struck London on July 7, 2005, slap in the middle of the 3-day G8 Summit in Gleneagles. The British are not easily inflamed into rioting or running amok, but we're being sold the idea that a "summer of discontent" is all but inevitable. The G20 meeting is certainly attracting a fair amount of organized protest, but it looks like fairly innocuous festival being put on by people who want to save us all from unemployment, financial ruin, climate change, or nuclear Armageddon. I'm sure there is something the authorities are not telling us — which is fine by me — loose lips, etc. But I hope and pray that this time they are paying serious attention to the prospect that some exceedingly nasty uninvited guests may be out to spoil the party.
Update
Angrysoba writes:
There have also been some conspiracy theorists who have found it mighty suspicious that when George Galloway was attacked at Glasgow airport by a disgruntled Rangers fan it happened in the only location without CCTV.
Speaking of Galloway, our Christopher Hitchens has decided to impress us all with his principles and magnanimity by calling on the Canadian government to let George Galloway in to hear what he has to say. He also extends this to another of his bete noire, Tariq Ramadan, whose English policeman who thinks he can speak French impression is one we'd all love to hear. Ramadan has been kept out of the US by President Obama despite the allegation that he gave money to charities that may have funnelled money to Hamas, which is ironic given that George Galloway managed to get into the US despite very publicly cutting out the middle man and driving to Gaza to do the very same thing.
He also says it isn't acceptable for Geert Wilders to be barred from showing his piss-your-pants-in-terror take down of Islam movie, Fitna, in the Houses Parliament but I think most people agree that if a principle is worth applying it should be applied universally.
In which Stabler pays his respects to one of Hitch's most influential role models.
Some years back I attended a screening at U.C.L.A. where John Cleese introduced a couple of W.C. Fields's great comedies. It was all together fitting and proper that he did this. Field's misanthropic genius, rightly hailed in the 1960s, has become a neglected subject in more recent years, perhaps owing to his abrasive racial jokes; and let's face it, he a big, fat, weird white guy who joked about booze as his own gin blossom bloomed like a prize winning rose. In 1941 Universal Studios decided Fields was washed up (despite recent hits), and at any rate he was clearly drinking himself to death; they left him alone to make Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. The result was an inspired and ridiculous fantasia about stupid films and foolish movie studios that anticipates Monty Python as succinctly as anything you could name, just about 30 years beforehand. It was his last film.
Cleese may be fighting a losing battle. A recent program notes from my local hipster's film society belittled Fields, and again the racial jokes and stereotyping may be the culprits. It is worth remembering however, that unlike a figure like Rush Limbaugh, part of who's Schick may trace back to Fields, he really WAS an equal opportunity offender (see the selfish, moronic Republican customer in The Pharmacy) and his central target was always Mainstreet, U.S.A. Consider his 1940 film, The Bank Dick.
Fields is a small town drunk and ne'er-do-well awarded a position of responsibility at the local bank on account of a bogus act of supposed heroism. Yes, Fields does brandish a bullhorn later in the film. He then induces his idiot future son-in-law Og Oggilby (just an average guy looking for a piece of the American Dream) to steal an advance from the bank to buy stock in the worthless "Beefsteak Mines." When the bank examiner shows up unexpectedly, Fields uses every trick in the book to distract his attention as encroaching final doom closes in. All in all, the most socially relevant film of 2009.
Despite its uncompromisingly caustic tone (The Bank Dick has none of the balancing sweetness of an earlier classic like It's A Gift), I sense an idealism in Fields. His hero was Twain, and he seemed to believe in the ability of Americans to laugh at themselves, not just their nextdoor neighbor. This may be what has put Feilds out of fashion in our present era of identity comedy and snark. Our new Drunken Misanthropes have intellectual airs and pride themselves on not listening to those who trouble them with the truth. And in the world of infotainment, we look to them not for laughs, but for guidance.
From left to right, Mos Def, Salman Rushdie, Bill, and Hitch. Very informative and entertaining at the same time.
Subjects, the health benefits of alcohol, Afghanistan and heroin, and nuclear weapons, Iran and the nature of the guiding principle that animates Hitch's life.
Hitch: "Wait until someone like Bin Laden gets hold of an apocolyptic weapon; you stop sounding so....."
Mos: "[That's] paranoia."
Salman: "YOU'D be paranoid TOO if everybody was out to get YOU!" Hang on, I misheard that bit. It went more like, "That isn't paranoia. There's only one group in the world that wants to get nuclear weapons in order to use them. And that is radical Islamicist politics wherever you find it...."
This is where the shit gets personal. Mos thinks Bin Laden is a mythical figure because he's been promoted like a mythical figure, which sounds spot on to me, although Hitch appears to find the idea offensive. It's a shame Bill Maher couldn't get Osama to appear on the panel, but the dude's phone number is unlisted. My question for Hitch would be that given that Osama has been played on film (or at least videotape) by more actors than Dracula or Tarzan, which of his appearances since September 11, 2001 should be considered authentic and why?
We all love a good satirical cartoon, especially when it provokes the zealots to anger. This one, by Pat Oliphant, has just been pronounced "hideously anti-Semitic" by none other than Abraham Foxman, who has developed something of a reputation for never seeing the funny side of anything.
In his March 23 Slate piece, An Army of Extremists, Hitch takes to task a select group of Israelis who he seems ready to hold particularly responsible for what he describes as "atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza." Intriguingly, though, he doesn't point his finger at the Israeli Government that gave the order for the Christmas and New Year slaughter in Gaza, nor the military command that planned and carried out the strategy, nor the plane crews or the grunts on the ground who were directly responsible for committing various atrocities. More remarkable still, even Hamas and the Iranian "mullahs" are given a free pass, because this week, Hitch has other fish to fry in the shape of radical military rabbis and their "extremist clerical teachings" based squarely and literally on "what the Torah actually says."
Putting together some anecdotal evidence and mixing in some commentary on Moses ordering his troops to "slay every male among the children, and slay also every young woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man," Hitch builds up, not so much a case as an atmosphere of innuendo that religious fervor rather than naked power politics was the major factor behind the Gaza massacre. All of which leads him into a suitably dramatic and provocative final paragraph rant:
Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It's high time the United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such colonization constitutes a theft of another people's land but also because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public money on the establishment of any religion.
It is a relief to read Hitch drawing attention to the horrors of Gaza. This is, after all, a considerable improvement on how he dealt with the fallout from Operation Phantom Fury in which US forces recaptured control of Fallujah with the help of white phosphorous as an offensive weapon in 2004 and at the cost of a death toll significantly higher than in the recent Gaza offensive. All the same, I can't let go of the sneaking suspicion that he is deliberately seeking to divert attention away from the real perpetrators of the killing spree. Does he really mean to imply that if the IDF had sent in an army of atheists that the carnage would have been any less or any more cruel or merciless?
Since the Israelis are in a position to wipe out the entire 1.4 million population of Gaza with Biblical thoroughness if they so choose, it's fair to assume that such a degree of extermination is not their intention. The scale of death and destruction dealt out to the victims in the recent conflict was calibrated to achieve certain aims and communicate certain messages to interested parties. The language of the message was brutally harsh, but it couldn't have been composed by bunch of unsettled rabbis and rabid settlers working in tandem. It had to have come from the highest echelons of the Israeli state, and it is disingenuous of Hitch to suggest otherwise. But you'd expect nothing less from such an astute point man for the power elite who has previously tied Hitler's and Stalin's genocidal policies to Roman Catholicism and Russian Orthodox Christianity, respectively.
This also calls to mind Hitch's spirited attempt this January to pin the blame for the Bush administration's embrace of torture on pressure from below. Apart from Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton, he seems to think nobody in government in the US should ever be held accountable for the laws, limbs or lives they break. This is a refreshingly innovative stance both morally and constitutionally.
Stabler writes about the Great Contrarian's style of evangelizing for America's very own Party of God.
There are obviously better camouflaged inconsistencies than our boy's little dust up with the man upstairs. Sure, he makes endless desultory appearances and "debates;" to let us know that popular thinking on justice was not all it could have been 2000 years ago and that Noah's Ark was almost certainly a myth. This doesn't, however, feel like penance from a guy who has aided and abetted Theocracy in the U.S. in every way within his power in the last ten years.
Yes, some of this was just stupidity. Hitchens will often tell you that he has no interest in what an effective opponent has to say, or he has at least said so in the case of Al Gore and Alex Cockburn (the nuttiest morsels in the right wing fruit cake he seems to have endless time for); no such selective listening was used in the writing of Kevin Phillips's excellent "American Theocracy." The book pretty much nailed what led to Bush's born-again White House, puts it in historical context and rightfully predicted the disaster that was already starting to occur when it came out.
As for Hitchens on these matters, well, the unavoidable term is indeed stupid. Just as he promised to laugh in our faces if we brought up the Military Industrial Complex, Hitchens got very specific telling his readers that not only was the Bush White House intellectually formidable, there was no reason to worry about them where religion was concerned. He found that they really didn't go to church that much, from his experience. Hitchens even channeled literary icon Alfred E. Newman when it came to the appointment of Bible thumping John Ashcroft: "Well, every President is allowed one bad appointment." (What, me Worry?)
This all came crashing down when it came to light that the third most powerful person in the Department of Justice was born again bumpkin Monica Goodling, who had to cut a deal by testifying (in very limited terms) about the political AND religious basis She was using to hire and fire people, an obvious illegality. Bush's main man Gozales eventually had to go, but not before had served his Born Again President well.
Hitchens has never said a word about any of this. the Evangelical influence in Bush's White House received a whopping pass from The Media. Hitchens followed the crowd on Terry Shivo as well. It was the one time Hitchens criticized the White House; but also the the one time the Bible thumpers clearly overreached, Bush's attempt to intervene was unpopular with a public still giving Bush every benefit of the doubt after 9-11. But it only strengthened Bush's popularity with the flock; and it is quite possible this is all the man cared about anyway.
So while Hitchens is very occasionally rude to one of their icons when they die or have been disgraced, he leaves the live and thriving targets alone. The Republican Party is now, more than ever, a prop for the kingmakers and power brokers of the religious right, people quite blunt in there advocacy for Christianity as the State Religion of North America.
As you listen to Hitchens blather on about the story of Isaac and Abraham, it should not be forgotten that this is the Party Hitchens worked in an only slightly shifty way to empower.
The answer is that both of them are comfortable with selling the public aspects of mysticism.
Uri, as we all know, has long been using mystical knowledge to soften and reshape cutlery. Call him a Chacerian fraud if you like, but according to my mum, he once even managed to telepathically bend a couple of her best silver soup spoons while she was watching him on a live TV show hosted by Bill Grundy, or was it Michael Parkinson. So, nice one Yuri!
In Hitch's case, the knowledge involved is different, but it's none the less mystical for all that. It all boils down to his assertion that "morality is innate." This is a claim to innate knowledge, and innate knowledge is, like Uri's claim to be able to bend spoons without going through the laborious physical process of actually bending them, actually a form of mysticism. It's all in a marvelous article entitled The Mystical Ethics of the New Atheists by Alan Germani published in The Objective Standard. I'm reproducing a portion below, but if you want to explore how thoroughly Hitch has managed to disembowel himself with his own corkscrew, I recommend reading the whole thing.
In order to persuade religionists to abandon their dangerous beliefs, one must do more than show what is wrong with religion—one must provide something positive to fill the moral void. One must show that an objective morality exists and that it is based not on revelation or faith but on observable facts. One must show how morality is derived via reason from sensory evidence.
What do the New Atheists offer in this regard? What morality do they espouse—and how do they arrive at its principles?
Let us turn first to the ethical ideas of Christopher Hitchens.
"We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion," says Hitchens of himself and his fellow atheists in the opening pages of God Is Not Great. Although Hitchens exerts little effort elaborating what such an ethical life entails (he focuses primarily on demonstrating the follies of religious belief and arguing for a secular and scientific vs. supernatural understanding of the universe), he does assert his ethical views in statements scattered throughout his written works and public appearances. For instance, in one passage in God Is Not Great, he posits that men are naturally selfish and opines that perhaps we would be "better mammals" if we were not. Asked on ABC's Good Morning America to respond to those who ask him to consider the "good" that religion does, including its promotion of "charity" and "selflessness," Hitchens lauded as moral those "who live their lives in effect for others"—but insisted that atheists can lead such lives, too. These and similar statements show that Hitchens equates morality with altruism, the notion that being ethical consists in living for others.
How does Hitchens know" that this idea is true? What facts of reality does he cite in support of it? "[C]onscience," says Hitchens, "is innate," and "[e]verybody but the psychopath" has the "feeling" that this is so. This innate conscience" is what makes murder and theft "abhorrent to humans without any further explanation"; it is what gives children an "innate sense of fairness"; and it is what informs each of us of our "duty to others." In short, according to Hitchens, this "innate conscience" enables us to just know what is right and wrong—and altruism is right.
The notion of an "innate conscience" is, of course, not original to Hitchens; the history of philosophy is replete with appeals to a "moral sense" or "moral intuition" or "moral law within." But although many have appealed to such a sense, none has ever been able to overcome the fact that it is observationally false that humans possess an innate sense of right and wrong: Many people, and not just psychopaths, make horrifically bad choices that ruin their own lives, the lives of others, or both. And not all of these people know that their actions are morally wrong. On the contrary, many believe that their actions are morally justified. Among the countless counterexamples one could cite against any claim to an "innate conscience" is the fact that the 9/11 hijackers regarded their murderous actions not as abhorrent, but as sublime. Did these killers—and the millions of people in the Middle East who celebrated their actions—lack an innate conscience? Or did their innate consciences house different contents than those of Americans who reacted with horror to what they did?
Ironically, the claim to innate knowledge—the claim to "just knowing" something—is precisely what Hitchens and the other New Atheists condemn when they condemn faith. Accepting an idea on faith means accepting it when there is no evidence to support it. Claiming innate knowledge amounts to the same thing: claiming to "know" something apart from evidence.
The claim to "innate knowledge," like the claim to knowledge through faith, is a form of mysticism, the claim to a non-rational, non-sensory means of knowledge.
The fact is that moral ideas are not innate; like all ideas, they are created, chosen, learned—and they can be developed or accepted either rationally (via observation and logic) or irrationally (via non-rational means). Moral ideas can be founded on fact or based on feeling; they can be valid or invalid. The question is: How do we know whether a particular moral claim is valid or invalid? What is the standard of moral validity?
By insisting that moral ideas are innate, Hitchens shirks the vital task of identifying a moral standard—and thereby abdicates the possibility of grounding his anti-religion diatribes: How can religious belief be wrong if the "innate consciences" of billions of people tell them that it is right?
Would that this was the extent of Hitchens's failures.
In connection with his observationally false view that morality is innate, Hitchens subscribes to the idea that man is mentally and thus morally hampered by innate irrationality. As he puts it:
"Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder."
Hitchens further claims that man has a "religious impulse" or "worshipping tendency" and that religious faith exists and is ineradicable because "we are still-evolving creatures."
These are curious claims coming from an intellectual who seeks to change minds about morality. If man's ethical ideas were innate, if his biology predisposed him to irrationality, if he had no choice about whether to commit evil, then the entire field of morality—which presupposes that man does choose his actions—would not only be pointless; it would be impossible. If man cannot choose his actions, then he cannot have a guide to choosing his actions.
Although Hitchens may be adept at pointing out religious absurdities, he not only fails spectacularly when it comes to providing a valid secular alternative to the moral guidance provided by religion—he endorses essentially the same ethics as do religionists (altruism) and he arrives at this ethics by essentially the same means (mysticism). If this is the best the New Atheists have to offer in their efforts to lure people away from religion, they should not be surprised to find religionists ignoring them.
If he's said it once, he's said it a dozen times, the most recent being in the debate on God in Alabama covered here. In the course of his attempt to render God superfluous as an arbiter of right and wrong, Hitch once again came out with his familiar claim "morality is innate". Several things bother me about this piece of reasoning, not the least of which are that Hitch never actually bothers to define what he means by either "morality" or "innate", and that his theistic adversaries never seem to make the effort to challenge him to do so. These things are manifestly not self-evident, and without some explanatory scaffolding to fix them in place, the sentence "Morality is innate" is just another catchy but vacuously vague slogan.
Since Hitch has been singularly unhelpful in making himself clear, let's put on the dictionarian's duncecap and reach for Merriam Webster. First, "moral", which has four definitions: 1 a: a moral discourse, statement, or lesson b: a literary or other imaginative work teaching a moral lesson 2 a: a doctrine or system of moral conduct bplural : particular moral principles or rules of conduct 3: conformity to ideals of right human conduct 4: moral conduct : virtue
Moving onto "innate", Merriam-Webster gives three definitions: 1 : existing in, belonging to, or determined by factors present in an individual from birth : native , inborn 2 : belonging to the essential nature of something : inherent 3 : originating in or derived from the mind or the constitution of the intellect rather than from experience
Putting on my finest maths teacher's mortarboard and counting all my paws and claws, I make that three (definitions of "moral") times four (definitions of "innate") equals twelve possible meanings of the phrase "morality is innate". And for the swats at the top end of the class, I will write it out as an equation: 3 x 4 = 12.
Listing out these 12 combinations, we get:
M1 + I1: A moral discourse (etc.) is existing in (etc.) an individual from birth. M2 + I1: A system of moral conduct (etc.) is existing in (etc.) an individual from birth. M3 + I1: Conformity to ideals of right human conduct is existing in (etc.) an individual from birth. M4 + I1: Moral conduct is existing in (etc.) an individual from birth.
M1 + I2: A moral discourse (etc.) belongs to the essential nature of (humans). M2 + I2: A system of moral conduct (etc.) belongs to the essential nature of (humans). M3 + I2: Conformity to ideals of right human conduct belongs to the essential nature of (humans). M4 + I2: Moral conduct belongs to the essential nature of (humans).
M1 + I3: A moral discourse (etc.) is originating in or derived from the mind. M2 + I3: A system of moral conduct (etc.) is originating in or derived from the mind. M3 + I3: Conformity to ideals of right human conduct is originating in or derived from the mind. M4 + I3: Moral conduct is originating in or derived from the mind.
Although it isn't beyond the bounds of possibility that Hitch might have meant all of the above or none, we can narrow down the list considerably by removing the obviously nonsensical or self-contradictory statements. As even a contrarian is only allowed to get away with mutually contradicting multiple statements, and not self-contradictory single ones. Agreed?
Is there anything we can throw out on this basis? Well, right away I think the I1 statements can be deleted. Infants in the first year after birth do not conduct moral discourses nor do they think or act in ways that are commonly describe as "moral". When they scream at 100dB for attention, food or a change of nappy at 3:am, their parents don't consider usually this behavior as immoral, even though they may describe it as "bad".
Moving onto the I2 statements, the first, "A moral discourse (etc.) belongs to the essential nature of (humans)," is promising. Not everybody is morally upright, but almost all of us are practicing moral philosophers to some extent. Making moral judgements about other people's behavior is quintessentially human. It's one of the things that appears to set us apart from our primate cousins.
What of the second I2 statement, "A system of moral conduct (etc.) belongs to the essential nature of (humans)"? Yes, I think we can go along with that one. A system of moral conduct is among our defining characteristics.
As for the third I2 statement, "Conformity to ideals of right human conduct belongs to the essential nature of (humans)," we'll have to give that a miss. Our species, if anything, demonstrates a remarkable talent for non-conformity with the moral principles it professes to uphold.
The fourth I2 statement, "Moral conduct belongs to the essential nature of (humans)," is deliciously ambiguous. So yes and no to that one.
Moving onto the I3 statements, from my perspective they all ring true, although not, I suspect, in the way Hitch would have it. Morality in the sense of moral principles, rules, injunctions, obligations, prohibitions, and what not all originate in or are derived from the human mind. We thought the whole shebang up all by our collective selves. It's all 100% human brain material, just like the Gregorian calendar, compound interest, astrology and punk rock. Then, we looked at morality and saw that it was good, and so we thought up religion as an effective method of putting it into the brains of our children. This was, of course, back in the childhood of our species. There were giants on the earth in those days. Now we're well into adolescence and have put away childlike things, such as religious indoctrination. This could be the reason why we now take our lives in our hands every time we enter a subway station or walk home alone at night, although I prefer to blame the pernicious influence of trash TV on the impressionable minds of the young.
Some of you may have found the this parable a little difficult to wrap your head around, and I can only apologize for not refining it sufficiently before serving it up, but I can assure you there's a moral in there somewhere.
Gorgeous or Furious (take your pick of the adjectives) George Galloway has been officially barred entry to Canada. The UK's Channel 4 News on March 20 reported that "after an open letter of protest from Canada's Jewish Defense League, he's been declared inadmissible under the country's immigration act" — not that he has any intention of immigrating. (In the second half of the video you can see George debating a representative of the above group who thinks that being friendly with Israel's enemies is a perfectly valid reason not to be allowed into Canada.) For the Government, though, apparently it's on national security grounds, but worse than that, according to the Guardian, a Canadian government spokesman said that the decision would not be overturned for a man regarded as an "infandous street-corner Cromwell". Obviously the spokesman was an educated man — for a Canadian! And for those of us with a more pedestrian vocabulary, "infandous is an obsolete adjective meaning "Too odious to be expressed or mentioned," [from the Latin: infandus; pref. in- not + fari to speak]. Perhaps now the word will get a well-merited revival. After all, there's certainly no shortage of infandous little oiks about these days.
Checking up on the identity of this unusually articulate civil servant brought me to MetaFilter, which gave his name as "Canadian Immigration Spokesman Alykhan Velshi" and provided a link to his own Wikepedia page. (Even I haven't got one of them, as far as I know.) And by all accounts, Velshi is an odious little toad himself. Born in 1984, which makes him just 25 years old, he is:
a lawyer, writer, policy analyst, and senior aide to a Conservative cabinet minister. He is currently the Director of Communications and Parliamentary Affairs for Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney. Previously, Velshi was a foreign policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute and manager of research at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and co-founded the latter organization's Center for Law and Counterterrorism with Andrew C. McCarthy.
Velishi is just the type of young buck the forces of neo-conservatism are looking for these days to help push through their agenda of stomach-churning Decency. As the Wiki entry goes on:
Velshi has written extensively about American and Canadian foreign policy, particularly with regard to the Middle East. In a December 2002 letter to the National Post newspaper, he called on the Canadian government to ban the political wing of Hezbollah. While attending the LSE, he wrote an academic piece defending George W. Bush's argument for preemptive war in Iraq as being grounded in both "original texts on international law" and several historical precedents. Just before graduating, he wrote an article for the National Review entitled "Choosing Sides: The challenge for Muslims", in which he argued that moderate Muslims were often reluctant to counter what he described as "Islamist extremism". In January 2006, he criticized the Globe and Mail newspaper for referring to Israel's separation barrier as a "wall" rather than a "fence."
Lexicological talents apart, the boy wonder is not exactly infallible, as this rather cute example, again from Wik, attests:
Velshi was the official contact on a late 2007 government press release commemorating the Jewish celebration of Hannukah, wherein the festival was erroneously described as marking "the triumph of the Jewish people against tyranny more than two million years ago". He explained that the document went through several revisions before its release, and that the word "millenia" was accidentally changed to "million years" somewhere along the way.
Oh for the halcyon days when fences were made of privet, wood or linked chain, barriers built of concrete were called walls, traveler to Western nations were allowed to express political views openly, while civil servants were obliged to maintain a certain decorum and keep their own views to themselves!
On March 3, Christopher Hitchens debated John Lennox on the subject of God's greatness at Samford University in Birmingham Alabama, and a member of flickr named stepher has thoughtfully posted some photos of the event that will delight Hitchfans everywhere. In this one, our lad bears a passing resemblence to Brian Blessed as Augustus in I Claudius.
In this one, by steffer's friend Blair Scott, shows Hitch at his most Kiplingesque, although obviously not very happy about having to put up with a polystyrene cup.
A blogger named ockna gave a blow by blow commentary on the debate via an iphone. Here's the gist of Hitch's argument taken from his report.
6:25- Christopher Hitchens is delivering his opening. He is telling a story about southern culture stereotypes, and explaining the reasoning for an atheist point of view.
6:30- explaining differences between theism and deism.
He is refuting of the idea that anyone is in a position to know the will or mind of a deity.
6:35- it is arrogance to think that humanity is the purpose and center of the universe.
6:57- Hitchens is up to deliver rebuttal.
he is rebuking the use of Einstein as an argument point for faith. Einstein wasn’t a man of faith.
7:00- we will soon be nothing, it will all be over eventually. “we have an appointment with the andromeda galaxy, and our sun will swell up and destroy us. who designed that?” (paraphrased)
7:05- the Christian explaination means we are under a tyrannical despotism; thought crime, created sick and ordered to be well. unfreedom.
to think this way puts you under real world control, subject to other men who claim to have god on their side.
7:20- q&a time. “are you more at odds with the idea of original sin and would we be better of without it?”
Hitchens basically says yes, but for religion as a whole.
“why is one myth or folk tale more true than another?”
Hitchens: prophecies are easily fulfilled stories, and many people in the bible accused Christ of being a false prophet. bronze age superstitions
Hitchens: on the virgin birth; more likely that the laws on nature were suspended or that a hebrew woman would lie?
“are you willing to accept the man has no greater dignity or meaning?”
Hitchens: “if we didn’t have these ideas, we wouldn’t be as advanced as were are today as a living species”
7:41- Hitchens: discussion about human and animal sacrifice. the idea that we are made in the image of god is a meaningless statement, we are primates. genetically 98% compatible with chimps.
“63% of Americans do not accept evolution, what are the consequences of this distrust of science?”
Hitchens: Most of them don’t even know what it is, so they say they don’t believe; it isn’t a fair test of anything.
“what advice do you give to someone who left deism but is still in that system (like samford)?”
Hitchens: leave it behind and study literature and find other consolation and beauty. emancipate yourself from the idea that you are a plaything on a supernatural being.
[Closing remarks} If everything that cannot be explained is attributable to a transcendant being, then nothing is unexplainable when that can be invoked.
Replace anything in history that refers to racism with the catholic church, and it will still be true. Nazis sought Vatican approval. explaination of the inquisition and Stalin’s use of the Russian orthodox church.
“morality is innate, and it is nice when religion catches up.”
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Hitchens' Tortured Logic That He Isn't Pro-Torture
It seems that our hated enemy, the Hitch-beast, has been roaring loudly about a throwaway line in an upcoming book by the British writer and philosopher John Gray. From The Times:
In these grey times, there’s nothing like a vicious, colourful but slightly pointless literary feud to bring a bit of gaiety to the nation. We can no longer rely on Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton, who have gone rather quiet after their ferocious squabble about terrorism and Islam. So the country now looks to author Christopher Hitchens and philosopher John Gray.
Gray has a book out next month, Gray’s Anatomy, which includes a chapter on torture. He mentions that Hitchens endured Guantanamo-style waterboarding – where water is continually poured over a prisoner’s face – as part of his research into the same subject. “Hitchens – a notable partisan of Enlightenment – defends [torture] as part of the global struggle to defend Enlightenment values against Islamist fundamentalism,” says Gray. Hitchens is furious at the accusation that he favours torture. “This is a direct falsification of my views,” he splutters. Light the blue touch paper and retire.
And it appears his blustering has successfully managed to get Gray and his publisher to back off:
Hitchens was concerned about a line in the introduction to Gray's new essay collection that suggested that after he briefly experienced the torture technique of waterboarding, in which water is poured repeatedly over a prisoner's face, he defended the practice as part of the global struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. After learning of his objections, Penguin admitted that the line was a mistake and that Hitchens has been consistently opposed to torture.
"John made a mistake, Christopher picked it up, we fixed it and John is embarrassed he made a wrong assumption and I am embarrassed not to have picked it up," said the book's editor Simon Winder.
The book, Gray's Anatomy, is now being reprinted minus the offending line, ready for publication by Penguin imprint Allen Lane on 2 April.
But this at once raises the question: has Hitchens really been "consistently opposed to torture" as it is claimed?
Basically, the short answer is no.
Chris' criticism of the Bush Administration's systematic use of torture was conspicuous by its absence during the vast majority of Dubya's time in office, and only in twilight of Bush II's reign did Chris decide to start grandstanding about it in a pathetic and transparent attempt to mitigate some of the damage that he has done to his reputation after two long terms of squalid and shameful apologetics for the Reactionary Right.
Hitchens spent most of the Bush Administration straddling the issue when he actually said anything at all, but sometimes he even outright supported it in practice, making all sorts of disingenuous excuses for it in the process. Aside from simply canvassing for the election of an Administration that was obviously engaging in torture and flagrantly ripping up the Geneva Conventions and other articles of international law, Chris wrote, for instance, a September 2005 piece for The Weekly Standard, entitled "A War To Be Proud Of." He no doubt expects us to have tossed this into the memory hole, but who can forget Hitchens' sophistic opening to that article when we wrote:
LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."
I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one begin?
This is a clear cut and incontrovertible case of Chris defending what was going on at Abu Ghraib, namely torture (which he even subtly concedes within this excerpt while nevertheless condoning it). There's simply no denying that he's defending torture here when he even goes to the extent of explicitly stating that he's on the side of those defending Abu Ghraib. "How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have been placed on the defensive in this manner?" he laments. This would be like some Soviet commissar earnestly insisting that he is against torture and for human rights, while at the same time denouncing critics of the Gulags.
Even today, it's not clear that Hitchens is opposed to torture. Maybe I've missed something, but he hasn't clearly come out against extraordinary rendition, which is, as we all know by now, just a euphemism in the imperial lexicon for torture. I've never seen a word from him on the CIA's secret prisons and the "black sites" it currently operates throughout the world. He's not calling for Bagram Air Base to be closed down due to the illegal and unconscionable abuse of its prisoners. And, while I suppose this is not supporting torture per se, he makes an awfully disgraceful case that the Bush Administration is not to blame for torture, but that they were forced to do all this because of the pressure from the American public.
So I think it's fair to say that on the whole John Gray's charge that Hitchens supports torture, which he now claims was an accident, turns out to be rather serendipitous on his part. A pity he has retracted the charge.
More and more accounts of the Brawl in Beirut are now starting to emerge, and let's face it, everyone loves to watch a good punch up in the playground. So we at Hitchens Watch are happy to oblige with as much gossip as we can get. After the distinctly antiHitchensian Leninist perspective on the hostilities posted by Hidari the other day, it's only right that we give some publicity to a more sympathetic account of how and why the Hitch was beaten, blooded and bruised, but certainly not subdued, and miraculously and fortunately not seriously injured.
This time the commentary is taken from the blog of Michael J. Totten, and it reads like one of the wilder chapters in a 1930s hard-boiled detective novel—a sort of cross between The Lebanese Falcon and Indy Jones and the Wimpey Bar of Doom. In addition, Totten provides a background narrative of sorts, both to establish mood and to provide a plausible justification for Hitch's initial act of vandalism, which set the whole episode off.
Some SSNP members claim the emblem on their flag isn’t a swastika, but a cyclone. Many say they cannot be National Socialists, as were the Nazis, because they identify instead as Social Nationalists, whatever that means.
It means it's OK to scribble "No, no, Fuck the SSNP" on their posters.
Outside observers don't find this credible. The SSNP, according to the Atlantic in a civil war era analysis, “is a party whose leaders, men approaching their seventies, send pregnant teenagers on suicide missions in booby-trapped cars. And it is a party whose members, mostly Christians from churchgoing families, dream of resuming the war of the ancient Canaanites against Joshua and the Children of Israel. They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, 'Greetings to You, Syria,' to the strains of 'Deutschland, Deutschland über alles'; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion.”
Which makes it perfectly reasonable to scribble "No, no, Fuck the SSNP" on their posters.
They wish to resurrect the ancient pre-Islamic and pre-Arabic Syria and annex Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, and parts of Turkey and Egypt to Damascus. Jews would have no place in the resurrected Syrian empire.
Which makes it a noble and righteous act to scribble "No, no, Fuck the SSNP" on their posters.
Hitchens of Arabia at his most dashing. "I'll be buggered," he must have been thinking, as the swarthy arms of his assailants gripped him tightly around the neck and he was dragged to the ground, "if I let them do to me what they did to T. E. Lawrence!"
But it was a reckless act all the same, to mess with the pre-Islamic pre-Arabic pan-Syrian Nazo-fascists on their home turf, as eye-witness Totten goes on to relate how he, Hitch and a third Englishman, Johnathan Foreman were attacked and prevented from departing the scene by a young thug who lacked even the decency to scream at them in English.
Christopher wanted to pull down their marker, but couldn’t. He stuck to his principles, though, and before I could stop him he scribbled “No, no, F*** the SSNP” in the bottom-right corner with a black felt-tipped pen.
I blinked several times. Was he really insulting the Syrian Social Nationalist Party while they might be watching? Neither Christopher nor Jonathan seemed to sense what was coming, but my own danger signals went haywire.
An angry young man shot across Hamra Street as though he’d been fired out of a cannon. “Hey!” he yelled as he pointed with one hand and speed-dialed for backup on his phone with the other.
“We need to get out of here now,” I said.
But the young man latched onto Christopher’s arm and wouldn’t let go. “Come with me!” he said and jabbed a finger toward Christopher's face. They were the only words I heard him say in English.
Christopher tried to shake off his assailant, but couldn’t.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said.
The young man said something sinister-sounding in Arabic.
“Do you speak English?” I said.
He didn't, and I'm not sure why I even bothered to ask. I hoped to calm him down, but Christopher, Jonathan, and I needed to leave. Standing around and trying to reason with him would serve his needs, but not ours. His job was to hold us in place until the muscle crew showed up in force.
“Let go of him!” I said, and shoved him without result. He clamped onto Christopher like a steel trap.
I stepped into the street and flagged down a taxi.
“Get in the car!” I said.
Christopher, sensing rescue, managed to shake the man off and got into the back seat of the taxi. Jonathan and I piled in after him. But the angry young man ran round to the other side of the car and got in the front seat.
I shoved him with both hands, but I didn’t have the leverage to eject him with the back of the front seat between us. The driver could have tried to push the man out, but he didn’t. I sensed he was afraid.
So my companions and I got out of the car on the left side. The SSNP man bolted from the front seat on the right side. Then I jumped back in the car and locked the doors on that side.
“He’ll just unlock it,” Jonathan said.
He was right. I hadn’t noticed that the windows were rolled down on the passenger side. The young man reached in, laughed, and calmly unlocked the front passenger door.
I stepped back into the street, and the young man latched once again onto Christopher. No one could have stopped Jonathan and me had we fled, but we couldn’t leave Christopher to face an impending attack by himself. The lone SSNP man only needed to hold one of us still while waiting for his squad.
A police officer casually ambled toward us as though he had no idea what was happening.
“Help,” Christopher said to the cop. “I’m being attacked!”
Our assailant identified himself to the policeman, and the officer took three steps back as though he did not want any trouble. He could have unholstered his weapon and stopped the attack on the spot, but even Lebanon’s armed men of the law fear the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.
A Lebanese man in his thirties ran up to me and offered to help.
“What’s happening?!” he said breathlessly as he trembled in shock and alarm.
I don’t remember what I told him, and it hardly matters. There wasn’t much he could do, and I did not see him again.
“Let go of him!” I said to the SSNP spotter and tried once more to throw him off Christopher.
“Hit him if you have to,” I said to Christopher. “We’re out of time and we have to get out of here.”
“Back to the hotel,” Christopher said.
“No!” I said. “We can’t let them know where we’re staying.”
Christopher wouldn’t strike his assailant, so I sized the man up from a distance of six or so feet. I could punch him hard in the face, and he couldn't stop me. I could break his knee with a solid kick to his leg, and he couldn't stop me. He needed all his strength just to hold onto Christopher while I had total freedom of movement and was hopped up on adrenaline. We hadn't seen a weapon yet, and I was pretty sure he didn't have one. I was a far greater threat to him at that moment than he was to me by himself.
Christopher, Jonathan, and I easily could have joined forces and left him bleeding and harmless in the street. I imagine, looking back now, that he was afraid. But I knew the backup he’d called would arrive any second. And his backup might be armed. We were about to face the wrath of a militia whose members can do whatever they want in the streets with impunity. Escalating seemed like the worst possible thing I could do. The time to attack the young man was right at the start, and that moment had passed. This was Beirut, where the law of the jungle can rule with the flip of a switch, and we needed to move.
I saw another taxi parked on the corner waiting for passengers, and I flung open the door.
“Get in, get in,” I said, “and lock all the doors!”
Traffic was light. If the driver would step on the gas with us inside, we could get out of there. Christopher managed to fling the man off him again. It looked hopeful there for a second. But you know where this story is going.
We knew it, too, because six or seven furious men showed up all at once and faced us in the street. They stepped in front of the taxi and cut off our escape.
None wore masks, which was a good sign. And I didn't see any weapons. But they were well-built and their body language signaled imminent violence. We were in serious trouble, and I ran into the Costa Coffee chain across the street and yelled at the waiter to call the police.
“Go away!” he said and lightly pushed me in the shoulder to make his point. “You need to leave now!”
This was no way to treat a visitor, especially not in the Arab world where guests are accorded protection. But getting in the way of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party can get a man killed, or at least beaten severely. Just a few months ago the SSNP attacked a Sunni journalist on that very street and sent him bleeding and broken to the hospital in front of impotent witnesses. A Lebanese colleague told me he was brutally assaulted merely for filming the crew taking down the SSNP flags as the prime minister ordered. “He didn't do anything to them,” she said. “He just filmed their flag.”
Christopher was encircled by four or five of them. They were geared up to smash him, and I reached for his hand to pull him away. One of the toughs clawed at my arm and left me with a bleeding scratch and a bruise. I expected a punch in the face, but I wasn’t the target.
Christopher was the target. He was the one who had defaced their sign. One of the guys smacked him hard in the face. Another delivered a roundhouse kick to his legs. A third punched him and knocked him into the street between two parked cars. Then they gathered around and kicked him while he was down. They kicked him hard in the head, in the ribs, and in the legs.
Jonathan and I had about two and a half seconds to figure out what we should do when one of the SSNP members punched him in the side of the head and then kicked him.
I stoically accepted that I was about to get beaten myself. The fear drained out of me as I was reasonably sure they weren't going to kill us. They didn’t have weapons or masks. They just wanted to beat us. There were too many for us to fend off. We lost the fight before it even began. I could have called for backup myself, but I didn’t think of it – a mistake I will not make again. I have my own muscle crew on speed dial now for protection.
Then the universe all of a sudden righted itself.
Christopher managed to pull himself up as a taxi approached in the street. I stepped in front of the car and forced the driver to stop. “Get in!” I yelled. Christopher got in the car. Jonathan got in the car. I got in the car. We slammed down the locks on the doors with our fists. The street was empty of traffic. The way in front of the taxi was clear. The scene for our escape was set.
“Go!” I said to the driver.
“Where?” the driver said.
“Just drive!” I said.
One of the SSNP guys landed a final blow on the side of Christopher's face through the window, but the driver sped away and we were free.
It was a kindness, demonstrating that traditional Arab hospitality is very much alive and well, that the SSNP guys let the tourists off so lightly. They might have fared a lot worse had Hitch drawn a black moustache on a John McCain poster at last year's GOP convention venue. And happily, they all lived to tell the tale, and tell it they undoubtedly will to the delight of wine bar, cocktail party and chat show audiences the length and breadth of Post-Christendom. We all know that our favorite raconteur, with a gesture warning the sommelier to keep his distance, will relate it as a tale of brave if not exactly unflinching defiance in the face of fascism. His companions in the fellowship, however, will likely draw a rather different moral from the story: that you can't take him anywhere, can you?
Oh I know I know....this story of our tubby little crusader (sic) in Lebanon is just going to run and run. Unlike the lad himself, who merely waddles, albeit invariably towards the American led Millenium.
Nevertheless, following the ever excellent Lenin's Tomb, we come across one of the best descriptions of precisely what happened when our little fat friend fought, bare handed, the forces of darkness.
To avoid attention from Britain's draconian libel laws (not that Hitchens would stoop so low, I'm sure), I should add that I do not know and have no opinions on whether or not this story is 'true'. But it's interesting, no?
I would belatedly draw your attention to a recent visit to Lebanon by Christopher Hitchens. There on the invitation of the Lebanese Renaissance Foundation (a Washington-based lobby group aligned led by a Lebanese Forces member and aligned to the right-wing Hariri cult), he seems to have spent his time being laughed at by Lebanese leftists, especially after bigging up the sleazy opportunist and sectarian Walid Jumblatt as a 'true revolutionary', and leering at the girls at Hezbollah rallies. One afternoon, after a pub visit, he received a bit of a kicking from several members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The original story that sent the blogosphere humming was that he had written 'fuck the SSNP', or some similar sentiment, on an SSNP poster, thus risking abduction and torture by the party's militias. This was Hitchens' own version of events, and the thought of such dubious dutch courage had some of the sycophants quivering with delight. It turned out, however, that he had actually been defacing a memorial to a Lebanese resistance fighter and SSNP member named Khalid Alwan, who had shot two Israeli soldiers during the occupation. And there were no militias anywhere, just a bunch of pissed off civilians. To be frank, if they couldn't take Hitchens and his tipsy bozo friends down, they aren't all that impressive. This unfortunate episode became especially poignant when Hitchens interpreted his actions as part of a personal war against fascism. "One must take a stand. One simply must", he drooled. High kampf indeed.
Forget that the Lebanese Forces, part of the coalition which welcomed Hitchens, is a fascist militia movement co-founded by the Phalange. The post-irony Hitchens doesn't have to notice trifling inconsistencies like this. I just raise this amusing anecdote because it contains an interesting object lesson in the ideological mapping of the Decents. The SSNP are said to be the real fascists here. It is tempting to say that the sense in which the SSNP is fascist for the purposes of this discussion, is the sense in which anyone not wholly signed up the Project for the New American Century is a fascist. I suspect that there is no political force in Lebanon outside of the March 14th movement that Hitchens and his emulators would not describe as fascist. But the Decents point out that the SSNP have a symbol that looks like it might be a swastika if you look at it with one eye closed. With slightly more force, they point out that the SSNP are antisemitic, which is true. They point out that the SSNP possesses violent militias, which is also true - they saw action in the 2006 war against the IDF invasion. They aren't the only ones to have militias, of course. Several of their civilian members were slaughtered by Hariri militias in Halba last year and their offices have been repeatedly firebombed and attacked by the supporters of Jumblatt. One might add that the party has historically been right-wing and anticommunist, which is one reason why the United States considered them allies for covert action. Their cadre shifted to the left somewhat during the 1960s, and as a result the party has at times been erroneously described as belonging to the 'secular left'. Though they oppose confessionalism, they also aim to unite much of the land around the Levant from Turkey to Jordan under a 'Greater Syria', an idea based on the eccentric racial nationalism of the founder Antun Sa'adeh.
Claims that the SSNP was "modelled" on the Nazi party, whom their founder is said to have admired, are also popular currency in the right-wing blogosphere. It is a claim that is featured prominently on the party's wikipedia page, albeit you might flood your pants if you check some of the references provided. However incautious such claims are, there is a 'there' there. When the party was founded among a tiny intellectual cadre at the American University of Beirut in 1932, its doctrines bore certain (superficial) affinities to fascism. It was not uncommon for anticolonial intellectuals, raiding the intellectual arsenal of the European philosophes, to alight upon Johann Gottfried von Herder's romantic nationalism, as well as the racial doctrines that had been generated out of the colonial encounter. This was a case of stealing the oppressors' jackboots. And some of the anti-colonial movements forged in that era exhibited great interest in Germany as a once defeated nation that had renewed itself. Such germanophilia did not of itself entail sympathy with Nazism. It did lead to the SSNP setting their anthem to the music of Das Deutschlandlied (or 'Deutschland über alles' as is it inaccurately known outside Germany), even if this is a tune that pre-dates the existence of Germany as a nation-state, never mind the existence of the Third Reich.
But matters are far more complex than this. The origin of this debate, as it were, is in the counterinsurgency of the French colonial authorities. The colonists accused the party of ties to Italian and German fascism the better to harrass the activists and prosecute the leadership. It was intended to undercut the popularity of the party (which it would not have had, if it had just been a fascist organisation). The charges were never substantiated, and the party went to great lengths to dissociate itself from both fascism and Nazism. This doesn't mean there were no pro-fascist tendencies in the party. The late 1930s and early 1940s were characterised by a tremendous struggle within the party between those who maintained that a pro-Axis position was logical for both strategic anticolonial reasons for doctrinal ones, and those who supported Sa'adeh's position that the party was neither democratic nor 'totalitarian'. But the latter position won. The Third Reich, for its part, had little interest in meddling in British and French colonial interests. Indeed, it was initially more interested in encouraging the Yishuv than in making any alliances with Arab leaders. Whatever affinities Sa'adeh et al may have had with the precepts of romantic nationalism, irrationalism and authoritarianism that underpinned fascist ideology, the relationship to fascism as such was always far more ambiguous than is implied in most of the polemical writing on this topic.
This caveat applies to a great deal of writing on nationalist currents in the Middle East, especially those that emerged the interwar period: the Arabs, we are told by neocons and their liberal confederates alike, were all in with the Nazis. Peter Wien's study of Iraqi Arab nationalism is a riposte to just this kind of scandal-mongering. And this is the only reason that Hitchens little street-fight with the SSNP is worth mentioning. For here is the point: it is a common trope of Zionist and imperialist ideology in general that nationalism in the Middle East has a special ideational affinity with fascism. If you wanted to redouble the critique, you could simply replace the term 'fascism' with 'totalitarianism' which effectively operates as a synomym for all non-liberal political forces in this discussion. This fits into a broader set of stories about how Israel's military aggression is actually thwarting the prospect of another Holocaust, and of how US imperialism and its local auxiliaries are at present an authentic force for democracy in a region characterised by 'fanaticism' and 'totalitarianism' of various stripes. That the political economy of Aramco imperialism has tended to involve the US in supporting the most right-wing and anti-democratic forces in the Middle East is yet one more of those trivial inconsistencies (between fact and fancy) which we need pay no attention to.
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Hitch on Hewitt: The Middle East, Obama's Stimulus
That worthless dog Hitchens on Hewitt the other day. Apparently, in Vanity Fair we shall soon hear him tell the harrowing tale of his puerile prank that went awry in Lebanon, er, sorry, I meant hear the tale of his heroic hand-to-hand combat with fascist stormtroopers on the front lines of Lebanon.
Listen as Hitchens pisses off Hewitt by citing Paul Krugman to argue that Obama's stimulus didn't contain enough spending in it. Hewitt is so annoyed by this he gives Hitchens a little cheap shot after the interview, in the next segment. Within a shrill rant about "President Pork" [Obama] Hewitt decides to add, mockingly: "You just heard Hitchens, uh, blast him for spending too little, I dunno what Christopher is.. I dunno, maybe did we catch him at a restaurant? Yeah we caught him at a restaurant, cause there's nothing little about the amount of money they spent..." I don't understand the relevance of Chris being interviewed at a restaurant, maybe Hewitt is trying to obliquely imply that he's drinking. If that's really the case, we here at The Watch are appalled, just appalled, by such crude ad hominem.
Hewitt also tries to get Hitchens to go along with him when he hints that the supporters of Chas Freeman, Obama's pick to chair the National Intelligence Council but who had to withdraw his name due to controversy, are crypto-anti-Semites. He even tries to get Hitchens to attack his own friend, the recently converted Communist Andrew Sullivan:
HH: But your pal, Andrew Sullivan, believes that the Jewish lobby took him out.
CH: Well, I don’t have any evidence to support Andrew’s contention.
Hewitt despises Comrade Sully, demonstrated for instance in that infamous interview back in 2006 where from the get go Hewitt was out to lynch Sullivan, though Sully blew up and pretty much made a complete fool out of him. Basicially, Hewitt doesn't think that Sully is a Christian because he's a homosexual. Though he wasn't honest enough to say it straight out like that.
My, what lovely people Hitchens associates with these days.
Last month in Beirut, they laughed louder at Hitch than they ever did at Billy Connolly. Indeed, their guffaws could be heard echoing the length of the Levant. And if the online grapevine is anything to go by, they really were laughing at — not with — him.
From In the Middle of the East, the blog of a Beirut-based translator going under the name Zentor, we have an informative critical account of underwhelming mediocrity of the journos on the Forbes St.Valentine's three-day Beirut press junket. And lamentably, if this is anything to go by, Hitch was no less mediocre than his fellow scribblers.
To see how not to write articles on Lebanon if you want to retain even a shred of credibility, read this utterly ignorant and blatantly biased drivel by one Lawrence Osborne - and do keep in mind that the editors of Forbes Magazine have already changed numerous factual errors in the piece on their website after Angry Arab and other commentators pointed them out - I mean this guy actually manages to call the March 14 faction ‘March 15′ - while he was on a Hariri-sponsored 3-day trip to Lebanon! Still unedited in the article are jewels like ‘the “March 14 movement” is opposed by the “March 8 movement” of Islamicists‘…Quite apart from the fact that the good sir Osborne presumably wants to refer simply to ‘islamists’ (maybe he is trying to sound scholarly?), he is saying this about a movement that includes Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement - the largest party of the Lebanese christians; the Marada of Franjieh, also entirely made up of christians; and the SSNP - an avowedly secular party made up mostly of christians and alawis, a an offshoot of shiism denounced by islamists. And how did Ahmed Chalabi end up in this article? I mean, he has the same neocon connection as the M16s (sorry, M14s…), but how exactly is he relevant to Lebanese politics? Also on this press junket was the by now utterly alzheimer-stricken Christopher Hitchens, who gave a lecture at the AUB last week where he managed to call feudal landlord and predictable weathervane Walid Jumblatt a ‘true revolutionary’ - the collective Lebanese audience nearly died laughing… Hitchens is a former leftist turned ardent neocon, which is a shame becaues it discredits his not uninteresting writings about religion as a convinced atheist. I recently read his 2007 book ‘god is not Great - how religion poisons everything’, which, although it doesn’t contribute any new arguments or insights, is a highly enjoyable 300-page anti-religious rant annex atheist-manifesto. It is only marred by Hitchens’ irritating habit of always trying to paint islam as just that little bit more irrational and destructive than christianity. And by every inane and wholly uninformed comment he makes to serve his neocon-allied March 14 paymasters in this country.
That last link goes to an article by Sean at a site called The Human Province, entitled Hitchens in Beirut, of which I reproduce a big chunk below. Interested parties please pop over there as Sean was actually at the laughable lecture.
The topic of the lecture was billed as “Who are the revolutionaries in today’s Middle East?” but he decided to talk about “the ironies of history” instead. One of the ironies he mentioned was schmoozing in the White House with Marxist Kurds from Iraq, including Talabani, the president of Iraq. He asked what it had taken to get to that ironic point. When it came time to ask questions, this was my query: “You asked what it had taken for you and your Kurdish friends to be hanging out at the White House, and even though it was a rhetorical question, I think it has a very concrete answer: hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. So at the risk of confusing you with Madeleine Albright, I’d like to ask you this: Was it worth it?”
He then asked me if I was putting the responsibility of the Iraqi civil war on America, to which I said, of course, because despite intent the effect of the war has been disastrous. He then proceeded to say that the dead of Iraq since 2003 was incomparable to the number of people killed by Saddam. I said that in fact it was comparable and per annum, in any case, recent years were actually worse than the Saddam years, on average. And that’s when he said that anyone who compared the two would “look a fool, as you do now.” But counting the dead isn’t very helpful, and that’s not the point I was making. My question was actually a sincere one, because while I was against the war in Iraq, I had my doubts and have often wondered if in the (very) long-term, even with American incompetence in prosecuting the war, Iraqis would eventually decide that it had been a net win. Needless to say, I’m skeptical, and even the brutal status quo of the Saddam regime is now looked upon with nostalgia by many Iraqis I know.
But Hitchens, as he repeatedly showed with his witty but asshole-ish British public school boy debating style, was more interested in being contrarian and entertaining than he was in actual dialogue. (At one point, he told the audience, “I know 50 times more about these subjects than anyone in the room.”) He brought out one logical fallacy after another but seemed most fond of the false choice. If you were against the war, then you were for Saddam and his sons raping women. If you were against the war, then you were for Libyan nuclear weapons as well as Pakistani nuclear proliferation via Khan, despite the fact that negotiations had been moving along for years to get Tripoli to give up its nuclear program.
In order to illustrate how he knows so much more about Lebanon than anyone else in the room, when pressed, the only “true revolutionary” he could come up with was Walid Joumblatt. To this, the audience mostly just laughed out loud. I would have felt sorry for Hitchens if he hadn’t been such a pompous ass.
I spend far too much time reading when I should be working and one of the areas I track are the right wing columns and blogs. Probably the conservative character I have most time for is the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan.
All right, real frothing conservatives like Coulter, Hannityor Pammy Cakes would not call him a conservative but that's his own self title.
I came across this piece by him while thumbing through his latest posts and the similarities and differences with CH were so overwhelming I wanted to share.
Sullivan says "But again, I understand these things take time. I'm lucky to be here at all and have seen enormous progress in my lifetime. The real sucker-punch to my faith in American government was the embrace of torture against terror suspects. Since it came as part of a response to Islamist evil that I had supported, in a war I had aggressively mongered for, shock was intermixed with guilt, and guilt ceded to a kind of patriotic grief. It is the flipside of love - this kind of grief. It has not abated because there has been no real accounting and no real responsibility taken - just as in the church. The people who really held power, who really should have taken the fall: they are still unrepentant and defiant, even contemptuous of their critics.
The conservative movement is another institution of a sort that has come undone before my eyes. It really was a formative part of my identity as a young man, and yet, for all the reasons I spelled out in my last book, it is not a movement that I feel comfortable in any longer. It actually appalls me daily. "
For me, it is a very honorablemeaculpa unlike the mealy mouthed offering of another immigrant to America and the right our Christopher's writings on torture. It is interesting to watch a grown man move from right to left even as we watch Christopher move from left to right. It's just surprising (to me) that it is the conservative who is more honest about his misjudgements.
Here's an interesting interview with Hitchens, back in those sunny days of yore that were the early nineties, where he sharply criticizes and exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the Neoconservative movement for being an aggregate of shrill, self-righteous thugs. Take a look at after the 8:50 mark in this clip:
Brian Lamb quotes Hitchens from a fine piece he did for Harper's in 1990 entitled "How Neoconservatives Perish," later included in his book For Sake Of Argument, where Chris had perceptively pointed out that the Neoconservatives were not much more than a bunch of heavy-handed hooligans and ruffians whose modus operandi largely consisted of denouncing with a torrent of abuse any who had dared to question the inherent goodness and saintliness of the Holy State and its mission to spread love and peace throughout the world, employing a host of stale stock phrases and terms in the process. To quote from the essay:
Words are watched and weighed carefully in this crowd, which makes them a pleasure to monitor. (I remember a neo-con speechmaker once saying that is was no accident the Russian language contained no word for detente. He was abashed, but by no means crushed, to be told that the English language apparently didn't contain one either.) It is not unfair to say that their politics have mainly consisted of key words and phrases, uttered with the proper sneer: 'Finlandization', 'disinformation', 'dupe', 'ripe fruit', 'choke point', 'fellow-traveller', 'strategic lifeline', 'fifth columnist', 'dagger pointed at the heart of', 'gullible', 'useful idiot', 'satellite state', 'inflitration', 'Chamberlain's umbrella', 'captive nation', 'peace through strength', 'moral equivalence', 'way of life', 'weakness and passivity', 'present danger'.
Later in the essay, he intriguingly writes the following, which likely explains his post-9/11 attraction to the movement:
It [Neoconservatism] has been also centrally preoccupied with power and more explicitly concerned with its cultivation and exercise than any other comparable intellectual movement.
In responding to Lamb, Hitchens argues that since the fall of the USSR the Neocons had "lost their ability to be able to bully and blackmail the oppostion and accuse it of treachery and sympathy for the other side, that was one of the reasons that the right wing was nostalgic for the Cold War, because it's lost its free pass as being the patriots while everyone else was disloyal."
What's interesting is how many of these very terms Hitchens once censured he now uses in his new role as the hammer of Islam, most notably dubious concepts like "moral equivalence" (while making facile "moral equivalences" between jihadism and fascism himself mind you), and how he has dedicated much of his time in the post-9/11 era to despicably engaging in the same browbeating against the Left that he once derided the Neocons for. For instance, his unconscionable behaviour in maligning anti-war voices, like George Galloway, with ridiculous accusations of being fifth-columnists and fellow-travelers of the Baathist Party, and not "anti-war, but pro-war on the other side" as he has often formulated it. Later in the interview, he names Noam Chomsky as "one of the most extraordinary moral beings of our time." How odd for him to have swept such a being into the dustbin forever, in one fell swoop, over an issue as fatuous and vacuous as so-called "moral equivalence," which, as I said, Hitchens is guilty of himself to the extent the term has any meaning.
The Neoconservative Hitchens should take a page out of his own essay and drop these squalid tropes and this routine before his reputation and credibility has completely perished for good.
“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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