In the concluding chapter to David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories, he suggests that the political climate has an influence on the types of conspiracies that become prevalent and also that conspiracy theories are subject to fashion as opposed to being timeless truths. Following World War Two, America was gripped by McCarthyism, which stemmed from the idea that the Soviet Union was quietly taking over America from the inside. Following the assassination of Kennedy, however left-wing conspiracies emerged in which it was believed that the right wing of the establishment were attempting to kill off progressive movements by executing its leaders – JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X etc…
In Britain, in the 1980s, against the backdrop of the fears of the Cold War and Margaret Thatcher’s heavy-handed dismantling of the miner’s unions it became popular to believe that the state would resort to all kinds of foul means to get its way and to be uncompromising towards its “enemies”. Thatcher was alleged to have said in a private meeting about the National Union of Miners, “In the Falklands, we had to fight the enemy without. Here it is the enemy within.” In fact, covert operations within the miner’s union were used to break up pickets and give advance notice of where strikes would take place. It was also a time in which nuclear missiles had been deployed to Europe and tensions between the West and the Soviet Union were at their peak.
In 1984, while these troubles were taking place, a 78-year-old rose gardener, Hilda Murrell was raped and murdered. Two distinct conspiracy theories emerged from this death. One of those was that this energetic campaigner had been killed by someone from within the nuclear power industry as she opposed not only the military use of nuclear power but also opposed nuclear power plants such as the Sizewell B reactor. Another theory, which was propounded by Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, gained popularity as it shone a certain darkness on Thatcher’s recent re-election victory. Because Thatcher had largely been re-elected on the strength of Britain’s victory in the Falkland’s War it became widely believed she had made the conflict inevitable and that she had done this by ordering the sinking of the Argentine vessel, the General Belgrano to scupper any possible peace initiatives. Because of the controversial nature of the sinking, Tam Dalyell had been leading an investigation into it and discovered that one of the people who had been involved in the sinking, Commander Robert Green, was the nephew of Hilda Murrell! Dalyell’s investigations led him to believe that members of British secret service had been searching her house for documents related to the Belgrano and been caught by her unexpectedly returning and that they had then beaten and sexually assaulted her, before driving her in a car to be stabbed and dumped in a field where she died of hypothermia. The horrific and sad way in which she was killed was finally resolved after the case was reopened in 2002 using DNA evidence unavailable in 1984, which found that 16-year-old boy who had been living in care, nearby, at the time had been responsible but the conspiracy theory propounded by Tam Dalyell was apparently well believed for a number of years.
Hilda Murrel, whose violent death in 1984 was to provide fuel for anti-Thatcher conspiracy theorists hooked on the speculations of Labour MP Tam Dalyell
David Aaronovitch believes that the right climate for conspiracy theories has returned venturing that it was the mess that the Iraq war turned into that led many people to start blaming his buddies in government, Tony Blair et al, not just for lying to the British public but for organizing hits on its own citizens and planting bombs on its subways and buses.
The final case study of his book shows Aaronovitch at his best and worst. It deals with a theory by MP Norman Baker on the death of weapons inspector David Kelly. Aaronovitch entitles this chapter “Mr Pooter Forms a Theory” in reference to a Victorian novel called Diary of a Nobody, in which a very ordinary person has delusions of grandeur. In a way this very title seems to echo the slur made by Tony Blair's spokesman, Tom Kelly, that David Kelly was a Walter Mitty type figure. Aaronovitch seems very keen to show that Norman Baker fits a similar mould. We are told that Norman Baker is chinless and bald and that he’s a very boring man! His clothes are boring! His voice is boring! He asks really boring questions in Parliament! What about? Oh, MPs’ expenses! How boring! Who’s going to care about MPs’ expenses? Aaronovitch points out that Baker shouldn’t even be in Parliament but somehow got lucky and became a really cost inefficient MP who has asked so many questions that he probably costs the taxpayer about 1.2 million pounds! (Aaronovitch has, very interestingly, estimated the cost of each question at one hundred and fifty pounds a pop, and he’s asked 8000 of them!)
It’s not completely clear why such an ad hominem attack was necessary except we get a clear impression that Aaronovitch really doesn’t like Norman Baker one bit. David Aaronovitch was, like Christopher Hitchens, one of the Iraq War’s most prominent cheerleaders, of course, and Norman Baker’s theory attacks a man we could be forgiven for thinking Aaronovitch would lay his life down for, Tony Blair!
Well, this much seems very personal but Aaronovitch does redeem himself somewhat by picking apart Norman Baker’s theory and also by showing that Baker himself could be quite nasty in his treatment of some of the people involved in the case. Particularly. Baker is dismissive of any claims made by Dr Kelly’s wife, for example, saying that she was in no state of mind to know her husband was feeling down as she herself was too sick to notice. Instead, Baker decides that Dr Kelly just “wasn’t the type” to commit suicide as his cribbage-playing companions in the local pub testified. Besides, Dr Kelly was a Ba’hai, a religion which frowns on suicide, just like Judaism, Islam and Christianity albeit not as strongly. It is conceded by Norman Baker that Dr Kelly’s mother also committed suicide from an overdose but he points out that Dr Kelly never seemed to become grief-stricken when he talked about it, so it couldn’t have been something on his mind on the day he died. Yet, one thing that Dr Kelly had mentioned in conversation to a colleague was that if the Iraq War came about then he may well be found “dead in the woods”. Baker remarks, “It is uncanny that he should have alighted on that very phrase.” Then again, if someone was suicidal then would it be “uncanny” if they predicted their own demise?
In Baker’s book, The Strange Death of David Kelly, he does make the interesting point that a public inquiry didn’t investigate very closely into the manner of death and that his death instead was assumed to be suicide. The Hutton inquiry which was set up was mostly to deal with the background to his death, whether the government or the BBC should shoulder any responsibility for his death given that David Kelly had expressed skepticism about government claims in a dossier about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq to the BBC. He had been exposed by the government as the source of Andrew Gilligan’s Today programme, which claimed the dossier had been “sexed up” and was grilled about this by the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Baker believes that the suicide verdict itself was unsound although the pathologists who examined Dr Kelly say that the cause of death was 1. a cut to his ulnar artery 2. an overdose of co-proxomol and 3. existing arterial problems. A number of doctors have questioned these as the cause of death such as David Halpin who is quoted as saying that the cutting of the ulnar artery is a rare method of committing suicide and that as a surgeon his experience has been that cutting an ulnar artery is rarely fatal. Aaronovitch counters that four people died of severing of the ulnar artery between 2000 and 2004. It is also important that there was a combination of factors in David Kelly’s death. The medicine that Dr Kelly was alleged to have taken was his wife’s co-proxomol, something that toxocologist Professor Robert Forrest says could well be fatal if taken in sufficient quantities especially if it were a combination of factors leading to his death. It also was responsible for killing between 300 and 400 people annually as Baker’s book mentions in a footnote (p.368 note 8). Aaronovitch takes Baker to task for using “cumbersome sarcasm” when questioning why one tablet was left over (Was it to help the police?) but employs is himself when Baker wonders why David Kelly should have used such medicine which could have failed – “Perhaps hemlock was unavailable!” He suggests. In fact, it seems like Baker is clutching at straws a lot of the time when trying to formulate his theory and begins resorting to the tactic of firing off as many “odd facts” as possible: Why were dogs used in Dr Kelly’s house? Why didn’t heat – seeking equipment find the body? Why wasn’t the army deployed? Why was a very large mast deployed? Answer – to communicate with Tony Blair!
The theory gets wider in order to explain his own questions and in true conspiratorial fashion he abandons the skepticism he deployed against the official verdict to speculate wildly about what had happened. Dr Kelly’s friend and investigative journalist, Tom Mangold, “seemed strangely keen to declare the death a suicide” implies that he had a certain involvement if “strangely” is to mean anything at all, and later Baker suggests that Dr Kelly was murdered by Ba’athists angry at Dr Kelly’s work in Iraq, but that the British government knew of it and allowed it to happen. Then, “It is even possible to surmise, that perhaps both Lord Hutton and Janice Kelly [David Kelly’ wife!] were told, and each was asked to go along with the story for the sake of the country, although there is of course no evidence to this effect.” Baker muses. He also writes very suggestively about an article that Robin Cook had written attacking the government’s claims over WMD quoting some of the article and adding, “Mr Cook died shortly afterwards, on Saturday 6 August 2005, while out walking in the Scottish Highlands.” Flick to the notes at the back of Baker’s book, however and you can see the article is dated 12 July 2004. More than a year later!
Aaronovitch suggests however that such a theory became popular, the book was published in 2007, due to growing anger over the Iraq War and people became more and more willing to believe the Blair government culpable of anything. Theories of the 7/7 bombings also became more widely believed. One website dedicated to these is here and an attempt by one journalist to debunk theories he had inadvertently began is here.
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Torture, Murder, and the banality of Christopher Hitchens
Jayne Meyer's essential The Dark Side: the inside story of how the war on terror turned into a war on American Ideals, tells a story now familiar yet, in scope, slightly elusive to the grasp-something like the 9-11 attacks themselves. It goes like this: after that catastrophic day, events in which the Bush White House's own negligence was central, the Executive Branch took all measures to expand it's own power and negate the Geneva Conventions. A major objective was to normalize the torture of Prisoners—which Bush did with reckless abandon. It is fairly certain prisoners were murdered in American custody.
The process was both surreptitious and hidden in plain sight. Hillary Clinton's deeply shameful meeting of the minds with Hitchens over the torture and show trial of American Citizen John Walker Lindh (both publicly endorsed it) well defines the tenor of the period; with an equally shameful lack of palpable dissent from the Left.
The unseemly aspects of Lindh's railroading, however, were a bit TOO public, and the American Inquisition was driven underground. Queasy constitutionalists in the Bush White House leaked their leaks, but largely the day was owned by Cheney, Addington and Woo. If, as Hitchens swinishly claims, Bush's use of the Geneva Conventions for toilet paper stemmed from a call from the public for greater ruthlessness; then why was so much hidden in the shadows, where American Law was revolutionized by a handful of men?
The most impassioned, eloquent, dogged and ruthless propagandist for these outrages was Christopher Hitchens. Bare in mind, given the queasy or even angry reaction some in The White House had to Cheney's State within a State, it is beyond the realm of possibility Hitchens didn't have some idea what was going on. Yet during this period he distinguished himself by attacks on Human Rights groups, Harold Pinter and Michael Moore. He resigned from the Nation because "the willing lairs for Bill Clinton" were not seconding his praise of Bush. When Abu Ghraib broke, he feigned outrage, but had adapted the "few bad apples" take by the time he endorsed Bush's reelection in 2004. His rabid defense of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller round out the disgusting period.
Hitchens's debauched values are limitlessly vile. He had argued vehemently for the removal of Bill Clinton from office for lying about his sex life in a nuisance suit bankrolled by his political enemies. Yet Hitch stood squarely with the Bush Administration which, in secret, altered the course of history by legalizing torture. His silly water-boarding stunt and polite points of order with Bill O"Reilly are threadbare cover. Hitchens worked tirelessly to insure his adopted country would become a torture state.
Barack Obama's real mission, it would seem, is to remain inoffensive. If his forward looking administration legitimizes the crimes of the Bush White House, rather than litigating them, he should be judged as complicit. What sort of country will be left to judge him, however, is a fearsome question. By continuing his folly in Afghanistan, Obama may find inoffensiveness breeds contempt, and right reactionaries will set up shop in the White House once again.
It might be worth speculating, however, how Hitchens could top his performance of the last twenty years? Hitch mentioned Sadism in his appearance on O"Reilly, and He could go farther only as a respected libertine in a Salo White House.
A small dining table has been placed in the Lincoln Bedroom. Hitchens, Dennis Miller, David Addington, and Andrew Sullivan exchange jokes and cackle. A large serving plate of human excrement, drawn from the bowels of tortured Iranian prisoners, is placed before them. After Dinner, President Mitt Romney, in a fetching blue evening gown, distributes cigars and leads them to the Oval Office.
All sit in a circle. Gennifer Flowers, in thick pasty make-up, tells ribald stories of the casting couch on Hee Haw, as a piano tinkles softly in the background. Answering a call from deep within, Hitchens rises. He slips into the next room to relieve himself. The rules must not be broken.
I've been saying all along that Iran should have the right to build a nuclear arsenal (to protect itself from Israel and the US). Of course, nuclear weapons are bad and nobody - in principle - should have them. But according to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, adversarial parties should have them in order to prevent war. It worked with us and the Soviets, no?
According to Commentary magazine (the most reliable source on the planet, obviously), the Obama administration has given the green light to Tehran to build nuclear weapons. I hope they do, because I'm not interested in witnessing, much less participating in, World War III. Let the Golden Age of the new MAD begin.
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Can we finally get rid of "disorderly conduct" as a crime?
Writing about the Gates/Boston Police affair, Hitchens relates a few stories about his own confrontations with the fuzz. This one I thought the most amusing:
More recently, I was walking at night in the wooded California suburb where I spend the summer, trying to think about an essay I was writing. Suddenly, a police cruiser was growling quietly next to me and shining a light. "What are you doing?" I don't know quite what it was—I'd been bored and delayed that week at airport security—but I abruptly decided that I was in no mood, so I responded, "Who wants to know?" and continued walking. "Where do you live?" said the voice. "None of your business," said I. "What's under your jacket?" "What's your probable cause for asking?" I was now almost intoxicated by my mere possession of constitutional rights. There was a pause, and then the cop asked almost pleadingly how he was to know if I was an intruder or burglar, or not. "You can't know that," I said. "It's for me to know and for you to find out. I hope you can come up with probable cause." The car gurgled alongside me for a bit and then pulled away. No doubt the driver then ran some sort of check, but he didn't come back.
Anyway, Hitch goes on to make the simple point that Professor Gates should've made his stand by asserting his Constitutional Rights as an American, rather than accusing the cop of racism. While it's true that many cops have the tendency to harass everyone, regardless of skin color, it would be foolish to deny race as a factor in this case. Especially since we now know Officer Crowley lied in his police report when he wrote that the eye-witness involved informed him of a "black man" breaking into the house. The witness - backed up by the 911 call - apparently said no such thing.
I preferred Bill Maher's response to the whole affair. Maher made the point that Americans are trained to live in fear of the police. Regardless of race, age, gender, you risk being arrested if you don't "kiss their ass," as Maher put it. If you offend their pride and sense of presumed authority.
I learned in college how cops are basically thugs, as I too was arrested for "disorderly conduct" (what a crock of shit that was). Disorderly Conduct (otherwise known as "Disturbance of the Peace") is the catch-all charge that can be conveniently cited to make an arrest whenever a cop thinks you're asking too many questions, or showing too much 'attitude' or what have you. It's the equivalent of workplace "insubordination" - i.e. when you argue with your boss because your boss is an idiot. Again, what the bosses want are "ass-kissers".
Most Americans dutifully fall in the line because all they care about are their careers and families. The Bill of Rights? Please. It's really sad how cowardly we've become in the face of police threats. Kudos to Professor Gates for standing up against police stupidity (yes, stupidity) and harassment.
The problem with simply citing your rights is that it doesn't always work, especially if you're a college kid or, one guesses, a minority. Also much harder to pull off in cities versus suburbs. Cops in cities are much tougher. That's probably why Hitch 'got away' in the California suburb. Suburban cops are also much easier to fool.
Sometimes, I think, a wild temper tantrum is the best and only way to respond to police harassment.
Christopher Hitchens is a conspiracy theorizing nut! At least that is the impression you could have of him if you were ever to read his article on Winston Churchill in which he suggests Churchill allowed the Germans to sink the Lusitania, to get the Americans into World War One and later knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in advance but kept quiet about it to get the Americans into World War Two and that Churchill's most famous speeches were read out over the radio by an actor (while Churchill himself was incapacitated by drink!)
You might be forgiven for thinking anyone who believes such twaddle would also be open to ideas of demolition jobs on the twin towers on 9/11, but try broaching the subject with him and he’ll blare fascist crackpot!" at you. Yellowcake from Niger is another idea Hitchens is happy to proselytize as well, but don’t get him started on crazy conspiracy theories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq…Oh wait! No, he was a firm believer in those as well. To help explain what makes a conspiracy theory and the effects that such theories have on our understanding of history, Hitchens’ old pal from the Decent Left, David Aaronovitch has written a highly readable and entertaining book on the subject.
Voodoo Histories aims to debunk the most popular conspiracy theories of the last hundred years or so and explain their appeal. In order to do so he also he has to come up with a definition of "conspiracy theory". He looks at and dismisses some alternative definitions such as Daniel Pipes's ridiculous formulation that a conspiracy theory is the belief in a conspiracy that never happened and instead provides two definitions of his own. The first one, "the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended" is presumably aimed at such theories that surround the death of Princess Diana, or Marilyn Monroe, while the second "the attribution of secret action to one party that might far more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another" seems to refer to 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracy theories.
Unfortunately, neither of these definitions seem satisfactory. Is there some law of nature that says less covert or complicated behaviour has to be the better explanation if, for example, it isn’t true? What are secret services for if not to engage in somewhat covert, non-simplistic behaviour which isn’t easily predictable? Isn't the "more reasonable" behaviour often a matter of dispute? A counter-example to Aaronovitch’s thesis that springs to mind is the Mukden Incident of 1931 in which Chinese guerrillas were blamed for dynamiting train tracks belonging to Imperial Japanese colonizers as the pretext for a further military expansion. The incident is, however, widely believed to have been instigated by the Japanese occupation forces themselves in an act that would be recognized by conspiracy theorists as a "false-flag" operation. Would the application of Aaronovitch's thesis not preclude such speculation and require him to accept the line of the Imperial Japanese army? It seems possible given that Aaronovitch similarly dismisses two other very widely believed conspiracy theories by acquitting Hitler of involvement in the Reichstag fire and also Stalin of the murder of Sergei Kirov. If you believed these were legitimate areas of historical enquiry you are wrong; they are examples of conspiracy theory nutterdom!
But this is exactly what I think is a methodology error of Aaronovitch's book. He seems too hamstrung by his own theory. He admits he is new to the principle of economy known as Ockham’s razor and unfortunately it shows. The idea that entities shouldn't be multiplied beyond necessity works well when it comes to science, logic or mathematics but it doesn’t cut it so well when applied to the messy and convoluted world of human interaction. Aaronovitch seems to inadvertently underline this very point with his first chapter which details the rise of the fraudulent document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When this document first emerged, and for many years after, it was widely believed to be the minutes of a secret meeting at the First Zionist Congress in which instructions were laid down for manipulating world leaders and the world's media in order to destroy the existing world order and building a new Jewish empire in its place. In fact, it could be said to have become part of the "official story" as subsequent events such as World War One and the Russian Revolution seemed to confirm the upheavals described in the Protocols. Newspapers across Europe and North America such as the Times and Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent carried stories that confirmed their belief in the authenticity of the document and universities would feature lectures on the topic.
The Protocols had also had a real effect in the world as they were used as justification for pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, and later in the Russian Civil War. The fact that The Protocols were fake was only revealed by some dedicated investigative journalism by such people as Hermann Bernstein and that they were actually the product of arguably more covert and complicated origins; they had been fabricated by the Russian Tsarist secret police – the Okhrana. In other words, there had indeed been a conspiracy, and quite a complicated one but not the one that was believed at the time. Aaronovitch doesn't give us any clues about how people were supposed to wield Ockham's razor, dismiss The Protocols as fake and finger the real culprits as Tsarist agents. It seems that Aaronovitch is inadvertently using Daniel Pipes's formulation for a conspiracy theory – belief in a counterfactual conspiracy – rather than his own definition.
He doesn't rectify this in his second chapter in which he describes the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Stalin had believed that there were plots to kill him and that Trotskyite agents were sabotaging the economy by "wrecking" Soviet industry. This seemed plausible at the time as Western industrialists often complained about the strange and inefficient methods they encountered on visits to the Soviet Union which suggested either incredible incompetence or something more sinister and carefully planned. That seems like a pretty good restatement of the Aaronovitch thesis, and would commit us to the former possibility as it accords with his first definition of a conspiracy theory, "the attribution of deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended." However, an obvious objection is that both were quite possible and likely. A piece of conventional wisdom to show the inordinate beastliness and paranoia of Stalin is that all those who were put on show trials and then executed or sent to the gulag were completely innocent of all their crimes (Martin Amis in Koba the Dread feels that it is "important" to know this), yet morally we could imagine that a genuine plot to kill Stalin would have been nobler than to acquiesce in his crimes as many of his later victims did. Although I am not au fait with any of these actual plots I wonder if it shouldn't be an area of genuine historical research.
At this point in the book I scribbled a note, "What a priori principle forces us to dismiss these as 'conspiracy theories'?" I was surprised to find my thoughts echoed during Aaronovitch's discussion of the Kennedy assassination later in the book. He quotes a writer who states, "it is far from clear whether a lone gunmen or a conspiracy theory is the a priori more politically naïve view." Aaronovitch disagrees with this but in a way that suggests he doesn't understand 'a priori' in a fallacious argument that there had been a number of lone assassins in the past making it more plausible that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Erm…again, no. While the argument for Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman is the most plausible it is not on a priori grounds but because there had been investigations into the assassination beginning with the police, followed by the Warren Commission and the House Commission (which, in fact, concluded that there had been a conspiracy) as well as several other investigations which differed in their judgments. The conclusion is therefore arrived at a posteriori as it is not logical, in any sense of the word, to conclude that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunmen on the basis that President Garfield was killed by a lone assassin or that President McKinley was assassinated by a lone anarchist. A list of prominent people are given each apparently as evidence supporting the lone assassin theory for the others – Huey Long, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X – although it isn't exactly clear how the lone gunman explanation for one would affect the others. Does the plot to murder Julius Caesar render all the others conspiracies?
Each conspiracy then has to be dealt with on its own terms and its own contingent facts. Aaronovitch is much better at doing this, demolishing specific theories and the methodologies of specific theories than he is at giving us grand theories about the Role of the Conspiracy Theory in World History (A good essay that came out around the time of a flurry of new books on JFK is by Stephen Ambrose here whereas claims that FDR knew in advance about Pearl Harbor are pushed by Gore Vidal and countered by Ian Buruma here and claims by Robert Stinnett that the US navy had intercepted and decoded Japanese navy codes are debunked here.)
When Aaronovitch gets his teeth into specific theories he can be very entertaining as he is with the Princess Diana theory, the Holy Grail industry and pointing out the uncanny resemblance of Jesus' supposed direct descendent, Pierre Plantard to the Irish builder in Fawlty Towers. He points out, rightly, that many 9/11 and other conspiracy theorists have claimed new rules for accepting and dismissing evidence and that they often fail to apply the same rules to evidence supporting their claim as they do to evidence that questions their claim. Often the claim is made that standard deductive logic is to be discounted in favour of "cumulative argument" which tends to mean finding as many loose ends as possible and then fashioning some kind of alternative explanation which often involves ignoring all the reasons for questioning the "official story" in the first place. The problem is that while these conspiracy theorists are so rigourous in their skepticism, they also allow themselves to be highly credulous towards other ideas.
I may continue this at a later date to include Aaronovitch's thoughts on 7/77, 9/11 and the "strange death" of David Kelly…
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Christopher Hitchens debates Dennis Prager on religion on the radio
If you ran into a bunch of men on a dark night, would you feel relieved or not to find out they had attended a prayer meeting or Bible class? Here Dennis beautifully compares Hitch to a Scientologist. Hitch replies with his usual spiel and also informs us that "religion is very new." Dennis also makes a good point about there being more stupidity going on at secular institutions such as university than down at your local church. And intriguingly, Hitch concedes this, but then he makes a case for students of evolutionary biology and physics being "by far the most enlightened and intelligent" people as well as "the people most free of overt religious belief."
Was the movement to abolish slavery overwhelmingly religious Christians or was the movement mostly not believers? And what of the value of the human fetus? You'll be gratified to hear that embryology and Hitch's own inner feelings confirm that "the concept of the unborn child is a real one." But at the same time, for Hitch, arguments such as the fetus is no more than a tumor or an appendix do not reflect badly on secularism because there happen to be some religious extremists (possibly including the Pope) who equate the insertion of an IUD into the cervix with mass murder.
Here Dennis puts forward the argument that without religion the Western world is doomed to extinction. And he cites Europe as an example. This leads Christopher to defend the old place, while twisting the question to claim that the problem is worse in the Catholic nations. Then they start arguing about the Cold War and Hitch refuses to admit that Czechoslovakia was in the Eastern Bloc before going onto waffle about Ronald Reagan, Billy Brandt, etc., a sure sign that he doesn't have a decent rebuttal to Dennis's extinction thesis.
Back to the original question, and then, via Jefferson and Franklin, onto Hitch admitting he's a mammal. Then he makes the ridiculous statement that being much more likely to call on God and wishing the Universe was organized for his own benefit is "a mammalian failing". He obviously hasn't discussed this with any dogs, cats, horses, cows or kangaroos. He then says that he finds this "wish thinking" contemptible, which makes him sound rather like a Buddhist monk with a peptic ulcer. Hitch also claims to "know" that the Universe was not designed with him in mind, and — surprise, surprise — he does not wish for world peace, preferring war and victory over the theologians. One wonders if he has David Ray Griffin in mind. Finally, does the golden rule need to be taught to kids? Naargh, it's innate, intones Christopher.
I had totally forgotten about how Hitchens hated "Borat" because he thought that it made Americans look patient and Sasha Baron Cohen look crass. Just wait until he sees "Bruno" which is a more direct and I think more triumphant assault on certain aspects of American life: the military, PR consultants, hunters, models, fans of wrestling, dumb talk show audiences, focus groups etc.
I was so blown away by "Bruno" that I'm tempted to think that it's the funniest movie of all time...the Velcro scene, all that shit with "OJ", and the Fort McCellan bit, which really topped it all off.
I await Hitch's condemnation of the film. It doesn't show that Americans lack patience or are remarkably homophobic. It just show that Americans are STUPID, which I think is the point. And was the point of "Borat" also.
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The Upward path: How Hitch hunted down the last Stalinist on the Isle of Wight
I missed this article when it first appeared in May, but I must say it made nostalgic reading on this damp Saturday night. In it, Christopher tells of his trip to the Isle of Wight "a decade or so ago" to meet Edward Upward (not exactly a household name, but a talented if under-appreciated British novelist), who would have been coming up to his century at that time. Upward was born on 9 September 2003 and died on 13 February 2009. Back in the old days he was a mate of Isherwood's Auden's and Spender's. Hitch admires Upward's anti-fascism while sniggering a little at his lifelong Stalinism and his admiration for Arthur Scargill. Indeed, the Preening Popinjay's judgement is final and damning: "his career was forever warped by his communism." Still, nobody's perfect.
In a vicarage-style house not far from the railway station in the small town of Sandown, Upward received me and led me to a side room. He explained without loss of time that the main rooms of the little home were out of bounds because his wife, Hilda, was in the process of dying there. “I shall miss Hilda,” he said with the brisk matter-of-factness of the materialist, “but I have promised her that I shall go on writing.” Attired in gray flannel trousers, a corduroy jacket, and a V-neck jersey, he reminded me of something so obvious that I didn’t immediately recognize it. On a table lay the Morning Star, the daily newspaper of the Stalinist rump organization that survived the British Communist Party’s decision to dissolve itself after the implosion of the Soviet Union. It is entirely possible that Upward was the paper’s sole subscriber on this islet of thatched cottages and stained glass and theme-park rural Englishness. Seeing me notice the old rag, he said, rather defensively, “Yes I still take it, though there doesn’t seem much hope these days.” When I asked him if there was anyone on the left he still admired, he cited Arthur Scargill, the coal miners’ thuggish leader, who was known to connoisseurs as the most ouvriériste and sectarian and demagogic of the anti-Blair forces in the Labour movement. Yet to this alarming opinion he appended the shy and disarming news that the last review he had had in the Morning Star had been a good one, precisely because it stressed that not all his work was strictly political. “It particularly mentioned my story ‘The White-Pinafored Black Cat.’” I inquired if he was working on a story at that moment. “Yes I am.” “And may one know the title?” “It’s to be called ‘The World Revolution.’” At this point and in this context, I began to find the word surreal recurring to my mind.
Surrealism apart, Hitchens is fair to the old codger where it suits his own purposes and dismissive where it doesn't. Upward shocked Hitch by remaining faithful to his youthful communist ideals much as John Anderson and Melanie Safka still retain a recognizable hippy ambiance. Consequently, he failed to share a slew of Christopher's most preciously held views, which must have been a disappointment. But he did satisfy in one major way. Back in the early thirties, he was as quick off the mark as George Orwell in seeing through the fascists.
In one respect of “realism,” though, Upward deserves great praise. It is a deplorable fact that the English literature of the 1930s contains scarcely a mention of the phenomenon of fascism. Anthony Powell’s long excursion through the upper crust doesn’t turn up a single Blackshirt (something of a shortcoming in point of verisimilitude, as he might have phrased it). Evelyn Waugh avoids the subject. Graham Greene’s fascists are not English. But for Upward, especially in his first volume of The Spiral Ascent, the miasma of fascism is in the very air that his characters breathe, and a direct clash with the Blackshirts conveys the intense and local reality that this force sometimes possessed in Britain. Upward at least faced what many shied away from.
Not being up to Mastermind level on English literature of the 1930s, I can't take issue with Hitch's claim. Whether or not Orwell employed the wor "Blackshirts" in his work before 1940, the spirit of anti-Blackshirtism pervades his work from The Road to Wigan Pier onwards. But for a definitive 1930s fictional English Blackshirt, we need look no further than P.G. Wodehouse's redoubtable Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, clandestine lingerie designer and leader of the Black Shorts, who is instantly recognizable as a Spitting Image caricature of Sir Oswald Moseley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, who hit my father on the head with a brick during the Battle of Cable Street, instantly converting him into a lifelong socialist. There are some aesthetes out there who contend that whatever else he may be Wodehouse is not not English literature. But Christopher is surely above such snobbery.
Somebody else who has some heartwarming reminiscences about Edward Upward is the blogger Gabriel at The Unrepentant Communist. He also has some excellent words about political commitment that will doubtless sound quaint or even surreal to the likes of Mr.Hitchens, who, I think it's fair to say, is no stranger to treason in either the political or the personal realm.
Anyway I was selling a quire of the Morning Star in Kings Heath high street in Birmingham with a girlfriend and comrade. I was approached by a well spoken elderly man in navy blue corduroy cap, who stood looking at me and said after a while...'I used to do that a lot'...fearing he was a'nutter' or at best a current opponent , I ignored him...He repeated the comment and added "my wife and I used to do that an awful lot you know"...convinced now that he was indeed 'a nutter' of some sort I asked him what he was on about and he started to chuckle..I then realised he was having a bit of sport with me..'selling the Daily Worker of course, you two remind me so much of us at that age'..Well a conversation commenced and I as it happened just happened to mention that I had just finished reading an excellent triad of novels about life in the CPGB in the 30's and 40's which I supposed, he being an elderly former CP member might find of interest. He started to laugh once again and said...'really now what were those books called?' and asked me to tell him more about them. At length I twigged that he knew about them and in a while he revealed that he was the author, this was getting very very bizarre.... He invited us back to his son's house 'for tea and cakes', his son was a lecturer at Birmingham and is since sadly now deceased also . I was charmed by Edward Upward's gentle humour and his wonderful diction and beautifully precise speech. I was also fascinated by his life story and his encyclopedic experience of the literary world. He told a hilarious tale about going to the Woolfs home in Bloomsbury for a meal and to be given his cheque for a contribution he had written for their journal. Virginia instructed hubby to draw up the cheque but Upward recalled, ' it visibly pained him, and his hand shook and his face was agonised as he slowly drew out the cheque, at long last, reluctantly handing it to me before I left for home'...he also recollected his close association with the likes of Auden, and Spender, the latter he was scathing about for his political conversion to the right and his association with a CIA sponsored magazine in his latter years. Christopher Isherwood he spoke of with great warmth though. On another occasion I, forgetting precisely his age, asked him had he known Burgess or Philby et al..he said ' oh no...I had long left Cambridge before they came up'...a comment which emphasised to me his extraordinary longevity...he was already the senior member of the group consisting of Auden, Spender and Isherwood at that stage and they regarded him as THEIR mentor.
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Money laundering, human organs and fake designer handbags?
This is truly Pythonesque. Venal politicians, what else is new? But rabbis? Well, as an observer who has been described as taking an interest in all things Jewish, all I can say is, thank goodness they weren't members of the Catholic clergy or Hitch would be foaming at the mouth.
These are real problems. How could the so called religious leaders of these people abandon their flock?
Last year it was the kosher food industry that was in jeopardy due to unethical practices taking place in their largest slaughterhouse. What’s wrong with these people?
Perhaps they are ‘taking their cue’ from the state of Israel itself, a land that commits crime after crime and gets away with it. Perhaps also, the Madoff affair awakened the authorities to the fact that no particular ethnic group is crime free. Whatever the reasons, it is just not acceptable for certain elements to become involved in these type of activities.
A religious leader is supposed to set an example, a good one. A rabbi is supposed to be a teacher. He is not a Saint or anything special in the eyes of the Creator. Yet, he is still expected to live an exemplary life and guide his community in a righteous way.The crimes committed by these people must not go unpunished.
Nawshirwan Mustafa: The new face of Iraqi Kurdistan?
There's something very interesting happening in Iraqi Kurdistan right now. On Saturday, the region will hold parliamentary elections, and the current coalition government led by Barzani (KDP) and Talabani (PUK) is being threatened by a breakaway and extremely popular, former PUK leader named Nawshirwan Mustafa. He organized a new political party called 'Change' that is fielding numerous candidates against the PUK/KDP coalition.
Dr. Jerry Weinberger (who I know from AUIS/Kurdistan) has just published a piece in TWS blasting the current government (especially Barzani), while openly supporting Nawshirwan Mustafa:
The Kurdistan esteemed in the west as a beacon of democracy and good government is a myth. I'll bet the U.S State Department believes the multi-storied building frames that dot the city of Sulaimani are signs of economic development. They're not. They're giant, never-to-be finished piles of concrete used to funnel public funds into the private pockets of the ruling party. The democratic deficit in Kurdistan stems from the collusion of the two corrupt political parties that have governed the region since the end of a bitter civil war in 1998: the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the north, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) in the south.
This is intriguing on many fronts, but for the purposes of HW, we might for the moment simply wonder where Hitchens will come down on this issue or if he'll bother to address it at all.
On April 20, 2007, Justin Raimondo wrote on his website:
Hitchens and his fellow neocons hail Kurdistan as a model for the rest of the region, and quite openly overlook its blemishes, knowing full well that its value – to them – lies in its status as a staging ground for the next round of wars in the Middle East. This is an eventuality most of the American people fear, and yet the neocons – especially Hitchens - rejoice at the prospect of it. If this was ever true, it is no longer. Weinberger delivered a full-scale attack on Kurdistan's "blemishes," and he opposes Kurdish independence.
In "Hitchens's Kurdish Sojourn,"Raimondo had correctly assailed our subject for romanticizing Kurdistan while refusing to address the region's corruption and human rights abuses.
At least one 'neocon' has put an end to all that.
I personally still favor Kurdish independence, but that's another issue...
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A glorious act of liberation in behalf of women’s rights, peace, and democracy
The above headline, which could have been taken right out of a Hitchensian sermon on the self-evident benefits to the Muslim world of being shocked, awed, bombed and occupied, were in fact clipped off the end of Paul Craig Roberts's latest lament on the apparent inevitability of war with Iran. I'm sure Paul won't mind if I stick up the whole thing, as its on a dozen other sites already and the more people who read it and other stuff like it, the greater chance that the madness can be halted before it brings on even more than the bravest chickenhawk can cock-a-doodle-dooo! at. And I'm talking Armageddon now.
Here goes:
In an impotent world, even the bankrupt can prevail By Paul Craig Roberts
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the US was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy.
Similarly, when Hitler attacked Russia, he did not preface his invasion with endless threats and a public case that blamed the war on England.
These events happened before the PSYOPS era. Today, America and Israel’s wars of aggression are preceded by years of propaganda and international meetings, so that by the time the attack comes it is an expected event, not a monstrous surprise attack with its connotation of naked aggression.
The US, which has been threatening Iran with attack for years, has passed the job to Israel. During the third week of July, the American vice president and secretary of state gave Israel the go-ahead. Israel has made great public disclosure of its warships passing through the Suez Canal on their way to Iran. “Muslim” Egypt is complicit, offering no objection to Israel’s naval forces on their way to a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US imposed on the world.
By the time the attack occurs, it will be old hat, an expected event, and, moreover, an event justified by years of propaganda asserting Iran’s perfidy.
Israel intends to dominate the Middle East. Israel’s goal is to incorporate all of Palestine and southern Lebanon into “Greater Israel.” The US intends to dominate the entire world, deciding who rules which countries and controlling resource flows.
The US and Israel are likely to succeed, because they have effective PSYOPS. For the most part, the world media follow the US media, which follow the US and Israeli governments’ lines. Indeed, the American media are part of the PSYOPS of both countries.
According to Thierry Meyssan in the Swiss newspaper Zeit-Fragen, the CIA used SMS or text messaging and Twitter to spread disinformation about the Iranian election, including the false report that the Guardian Council had informed Mousavi that he had won the election. When the real results were announced, Ahmadinejad’s reelection appeared to be fraudulent.
Iran’s fate awaits it. A reasonable hypothesis to be entertained and examined is whether Iran’s Rafsanjani and Mousavi are in league with Washington to gain power in Iran. Both have lost out in the competition for government power in Iran. Yet, both are egotistical and ambitious. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 probably means nothing to them except an opportunity for personal power. The way the West has always controlled the Middle East is by purchasing the politicians who are out of power and backing them in overthrowing the independent government. We see this today in Sudan as well.
In the case of Iran, there is an additional factor that might align Rafsanjani with Washington. President Ahmadinejad attacked former President Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s most wealthy persons, as corrupt. If Rafsanjani feels threatened by this attack, he has little choice but to try to overthrow the existing government. This makes him the perfect person for Washington.
Perhaps there is a better explanation why Rafsanjani and Mousavi, two highly placed members of the Iranian elite, chose to persist in allegations of election fraud that have played into Washington’s hands by calling into question the legitimacy of the Iranian government. It cannot be that the office of president is worth such costs, as the Iranian presidency is not endowed with decisive powers.
Without Rafsanjani and Mousavi, the US media could not have orchestrated the Iranian elections as “stolen,” an orchestration that the US government used to further isolate and discredit the Iranian government, making it easier for Iran to be attacked. Normally, well-placed members of an elite do not help foreign enemies set their country up for attack.
An Israeli attack on Iran is likely to produce retaliation, which Washington will use to enter the conflict. Have the personal ambitions of Rafsanjani and Mousavi, and the naive youthful upper class Iranian protesters, set Iran up for destruction?
Consult a map and you will see that Iran is surrounded by a dozen countries that host US military bases. Why does anyone in Iran doubt that Iran is on her way to becoming another Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in the end to be ruled by oil companies and an American puppet?
The Russians and Chinese are off balance because of successful American interventions in their spheres of influence, uncertain of the threat and the response. Russia could have prevented the coming attack on Iran, but, pressured by Washington, Russia has not delivered the missile systems that Iran purchased. China suffers from her own hubris as a rising economic power, and is about to lose her energy investments in Iran to US/Israeli aggression. China is funding America’s wars of aggression with loans, and Russia is even helping the US to set up a puppet state in Afghanistan, thus opening up former Soviet central Asia to US hegemony.
The world is so impotent that even the bankrupt US can launch a new war of aggression and have it accepted as a glorious act of liberation in behalf of women’s rights, peace, and democracy.
I'm very partial to a solar eclipse, even when it doesn't go all the way. This morning's event was total over parts of India, China, a few of Japan's southern islands and points farther east, and was billed as te longest eclipse this century, but from my part of Kyoto, the dragon only managed to swallow about 75% of the ball of fire before the sounds of dustbin lids and frying pans being banged together drove off the beast. It was mostly cloudy, but I managed to get some good views by observing a reflection of the eclipse in a dish of water on the patio and looking at that through some special very dark glass. (Always remember, kids, that staring at the sun is as bad as staring at the face of the Gorgon. Thousands have gone blind from not heeding that advice during past eclipses. So don't try it, even if you're wearing shades.)
A bit over a hundred kilometres south of here in downtown Osaka coverage was more like 80%, so I emailed my fellow Hitch Watcher Angrysoba to see if could catch it. And he rewarded me by snapping up this photo of the eclipse through the thin cloud cover that has become a permanent feature of the Kansai summer this year. I think he's caught the phenomenon beautifully. The cloud cover provides an ethereal and meterological je ne sai qua to the scene, and the delicate interplay of light and shadow is absolutely superb.
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A sworn foe of the clerical, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic
That grand old European intellectual and snappy dresser, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, took his leave last Friday at the age of 81, and Christopher was extremely quick off the mark to honour the man with an obituary this Monday. In another one of those amazing "ironies" that keep lifting the Popinjay's life above the mundanities that define existence for lesser mortals, Kolakowski died in Hitch's old haunt of Oxford where he had lived for most of the past four decades, while Hitch heard the news in Kolakowski's native Poland, "just 15 minutes before entering a room in which I was to give a short lecture on his influence."
I couldn't help but notice the close similarity between Hitch's obit intro and the introduction to a review covering some works of Kolakowski's written by Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books in 2006.
Here's Hitch:
An ardent Communist in prewar and wartime Poland (and a sworn foe of the clerical, chauvinist, and anti-Semitic Polish right wing to the end of his days), Kolakowski was shorn of his Stalinism by exposure to its Moscow form on a visit to Russia, and he emerged as the leading "revisionist" Marxist philosopher of the Polish spring of 1956. At that stage, he advocated a form of democratic socialism approximately based on a reading of young—as opposed to late—Karl Marx. But repeated encounters with the obdurate and repressive Communist regime convinced him that the system was essentially beyond reform. A second Polish spring in March 1968 was put down with the use of the most crude police tactics and the employment by the Communist Party of anti-Semitism as a weapon against dissent. Forced to leave his homeland, he roosted for a while as an exile professor in Berkeley, Calif., where his experience of the student movement more or less completed his break with the New Left.
And here's Tony:
Leszek Kolakowski is a philosopher from Poland. But it does not seem quite right—or sufficient—to define him that way. Like Czeslaw Milosz and others before him, Kolakowski forged his intellectual and political career in opposition to certain deep-rooted features of traditional Polish culture: clericalism, chauvinism, anti-Semitism. Forced to leave his native land in 1968, Kolakowski could neither return home nor be published there: between 1968 and 1981 his name was on Poland's index of forbidden authors and much of the work for which he is best known today was written and published abroad.
Of course, as John Barrell has gone to great pains to spell out in the past, "there is of course no question of plagiarism, for Hitchens everywhere introduces little touches of fine writing that allow him to claim ownership of what he has borrowed." Nevertheless, it would have been nice if he'd acknowledge an intellectual debt to Judt or whoever else's work happened to be open on the browser while his genius was at work, just as any decent scribbler would.
More importantly, it is remarkable that Christopher has drawn a portrait of Kolakowski that highlights his anti-clericalism but fails to mention his generally positive view of religion. Yes! To read Hitch you'd be forgiven for thinking old Leszek had been indicted into the Atheist Hall of Fame alongside such luminaries as Albert Einstein, Tom Paine and Mother ("I have my doubts") Teresa. Kolakowski's philosophical writing is clear, concise, lucid and enlightening for much the same reasons that Hegel's isn't. But being philosophy, it does contain rather a lot of long words and subjunctive clauses that cause most readers to scratch their heads, go back over the same sentence three times, and then in a fit of exasperation call on a smarter friend such as Angrysoba for clarification. So rather than present any pure unadulterated single-malt Kolakowski here, I'll leave you with a few paragraphs from George Scialabba's superb review of the late professor's early-eighties classic Religion: If there is No God, in which Kolakowski presents a view of religion and modernity that is as close to an antithesis of what Hitch served up in GING.
Kolakowski quotes Ivan Karamazov’s remark about everything being permitted if God does not exist and proposes that it is “valid not only as moral rule but as an epistemological principle.” Reason and religion have fought each other to a stand still; and while there are no rational, universally accepted grounds for admitting any religious truth, we are not bound to accept any definition of rationality that, like scientific positivism, excludes religious possibilities altogether. Positivism’s main line of attack has been to demonstrate that religious language doesn’t do what plain, honest, everyday usage is expected to do: produce predictions, consensus, and other useful results. Normative statements, ultimate choices, and cosmic conjectures about how everything hangs together cannot be justified in empirical terms. But, Kolakowski argues, such norms, choices, and cosmic prejudices are exactly what is presupposed by the positivists’ assumption that all genuine knowledge is publicly verifiable and that nothing else counts. In reality, he claims, what counts only counts within some epistemological/moral/cosmological framework, and such a framework cannot be justified, only chosen. Belief is choice, and secular rationalists are believers, too. Not to choose is to drift, to define truth as whatever solves whatever problems are at hand. Hence our dilemma: “either an infinite regress or a discretionary decision… either God or a cognitive nihilism.”
Hear that, my progressive atheist droogs, believe it or not, "secular rationalists are believers too." No wonder Hitchens doesn't want to start off down this road. Finally, back to George Scialabba, and this is doubly interesting because it also touches on the atheism/rationality issue raised by Hidari in his recent column at this site:
Kolakowaki’s defense of religion is peculiarly modern: all the standard objections are cheerfully admitted, even embellished, then declared not to matter. Belief is a “logically arbitrary” option, but then so is unbelief. Believers and nonbelievers should not expect to convert each other, indeed should not even expect t understand each other. We shouldn’t talk of “an ‘escape into irrationality,’ but rather of the irreductibly different ways in which religious beliefs are validated in contrast to scientific propositions, of the incommensurable meanings of ‘validity’ in those respective areas.” The Sacred and the Profane are equally coherent and equally compelling, each on its own terms, and may as well quit feuding and just nod stiffly at each other from opposite sides of the room.
It is a little too pat. What is really on Kolakowski’s mind? One hint is that, despite his professed agnosticism, his references to skeptics are almost uniformly negative. Rationalists have “travestied” Christian notions like original sin. Free thinking, once an instrument of tolerance, has degenerated into “fanatical rationalism.” Science has “monopolistically” arrogated to itself the very definition of Reason. And so on. This may be the author’s idea of sportsmanship, since religion is definitely the underdog in this matchup and needs rhetorical support. But these jibes sound too genuinely enthusiastic; more likely they are the product of Kolakowski’s long-standing ambivalence. He once declared himself an “inconsistent atheist,” and went on to observe wistfully that nevertheless “men have no fuller means of self-identification than through religious symbolism” and that “religious consciousness ... is an irreplaceable part of human culture, man’s only attempt to see himself as a whole.” In “Religion” he concludes forlornly that “human dignity is not to be validated within a naturalistic concept of man. The absence of God spells the ruin of man in the sense that it demolishes or robs of meaning everything we think of as the essence of being human: the quest for truth, the distinction of good and evil, the claim to dignity, the claim to creating something that withstands the indifferent destructiveness of time.” After a life extraordinarily full of both action (dissent and expulsion from Communist Poland) and thought (the massive and renowned “Main Currents of Marxism”), here stands Kolakowski, head bloodied and only just unbowed, unable to take comfort but unwilling to renounce it altogether, at least for others. Perhaps—at least for others— there is some escape from modernity.
When Jeffrey Goldenberg at The Atlantic received a question about the relative demerits of various liquors, who better to answer it than his colleague Christopher Hitchens:
Does gin actually make you crazy? Is it any worse for you than vodka, rum, or beer? T. C., Chicago, Ill.
I turned this question over to Atlantic Health and Lifestyle Columnist Christopher Hitchens, who said that there is indeed something malevolent in gin. “My father, a Navy man, noticed that the people who drank whiskey lived a lot longer than those who drank gin. Gin can have an infuriating effect on people. If booze makes you quarrelsome, then gin can lead you to spitefulness.” Hitchens reports that he gave up gin when his daughter was born. He recommends port as a reflective and cheerful alternative, “though it is said to lead to gout.”
For a detailed discussion of the side effects of drinking various alcoholic beverages, see here. The researcher, Scribbler50, has captured the symptoms experienced by Single Malt Scotch drinkers and their peers with admirable precision:
Possible side effects could include Acute Reverse Amnesia… your friends don’t recognize you! This is the result of their bearing witness to a heretofore unseen pedantry in all things Single Malt, disorienting those who knew you as a Bud Light. And further blurring their powers of recognition is your uncontrollable cork and snifter sniffing in public. Vomiting could also occur here, but again, only by your peers. (Caution: In very rare cases a distinct blackening under the eyes has occurred and a flattening of the Malt drinker’s nose when his pedantry has pushed a bartender way too far.)
In the same issue of the Atlantic, Christopher continues his hagiographic examinations of great American historic icons of the kind feministas used to refer to as "dead white males". This time, the honours are done to Abe Lincoln in the form of a review of Michael Burlingame's new biography of the man in the tall black hat. Among the nuggets revealed, Abe was a mocker of religion after Hitch's own heart:
Burlingame’s highly diverting early pages show Lincoln being actively satirical in matters of faith, lampooning preachers, staging mock services, and praying to God “to put stockings on the chickens’ feet in winter,” in the words of his stepsister Matilda. Reminiscing about frontier Baptists many years later, he told an acquaintance: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”
However, in his 1846 election campaign, Lincoln was cornered by the faithful and forced to deny that he was an “open scoffer at Christianity.” His handbill on the subject is rightly criticized as too lawyerly by Burlingame, who elegantly points out:
"In this document Lincoln seemed to make two different claims: that he never believed in infidel doctrines, and that he never publicly espoused them. If the former were true, the latter would be superfluous; if the former were untrue, the latter would be irrelevant. "
Loyal Blairite to the last, Christopher Hitchens has launched an incredibly vicious, over-the-top and totally unbalanced attack on the good name of Tony's former partner and rival, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
What Gordon has done to deserve such an assault one can only wonder, but the timing, when the gentleman is already under threat of the political death of a thousand press cuttings, makes perfect sense if we suppose Mad Dog Hitchens is running as a pack hound on an anti-Brown foxhunt. But who's blowing the horn on this one?
The British Labour Party has just, in elections to the European Parliament, received its smallest share of the vote since 1918 (when it was a new and young third-party force). Its candidates in local elections have trailed in third and even fourth place, losing ground in working-class districts to openly Fascist groups such as the British National Party. This is not a defeat. It is a humiliation. And on exactly what question of principle was Labour brought so low?
If you can’t answer that question, you are in good company. The main if not the sole “issue” appears to be the self-love and the self-pity of a prime minister—Gordon Brown—who has never won a general election or even a contested leadership election within his own party. He is in power only in order to be in power. He is in power only because he believes he has long had a natural right to be prime minister. For many years he waited as a resentful dauphin, swallowing his envy and bile. And then, like the fruit of the medlar tree, he went rotten before he was ripe.
The full article, No, Prime Minister can be read at Vanity Fair.
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Christopher Hitchens Can't Wait to Go to War with Iran
Funny how most people see the mushroom cloud as an ominous symbol of nuclear devastation when, in reality, the mushroom cloud doesn't hurt anyone. It's simply the result of a sudden formation of a large mass of hot, low-density gases near the ground and cooler air being drawn into the rising toroidal fireball, which itself cools into the familiar cloud appearance. It is the shock wave of bombs that causes damage. There's also super hot thermal heat waves that burn the skin and eyes while igniting any combustible material. There's also radiation, which damages humans at a cellular level. But it's the shock wave, a nearly invisible wave of air molecules, which travel through the air like waves in the ocean, decimating houses, flattening trees, and causing little girls plucking flowers in Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign ads to suddenly look up.
But the mushroom cloud is the image we fear. We're so afraid of these benign formations (and their accompanying devastation) that we're willing to do almost anything to avoid them- including going to war.
ForaTV is an intellectual powerhouse that gives talks and lectures by prominent minds. Their slogan is "The world is thinking." Apparently they've changed their slogan to "The world is drinking." because they've invited the inept, insatiable, insolent, inbred, inebriated fat man to which this web log devotes its firepower there to speak. Christopher's topic? War. War with Iran. War with Iran and avoiding the instantaneous evaporation from nuclear fallout before the notorious cloud of which I speak.
Hitchens fear-mongers and war-mongers with the same old tired justifications we heard in 2003, when the 'n' in Iran was a 'q'. Iran is developing a nuclear program after lying to UN inspectors, the country has committed brutality and fraud, they're going to annex Bahrain, they fixed the elections, and they're maintaining a brutish, unwelcoming attitude to the rest of the world. Oh no! A Middle Eastern country has murdered their own people, lied to the UN, annexed surrounding states, and they have weapons of mass destruction! We're sure of it! We have to act! Sound familiar? That went so well last time. But the comparison to Iraq isn't even something Christopher is ashamed to make, saying of Iran's nuclear program:
"It's developing them very fast. It's going to use them for nuclear blackmail, not against Israel, in my opinion, but against neighboring gulf Sunni states like Bahrain which it will claim as its Kuwait."
Claim as its Kuwait? You mean like when Iraq annexed Kuwait before the first Gulf war? It takes some pretty god-awful hubris to justify actions against Iran by referencing the country from the least just position Hitchens has ever taken, Iraq. His position on the second Iraq war was unpopular and hated. Does he really think the same scary rhetoric will work for Iran? He ends with a question for his audience:
"This is a question, not for me, but for everyone. For everyone in this room: which do you think is worse? That the mullahs get a bomb after the way they've behaved to their own people and to their neighboring countries and the way they intend to behave... or they be told that they can't have a bomb? And that we accept the logical and probable consequences, in either case."
I have my own question for his audience. How can anyone take an argument seriously when FEAR is the biggest motivation to accept it? So there you have it. Hitchens tells us our only two options: Sanction Iran, force them to drop their weapons, and presumably go to war - or face the mushroom cloud.
Robert Wright, author of the Evolution of God (which I haven't read but which sounds interesting) has a new piece in the Huffington Post, which asks, very simply, the question: why are the 'New Atheists Right Wing on Foreign Policy?'. He has some good answers, and I'll add a few of my own thoughts later on. First off: 'Atheism has little intrinsic ideological bent. (Karl Marx. Ayn Rand. I rest my case.) But things change when you add the key ingredient of the new atheism: the idea that religion is not just mistaken, but evil -- that it "poisons everything," as Hitchens has put it with characteristic nuance.' Now I'm not actually sure that I agree with this, and Wright's next point doesn't follow from it.
'Consider Dawkins's assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli-Palestinian wars."'
Now if it's true that he said that then this is indeed false, but it doesn't follow from the argument that 'religion is evil'. Instead it follows from certain epistemological/ontological assumptions, which, generally speaking, the New Atheists share.
The New Atheists are, generally speaking, Rationalists, by which I don't just mean that they aspire to be Rational (a reasonable enough aspiration), but that they are actually Rationalists in the philosophical sense. Here the big names are Descartes and Kant. Again nothing particularly right wing about that: Chomsky is in the same tradition*. But the problem is that if you believe in 'Reason' then are run the risk of falling into a trap, which is that people's reasons for acting are, predominantly, as the jargon has it, 'cognitive'. In other words, first we think, then we act.
Again, so what? Well the problem here is that there is another trap, that follows from this: to emphasise, and over-emphasise, rational, philosophical, metaphysical reasons for behaving, as opposed to empirical, material interests.
In other words, instead, of seeing, as Brecht put it: 'Food first, morals after', in other words that people act to get hold of money, and food, and a house, and a car etc., and to remove sources of pain and distress (e.g. troops who break down your door and try to torture your family) and then sometimes use religious rhetoric to justify this, the New Atheists tend to 'put the cart before the horse' and see the 'cognitive' belief system, as being the cause of the behaviour, and the material interests as just a distraction.**
So let's return to Israel-Palestine.
'Consider Dawkins's assertion, in his book The God Delusion, that if there were no religion then there would be "no Israeli-Palestinian wars."
For starters, this is just wrong. The initial resistance to the settlements, and to the establishment of Israel, wasn't essentially religious, and neither was the original establishment of the settlements, or even of Israel.
The problem here is that two ethnic groups disagree about who deserves what land. That there was so much killing before the dispute acquired a deeply religious cast suggests that taking religion out of the equation wouldn't be the magic recipe for peace that Dawkins imagines.' says Wright and he is surely..well...right.
To put it bluntly, the New Atheists are far too quick to see the fact that there is a lot of religion in the world, especially in troubled places, and then draw the inference that it is the religion that is causing the trouble.
But of course, and Israel-Palestine provides evidence for this, one could draw the opposite conclusion. Perhaps people are turning to religion as a result of the trouble?
'The Israeli and American right join Dawkins in stressing religious motivation in the Middle East, and there's a reason for that. The people there whose political grievances are most conspicuously caught up with religion are Muslims. If the problem is that Muslims are possessed by this irrational, quasi-autonomous force known as religion, then there's no point in trying to reason with them, or to look at any facts on the ground that might drive their discontent. And there are facts on the ground in the West Bank that the Israeli and American right don't want to talk about. They're called settlements.
And so too with discontent throughout the Muslim world: If religion is the wellspring of radicalism, why bother paying attention to any issues in the actual material world? Why, for example, would you do what President Obama has done, and address a longstanding Iranian grievance by admitting that the US played a role in a 1953 coups that replaced Iran's democratically elected leader with a dictator?
Sam Harris has been explicit in rejecting material explanations of Islamic radicalism. In The End of Faith, while discussing terrorism, he pondered such roots causes as "the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...the collusion of Western powers with corrupt dictatorships...the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity that now plague the Arab world." He concluded: "We can ignore all of these things, or treat them only to place them safely on the shelf, because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism."
Yes, and the world is full of people who smoke and never get lung cancer. So, by Harris's logic, there's no chance that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer -- and we never should have investigated that possibility!'
Wright concludes with something that a Godless atheist like me can agree with, but which leads to very different foreign policy prescriptions:
'People are survival machines built by natural selection. (This Dawkins gets.) When they sense threats to their interests, they can not only get violent, but wrap themselves in a larger cause that justifies the violence. Here they're as flexible as you'd expect well-built survival machines to be: that larger cause can be religion, yes, but it can also be nationalism or racialism. Hitler whipped up more fervor with the latter two than the first. Whatever's handy.'
One might add that despite all their 'scientific protestations' and let's never forget that Hitchens, in particular, has no scientific training, the New Atheists rarely provide any evidence for their assertion for that metaphysical beliefs cause behaviour more than material interests...despite the fact that this is exactly the opposite of what a belief in Darwinism would lead one to believe (apes and other animals are violent, and yet what religion do they have?).
Instead, it seems to be some kind of belief, or the result of Faith. An almost religious one, one might say.
*The difference is that Chomsky views people as being rational about their material interests, whereas to the New Atheists, it seems, material interests don't really seem to exist at all. Everything exists in a free-floating world of 'pure consciousness'.
**All you Hegelians out there, and I know Hitchenswatch is just swarming with them, will identify this as the problem of whether Being determines Consciousness or whether Consciousness determines Being. As Hitchens well knows, Marx, turning Hegel 'on his head' wrote: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.". For the New Atheists, on the other hand, it's the other way round.
“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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