Ever since I stumbled onto this site, I have had growing respect for Greywolf and the hard work and insight he brings to the watch of all that is Hitchens. In a personal hard time a few years ago he has shown me both kindness and tact. In my very humble opinion Greywolf's skepticism for the authoritative voice should have been the model for mainstream media during the arguments for the war in Iraq.
However, (and there is always a however), Grey and I do not always agree, today I would just like to add a counter opinion to the increasingly common meme that vaccinations are dangerous and the evidence against them is suppressed by "Big Pharma".
There are several common arguments put against vaccinations: * vaccinations cause autism * the ingredients in vaccination are poisonous in and of themselves * the vaccine schedule is too intensive for children's immune system * all evidence contra-indicating vaccines is covered up by Big Pharma.
I am not going to tackle every single one of these points again, the information is out there and I will add links for those that want to delve, instead I want to talk about this Western weakness. In a Wired magazine article called "An Epidemic of Fear - How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All", the author, Amy Wallace spells out the impact of a culture of distrust, fear and celebrity entitlement.
"To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.” So what has this award-winning 58-year-old scientist done to elicit such venom? He boldly states — in speeches, in journal articles, and in his 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets — that vaccines do not cause autism or autoimmune disease or any of the other chronic conditions that have been blamed on them. He supports this assertion with meticulous evidence. And he calls to account those who promote bogus treatments for autism — treatments that he says not only don’t work but often cause harm.
As a result, Offit has become the main target of a grassroots movement that opposes the systematic vaccination of children and the laws that require it. McCarthy, an actress and a former Playboy centerfold whose son has been diagnosed with autism, is the best-known leader of the movement, but she is joined by legions of well-organized supporters and sympathizers."
And this celebrity pushed suspicion is effective, it fits into the whole food, vegan child care snack options, many parents with the best intentions in the world are so risk averse that they hear this "information" and want to save little Tarquin or Christian from the potential danger of a "Big Pharma" "error".
"In states where such opting out (from vaccines) is allowed, 2.6 percent of parents did so last year, up from 1 percent in 1991, according to the CDC. In some communities, like California’s affluent Marin County, just north of San Francisco, non-vaccination rates are approaching 6 percent (counterintuitively, higher rates of non-vaccination often correspond with higher levels of education and wealth).
That may not sound like much, but a recent study by the Los Angeles Times indicates that the impact can be devastating. The Times found that even though only about 2 percent of California’s kindergartners are unvaccinated (10,000 kids, or about twice the number as in 1997), they tend to be clustered, disproportionately increasing the risk of an outbreak of such largely eradicated diseases as measles, mumps, and pertussis (whooping cough). The clustering means almost 10 percent of elementary schools statewide may already be at risk.
"Unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser’s Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback. “This study helps dispel one of the commonly held beliefs among vaccine-refusing parents: that their children are not at risk for vaccine-preventable diseases,” Glanz says."
I wont go into all the gory or even the cold grey details but I do suggest those that want more information to have a read. To follow the politics and back and forward of the scientists and doctors who feel like they are fighting a losing battle against a dangerous soft delusion fostered by people pushing unsupported "treatments" like Chelation therapy I would recommend Orac.
In the meantime one of the key questions that people on my side of the debate need to answer is WHY, when the evidence is so strong do people embrace a pile of fuzzy stuff. Carl Sagan answers it as well as anyone.
"Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort. “A great many of these belief systems address real human needs that are not being met by our society,” Sagan wrote of certain Americans’ embrace of reincarnation, channeling, and extraterrestrials. “There are unsatisfied medical needs, spiritual needs, and needs for communion with the rest of the human community.”
So until the scientific and medical community makes time to address timeless human fears and need of comfort and community they risk losing more young children to diseases we learned how to beat 50 years ago.
PS for those who are fighting with friend or family I reccomend this quick guide.
I Know this isn't a Hitch article but I would welcome ANY comment.
Bobby has a theory — a conspiracy theory — about how the presence of thimerosal as a preservative in vaccines and the increasing numbers of shots that youngsters have been taking this past 30 years have caused high levels of autism, Asberger's syndrome and attention deficit disorder in children in the US. He's on a crusade to expose the links between vaccines and autism. And Joe Scarborough, who has a son with Asberger's syndrome, is giving him a fair hearing.
Mercury-containing thimerosal has been reduced to "trace amounts" in vaccines recommended for use on children aged 6 or younger according to the US FDA, and it's use in vaccines has been prohibited by some US states. But it's making a comeback with the H1N1 vaccine, for which California has suspended its ban, along with some other dubious ingredients. I don't like the sound of these here "adjuvants"!
Anyway, the Aussies seem to have survived their flu season quite well without access to the magic potion, and the Cochrane Collaboration found "no evidence whatsoever that season influenza vaccines have any effect" in reducing numbers of cases, deaths or complications from flu. While I survived my own course of childhood vaccinations with little more than a BCG scar on the arm and some residual jerkiness, I would be very wary about giving carte blanche for today's medical industrial complex to inject anything they want into the bodies of unsuspecting adults and innocent babes alike. And President Obama's recent alarmism in declaring swine flu a national emergency has pushed my personal incredulity past breaking point. As far as I'm concerned, Big Pharma is guilty until proven innocent and Big Government is their bitch, as Hitch would put it.
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Our Passions Forge Our Fetters — Part 3: Hitchens achieves his low point of the evening
In this third and final part of part of his commentary on last week's Intelligence Squared Debate (for Parts 1 & 2 see here and here, the Vatican's very own Papal Nuncio to Hitchens Watch, TOMAHAWK, looks at the Q&A session, where just when he thought things couldn't get any lower, Christopher proved him wrong by announcing to rapturous applause that he has made a lifelong habit of following the promptings of his male member. — Greywolf.
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 3) by TOMAHAWK
As if all this wasn't dispiriting enough, the Q&A that followed managed to drag the tone down further. A large portion of the questions related to sexual questions with one young chap simply saying he didn't want anyone interfering with his sex life. A question about the 10 Commandments brought forth some interesting replies. Hitchens appears incapable of recognizing that the Catholic Church holds that the Commandments embody truths of the natural moral law accessible to all. For Hitchens and Fry and the largely benighted (but sadly not humble) audience, to assert the former is to make the commandments irrelevant. But the commandments are understood as a gift given to strengthen confidence in the ability of man to live by rational rules and which assist him in the living out of those rules. Sadly, nobody took this up—again the proposers failed.
The 10 Commandments question allowed Hitchens to achieve his low point of the evening. He told the audience that he agreed with some of them, which was nice, but that he didn't think much of the one on adultery. This came along with his announcement that he was "obsessed by sex" and took and continues to take pleasure in following the promptings of his male member from a young age. The shallowness, egotism, etc., were there for all to see. I was tempted to ask whether after dumping his first wife (pregnant at the time) for a younger model following the promptings of that member he likes to talk about, she might have thought about these things rather differently. Perhaps she didn't find this kind of thing funny. Hitchens also objected to the very idea that one might have bad/evil thoughts (e.g. lusting after someone not one's wife). It was telling that he regarded any idea of moral virtue in relation to the inner life as "thought-control" by a "dictator". To the troubled conscience such thoughts may be consoling, but is he seriously suggesting that it is morally irrelevant whether or not one's thoughts towards others and oneself are hateful, prideful, lustful etc.? Apparently so. Hitchens the materialist seeks to abolish the inner life—yet still wants to talk of what counts as "good" having done so. It became evident that for Hitchens it's HE who sets the rules of morality, no external authority. He is an adulterer - ergo adultery isn't really a serious sin. This is Enlightenment thinking apparently.
Fry did make a point that if the Church is seen as not much better than what is outside the Church (oh - he obfuscated the meaning, as understood by the Church, of Extra Ecclessia Nulla Salus—but he got to say something in Latin and sound learned I suppose) then what is the point of it? The weakness of the proposers lay in the fact that they did not answer this as a Catholic should.
So, a dispiriting evening all round. Fry came across as a tortured soul who, as I said, didn't seem at ease doing what he is doing (after the debate he "twittered" that he felt "slightly guilty"). Hitchens does his friend no good at all. The latter finished by proposing contraception as a solution to many of the world's problems. This base materialist, at the end of the day, doesn't want more 'mammals' and he calls it “compassion”. So, sterility, sexual wrongdoing and copious amounts of dishonesty, irreason, etc., are, apparently, forces for good in the world. When, towards the end, a smiling African nun stood up and said without guile that what we really needed to do was to love and follow the example of Jesus Christ (the real one - not the Fry-approved version) the silence was deafening.
Why, it might be asked, did so many people, in England, turn up to a debate on the Catholic Church—a Church that has an absolutely minuscule influence in the public life of this country? Who knows? By the end of the Q and A session one almost felt one was back in Reformation times, except this time with an outright atheist audience with moral views that would have disgusted many of the so-called “reformers”. Those who live disordered lives similar to Mr Hitchens’s doubtless find solace in him beating up on the Church. While Fry and Hitchens mouth platitudes about the poor they want the Vatican to sell palaces to help. Yet it seems they, like the Bolsheviks and Jacobins, are far more interested in destroying the Church for Her teachings on the moral law than they are on helping the poor (rather like the old-style Reformers who destroyed the best help the poor had). Aldous Huxley once noted that, "As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." And that truth goes hand in hand with another—lust darkens the mind. And last night saw many darkened minds indulged by the passionate irreason of two carnal rejecters of Logos.
Finally, a foreign friend of mine noted that the debate was a typically English one–taking place in that country that had “emancipated” itself from the Catholic Church and helped give birth to untrammelled ‘Capitalism’. Fry and Hitchens are the followers of the thugs who looted the monasteries in the 16th century and enclosed the common lands, driving the peasants off the land and creating a rootless proletariat. The sexual libertines, like the looters, share a hatred of the Church as the witness for the moral law. And they’re passionate about it.
Earlier this month in Toronto, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia and A.J. Jacobs were invited up to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum where the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibit and asked to come up with their own version of the Ten Commandments. On top of that, they were allowed to do a Charlton Heston impression in front of a live audience, which you can hear here.
Hitch, who comes on first in this recording, does an excellent job of pulling apart the Almighty's original rules and even goes deep into conspiracy theory in suggesting that Moses never actually received the two tablets of stone from the Lord, let alone the replacements, and that somebody high up in the Hebrew hierarchy made the story up for their own nefarious reasons. He's not particularly fond of the Commandments as a set (listen to the speech to find out why) or of the Christian injunction to "love one another" either, and while he didn't go as far as to carve his own set of rules, he did mention that there were some "stern prohibitions" we might like to consider and he gave a "wish list" of four specific items. Hitchens's Prohibitions are (in King James Old Testament language):
1. Thou shalt not engage in slavery. 2. Thou shalt not engage in genocide. 3. Thou shalt not rape and torture children. 4. Thou shalt not despoil the natural order.
This list of injunctions has the merit of leaving out oxen, coveting and the Sabbath day, and it's short enough to fit on a single tablet. But there seem to be some serious omissions in it. Permitted are harsh exploitation as long as it's not slavery, mass murder as long as it's not genocide, rape and torturer as long as the victims are over 18, and absolutely anything at all, because let's face it, despoiling the natural order is a concept largely in the eye of the beholder. For an old-fashioned conservative it might mean gay marriage or allowing the working class to vote, while for George Monbiot it means flying in an aeroplane "burning carbon!!" unless the trip is in a good cause like attending an environmental conference.
If I were invited to impersonate a deity (no blasphemy intended) and allowed to carve my own Ten Commandments in stone, I would definitely go for the following, just to show my underlings that their Lord at least had a sense of humour.
1. Thou shalt not Hitch thy cart to another man's ass. 2. Thou shalt not Itch for things thou canst not scratch. 3. Thou shalt not Bitch about thy Father in Heaven not providing adequate room service, amenities or mini-bar facilities during thy time on Earth. 4. Thou shalt not Kitsch but shouldst develop an eye for quality, for cheap and gaudy decoration douth sorely offend the Lord thy God. 5. Thou shalt not Snitch upon thy friend, neighbor, nor even a stranger riding in the same caravan who hasn't got a ticket. 6. Thou shalt not Ditch thy gudwife and children — not even if thou findest another who giveth thee a whale of a boner, Jonah. 7. Thou shalt not Pitch to others of the need for war, fighting or violence against thine enemies. 8. Thou shalt not Stitch up others through devious deceptions or dodgy dealings. 9. Thou shalt not beWitch others with wicked words, chants, incantations or magic spells. 10. Thou shalt not enRich thyself by breaking Commandments 1 through 9 on pain of eternal damnation.
Peter Hitchens is 58 today. On my last birthday I was simply glad to get there! Happily, Peter Hitchens glows with health. Or he did last time I saw him earlier this year, looking nearer 38 than 58. Birthdays are often a cause for reflection, 'what's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget', but Peter has enjoyed good fortune and I think he must have plenty of laughter and good times to reflect upon. Some folk are happy to reflect upon their dahlias and have to be dragged into 'Travels With My Aunt', not so Peter Hitchens. Malta, Portsmouth, Oxford, London, Washington, Moscow and back to the dreaming spires. A happy homelife and paid to travel all over the world, it must have been an amazing journey. May you have many more.
On saturday it is All Hallows Eve. Mwahahaha! It is directly opposite Beltane in the calendar. 'Hallow' means 'holy', we read in the Catholic Bible, II Machabees Chapter XII verse 46: "it is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins." Departed souls come to warn the living to mend their ways before it is too late. Enjoy Halloween. Pray for me, and I'll pray for thee.
Here is a quick little quiz called 'Which Hitch?' (or should that be Witch Hitch?). All answers can be found in published sources so for example which Hitch declared his love for Viv Groskop recently? Peter. Enjoy.
Q1. Which Hitch has declared himself to be the embodiment of all evil?
Q2. which Hitch used to ride a big motorbike?
Q3. Which Hitch slept with his friend's sister because “it was better than nothing“ ?
Q4. Christine Keeler, that well known call girl, shared a bed with which Hitch?
Q5. Which Hitch sent his child to a Quaker school?
Q6. Which Hitch said that “the Labour Party was now the Conservative Party at prayer”.
Q7 In a review of his latest book in the New Statesman, this was written of which Hitch: “In my mind’s eye I can see him now, a clutch of copies of Socialist Worker under his arm, as he advanced slightly nervously into the dingy light of a wine bar in Holborn that the staff of the New Statesman used to frequent once the day’s tasks were over. “ ?
Q8. Which Hitch is quoted as saying: “To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental”
Q9. Which Hitch is quoted as saying: “The four most over-rated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics”
Q10. Which Hitch is quoted as writing: “the inconsiderate and the bully are freer to behave as they wish than at any time for a hundred and fifty years. Their actions often go unrecorded or are dismissed as petty by the authorities. Yet their effects on people's lives are deep and painful”
Q11. Which Hitch wrote: ”the former importance of marriage has been dissolved by general sexual availability without commitment. Once men had to marry for sexual satisfaction. Now they do not. Women have robbed themselves, by choosing easily available sex, of the great bargaining power which they used to posses during a few short, desirable years.”
Q12. Which Hitch has stockpiled 120 100W bulbs but is 'seldom at home'?
Q13. Which Hitch has declared that the spirit of these words is the one he hopes to embrace at his own last hour: “Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Q14. Which Hitch examined how it was that Orwell came to repudiate the “unthinking imperialism that had been his family’s meal ticket.” ? And which Hitch, when asked if he has undergone any similar repudiation in himself, answered: “The things that people reject they can have a secret share in,” ?
Q15. Which Hitch used to have a “pronounced” stutter?
While the Hitch in his lair has resigned himself to the US pursuing the War on Turbaned Terrorism at all costs, others nearer the front lines are resigning their commissions for precisely that reason. One such is Mathew Hoh, who has, according to the Washington Post, "became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war." He's a former Marine Corps captain who, unlike the chicken hawk cheerleaders who squawked loudly for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now for the US to bomb Iran, has served on combat in Iraq and was until recently the senior US civilian in Zabul province. In resigning,he wrote "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
It's not Saigon yet, but it's getting there. In this iconic shot, the late Hugh Van Es captured this bunch of Americans queuing up to leave Nam in 1975.
This looks like the sign of a serious loss of morale. Maybe Mr. Hoh should have boned up on Hitch's pep talk in Slate of last month. It has such a marvelous White-Man's-Burden oomph to it.
However much and however justifiably the press prefers to lay the emphasis on stories of "overstretch" or "post-traumatic stress disorder," it remains the case that we have been schooling a superb generation of soldiers who have the irreplaceable advantage of having fought, and in many cases vanquished, the deadliest imaginable enemies in the most arduous possible terrain. This means that if, say, the government of the Philippines or Indonesia or India or any of the other Asian democracies should request assistance against the same foe, we would be able to supply them with a wealth of expertise as well as a fair bit of muscle. Whatever political decisions are made about our posture toward the rather sketchy Karzai or Maliki governments, the long-term abilities conferred by this bitterly won battle-hardening constitute an asset that is unquantifiable. And it isn't merely combat experience, essential as that may be, but the learned ability to find ways of isolating, discrediting, and dividing the terrorists.
A presence in Iraq and Afghanistan also means that the recent coup by the Revolutionary Guards in the all-important country of Iran is a coup that already faces containment. Just across two of its main frontiers are some pretty formidable contingents that the dictatorship must always keep in mind. This consideration is likely to become ever more important as the crisis of the mullahs deepens. Until recently, they would have seen at least one clear way out of their cul-de-sac: another holy war with a rival or neighbor, most probably a Sunni Arab one. Among the extremists in Tehran, there have already been bellicose noises about Bahrain, for example: a monarchical Arab mini-state with a majority Shiite population that some claim to be rightfully Persian. Given the rapid progress that it has made toward nuclear capability, and the no-less-rapid way that it has alienated its own people, the temptation for the Ahmadinejad regime to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels" and to appeal to tribal and religious emotions is already fairly great. Now, try to picture the foregoing equation with the U.S. military presence removed, let alone with it having admitted defeat.
On its own, of course, the Iranian menace would not justify keeping forces in two neighboring countries. Nor could the presence be justified by the opportunities for training that it provides. But we don't have the right to forget why we are in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place: to make up for past crimes of both omission and commission and to help safeguard emergent systems of self-government that have the same deadly enemies as we do and to which, not quite incidentally, we gave our word.
Essential Hitch: Afghanistan is an ideal training ground for US troops that will be needed for the war we've always been at with Eurasia, not to mention Eastasia; we're in Afghanistan and Iraq to put a squeeze on Iran, but that's just a bonus. Essentially, Afghanistan provides golden opportunities for training. Afghanistan is not Vietnam! How much clearer can I make it? Now stop that ho humming and get back to your posts!
However, not a few people, even among those fighting and coordinating the current war, are beginning to view it as the same old geopolitical board game with just a different set of dominoes. Today the US has lost 14 people including 11 soldiers in two helicopter crashes in Afghanistan and eight more have been killed in attacks in the south by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), taking total US fatalities this month to 55 troops. With morale fading among the boys, there has never been a more vital time for Hitchens to volunteer for active duty with the Foreign Office in Helmland, Zabul or even South Waziristan. The natives will love him, brew him endless pots of tea and discuss Kipling and the Raj. And a generous stock of gin and incontinency pants will be provided.
This was old news before Porker Hitchens got his snout into it, but in the Spring of this year the Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of over a quarter of a million pigs, allegedly to prevent swine flu, although the Health Ministry insisted it was a "general health measure". Whatever! Had Uncle Sam gone into wipe out these swine in the name of health and efficiency, sanity and sanitation, no doubt Christopher would have been one of the loudest grunting his approval. But when the Egyptians — the filthy swines — try to clean up their own act by going the whole hog and end up dealing with some nasty unintended consequences, he simultaneously blames both the Mubarak regime and clerical hysteria. Now it's not often you see those two beasts feeding out of the same trough.
Then he manages with considerable dexterity to link this to Iran, anti-Semitism and irrational prejudice about pigs being "unclean because they even eat their own excrement."
Back in May, just as Egypt's anti-porcine hysteria was gathering pace, there was a proposal from Sheik Ahmad Ali Othman, a senior advisory figure at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, that all pigs be killed because they were the descendants of those unbelieving Jews who were turned into swine in the Quran. (In case you don't follow this very toxic debate between contending schools of militant Islam, there are those who maintain that Jews are the spawn of the pigs and monkeys into which Allah turned the heretics, and those who take the more moderate view that the heretics turned into pigs and monkeys were further cursed by being made barren and sterile. The latter view leads to the slightly more lenient and broad-minded conclusion that, bad as today's Jews are, they at least cannot be in a direct line of descent from the original condemned beasts. These fine distinctions are worth knowing.)
I should think very few of people do follow that type of debate. You get intelligent and yet ignorant and bigoted arseholes in any reasonably large group of people, as the presence of the Hitch among the British, US, atheist, journalist, scruffy, and scotch-drinking communities is a constant reminder. Still, once the Hitch gets its trotters moving, you can bet your bacon the trail is going to lead it to the conclusion that religion poisons everything. For comparison, in the 1990s the secular UK scientifically slaughtered 4.4 million cattle suspected of potentially being infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) after discovering that its advanced, industrialized and well-regulated agricultural sector had managed to contaminate the nation's herds by systematically feeding these herbivores with the remains of their fellows in the form of meat and bone meal. Then in 2001 alone, it illegally slaughtered over 4 million cows and other farm animals (killing all animals within 3km zones around farms presumed to be infected) as a precaution against the spread of foot and mouth disease. Let's not look at the US meat industry's record, because that would be enough to put anyone without a spongiform brain permanently off their pork chops.
Needless to say, had Egypt mounted such a cattle cull, doubtless Hitch would have found a way to make it out to be a jihad against "our friends the Hindus". So the moral of this Hitchop's fable is, as always, that when WE do something, we do it sensibly and rationally in a mature, proper and professional fashion, while when THEY do it, they invariably make a complete pig's breakfast of the affair!
To finish, here's a chap who agrees with Hitch about the Royal Family.
The appearance of the arrogant Antichrist in the Antipodes angered and agitated aboriginal and adoptive Australians alike. It also provoked some thoughtful responses in the 9 October issue of Eureka Street (PDF), including one by Neil Ormerod examining the logical shortcomings of Hitch's alleged claim that he knows God doesn't exist (did he really claim that!? I've only ever heard him claim to doubt it.), which I'm taking the liberty of reproducing below. — Greywolf
Christopher Hitchens' illogical atheism by Neil Ormerod
The age of muscular evangelical Christianity has passed to be replaced by the age of muscular evangelical atheism. The Christopher Hitchens bandwagon was in town as part of Sydney’s ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’. On Saturday night the author of God is Not Great spoke on the topic of‘religion poisons everything’.
Religion, he claims, makes us serfs of God, an omnipresent father-figure who will not go away and let us all grow up. Time to cast off the shackles of belief and stand as adults without the fear of God looking over our shoulder.
Hitchens’ presence caught my attention while driving home, as he was interviewed on ABC Radio by Richard Glover. I was struck by how quickly he spoke, presumably to cover up the gaps in the logic of his position. However the conversation moved on from God to Hitchens’support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; God once more disappeared from the public airways.
Listener response via SMS included some muddled defences of religion as well strident support for the author, but what caught my attention was one SMS that criticised Hitchens for his arrogance. It was impossible to claim to know that God does or does not exist, so it was arrogant for Hitchens to claim to know that God does not exist.
It seemed to me that this caller captured something of the ‘spirit of the age’. For all intents and purposes God’s existence, or non-existence, is viewed as beyond the scope of reason to settle. The existence of God is purely a matter of faith, not reason.
It is interesting to note how far we are from an earlier world view in Christianity where it was clear to everyone that it is possible to know God’s existence through the use of reason, for example through Aquinas’ ‘five ways’ . Indeed not so long ago Vatican I (1869—70) taught that it is possible to know the existence of God through reason. Vatican II repeated this teaching in the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum.
The nature and causes of this shift have been exhaustively examined in the major work by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. There are religious, philosophical and political forces at work in a process that took centuries to arrive at our current cultural assumption, that God’s existence lies beyond the reach of reason.
And it is just that, an assumption. Who among us have seen a proof that God’s existence cannot be reached through the use of reason? We generally just take it as given. In fact we’re embarrassed by the suggestion that God’s existence might actually be something one can know through reason.
Religiously, Luther’s split between faith and reason were a major factor; philosophically Kant added intellectual respectability to Luther by declaring God’s existence to be beyond the reach of reason, though still a necessary postulate for practical reason and moral behaviour. But what interests me are the political forces at work.
The post-reformation wars of religion clearly gave God a bad name in the West. Religious belief had proved itself politically divisive and destructive. A new political modus vivendi needed to emerge which would prevent religious rancour from becoming social turmoil.
The Enlightenment solution was to marginalise religion from the public realm, to make it a matter of private choice, not public policy. Whereas the public realm was a realm of reason, the private realm was a matter of individual (and irrational) personal preference.
It was not that God was excluded from the public realm because God could not be known through reason; rather God must be excluded from the public realm, therefore God cannot be known by reason. If in fact God’s existence can be known by reason, then the Enlightenment exclusion of religion from public debate cannot be justified. A God that can be known through reason is a dangerous political idea!
Of course all this is a long way from providing what would once be called a ‘natural theology’. Taylor is not convinced such a project can be successful. He expends a large amount of energy simply trying to show that the exclusion of God does not necessarily follow from other assumptions that ground our culture. Atheism is not the only possibility. How far we’ve travelled from Aquinas’ ‘five ways’!
In the meantime Hitchens and fellow travellers such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) are making a claim for the intellectual high ground. Belief in God is not just viewed intellectually as quaint, but as a sign of intellectual bad will, of clinging to a childish illusion.
Perhaps we need to meet them head on at that intellectual level and revisit the teaching of Vatican I (and II)
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Our Passions Forge Our Fetters — Part 2: The king of sexual innuendo
Following on from the first part of his commentary on last week's Intelligence Squared Debate, when he told us about the performances of Archbishop John Onaiyekan and Ann Widdecombe MP, Hitchens Watch's very own man inside Opus Dei, TOMAHAWK, looks in detail at the contribution made by actor, comedian, ubiquitous public intellectual, unabashed atheist and Renaissance man Stephen Fry. The tension of waiting for Hitch to strut his funky stuff is making this almost as exciting as waiting for Led Zeppelin to come on at Knebworth in '79! — Greywolf.
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 2) by TOMAHAWK
Fry followed Widdecombe and looked rather uneasy doing what he was doing. His soothing tones came as something of a relief following CH and Ms Widdecombe, who is cursed with a most unfortunate voice. Fry, unlike Hitchens, seems to think of Jesus Christ as a jolly good chap. And he "respects" religious people. That said, he can be a pretty formidable misrepresenter himself. Not long before the debate Fry appeared to tell Channel 4 News that right-wing Polish Catholics were responsible for Auschwitz! He did so in the course of laying into a right-wing Polish party that dares to disapprove of the public promotion of sodomy. As this makes Mr Fry jolly angry he thinks that lying about history (or Making UP History) is fine (although to his credit he has since apologised after being “outed” on the issue by reputable historians of the era). He also solemnly announced that the Church had "tortured" Galileo and seemed to be under the impression that Galileo had proved heliocentrism - thereby revealing further ignorance of both history and science—safe in the knowledge that most of his audience would lap all this up too (for details see Galileo, Science and the Church by Jerome Langford or The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler. And there are many other scholarly volumes on this).
On he went. Child abuse was brought up—strange how Hitchens and Fry are so horrified by sexual wrongdoing and yet both in this debate and elsewhere promote the kind of sexual libertinism and perversity that actually makes all of these problems worse (Fry himself, raped as a schoolboy, elsewhere thought it wise to glibly announce that he liked the experience and that there was too much fuss about this sort of thing (see his interview on Shrink Wrap with Pamela Stephenson)). Is the rape of boys only wrong when priests do it?
Homosexuality came up and Fry effectively defined his essence as homosexual, ergo anyone condemning homosexual acts must be saying that Stephen is, inherently, evil. Ironic how this self-styled "empiricist" has recourse to the idea of essences when it comes to falsely identifying himself!
The Church, of course, does not say that anymore than it identifies any man with his vices. If Stephen chooses to identify himself with his vices then that is tragic. But he doesn't have to do that anymore than the rest of us do. Of course, it is the fact that the Church has a fully consistent and rational sexual ethic than enrages Fry who, in his rather emotional terms, takes it "personally". There is little debate to be had here with one who identifies himself with his vices. Perhaps sexual sin, more than any other sin, disposes the one who commits it to identify his essence as one bound up with that sin. Who knows? The proposers did not really deign to outline the true basis the Church's position on sexual ethics and human dignity and thereby further weakened their position.
Fry, who mocked the idea of transubstantiation (his words betrayed the fact that he had no idea of "substantial form") and also called for the Church to sell of Her riches etc., sounded surprisingly like a retro Protestant. Quite why the former should bother him so much and quite why an intelligent man like Fry thinks that historic Church property being alienated from believers will somehow help the poor (the Archbishop took this up), I'll leave to psychiatrists.
Then, as with Hitchens, Fry came back to condoms and, preemptively, got jolly cross with Widdecombe lest she contradict him that condoms were absolutely crucial in combating AIDS—a problem largely caused by the very sexual promiscuity promoted by Fry and Hitchens (for which they have yet to repent—in fact they repented for nothing all night—for, in their eyes, their "side" has nothing to repent for, especially when it comes to sex).
Finally, Fry, the king of sexual innuendo, accused his opponents of being obsessed with sex ("coming from you!" cried an audience member). His analogy of food/sex where only the obese and the anorexic are obsessed by food was both crude and telling. For Fry, celibates are perverted (Hitchens thinks so too). Apparently chastity/celibacy (wasn't Fry a proud celibate for 16 years?) are perverse, but any sexual activity that is consensual isn't. This is strange indeed. One is reminded of the words of GEM Anscombe:
"There is no such thing as a casual, non-significant sexual act; everyone knows this. Contrast sex with eating - you're strolling along a lane, you see a mushroom on a bank as you pass by, you know about mushrooms, you pick it and you eat it quite casually—sex is never like that. That's why virtue in connection with eating is basically a matter only of the pattern of one's eating habits. But virtue in sex—chastity—is not only a matter of such a pattern, that is of its role in a pair of lives. A single sexual action can be bad even without regard to its context, its further intentions and its motives.
Those who try to make room for sex as mere casual enjoyment pay the penalty: they become shallow. At any rate the talk that reflects and commends this attitude is always shallow. They dishonour their own bodies; holding cheap what is naturally connected with the origination of human life. There is an opposite extreme, which perhaps we shall see in our day: making sex a religious mystery. This Christians do not do. Despite some rather solemn nonsense that's talked this is obvious. We wouldn't, for example, make the sexual organs objects of a cultic veneration; or perform sexual acts as part of religious rituals; or prepare ourselves for sexual intercourse as for a sacrament. As often holds, there is here a Christian mean between two possible extremes. It is: never to change sexual actions so they are deprived of that character which makes sex so profoundly significant, so deep-going in human life...
Sexual acts are not sacred actions. But the perception of the dishonour done to the body in treating them as the casual satisfaction of desire is certainly a mystical perception. I don't mean, in calling it a mystical perception, that it's out of the ordinary. It's as ordinary as the feeling for the respect due to a man's dead body: the knowledge that a dead body isn't something to be put out for the collectors of refuse to pick up. This, too, is mystical; though it's as common as humanity.
Fry added a gross misrepresentation of a Church instruction on secrecy, the confessional and minors (had he read the instruction or a false report on it?—try and guess) and demonstrated his ignorance of the concept of limbo in Catholic teaching (and got jolly cross when Widdecombe picked him up on it—sadly Widdecombe got it wrong too!). He finished with a rather nauseating peroration on the carpenter from Galilee who Fry thinks of as a jolly good chap (minus, presumably, what He said concerning the moral law, His foundation of a Church, etc. etc. etc.).
Ever since he published GING and went on the rolling thunder God-bashing debate tour, Christopher has been more assiduous than before in his efforts to point out the connection between religion and child abuse. Whether it's rape or sexual abuse of minors by members of the Catholic clergy and covered up by their superiors, "male genital mutilation" (his term for circumcision) carried out in the name of Judaism, female genital mutilation in the name of Islam (although not when it's done by the "secular" Kurds), or most recently, the marriage of child brides to adult men in Yemen, Hitch is never happier than when making the connection between what our friend Angrysoba persists in describing as "childfucking" and his own universal poison of "religion".
However, Child sexual abuse is far wider than Hitchens acknowledges. There is no firm evidence that it is more common in general among the religious than the secular or among theists than atheists, and, with the possible exception of circumcision (which only a small minority people in a special Greywolf poll accepted as constituting child sexual abuse), there is no firm evidence that when religious people rape or sexually abuse children that they do it for religious reasons. And yet Hitchens seems blissfully unaware that much if not most "childfucking" has no religious basis whatsoever, and — with the singular exception of his recent lukewarm criticism of Roman Polanski's crime, which he attempted to tie in with goings on in Yemen and Iran — his rule appears to be to remain resolutely silent on the issue apart from when it suits his anti-religious agenda to speak out. It's almost as if, as long as the abuser is a secular son of a bitch, the Hitch really doesn't give a shit and that the tiny victims of these heinous crimes are merely the meat in Hitch's rhetorical sandwiches, which he unfailingly serves with relish. If he could get the same mileage out of Catholic priests beating dogs or Shi'ite mullahs swinging cats by their tails, that would do him just as well.
If, as a regular Hitchens reader, you thought that the worst place on earth to be a child was the Middle East, then you'd be wrong. Because broadly speaking, just like Sting's Russians, the Muslims love their children too. Actually, I have it on good authority that the worst place on earth to be a child these days is not the Mid-East but the Mid-West. Just last week, specialists from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Marshals from Texas and the Department of Justice Prosecutors from Washington D.C. all got together in Tulsa, Oklahoma for the state's first Human Trafficking Awareness and Training Conference. Because, in the words of Jamie Reeves, the News Editor of the University of Tulsa's student newspaper The Collegian, "America is now the number one destination in the world for child sex trafficking, according to the State Department Bureau of Justice Statistics. Sex trafficking of modern-day slaves is at an all-time high and larger U.S. cities are major markets for this illegal sex trade industry."
At the website of Oklahomans Against Trafficking Humans (O.A.T.H.), we find the following stats:
Think Human Trafficking Doesn't Happen Here? Think Again! Did you know millions each day face forced labor and sexual exploitation -Over 2 million children are trafficked annually -Human trafficking is a $34 billion industry & the 2nd largest criminal activity in the world -An estimated 45,000 men, women & children are brought here by traffickers from around the world annually. -300,000 of our own children are at risk each year. - America is the #1 destination for Child Sex Trafficking in the world. - A child is reported missing every 40 seconds in the US.
It's Happening Here in Oklahoma -In 2003, the Dept of Justice reported the largest concentrations of trafficking survivors who received federal assistance resided in California, Texas, New York and Oklahoma. -In 2004 the FBI’s program "Stormy Nights" rescued 13 Oklahoma children ages 12 and up from a prostitution ring operating at Oklahoma City truck stops and traveled to other U.S truck stops. -In September 2006, an Oklahoma City federal court handed down a judgment against men running a human trafficking scheme where workers from India were lured to Oklahoma for forced labor at a manufacturing facility in Tulsa. -February 2009, our FBI Task Force working with Innocence Loss rescued several girls from forced prostitution through a Craig's List sting operation. -Oklahoma cities are on major human trafficking routes throughout the Midwest
Types of Human Trafficking in Oklahoma: - Debt Bondage in domestic service for private homes and labor sectors including the restaurant, hotel, massage, nail salons, agricultural, construction, and landscaping industries. - Commercial Sex Industry including prostitution, stripping, escort and massage where women must give the money they make to their pimp, not allowed to quit, plus basic human rights and freedom violations occurring. - Child Trafficking involving all minors caught up in prostitution, pornography, stripping, escort, massage and sex chatting while trafficker or pimp is marketing them for commercial profit.
More information on child sex trafficking in America is available at End Human Trafficking.
Shared Hope International has conducted field research on child sex trafficking across the U.S. This research found underage girls are the bulk of victims in commercial sex markets - this includes pornography, stripping, escort services, and prostitution. There are three main manifestations of child sex trafficking in America: pimp-controlled prostitution, familial prostitution, and "survival" sex. Melissa Snow, Director of Programs for Shared Hope International, will be bringing you periodic updates from the field: the reality of child sex trafficking in America.
It's happening across the U.S.- from Maryland to Minnesota, Iowa to Utah, American children as young as 12 years old are being sold by pimps in prostitution. By law, any child in prostitution is a victim of human trafficking. And how can such rampant sexual exploitation of America's youth exist? Pimp control. We use "pimp control" to refer to the targeting, recruiting, and maintaining of a person for commercial sexual exploitation- in many cases, a child.
Here in America, the average age a child is targeted and recruited into sex trafficking is 13 years old. Pimps prey on the innocence of youth because it provides them with a target that can be romanced, tricked and then brutally forced into the sex trafficking market. Pimps use a variety of techniques to target and recruit a child into prostitution, from immediate force and violence as demonstrated in the case of two underage girls from Toledo, to the more common "loverboy" or boyfriend approach.
Hitchens is exceptionally enthusiastic about attacking certain religious groups and organizations for tolerating child rape and sex abuse, but I've been reading him for years and I cannot recall a word about the much larger problem of socially widespread child rape and abuse where no religious angle is apparent. Perhaps he has occasionally pontificated on the matter, but not often enough for his words to be easily accessible among in the many thousands of google hits that lump "Hitchens" and "child abuse" together with religion. This is an omission that amounts to a distortion and, given the sheer scale of Hitchen's outpourings on "religiously sanctified" child abuse and the breadth of his bully pulpit, it could easily be construed as adding up to an implicit endorsement of adult men having sex with minors, just as long as the abusers aren't Catholic priests or Muslims. Also, as a vocal proponent of sexual freedom who also has also demonstrated a salacious interest in the seedier side of sex on numerous occasions, Hitch might do well to reflect on his own personal contribution to the pornogrification of mainstream Western culture that has undoubtedly helped to sustain a social environment in which all kinds of things that a traditionalist would term "perversion" can and do flourish. He is, for example, gushing with praise for Nabokov and lamented that he never got a Nobel, and yet Lolita was just twelve years old. Just because the novel didn't prompt Hitch or Martin Amis into touching up a tot, it is incontestable that it brought the idea that such a thing is possible to the attention of many minds that the thought might never otherwise have crossed. It made the thought "fashionable" and helped deepen the pornographic swamp, so to speak. But then again, on such matters Hitch is about as reflective as a coat of pitch.
Sound and Decent advice for our cousins across the pond from the last sane man in England, Pat Condell. This is a special treat for FGFM, but we can all take advantage of the generous slices of advice Pat dishes up with such deadpan seriousness. Peace, oh yes!
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Our Passions Forge Our Fetters — Part 1: A Secular Ian Paisley
Last week's Intelligence Squared Debate has attracted plenty of triumphantalist crowing from among the pagan, heathen and apostate comunities as well as an almost deafening online silence from representatives of the One True Faith and, moreover, precious little in the way of scholarly critique on the whole dog & pony show masquerading as an early 21st-century equivalent of the Wilberforce-Huxley Debate and the Skopes Monkey Tial rolled into one. In an effort to help rectify this lamentable state of affairs, Hitchens Watch is delighted to be able to be the first online outlet to publish an exclusive review of the event coupled with some insightful and possibly inciteful analysis by TOMAHAWK, a Catholic intellectual who attended the debate and bore witness to the entire sorry spectacle. — Greywolf
OUR PASSIONS FORGE OUR FETTERS A Hasty Commentary Re. a Debate on the Catholic Church (Part 1) by TOMAHAWK
On October 19, I attended, along with a couple of thousand others, the Intelligence Squared Debate: "The Catholic church is a force for good in the world". The event was held in central London at the Methodist Central Hall. Speaking for the proposition were Archbishop John Onaiyekan (from Nigeria) and Ann Widdecombe MP; for the opposition Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. Predictably the latter two, who remarkably seem to qualify as 'public intellectuals', attracted a large crowd of admirers to the event.
The African Archbishop opened the debate with a leisurely and relatively contentless speech (which he ended well short of his allotted time). In doing so he failed to set the terms of the debate and offered a great opportunity for the opposition to dictate those terms. The Archbishop spoke of his upbringing in a non-Christian belief system (Animism I suspect) and the conversion of his family; how the Church must be understood as a community of believers and we should look to these believers and their actions in the world to see that the Church is a force for good. The list of goods tended, sadly, to neglect the spiritual goods —surprising from a cleric.
Up came CH, rather fawned on by the partial moderator. Even more aggressive than usual CH barked out a list of crimes the Church. The usual stuff: Crusades; Slavery; Torture; Child Abuse; collaboration with Nazis; Child Abuse; AIDS and condoms; exploitation of the poor; Child Abuse; and so on and on. He delivered his piece charmlessly but with passion, such that many in the audience, groupies and some non-groupies, seemed to think he had made a gripping and authoritative intervention that a) annihilated any claims that the Church was a force for good and b) showed CH to a brilliant summariser of history, theology and philosophy. He was, of course, helped in this by the rather weak opening speech. That said, by presenting a mere shopping list and not ever addressing the nature of the Church and what he himself meant by "good" as in "good life" "virtue" etc. (metaphysical and moral notions of good), CH showed no interest in any substantive debate—not something his fans would mind I suppose.
Hitchens, who claims to be a great fan of the Enlightenment (does anyone seriously believe he has ever read a volume Kant, Spinoza or Hume all the way through, far less understood it?), certainly gave first person evidence of Hume's dictum that reason is the slave of the passions. For, both he and Fry, while praising "reason", were by far the more emotional debaters. Nothing necessarily wrong in that, except that when passion distorts truth, men become dishonest and corrupt themselves. And this CH did in spades. Various historical misrepresentations (lies?) were repeated—many of which have already been refuted, e.g here and here. When he did make genuine points about shameful episodes in the Church's past he downplayed what the teaching of the Church was and focused on the vices of certain Catholics in history. This, of course, meant that the implicit moral baseline from which he affected to judge the Church—broadly based on some secular idea of human rights (many of which seem to be ungrounded other than in the desires of people like CH)—went entirely unexamined. And of course a great deal might be said about where such a profound and by no means obvious moral framework is derived from: see here—an article one should read in order to find out what should have been, but wasn't, under discussion. Anyone listening to the speech who knew anything about the Catholic Church (whether pro or anti) would be frankly embarrassed by the range of CH's ignorance (he knows nothing of the different levels of Church teaching, thinks limbo was a dogma, knows nothing of the development of doctrine, thinks that the Church's Declaration Nostra Aetate (which he dated wrongly) overturned a charge of Deicide against the Jews—thus misrepresenting both the Declaration and the Church's teaching before it).
Hitchens closed, sounding like a secular Ian Paisley, and the audience, presumably believing his numerous misrepresentations (misrepresentations that have been repeatedly brought to his attention) rapturously welcomed him in the manner of a crowd of sinners welcoming a fellow into their ranks who shamelessly tells them that they and he and they have no sin.
Next up was Ms Widdecombe, a Catholic convert from Anglicanism, rather cattily introduced as "staunch" and "conservative" together with the untrue implication that her conversion was chiefly over women's ordination. Unlike the Archbishop she was much more adversarial and set about trying to refute Hitchens's claims. In this she did rather well, but it must be questioned whether this was the best use of her time. After all, all Hitchens and Fry had to do was fling enough mud and, as long the proposers sank to the occasion, they could spend the entire evening trying to clean off the mud and not get around to talking about the Church as a force for good. This they largely did, and at the cost of neglecting the deepest truths about the Church they were defending (see the Feser article above) not to mention the sacramental life of the Church, the lives of the saints, the glories of Christian inspired art, music, architecture and the way in which the Church answers the deepest needs of man by seeing man as more than material. In neglecting all these areas the proposers failed badly in their task and, instead of even looking at the moral life and its relation to charity, they appeared to talk only of a merely material version of ‘charidee’—of the kind that Mr Fry so assiduously promotes so long as it is not in any way proselytising (unless it’s promoting condoms, sexual liberation and abortion—in which case Fry will readily lend it his support and assistance).
To be continued
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Vidal disses Hitchens as "Mr. bad guy conservative"
Earlier tonight, I went to see Gore Vidal interviewed by Jay Parini at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Vidal is promoting a new book (Snapshots in History's Glare) that celebrates his life through a series of photos and old letters (many previously unreleased).
GV was surprisingly alert, but then again my expectations weren't very high, given how old and crippled the man is. I didn't realize he had a such a penchant and talent for impersonation, and this makes him even funnier in person than in print (if that's possible). Telling anecdotes, recalling old conversations, Vidal performed spirited interpretations of JFK, Tennessee Williams, Federico Fellini, and Saul Bellow, among others. He even 'did' FDR, but unlike the others, I don't think that one was based on personal acquaintance.
Anyway, many of us in the audience submitted questions, and mine got through. I wrote it like this: "Why do you think Christopher Hitchens became a neocon? Greed? Power?"
Jay Parini read aloud my initial question, while discarding the leading follow-up suggestions. I swear to God, after the words Christopher Hitchens were uttered, I heard several people groan, as if the name alone somehow pained them. Vidal answered quickly: "I don't know. Ask him."
At this point, we were in danger of ending it there. Vidal briefly paused, and Parini seemed suspiciously eager to move on. But then Vidal suddenly jumped back in. Now, this is by no means exactly what he said, but it's the best I could do under the circumstances. Vidal answered the question:
For years, he [Hitchens] identified himself as my heir, but then I kept on living; I kept on going. Much to his disappointment. After awhile, he couldn't be the good guy anymore, so he decided to try and become Mr. bad guy conservative, and boy did he do it. Look at him.
That was it. The officious ass Parini cut him off. Too bad, because it appeared Vidal had plenty more to say on the theme. If anyone else was there, please chime in and help out. Did I get it right? Did I miss anything? Say what you will about Vidal's response, I was at least encouraged that he accepted the premise of my question as a given.
Meanwhile, as the reports from the debate on the motion "The Catholic church is a force for good in the world" trickles in, it looks like the fedei defensors have been absolutely routed by the godless barbarians. Which only goes to show you can be too tolerant. The sooner the Church brings back burning at the stake, the sooner they'll get some real respect.
Andrew Brown's report in the Telegraph is here. He tells us Hitch had the spirits very much at his side.
Even if you didn’t agree with him you’d have to concede Hitchens especially was spectacular and hyper-articulate. Fry, who is less avuncular somehow now he is so slimline, was visibly nervous and appeared to have a dry mouth. Hitchens drank bottled water mostly, and plenty of it, though from time to time when he was sitting down he raised a glass of amber fluid from out of sight, down on the floor somewhere, and took a slug from that. I don’t know why he kept a drink under the table like that, perhaps because the debate was filmed for broadcast. He sweated profusely and dabbed his shiny forehead, eyes and cheeks with a handkerchief. But his diction was clear and he was in control, like a revivalist tent preacher, building the volume to a crescendo at the end, to applause and roars from the audience.
Meanwhile, the blogger Good Grief, Linus attended the debate and has some good pictures up. His account is here.
Christopher Hitchens followed, and attacked mercilessly. I've seen a few Hitch debates online, but this one didn't include any of his usual rhetorical gambits. Instead he took the ball passed by the Archbishop and ran with it brilliantly; he insisted that any representative of the Church should start any such discussion with a long list of apologies; he ran through many of them, such as the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust; the torture of Galileo and anti-semitism. He continued relentlessly with modern day problems, such as child abuse and their obsession with condoms. He pointed out that the Holy See had lifted the excommunication on Richard Williamson, a holocaust denying bishop. He left the floor with a buzz going around the room at the ferocity of the attack.
Let me finish on a comment dropped in at the Telegraph bloogspot as I am broadly in sympathy with the expressions of the writer, Simon Denis.
I’m glad to find this posting because as someone who was also at the debate I find it reflects my own view. My companion, a Russian, observed that what the proposition needed was a “Gilbert Keith Chesterton”. True enough. The debate was badly weighted in terms of oratorical talent. And the reason I said nothing as an audience member was that in the absence of an inspiring pro-church luminary on the panel, I feared the ridicule of the massed atheist rationalists. So what was I at least tempted to say? First, pure conservatism. The Church is a force for good because it is there; it is a foundation stone of our identity; remove it and we would suffer a loss of bearings potentially catastrophic to the well being of society. Secondly, I would have disputed Hitchens’ smug Marxist assertion that all we need for heaven on earth is to get rid of blocks to self-indulgence. There are needs and yearnings in the human heart which no merely material provision can assuage. Third, I would have asked Fry how he could deny that the institution which had given us Palestrina, Carravagio, Raphael, Bernini, Mozart, La Sainte Chapelle, King’s Cambridge etcetera could be anything other than a force for good. My final point would have been to quote the dictum that regimes are vulnerable at the point of reform; the church is busily off-loading its bad old ways and preserving the kernel of admirable doctrine which all can agree has something to say to us. To attack it now, therefore, is counter productive. It was a disadvantage to have none but Catholics defending their church. They were vulnerable to the bullying of an audience more profoundly influenced by fundamentally protestant sensibilities than it would care to admit. A cool, conservative defense of the church as an institution among other such bodies might have shimmered past the obvious no-popery rhetoric which formed the subtext of so much that Fry and Hitchens had to say. Incidentally, I think that Fry was rather carried away by Hitchens. He began on a much more moderate note than that on which he ended. He might have been able to leave the church suspended in a position of neutrality, neither good nor bad, but the revolutionary fervour of his cocksure colleague infected him. In then end both were shouting rather loudly and in favour of a rationalism which always offers more comfort in the heat of argument than in the cool of the night or the silence of the small hours. Despite the many hits they scored – Fry very clever on the analogy between sexual and gastronomic pleasures – there was something finally depressing about the ease of the opposition’s victory. Partly it was the immense smugness of Hitchens. Then again, it was the dullness of the materialist, populist world their rhetoric implied – tearing down St Peter’s and burning the vestments. Finally, it was the intensely vulnerable innocent fidelity of the poor, humble Archbishop and of the elderly African nun who spoke in his defence. The audience was merciless to them and it was not a pretty sight.
Quite right, godless barbarians are often merciless, and they love their missionaries fried, boiled or roasted. What this audience showed is that in the absence of obedience to the will of God, civilization is only a few short rhetorical flourishes away from genocide; or in the presence for that matter, come to think of it.
At the 2005 Hay Festival (can it really be that long ago?), Christopher Hitchens played Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry's Jeeves on the subject of Blasphemy with Joan Bakewell (the real intellectual among them) trying to keep everything on an even keel as Aunt Agatha.
A while ago we were treated to our Chris vomiting up the approved opinion TM on Iran.
He gave us such gems as "First, it has become ever clearer that Iran's uranium-enrichment and centrifuge program has put it within measurable distance of the ability to weaponize its nuclear capacity. Second, it has become obscenely obvious that the theocracy is prepared to govern by force alone and to employ the most appalling measures to remain in power without a mandate."
"Q: Is Iran a threat? A: Oh yes. Even as we speak Iran is potentially starting the beginnings of a very possibly quite almost-real hypothetically nuclear weapons program! Q: Oh no! How many nuclear weapons does Iran already have? A: Counting warheads, ICBMs, mid- and long-range missiles, ABMs, tactical nukes, bunker-busters and submarine-based weaponry, the full nuclear arsenal of Iran at this moment is very rapidly just beginning to quite possibly approach a number just short of one!"
So while Christopher wants a sound thrashing ...... "Would one prefer a "genuine" deadline, whereby, for example, the United Nations required Iran to demonstrate compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions on nuclear proliferation—we have a bushel of these—or face further U.N.-mandated sanctions? "
Fafblog knows what these Hawks really mean. "Q: What should we do with Iran? A. All options are on the table. Q: Should we bomb them? Is bombing them on the table? A: Bombing them must be on the table, because it is an option, and all options are on the table. Q: What about starving them to death with sanctions? Is starving them to death with sanctions on the table? A: In that an option? Because if it is an option, then it must be, as we have mentioned before, on the table. Q: What about bombing their cities and burning their children and raping their livestock and feeding their people to thousands of millions of man-eating ants and piling their skulls into a heaping bonfire on the White House lawn while the President and the Cabinet and the Joint Chiefs of Staff dance naked in circles ejaculating wildly into the flesh-filled smoke? Is that on the table? A: It would be irresponsible for this option not to be on the table, given that all other options, as we have said, are on the table."
So when we get to Afghanistan (the Good War TM) which analysis of our actions looks better? The Faf? "Q: Is Afghanistan a threat? A: Of course not! We are not at war with the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan. We simply happen to be killing the proud and freedom-loving people of Afghanistan on a regular basis. Q: But we deeply regret killing them, each and every time we kill them. A: And each and every time we plan to kill them, and each and every time we're in the middle of killing them, and each and every time we plan to kill them again. Q: And every time we go to kill them, we of course take every possible precaution we can possible take to avoid killing them, except of course for not actually killing them. A: In a way, you could say that by killing them so conscientiously, we are actually doing them a favor. Q: In a way, you could say that our killing them is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for them."
Or the Neo-cons including our Chris? They are back and forth on this one, they cant quite get their dicks out of Iraq even if it leaves their miserable bloated hands free to ravage Afghanistan. "Hitchens real warning, however, came about Afghanistan. He asked: "Do people understand how much the president is committing the United States to an endless war in Afghanistan? [Obama] wants to draw down these soldiers [in Iraq]... so he can send them to Afghanistan."
Perhaps the harshest criticism of Obama from Hitchens came at the end: "the model on which Obama ran, that there's one bad war we can't win and there's one good war that we should be trying harder, is almost exactly wrong. Iraq matters far more to us" than Afghanistan.
Whichever war is assessed as the "good war" by bloated pundits in America is going to have very little impact on the recipients of American beneficence.
Hitchens hasn't exactly taken on Monty Python, but he has a take on them in Vanity Fair. Shame the piece is so short, but we learn why the subject of cheese comes up so often in their skits. We also learn how the Pythons did Shakespeare's trick in reverse.
Shakespeare always took care to write in at least one sitcom sketch for the plebs, from the porter in Macbeth to the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet. With Python, the trick was in reverse: egghead allusions to literature and philosophy—the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights; the ballad of the drunken thinkers, from Socrates to Hegel—mixed into a fiesta of manic vulgarity and multiple entendre. A good sign, here, is not knowing when to stop and indeed sometimes not having any idea of how to do so: thus the lavish use of the quenching 16-ton weight, or the admonishing appearance of Graham Chapman to announce that this silliness had gone far enough. (A moment to acknowledge that absent friend: Chapman was lost to us in 1989. He had proudly “come out” long before, when coming out was new, and went on to immortalize both Brian and Biggus Dickus in the single funniest movie ever made.)
I can't agree that Life of Brian is anywhere near the single funniest movie ever made. The gags are much too predictable, even the first time you watch it. And to get away with comedy that you can see coming a mile off you have to be either Laurel and Hardy or Peter Sellers. I'm sure we all have our own idea of what the single funniest movie ever made is, and for me it's got to be The Blues Brothers. There are also about a dozen Billy Wilder films that leave me a quivering mass of jelly every time I watch them. And if we're talking beyond Beyond the Fringe, there's nothing quite like Pete and Dud in Bedazzled. As for "Biggus Dickus", I never really found that funny. Far inferior to the joke Roman joke names that tripped so saucily off Frankie Howerd's lips in Up Pompeii such as Naughtius Maximus, my master Ludicrus Sextus, my mistress Ammonia, their son Nausious and daughter Erotica, and who could forget Hernia, Voluptua, Nymphia and Laetitia with the stress on "titi"? But I'm blubbering. Salute!
Sometimes Hitchens wins through sheer tenacity. In his Slate piece on the Polanski case, there is that dark fog only Hitchens can really make descend, and the reader is lost in half-truth, total lie, shoddy thinking, brazen hypocrisy, and the sad waste of stupidity born of greedy conflict of interest. The well-intentioned reader, just like Jake Gittes in Polanski's most famous film, is led down a blind ally into sheer doom.
Sigh. Let us turn our attention to a piece on "Hollywood Exceptionalism" written by a writer who has taken a bundle over the years from Vanity Fair, a publication which every month takes the unwashed rabble from the gutter and presses their noses to the window so that we might gaze at the stars, first in awe and later in bitter contempt. Does anyone work harder to remind us that Hollywood is exceptional than the writers of the high-toned puffery of Vanity Fair?
Yet I am sidetracked already. Let's start with matters alluded to in Hitchens's byline: "the law prosecutes those who violate children, and does so on behalf of those who haven't been violated yet." In practical terms, this obviously argues for the release of Polanski, who poses no threat to the children in the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County. Practical legal considerations, obviously, are not why Polanski has been extradited.
Putting his name in the title of his Macbeth film, which Hitchens tries to make appear as a symptom of Polanski's ego run amok, was almost certainly done by the studio or the producers. The film, though superbly acted, has no stars or marquee names. Wait, I'm getting lost in the fog.
Hitchens has clearly come to Slate neither to bury Polanski nor to praise him, but to whore for Vanity Fair. Apparently a few years ago the magazine put into print a vile, dirty joke about Polanski promising to make a young starlet "the next Sharon Tate" scant months after her murder. The problem is they presented it as the truth. The hurt potentially caused by this gutter journalism, we should note, potentially extends beyond the damage it might have inflicted on Polanski himself.
Polanski sued. Taking a tack that might have been approved by the Phil Spector legal team, the magazine chose not to dispute its lie, but rather to portray Polanski as such a human monster that it was impossible to defame him. Hitchens, we see, agrees with his elegant meal ticket. The jury, sanely, did not.
Seasoned Hitch watchers should hardly be surprised at this arrogance, but we should not let ourselves become too numb. Hitchens's official take during the Lewinski scandal, where he attempted to have a personal friend sent to prison for making statements in private conversations that were completely true, was that: A) Bill Clinton had tried to pay extortion and B) it was outrageous to suggest that Clinton's enemies (like Hitchens himself) were cashing in on blackmail.
The simple truth that a publication printing a lie is repulsive not because it might damage a wicked person but because it breaks a basic bond of trust with the readership seems never to have occurred to a moral dullard like Hitchens. Apparently, the man has been transformed by his high wages into a purveyor of complete blithering idiocy.
I think the extradition of Polanski is a bad idea, and the best reason for saying so is that the starstruck DA's office of Los Angeles will bring (another) unwinnable case into Court, and force a jury to do the right thing: let a guilty defendant walk due to compelling extenuating circumstances. There will, of course, be lots of deeply bad feeling stirred up all around and millions washed down the drain in a state that is broke.
Let me close by saying, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Never heard of her? Well, her name never came up in Hitchens's work. She's the fourteen year old Iraqi girl who's was raped, and them murdered along with her family. This atrocity was committed by American soldiers in the course of a war effort Hitchens has repeatedly told his readership was being waged with a maximum of integrity. Yet Hitchens has never, at least in print, displayed the slightest curiosity about how such an atrocity could have occurred.
Hitch on on Hardball, discussing Obama's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, not only speaks erroneously of Mother Teresa having made her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm rather than Oslo, but much more juicily, he says the Prez, "has made a huge hostage to fortune by doing this. From now on everything he does will be... Nobel Peace Laureate. It's a crazy thing to do before you've done anything to deserve it, to earn it. He hasn't brokered a single, even handshake deal of the kind that breaks down so often. I would say it's un-American."
This subject has done what we all thought was impossible. It has provoked Hitch into saying something positive about Hilary Clinton! Moreover, in the last half minute, our hero tries to mount a slanderous rant against the Iranian administration, accusing them of "breaking" "the relevant treaty", which is news to me and the IAEA, but Chris Mathews slaps him down with a "you guys on the right!" sigh of exasperation. We know exactly how Mathews must feel. It's never an easy task to deal with apparently rational and even lucid individuals who are suffering from Stockholm syndrome.
Well, dust storm, actually. As our intrepid antitheist globetrotting correspondent continues his expedition to the Antipodes, he has managed to send back a postcard in the form of a Slate Fighting Words column from Sydney on a subject that might as well have been having a lovely time, wish you were here and the weather's distinctly hazy.
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, Sir, a Hitchens essay on Australia is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. Moving closer to our own time, Daniel Moynihan is said to have said that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." In his column, Hitchens includes a lot of padding and filling in the form of general observations, vacuous musing and pondering such questions as whether Australia is truly "the lucky country" and "the immense solitudes of the Australian interior". But he does fling the occasional purported hard fact in like the hazelnuts in a Topic bar.
One of these "facts" is that, as Hitch puts it: "The country has been almost immunized from the recent international economic slump, because its principal currency-earning export is iron ore, and as long as the gigantic mines keep digging it up, the Chinese will carry on buying it. I'll leave it to Yoyo or anyone else living and working in Australia to verify how hard the slump is biting, but on the subject of principal currency-earning exports, I looked it up at the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's website, and according to them the country's leading export sector in 2008 was coal at $46.4 billion. Iron ore and concentrates was in second place a long way behind at $30.2 billion. So, no marks for literal accuracy, but close enough for Hitchens work.
You young whippersnappers won't believe this, but the old days Christopher Hitchens really did used to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. At his peak he was able to publicly humiliate a fumbling, bumbling and stumbling Charlton Heston on prime time TV by asking him to name all the countries sharing a land border with Iraq.
Alas, such days are now far behind us. Charlton has since shed this mortal coil, driven over the edge by a combination of the roasting he received at Hitch's hands and the equally shameful shaming dished out to him by Michael Moore and featured in Bowling for Columbine. While Hitch has since grown into the definitive out-of-condition, punch-drunk, boring old journalistic toad who seems to have totally lost his soul, his sense of proportion and his eye for detail.
Meanwhile, just as he must already regret crossing the seas to try and hustle an Olympic deal for his adopted hometown, the president may live to wish that he didn't go all the way to Stockholm to accept the unearned adulation of what Saul Bellow once called the Good Intentions Paving Company.
After waiting in vain for more than 24 hours for Newsweek to correct the mistake on their website, I feel it it incumbent upon Hitchens Watch, as a public service, to point it out. If President Obama were to go all the way to Stockholm to accept his honour he would undoubtedly come to regret it, because the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo.
We're a little early for Halloween, but HitchensWatch arts correspondent Stabler is easing himself into the spirit of the season with some vintage Brazilian horror movies and some very wicked thoughts.
Last night my local revival house, as part of there month long celebration of horror cinema, screened two films by Brazilian Horror Icon Jose Mojica Marins, or as he is known to his fans, "Coffin Joe." This continuing retrospect of his work could only be kicked off by his jaw dropping debut At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1964) and it's transcendentally disturbing sequel This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse.
To describe a Marins film is a folly I won't waste your time with, but I will tell you this much: a Coffin Maker named Ze lives in a small town. He wears a Top Hat and Cape and smokes a pipe. He enjoys killing people in town and gloating sarcastically at their funerals, as he is a force of existential will so great none may credibly challenge him. He is trying to find a woman utterly devoid of sentiment that he will mate with to create the perfect human being. In his search, he kidnaps women from the Village and, when they show themselves to be softies, he kills them with poison snakes.
The films are hilarious and unsettling folk art that are even a little boring, thus qualifying as true art. They do have an unmistakable philosophical, um, content. Coffin Joe delivers an almost never ending interior/exterior monologue about how religion is superstition (he bates the local priest by eating meat on Good Friday), how only the will is pure, and only idiots and weaklings use the crutch of faith. One of his favorite pastimes is going to the graveyard at midnight, and screaming jeers at the corpses to rise up and challenge him. Finally, lighting strikes a tree, and the burning trunk collapses and pins him to the ground.
With superhuman effort, Coffin Joe pushes the tree aside, rises and screams "That was only an accident! I still don't believe!"
Which I think about brings us around to you-know-who. I purpose the following: This Halloween, we kidnap the scourge of d'Souza and lock him in Highgate Cemetery. Not the nice, open-to-the-public half with his old friend Marx; but the scary Stoker inspiring half. To win his release he must howl his blasphemy at the gravestones, daring the dead to rise up against him!
If he's still there in the morning, fine. Yet I think it could turn out to be the best Halloween ever.
“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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