During the summer our rambling raconteur, Mr. Chris Eric Hitchens, partook in a little chat with EconTalk on the topic of one Mr. Eric Arthur Blair, more widely known by the nom de plume George Orwell:
The rest of the interview is available on this Youtube channel.
Sit back and you'll learn about the famous sportsman "Ben" Tillman, Hitch's hare-brained theory that the "the clocks striking thirteen" opening line of 1984 was a subtle allusion to John Adams (Hitchens boasts that he's the only person to have "noticed" this. Indeed, and for good reason), that Such, Such Were The Joys was a book, that Orwell didn't "get" the rise or importance of America when a casual reading of St. Georgy's works make it clear that he realized US power was eclipsing the sunset British Empire (and that this wasn't necessarily a good thing), that Orwell was not heroic for fighting, and nearly dying, in the filthy and perilous trenches of Aragon during the Spanish Civil War, etc.. etc..
Later on, Hitchens delves into the mean-spirited mudslinging and dirt that was flung at Orwell by the Left due to his exposure of Stalinist machinations in Spain and elsewhere. Orwell was not only accused of the most base motives, and of objectively supporting the Fascists, but even more sinisterly, he was accused of subjectively and consciously supporting them, an important distinction. At this point in the discussion it's hard not to notice, as has long been apparent despite his uncompelling protestations, that Hitchens views himself in a quite similar vein to Orwell in that he has also harshly criticized the failings and faults of the Far-Left from within it, and has been viciously pilloried and smeared for it by his critics. But this is absolutely absurd. That drunk Hitchens must have been even more sloshed than usual in this interview to claim that his critics have engaged in ad hominem attacks against him like that.
If we want to be serious about it though, it's the David Horowitzes and Nick Cohens of the world today, Hitchens' comrades, that now employ this Stalinist line that if you are not celebrating a war that has led to over a million deaths in Iraq, or if you're not for mass-murdering Muslims in general, you are objectively and subjectively a supporter of Saddam Hussein and/or allied with the "Islamofascists." In a textbook case, Hitchens infamously used this old totalitarian logic against George Galloway to obliquely suggest that Mr. Galloway was only opposed to the "liberation" (a very Orwellian term I might add) of Iraq because he was secretly in league with the Hussein dictatorship.
Of Hitchens' many treacherous acts, few have been greater than his betrayal of George Orwell and nearly all that he stood for. Every single word Orwell had written since 1936 was dedicated to exposing totalitarianism and championing democratic socialism, as he himself once famously put it. He masterfully articulated the inevitable poverty, injustice, war, unemployment, and misery that is inherent in the capitalist system, and used his great powers and command over the English language to, in crisp and clear prose, appeal to the heart as well as the head on these points. In the Ukrainian preface for Animal Farm he wrote that "And for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement." Orwell has had his victory with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the discrediting of Marxist-Leninist tyranny on the Left--a great victory for the Socialist movement--but alas, this event was likely the beginning of the end of Hitchens' socialism. Christopher is not a Winston Smith, but has become an O'Brien, and exactly the kind of snobbish, pseudo-Leftist elite of the literary-intelligentsia, a hyper-imperialist stooge and ex-Bolshevik reactionary, that Orwell so eloquently and perceptively railed against.
We plebeians at Hitchens Watch are far from being the only people pissed off at the Preening Popinjay's pathetic, punctilious and pedantic pummelling of that precocious patrician and (running out of words beginning with 'p') venerable octogenarian, Gore Vidal. And if you don't believe me, just look at the letters that came in bashing the column in Vanity Fair. And why not?
It isn't as if it's Vidal's fault that Hitch hasn't got nearly enough of what it takes to be "the Dauphin", either in terms of effortless superiority or literary output. So we're going to be going on and on about this for some time to come, mark my words.
One of the best dressing downs that the Contrarian Clown so far for dredging up the contents of his own private cesspool and splashing them across the pages of Graydon Carter's glossy magazine comes from a blogger named Steve Donoghue, who has drafted a post entitled Penny Press Addendum: The Lying in Winter that puts "the little squib in Vanity Fair" in perspective. (Many, many thanks to John Cotter, editor of Open Letters, for putting us on to this.) Please read it all and relish it. For me, the singe best of a myriad of good points Steve makes is this one.
The vital thing to remember when you finish this little squib of Hitchens’ is the relative scale of what we’re seeing here. Yes, the Vidal That Is continually says unworthy things in unworthy ways. But Hitchens has been writing professionally for what? Thirty years? More? And for that he has what to show the year 2210? So far: nothing. Ephemera, often bashed out hung over ten minutes before deadline. Thirty years ago, Vidal had produced a body of work almost unequalled by any 20th century practitioner of English – and that was before he collected United States or wrote Palimpsest. It entitles him to forbearing silence whenever the tawdriness of his dotage makes an appearance. It obliges Hitchens and his ilk to shut their disrespectful yaps about inscriptions on frontispieces.
Hitch, though, was never much of a one for obliging the nobility. But moving on to the end, Steve has some harsh words for Graydon for publishing Hitch's latest vanity piece, but I think Graydon deserves our gratitude and our forbearance in equal measure. After all, we wouldn't want him to be accused of censoring the talents of his golden boy. And on top of that, he has done Gore the same favor in the past in allowing him to go a few rounds with fellow VF scribe Dominick Dunne over his alleged dinner party putdown, in Dunn's words, according to Pundit Review:
"'Why do you suppose Irish Catholics are all such social climbers? Is it because their mothers were all maids? Oh, I don't mean you, of course,' he said without a pause. With that he got up to leave."
Dunne ended his Gore anecdote by noting that the next morning he called his brother John Gregory Dunne and, after imitating Gore's comments, the two "roared with laughter."
Vidal responds in the May [2001] issue: "As we listened to Diarist [Dunne] tell us in grave, morally outraged tones about the 'crime and criminality among the rich and very rich' . . . I wondered why he should be so concerned with the doings of people unknown to him . . . What attracts him? The fact that they are rich or very rich? . . . Diarist is more interested in who got what money and in Celebrity, particularly his own."
Vidal defends his crack about the Irish being descended from maids: "This was a joke, but like all good jokes, it has resonance - witness Diarist's shrill, off-key response.
"I tried to tell him the story in the hope that he might put to better use all those years of climbing the jungle gym of American society."
Dunne responds to Vidal's letter: "We must stick to the facts of what happened. Remember, I don't drink at those parties, have an excellent memory, and always carry a green leather notebook . . . to make a few notes."
He fumes, "I thought you were in a mean, miserable mood because your defense of Timothy McVeigh had been such a colossal flop that it embarrassed the room before nearly clearing it, while I held the attention of the table . . ."
I've been warning you all about goverment terrorism for some years now, only to be derrided as being a case of borderline premature senile dementia. But now the Telegraph is finally backing me up:
Live pigs blown up in government terrorism experiment —
Live pigs are being blown up as part of a series of government terrorism experiments at Porton Down, the government's secret military research laboratory.
Eighteen pigs wrapped in protective Kevlar blankets were blasted in a bid to help scientists understand more about the effects of bomb blasts on victims.
Not that there's any shortage of human bomb blast victims to observe, but doh, it's a scientific experiment.
The animals were placed less than three yards from an explosive. Before being blown up, tubes were inserted into their blood vessels and bladders, and their spleens were removed.
If the UK military establishment can do this quite openly, one shudders to think what they might get up to when nobody's looking.
A wire was also put into a major abdominal blood vessel to ensure the vessel became lacerated in the explosion.
That wasn't very sporting, was it?
The Kevlar blankets were used to protect the animals from minor bomb debris and the animals were anaesthetised throughout.
The lengths some people will go to avoid animal suffering are awesome. There must be an RSPCA award for this kind of thing. But why on earth are they going to all this trouble?
Scientists wanted to find out how long the animals survived when more than a third of their blood had drained from their bodies.
I believe Count Dracula carried out and documented the relevant experiments centuries ago. And Dr. Mengele filled in a few minor gaps. It's all there in the literature, boys.
Medics hope the experiments will help British soldiers in Afghanistan as well as casualties of terror attacks like the July 2005 bombing of the London Underground and a double-decker bus.
In other words, we're blowing 'em up over here so we don't have to blow 'em up over there. Well, bringing them all home immediately would certainly improve the lot of our brave young boys and catching the people who orchestrated the 7/7 bombings and subjecting them to this sort of experimentation san Kelvar and san anesthetic would go a long way toward limiting future terror attacks. If only we had the guts to exterminate such vermin over here, then maybe we wouldn't have to send our boys and girls (although not Hitch's spawn, mind you) to fight the Baathists, Bin Ladenists and Talibanis over there. Just an idle thought
* No pigs were harmed in taking this photograph.
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Boys will be boys: Barbed Aryans and the harlots that raise them
Peter Hitchens plays Heathcliffe. These new-fangled Victorian values are the thin end of the wedge. In my day we used to thrash our lads with the horse whip, the cat o' nine tails and any other farmyard animal we could lay our hands on. In time the practice declined, and so did the empire.
Peter Hitchens is upset by the decline of civilization. From his Daily Mail pulpit this Sunday he reminds us that not only are we failing to defend ourselves against the barbarians at the gate, but we are now producing plenty of our own little savages home-grown. But at least Peter understands that if they are monstrous, they were made monstrous, and not by some capricious deity nor some mystical shit innate within them, but by they way they were dragged up.
On the way, he manages to blame liberal policies, easy divorce and single mums. That last group have apparently been on the rampage ever since we did away with the stocks, the poor law and the treadmill.
Here's his latest column:
The point they miss is that the [Edlington Boys] in this case are almost certainly not freaks. I do not think they were born without consciences.
I think they have had their consciences shrivelled by the lives they have led. Though they are monsters, they are monsters we have helped to make.
Imagine if the same two boys had been brought up in a stable family, untouched by the drug culture, their minds unpolluted by televised slurry.
Imagine how it would have been if adults always felt able to discipline wayward children in the street, if local policemen had existed at all and felt free to wallop miscreants. Imagine if the place was full of experienced mothers, whose main task was to raise children, and hard-working fathers with real jobs.
They have done - and continue to do - tremendous, deep damage to our souls and bodies, and if there was ever a time to have a good, full-scale howling moral panic, this is that time. Yet if anyone proposes real radical measures to put these things right - the end of subsidies for fatherless homes, the reintroduction of hard discipline in schools, measures to make divorce difficult again, the freeing of the police from liberal codes of practice, ... - then they are called ‘extremists’, and the David Camerons of this world tell us that we ‘cannot go back to the old days'."
Good!
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Flying Rodent On Hitchens' Very Sane Advocacy Of War Against Iran
We here at Hitchens Watch are continuing to quietly applaud our preening Popinjay for getting his feathers in a ruffle over Iran's nuclear program and squawking loudly about some sort of "confrontation" with that nation, even if he's not, alas, doing so with quite as much full-throated fervency as he did over Iraq in '03. You see, it's hard to imagine anything more out of touch, more flabbergastingly imbecilic, more crazed, more sadistic, more in vain, more repulsive—and therefore more effective at wiping off the map and from the page of time what remains of Hitchens' credibility and reputation—than for our psittacine to keep on shrieking for a war against Iran to all and sundry. Parroting the jingo-extremist line on Iran this earnestly has surely earned him a cracker or two from Norman Podhoretz himself. Bravo Hitch!
Now I think this goes to show you how sometimes you truly have to be an intellectual to say something so stupid. As even many hawks have conceded, an Operation Opera 2010 against Iran's nuclear facilities by Israel would, at best, delay their nuclear program by merely a few years, and a ground, or aerial, invasion by the US is virtually inconceivable considering how bogged down they are in Iraq and Afghanistan currently. Probably the main outcome of such an attack would be to rally the revolting Iranian population, and the Muslim world, around the regime in Tehran, and help to refasten the Mullahs' grip on power internally. It would be hard to present a better gift to the Ahmadinejads and Ayatollahs of that country than a futile and feckless war against, in effect, the people of Persia.
I had figured that if Hitchens was going to continue to play the Tough Guy Neo-Con role he would be at least calling for a little more practical mass murder, like say, desperately trying to convince us that Somali piracy is a form of Islamic terrorism and that fighting the Shabaab by proxy has demonstrably failed, but come on, seriously suggesting that the US should invade Iran now, after everything that has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan (which would be cake-walks in comparison to a successful war in Iran) is at this point pretty much a sign of bat-shit lunacy, or maybe even evidence of the onset of senility. And naming his upcoming memoir "Hitch-22" just reinforces our suspicion that he's nuts. Although there is a catch: Hitch has to be crazy to compare himself with that famous species of paradoxical military lunacy, but to implicitly describe himself and what he's been doing as crazy would show he's being pretty sane after all.
Flying Rodent, the brains behind the brilliantly satirical Decentpedia (the reports of its death being fortunately exaggerated) recently gave us his psychoanalysis of Hitchens' twisted mind on the topic of Iran. It turns out we are not the only ones deeply concerned about Hitch's mental health, and is worth quoting in full:
...And a belated happy new year to Chris Hitchens, who I'm starting to suspect is neither misguided nor a deluded optimist, but rather a brutal psychopath and a raving homicidal maniac.
The subject matter is, of course, the hated Iranian regime: aggressions and provocations by, and the tonnage of bombs we will have to drop on the Iranian populace in order to bring them the joy of freedom.
Today's tipple is Johnnie Walker Black Label, and the crimes of the mullahs - or the Revolutionary Guard, as Hitch now terms the Iranian regime - they go into countries where they're not wanted, arm violent insurgent groups and militias, shoot protestors in the streets, send death squads to the other side of the planet, seek nuclear weapons and they torture, rape and disappear prisoners. "The existence of such regimes is incompatible with us," Hitchens says, with a straight face.
Fear not, though - Chris has the solution...
"...If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them... They’ll say I’m asking for war, but I’ll say no. I’m not. I’m recognizing that someone is looking for war. We should be firm enough to say “Alright.” We didn’t look for it. We’ve tried everything short of war for a long time. Everything..."
Reel your eyes back into their sockets, folks, because Hitchens is actually contending that the Iranians - whose experience of war in the last five decades was fending off a western-backed assault from our previous intolerable modern Hitler, Saddam Hussein, at the cost of half a million lives - are gearing up to make war upon their neighbours. This aggression will not stand, man.
Sharp-eyed readers will note that we, the injured and passive western democracies, have actually attacked, invaded and currently occupy the territories immediately to Iran's west and north, not to mention bombing Yemen to their south. If we include the Israelis in our thinking - and we really should - we can add Lebanon, Gaza and Syria to the list of local countries we have been forced to attack.
Should we mention that two of the US presidential candidates threatened to attack Iran with nuclear weapons during the recent primaries; and that prominent public figures have been calling for war with Iran for most of the decade?
Still, let us not forget that the Iranians are warmongering, irrational lunatics who cannot be deterred.
Other readers might notice that our attempts to democratise Iraq and Afghanistan have been a long, outrageously expensive and horrifically bloody nightmare, and that Hitchens is one of the few commentators who has refused to budge an inch from his previous, lunatic aggressiveness. Thank God, Hitch knows how to avoid a re-run of our hideous failures...
"(We'll say) ...We're not going to stay. We're handing the country over to you. We're not occupying... (Earlier) ....How many Iranian dissidents are going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?"
How many indeed? Perhaps our troops will be greeted with flowers and our not-occupation will pay for itsnotself during this hypothetical war, in which we might as well clad our soldiers in natty white uniforms with red crosses on the front. Where these soldiers are going to come from is another matter, but not one that I expect to trouble Hitchens' fevered dreams of explosions and righteous violence.
Two years and a bit ago, brave Sir Christopher plucked up the nerve to tell his Slate readership that "we" should abolish the CIA, mostly because their "policy of caution" over Iran didn't suit his masters' agenda, but also because in his view their destruction of interrogation (read "torture session") tapes amounted to mutiny and treason.
Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime, which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as clinically dead. A fine day's work by those who claim to guard us while we sleep.
Now Congressman Ron Paul, who is not the kind of person you would expect to find on Hitch's Christmas card list, has come up with virtually the same proposal, although for rather different reasons from those given by Christopher. Ron thinks the CIA has mounted a coup against the US government, they are in the illegal drugs business, and that the agency needs to be taken out. Whether to lunch, dinner or a firing squad he did not specify, but there probably isn't very much daylight between his proposal and Christopher's idea that "the [CIA] system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again."
Speaking at a libertarians conference in Atlanta last weekend, the Congressman said:
There's been a coup, have you heard? It's the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military. They're the ones who are over there lobbing missiles and bombs on countries. ... And of course the CIA is every bit as secretive as the Federal Reserve. ... And yet think of the harm they have done since they were established [after] World War II. They are a government unto themselves. They're in businesses, in drug businesses, they take out dictators ... We need to take out the CIA.
From this distance, as far as I can hear, the main difference between Ron Paul's message and Christopher's is that the former delivers it in a whining Texas drawl that sets off my tinitus while the latter does so with a whinging Oxford twang that brings back memories of Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns. Of course, I love 'em both, but at the same time I'm shocked to hear them both waxing so negative about the people who spy on us (for our own good, you understand) while we sleep.
But if they really are serious, they might like to ponder the problem from the same standpoint as astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole when they contemplated switching off HAL. If you remember, he ran everything too, and he didn't take kindly to suggestions that he be taken out.
Frank. OK. But look, Dave. Let's say we put the unit back and it doesn't fail, uh? That would pretty well wrap it up as far as Hal was concerned, wouldn't it? Dave. Well, we'd be in very serious trouble. Frank. We would, wouldn't we? Dave. Uh-huh. Frank. What the hell could we do? Dave. (Pause and sigh) Well, we wouldn't have too many alternatives. Frank. I don't think we'd have any alternatives. There isn't a single aspect of ship operations that's not under his control. If he were proven to be malfunctioning, I wouldn't see how we'd have any choice but disconnection. Dave. (Pause) I'm afraid I agree with you. Frank. There'd be nothing else to do. Dave. Be a bit tricky. Frank. Yeah. Dave. We'd have to cut his higher brain functions (Frank - mm-hmm) without disturbing the purely automatic and regulatory systems and we'd have to work out the transfer procedures and continue the mission under ground- based computer control. Frank. Yeah. Well, that's far safer than allowing Hal to continue running things. Dave. You know, another thing just occurred to me. Frank. Mm. Dave. Well, as far as I know no 9000 computer's ever been disconnected. Frank. Well, no 9000 computer's ever fouled up before. Dave. That's not what I mean. Frank. Hmm? Dave. Well, I'm not so sure what he'd think about it...
Christopher Hitchens likes to let it be known that he appreciates irony, although ironically, actual evidence of his appreciation of irony is seldom on show. But perhaps this perception comes from me not sharing his experience of having attended Oxford, where the irony is often so subtle and ephemeral that those of us who were never initiated into the cult are quite unable to catch so much as a whiff of it.
In his recent slimy, cheap, underhand, mean-spirited and thuggish attack on the character and reputation — his usual MO, in fact — of Gore Vidal in Vanity Fair, Christopher accused his former spiritual master of deciding “to go slumming again and to indulge the lowest in himself and in his followers”. Yes, I suppose that’s one way of putting it. He then reels off a list of some of Gore’s latest outbursts as reported by Johann Hari that he obviously thinks seal the argument but which I feel show that Gore, at eighty-five, wheelchair-bound, infirm, with none of his internal organs firing on all cylinders, and within a few short years of making his final exit with the cause of death put down to “extreme old age” on the certificate, is still splendidly in touch with the real world — as opposed to the “we make our own reality; we’re an empire now” post-9-11 Disneyland inhabited by Christopher and his fellow Mouseketeers. Scan the list and you’ll see what I mean.
He openly says that the Bush administration was “probably” in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”; that Timothy McVeigh was “a noble boy,” no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that “Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war” by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as “a failure”; the country will soon take its place “somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs”; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage—broken by “the madhouse”—after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be “the Yellow Man’s burden,” and Beijing will “have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.”
There are plenty of debatable ideas in that lot, much to agree and disagree with and chew over and expand upon, as well as a few grains of Vidalian irony for good measure. But of course, Christopher is unable to do any of this because it is Christopher, not Gore, who is stuck in an ideological straightjacket that does not allow him to stretch his neck far enough to take in the other man’s perspective, let alone engage with it.
I don’t know whether this qualifies as Oxford irony, but it was not so long ago that Christopher himself referred to the United States as “America the Banana Republic”. Don’t believe me? It was 15 months ago in the very same magazine in which he has now faulted Gore (in a fucking hotel lobby interview for Chrissakes!) for saying the country will soon take its place somewhere between Brazil and Argentina. The difference is that Hitch consciously did his slumming in print, not in an off-the-cuff remark to a reporter while he was feeling like death warmed over. And do you want to know Christopher described the future of the US? Thanks, I knew you would.
At a dinner party in New York during the Wall Street meltdown, where the citizens were still serious enough to do what they are supposed to do—break off the chat and tune in to the speech of the President of the United States and Leader of the Free World—the same impression of living in a surreal country that was a basket-case pensioner of the international monetary system was hugely reinforced. The staring eyes (close enough together for their owner to use a monocle) and the robotic delivery were a fine accompaniment to the already sweaty “Don’t panic. Don’t whatever you do panic!” injunction that was being so hastily improvised. At a White House meeting with his financial wizards—and I mean the term in its literal sense—the same chief executive is reported to have whimpered, “This sucker could go down,” or words to that effect. It’s not difficult to imagine the scene. So add one more banana-republic feature to the profile: a president who is a figurehead one day and a despot the next, and who goes all wide-eyed and calls on witch doctors when the portents don’t seem altogether reassuring.
Now ask yourself another question. Has anybody resigned, from either the public or the private sectors (overlapping so lavishly as they now do)? Has anybody even offered to resign? Have you heard anybody in authority apologize, as in: “So very sorry about your savings and pensions and homes and college funds, and I feel personally rotten about it”? Have you even heard the question being posed? O.K., then, has anybody been fired? Any regulator, any supervisor, any runaway would-be golden-parachute artist? Anyone responsible for smugly putting the word “derivative” like a virus into the system? To ask the question is to answer it. The most you can say is that some people have had to take a slightly early retirement, but a retirement very much sweetened by the wherewithal on which to retire. That doesn’t quite count. These are the rules that apply in Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela, where the political big boys mimic what is said about our hedge funds and investment banks: the stupid mantra about being “too big to fail.”
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Christopher's book-length study of the cultural kinship between the US and British elites since the time of Kipling and before, the generally well-received Blood, Class and Nostalgia, subtitled Anglo-American Ironies. It counts as a scholarly work by Hitchensian standards because unlike some of his more recent books it actually has an index. And ironically in the light of what Christopher has said about Gore’s slumming, it is replete with historical anecdotes that can only be termed conspiracy theories, such as the one about Cecil Rhodes planning to bring the United States back into the British Empire. Hitch has swallowed that one without blinking.
But best of all is Christopher’s embrace of what we might call the “Churchill let the Lusitania sinking happen on purpose” conspiracy theory, which is at least as eye-popping as the “Roosevelt let Pearl Harbor happen” theory that Gore alludes to. Here’s what Hitchens has to say.
He [Churchill] played a pivotal role in the great drama of the Lusitania, which more than any other single incident prepared United States public opinion for a war on the terrain of old Europe. On May 7, 1915, this British Cunard liner of 30,000 tons was hit by a single torpedo from the German submarine U20, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Walter Schwieger. Of those 1,195 civilians who perished in the chilly waters off southern Ireland, 140 were American citizens.
After establishing the mood and giving the reader an icy shiver down the spine, Christopher jumps back in time to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor and how this was used as a pretext for the US to launch the Spanish-American War. The Yankees finally owned up to this false flag op in 1976. Precedent set, Hitchens adeptly maneuvers Winston into the frame.
Any student of psychological warfare and American politics would therefore understand at once the importance of a single dramatic atrocity. As it happened, the British Admiralty in 1915 possessed a department operating under the direct command of Winston Churchill. It was called “Room Forty,” and its job was that of intelligence and deception.
As with the Maine, the evidence of the cause of the disaster had to be rearranged. The Lusitania had broken up and sunk in an extremely short time, after being hit by only one torpedo. It therefore had to be found that more than one torpedo had struck her. This task was performed by a pantomime court of inquiry headed by Lord Mersey. It then had to be denied that the Lusitania was carrying any munitions of war. This denial was made repeatedly and strenuously by every organ of the British government.
“So what?” I hear you saying. “One torpedo, or several. Munitions or not. The Krauts still did the deed. Winston wouldn't do anything like that.” Hitch heard you too, all those years ago, and he has a response.
Given that both elements in the official story were outright lies, it has to be asked how such a valuable cargo came to be put in jeopardy.
Now we know where David Ray Griffin gets his pouncing investigative style from. To answer his own question, Hitchens brings in his own expert witness, complete with the kind of qualifications any self-parodying irony-challenged moonbat "truther" would give his last copy of Crossing the Rubicon to possess.
In his pathbreaking book Room Forty, Patrick Beesly makes a highly scrupulous forensic analysis of the Lusitania affair. As a former serving Naval Intelligence officer and staunch patriot, he finds his own conclusion as unwelcome as it is inescapable….
He then quotes Beesly:
"For my part, unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval."
And Christopher continues:
If we take conspiracy here to have its adult and realistic rather than its paranoid meaning — in other words, “a secret agreement for prearranged ends” — we can see that Beesly makes an excellent case. He establishes a motive and a causative chain where more strain and artifice are required to believe in coincidence than in the “agreement.”
Indeed we can, indeed he does, and indeed it does. What this shows is that Christopher can talk like the narrator of The Outer Limitsafter all, or at least he could back when he was forty. Sadly, he seems well past it at sixty while Gore is still going at it like the Energizer Bunny at eighty-five. Whatever your own personal penchant for the paranoid, you’ve got to agree that the capacity for sharp, well-argued conspiracy theorizing such as he applied to the Lusitania incident makes Christopher a great loss to the "truth" movements of our own day.
If I remember correctly, the Hitchens angle is that the CIA should be abolished, not because in the course of duty they routinely render people of interest unto people who torture them with hot irons and broken bottles, nor because they are partial to arranging assassinations and the occasional coup d'etat, nor even because they play a major role in the global heroin and cocaine industries, but because they aren't very good at taking orders from the necocons. He voiced his condemnation quite a while ago, but as far as I can remember, that was Christopher's reason.
Not being nearly as radical or as revolutionary as Hitchens, I've never called for the CIA to be abolished. I think that, like the Catholic Church, Hezbollah, Exon Mobil, the White Fish Authority, and Amnesty International, it does so much good in the world that it outweighs the considerable evil it also perpetrates. But let's not split hairs.
One of the CIA's best points is that it produces a steady stream of insiders who come out with information — much of it clandestine — on the evil doings of the organization itself, the US government, and other evil entities around the world. Our good friend and comrade Stabler has brought to my attention one such instance concerning CIA official and deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, which he came across at the Huffington Puffington Blow-your-house-downington Post website. We're both wondering what, if anything, Hitchwatchers will make of it. Brennan was a figure in the Bush administration who was subsequently taken on by Obama. He says he objected (privately) to waterboarding while approving other aspects of "enhanced interrogation". The comfy chair and the cushion come to mind. And he's recently been taking on Dead-eye Dick Cheney, calling him either "willfully mischaracterizing" Obama's position or else "ignorant of the fact". With the appearance of one Anthony Blair to answer questions in front of the UK's Iraq Inquiry just a few short weeks away, Harry Shearer is wondering whether anyone can dig up Brennan's self-censored Op Ed piece on US policy in Iraq, just for the sake of comparing notes. After all, who knows what goodies may fall out of it.
The Fantasy Assignment Desk: Where's the Brennan Op-Ed on Iraq? By Harry Shearer
The British have been doing something so deliciously un-American: looking backward. The Chilcot Inquiry into the origins of the Iraq War is back after its Christmas recess, garnering live TV coverage Tuesday when Tony Blair's still-loyal former spin doctor-in-chief, Alistair Campbell, delivered a rousing display of what "loyalty up" means. Britain, he said as he concluded his testimony, should be proud of what it did in Iraq.
Maybe that's why, as I read Peter Baker's generally admiring NYT Magazine piece on deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, this passage leapt off the computer screen:
"Brennan, unhappy, left government in 2005 and went on to write a proposed Op-Ed essay that he titled, "Mr. President, You're Wrong on Iraq." In keeping with CIA rules, he submitted it for classification review by the agency before distributing it to any newspapers for publication. A copy found its way to the White House, where it angered top officials. Brennan ultimately thought better of the article and withdrew it from CIA review, but it was too late to salvage his standing at the White House."
Sounds like hot stuff -- a CIA guy coming out against a President who, by 2005, was blaming the CIA for what we didn't find in Iraq. Surely a reputable journalist like Baker would follow up, ask Brennan (in one of their many reported chats over the last year) what he said in that self-spiked Op-Ed. Maybe he did, but there's no sign of such questioning, nor of any answers it might have elicited, in the long article.
So I'm reviving a department from the early days of Eat the Press: the Fantasy Assignment Desk. If any journalists are reading this, here's your assignment: find out what was in Brennan's 2005 Op-Ed on Iraq. Better yet, find a copy. Ideally, put it in the public conversation in the next few weeks, before the lines form outside the Queen Elizabeth Conference Center for Tony Blair's appearance before the Iraq Inquiry. In my business it's called "timing".
Remember Iraq? Of course you do. It was that insignificant, backward little country that somehow (who knows how?) ended being governed by a terrible Evil Fascist Communist Islamist Dictator, Saddam Hussein, who was, briefly, The Most Evil Man Who Ever Lived.
Luckily 'we' invaded and installed a pro-American puppet government so that the natives would never have to be governed by Arabs again. With a burly white hand on the tiller, Iraq is now steering to success, until it is now the happiest best and brightest country in the world, or possibly the Universe.
Well! With Iraq having been such a success, it stands to reason that other countries should be next. And Kommander Kris 'Itchens of the 101st Fighting Typists (the famed 'Keyboard Kommandos') points us in the direction of...Iran!
'Michael Totten: If the Obama Administration calls you up and says, "Christopher, we need you to come in here, we need your advice." What would you tell them?
Hitchens: I would say, as I did with Saddam Hussein—albeit belatedly, I tried to avoid this conclusion—that any fight you're going to have eventually, have now. Don't wait until they're more equally matched. It doesn't make any sense at all.
The existence of theocratic regimes that have illegally acquired weapons of mass destruction, that are war with their own people, that are exporting their violence to neighboring countries, sending death squads as far away as Argentina to kill other people as well as dissident members of their own nationality—the existence of such regimes is incompatible with us. If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them.....Unless an Obama Administration person can say to me, "No, the confrontation can be avoided, there isn't really a casus belli here," unless they could persuade me of that, I'd say that once we've decided this, the fight should be on our terms. We should not allow them to get stronger and acquire more of the sinews of warfare.
They'll say I'm asking for war, but I'll say no. I'm not. I'm recognizing that someone is looking for war. We should be firm enough to say "Alright." We didn't look for it. We've tried everything short of war for a long time. Everything. We went to the International Atomic Energy Authority and found them cheating everywhere. Their signature on the Nonproliferation Treaty is worthless. We have the names of members of the Iranian government who are wanted for sending assassins to Europe and Argentina. We know what they've been doing to subvert Lebanon, to make trouble in Iraq....'
I know this seems extraordinary but I really think that this is Hitchens' best interview ever. It is the Platonic ideal of Hitchens. All his best points are here. There is the constant references to 'friends' and 'comrades' who he 'stayed with' or 'met' (none of whom are ever named, and the language in which he speaks to these people never being specified) all of whom agree with American foreign policy, the world over. There is his extraordinary erudition, which means that Hitchens knows facts that no-one else on earth knows ('Hitchens: Call me chauvinistic if you will, but I think India would be better under British rule. That's what Karl Marx said. He said, don't imagine that India will not be colonized. It would be invaded by either Iran, Russia, or Britain. MJT: Well, you know what Karl Marx thought of Russia. Hitchens: He hated Russia. He loved America. MJT: How counterintuitive that is if you don't know it'......well, Totten, not only do I not know it, I don't know it because it's not true...I do like, however, how Totten pretends to care what Marx thought because he is in awe of Hitchens' public school accent and wants to butter him up).
And most of all there is the call for other people to fight and die in the endless wars that Hitchens will watch on TV.
However, finally, let's have Hitchens describe his own actions, in his own terms (from part 1 of the same interview).
'People like us went to fight in Bosnia.' (emphasis added).
Battle of the bookworms: Gore Vidal proves he has just as many books as Christopher Hitchens and he can pile 'em just as high.
—By Anthony Thorne
Hitch sh*ts me these days, and like others, I used to be an admirer. (He made some amazing appearances on the Clive James show in the UK). I wrote the following as a comment on the Vanity Fair piece but suspect it won't make the safe landing to acceptance:
Christopher Hitchens's airy dismissal of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's heavily documented book — also praised by such noted loony conspiracy theorists as John Pilger on the back cover — is amusing. "Risible conspiracy theorist" Ahmed testified in US congressional hearings on the failures of the 9/11 Commission Report in July 2005, so he's not really the stuck-in-a-bedsit anorak type Hitchens has painted him as here. (Then again, perhaps offering expert testimony to US politicians isn't as untarnished an achievement as it used to be. Googling dear old Chris's activities that same month shows ample evidence of his own fevered — and fruitless — barracking for the neocon war effort, a poisonous achievement even when compared to the rest of his recent history).
Hitchens's subsequent "debunking" of Ahmed's book — an example of his remaining intellectual prowess, I gather — attacks the author's flat, publisher and publisher's website but neglects the presumably trivial task of pointing out any factual errors in what Ahmed wrote, or why Pilger and Vidal were presumably so misguided in being convinced by the numerous facts Ahmed assembled. Ah, but Hitchens, you old wheeze, I forgot what a fervent believer you still are in the Neocons' self-proclaimed ability to make their own reality, a bold assertion at the beginning of the "War on Terror" and one that Hitchens — like a drunken, red-faced entrant on BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT refusing to be escorted off-stage by security — still hasn't given up on.
This roundabout attack on Vidal, throwing sulky glares at Ahmed's robustly researched and heavily documented history of the 9/11 failures, obscures the real source of the author's ire. Vidal has committed the utter, unforgiveable blasphemy of doubting some of the Bush administration's self-serving statements regarding 9/11, and dared to suggest that the administration figures that orgasmically pined for a New Pearl Harbor in September 2000 might not have been completely torn up when they got it in September 2001. What a shocker! Of course, Vidal, to his well-known credit, continues to do interviews on the topic with more worth and acuity than Hitchens's journalistic career has managed for a decade. The only "miserable coda" Hitchens displays in this article is his own.
All that noted, Hitchens's karmic nemesis George Galloway — a man forever blessed with the ability, at any moment, on any occasion, to have Hitchens's number — has also recently expressed doubts about the official story of 9/11. Before he moves slooowly back to the typewriter to begin his refutation of Galloway's current position, I'm sure Hitchens will be faced with a painful decision — Highland Eagle or Glenlivet Single Malt?"
Ahmed Mosaddeq Ahmed at the chalk face explaining the background to how and why America was attacked on September 11, 2001: Seven years after the appearance of The War on Freedom, Hitchens has overcome his perennial reticence to mention serious 9/11 studies and lashed out with a puerile attack on the scholar's reputation.
Over the eight years and four months since out of the wide blue yonder the members of the Axis of Weasels (including Kristol, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Rumsfeld, Old Uncle Dick Cheney and All) were granted their heartfelt wish for new Pearl Harbor and Christopher had his Van Morrison-style rapture of exhilaration, the self-styled champions of messy freedom, blind, deaf and dumb justice, trick or treat, shock and awe, us and them, preparing to loose a town a week, and fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here have comprehensively wrecked all chance of making the present century any more bearable for the vast mass of humanity (not to mention our furry and feathered friends) than the last one was. All these wars and and settling of scores, all this fear, terror and deliberate error, all this destruction of precious human life, limb and potential, and all this wastage of irreplaceable and non-renewable resources is pathologically criminal. Regardless of whether they actively made 9/11 happen on purpose, let it happen on purpose, let it happen through incompetence, or just got lucky, they've certainly been having a ball at the world's collective expense ever since.
The individuals collectively in charge of US military/imperial policy have done more damage to more people and to society and civilization than anybody since the unholy trinity of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. That's right; they've out-polled and potted Pol Pot and they've left Saddam's and Suharto's records so far back in their wake that you can't see 'em for dust. They've managed to do this because they've got their grubby little hands on the levers of power and they've have had plenty of help, from Tony Blair for one, but also including from most of the rest of us who while we've noticed plenty of signs that we're living under creeping tyranny, have given the bastards carte blanche to go on lying, cheating, wrecking, looting and killing with gay abandon, mostly because we've worked out that trying to stop their steamroller by standing in front of it is a strategy likely to fall very flat indeed.
Christopher Hitchens's part in the ongoing orgy of creative destruction has been to tell us why the steamrolling is necessary. I wouldn't describe him as an apologist — can you imagine him apologizing for anything? — but as an explaner to the masses of why we fight. His position cries out for caricature, and it is easy to picture him as a cheerleader combining the swaggering revolutionary furvor of Chauvin with sound, solid sensible white man's burdenism of Kipling. Today I invite you to see him as medicine man for the war party. You have my full permission to imagine him dancing with Wolfowitz half naked around a campfire clad in eagle feathers and a loincloth, waving a tomahawk in one hand and a bottle of fire water in the other and crying "war—! war-war! wa-wa-wa-war!" at the top of his voice. Alternatively, you may prefer the image painted by George Galloway of "a jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes." Certainly, he's had us rolling in the aisles these past few years.
While Christopher has long been arguing for the virtues and necessity of Bush's and now Obama's wars and basing this "analysis" on the existential threat of Islamic terrorism, he has been rather bashful about discussing the meat and potatoes of what makes Islamic terrorism kick. In particular, he's been as eager to delve into the details of 9/11 as a vampire is to eat garlic, leaving that minefield claims and counterclaims to others. All in all this has been a sensible strategy, as it is doubtful whether his views on that event could stand upto serious scrutiny any better than his stand on yellowcake has.
But in Vanity Fair this month, Hitchens has broken 9/11 silence in order to aim some ill-advised blows at his former master (well, let's say mentor) and intellectual, cultural and moral superior, the octogenarian Gore Vidal. Like Daarth Vader telling Obiwan Kenobi, "Your powers are weak, old man!", he's pulled out his light saber, stuck out his chest, and decided he's finally brave enough to go mano a mano with the aged and infirm patrician. And for good measure, he's aimed a few blaster shots in the direction of a sort of Luke Skywalker of the rebel movement, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, whose 2002 critique The War on Freedom was described in glowing terms by Gore as "Far and away the best and most balanced analysis of September 11", an endorsement which must surely have offended many in the rebel movement as well as the crew of the Fox News deathstar.
Likewise, Hitch's latest outburst has generated no small amount of offense among his devoted readership of fools (including us at HW), mainly because many people feel it just isn't decent with a small "d" to attack the old and weak regardless of whether or not one has right on one's side. Our own Mark G., a budding Jedi himself, has taken up the matter in a recent post, but there are a lot of threads in this bundle of yarn, and so I'm sure we will be trying to untangle some of them at greater length in future. The other day, a perspective on the subject arrived here in the comments from Anthony Thorne, and I like it so much that, with his permission, I'm putting it up as a post immediately following this one.
Being under strict orders not to indulge in "conspiracy theories" from Comrade Rakhmetov — he's like a doctor advising his patient to cut out smoking and eat more roughage! — I'm biting my tongue on 9/11 and concentrating instead on how the global warming/climate change bandwagon will fare now that the jaws, claws and paws of proper winter have returned this year like a can of Heineken to reach parts of the Northern Hemisphere that other winters cannot reach. But if you youngsters want to get stuck in, my advice is go for it with as much gusto as the "68ers" put into loathing Nixon. At the very least, it should prove very cathartic.
Some shocking news from the front lines of US law enforcement, or when is a non-leathal weapon a deadly weapon? When it's killed 350 people and counting, apparently.
In what is being heralded as a landmark decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently declared that police officers could be held liable for using a Taser without proper cause. And in making their determination, the court also set new legal parameters on how law enforcement is to use Tasers, stating, "The objective facts must indicate that the suspect poses an immediate threat to the officer or a member of the public." The federal finding substantially changes the landscape of Taser usage, and may signal the end of Tasers for law enforcement agencies who are now more vulnerable to civil and criminal action then ever before....
In the VCU debate with Turek, in answer to the question, "If God does not exist, what then is the purpose of life?", Christopher quipped, "Well, I can only answer for myself. What cheers me up?" Um. I suppose mainly gloating over the misfortunes of other people." After that got a big laugh and a round of applause, he expanded on the point. "Mainly crowing over the miseries of others. It doesn't always work but it never completely fails. And then there's irony, which is the gin in the Campari, the cream in the coffee. Sex can have diminishing returns but it's amazing.... No, that's pretty much it; then it's a clear run to the grave."
If you listen to his intonation and watch his facial expression and body language, and you're a reasonably bright spark, you'll probably conclude that Christopher was being his usual wickedly funny self, and that although he isn't a complete and utter sadist, there's more than a grain of honesty in the admission that he enjoys witnessing and contemplating the misfortunes and miseries of others - well, certain others at least. Well, we all enjoy a bit of schadenfreude from time to time, don't we all?
I thought of Christopher's remarks and wondered what he might be thinking when he learned that one of his former comrades and latter day intellectual adversaries, the intrepid anti-Zionist British Jewish proper intellectual Tony Judt had been stricken with rapid-onset motor neuron disease, a condition that has left him almost as physically helpless as Stephen Hawking. I only heard about this today in the Guardian. Such news slowly to me at the Greywolf Ashram as I don't read or view "the news" in any sort of systematic way, but I'm surprised that it's taken so long for me to hear about it.
Tony Judt in healthier times
Ed Pilkington interviewed Tony (published the Guardian on Jan. 19, 2010) and put together a heart-rending account of his current misfortunes and miseries:
Eighteen months ago Judt was, by his own description, "a 61-year-old, very healthy, very fit, very independent, travelling sports-playing guy". He had a slight shortness of breath walking up hills and found himself hitting the wrong keys when he typed, nothing more.
Then in September 2008 he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a progressive degenerative illness that causes the cells which control movement to die. His specific condition is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known as Lou Gehrig's disease after the legendary New York Yankees hitter who died of it in 1941.
The disease ravaged Judt with astonishing speed. By December he had lost the use of his hands. By March he was in a wheelchair. By May he was wearing the "silly-looking facial tubing" as he puts it, because his diaphragm muscles were no longer strong enough to effect the bellows motion that induces breathing.
On the same theme, in the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt reflects on his condition in the first of thee short articles here.
By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic. With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me. The same is true of my torso, with the result that backache from inertia and pressure is a chronic irritation. Having no use of my arms, I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that—as a moment's reflection will confirm—we all do dozens of times a day. To say the least, I am utterly and completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers (and anyone else).
During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.
Whether the reader feels the urge to gloat or crow over Tony's condition or is saddened or mortified at the news is a reflection mainly of the reader's own character and sensibilities, including how well they have their superego under scrutiny, so you are welcome to check out your feelings at Tony's plight as a sort of Rorschach test. I wish someone could wave a magic wand and make Tony's neurons better again, or that he could be made well by power of prayer, ginseng or brain surgery. Call it magical thinking or wish thinking if you wish. But there are times when cold rational stoic acceptance of the inevitable without hope, faith or wishing just doesn't cut the mustard. If Tony Judt happened to be an ideological opponent of mine, I'd like to think that my wishes for his miraculous recovery would be the same, but perhaps I wouldn't be wishing quite so hard.
Over the years, Tony has had a few run-ins with the Zionists, and in late 2006, when he complained that a scheduled speech he was booked to give at the Polish Consolate in NY was cancelled after pressure from the Israel lobby, Hitch defended the lobby's right to go witch-hunting, going to the trouble of accusing him in Slate of having a "persecution complex":
How dare the Polish Consulate refuse the heroic dissident Judt a platform! And how dare the Anti-Defamation League, or its chief spokesman Abraham Foxman (it's not quite clear who called) even telephone the Poles to complain?
Well, short of a miracle, Tony will not be giving many more lectures, a thought that is bound to delight Abe Foxman and the rest of the anti-defamation clan (you don't suppose they put a hex on him?) as well as of the "lotus-eaters who make up the American liberal-hawk intelligensia" who Tony summed up so well in his 2008 book Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. As John Gray says in his review:
Judt is especially hard on America's liberal hawks. These " tough", "muscular" liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left, he suggests. "They see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people's expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide." As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. "America's liberal armchair warriors," he writes sharply, "are the 'useful idiots' of the War on Terror." A few pages later, he hammers the point home: "In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them."
Let's finish with a paragraph mentioning Hitch from Tony's 2006 article in the London Review of Books entitled, appropriately enough, Bush's useful idiots.
But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.
In a moment of weakness a while back, I made the mistake of subscribing to the print version of Newsweek because it was relatively cheap. Although I typically discard it immediately when it appears in my mailbox, I was leafing through it while waiting to get my packages and was reminded that Our Boy actually writes for the damned thing.
In a seven-paragraph piece (almost as long as some of his books!), Hitch claims that the Iranian regime is doomed and that "we" had better take it down before it acquires nuclear weapons.
[W]e have a very direct interest in having the Iranian people permitted to interfere in their own internal affairs, and a very immediate reason to insist that the regime's thugs not make their next appearance on the historical stage with nuclear weapons with which to undergird their claim of unfailing righteousness and conviction that they alone know what it is to be a victim.
Now, it's all in his typically florid language, so there's plenty of Decent Deniability in it, but I was struck by a couple of comments made in response to the article. The first is by someone who means well, but is a bit confused:
Posted By: olderwiser @ 01/04/2010 12:11:13 PM
As an independent observer, I have noticed that atheists seldom, if ever, recommend either wars or killing to remedy the ill practices of their religious competitors for the minds of humankind. I have also noticed that religious leaders throughout the centuries have recommended wars and killing in order to either acquire new worshippers or to eliminate other religious competitors. I only mention this to compliment Mr. Hitchens and those of his persuasion for their civility. Good going, Christopher...
This as a prelude to telling atheists and the theists to lighten up, which isn't a bad idea. But how could someone claim that the likes of Hitchens have never called for war as a remedy for the abuses of the mullahs? Sam Harris has certainly called for the bulk of the Iranian population to be vaporized preemptively for a collective thoughtcrime that might lead to a nuclear exchange. However, a somewhat less sophisticated political commentator further on is ultimately more in line with The Great Man's philosophy.
HitchHunters have always been in the vanguard of the Glorious electronic communications revolution. As part of our full-spectrum coverage of The Great Man, I am pleased to announce that there is a new Twitter account that is linked to the articles on this site.
We know Hitchens isn’t stupid, so he must be lying when he writes “stuff” like, “I have no wish...to assassinate Vidal’s character” just after writing about 1,700 words that try to assassinate Vidal’s character. Who’s he kidding? Calling someone “awful, spiteful, miserable” is intended as an objective, neutral commentary?
In the next and final paragraph of his hit piece on Vidal (which asserts in the title the creative insult that Vidal is “crazy”), Hitch lies again: “I don’t in the least mind his clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history with me.” If Hitchens didn’t mind, then why the hell did he spend the preceding paragraphs complaining about it? ‘I don’t mind (except that I do)’. Again, who’s falling for this nonsense? In fact, the Vidal event in NYC to which Hitchens refers (where V smacked down H) seems to have been the trigger for the article in the first place.
The hypocrisy: Hitchens doesn’t like Vidal’s negative opinions of Updike, Buckley and Mailer, so he accuses Vidal of lacking “grace” and “generosity.” It reminded me of the highly entertaining FoxNews clip where Hannity accused Hitchens of lacking “human decency” in expressing a harsh opinion of the then recently departed Jerry Falwell. Then, Hitchens was right. He responded to Hannity (I’m approximating), “You asked me my opinion. I give it to you. And then you tell me that I don’t have the right to give the opinion which you asked me on to express. This is tomfoolery on your part.” Well, likewise, Vidal was asked what he thought of those three writers. Why would Hitchens now hypocritically suggest that Vidal should refrain from stating what he evidently believes, on the grounds that the opinions may lack “grace” or “generosity”?
Of course, Hitch’s writing these days is riddled with examples of psychological projection and hypocrisy. His attempted takedown of Vidal also relies largely on the use of cliched conservative rhetoric. The radical antagonist is a “crackpot” and a “crank-revisionist.” I think H called V just about every name in the reactionary playbook as he dismisses Vidal’s willingness to consider the notion that our government is run by crooks and murderers:
He openly says that the Bush administration was “probably” in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would “certainly fit them to a T”
I think Hitch would be surprised to discover that this is not nearly as ‘crackpot’ a statement as he imagines. At least, I’d bet that many more people are sympathetic to that view than Hitchens thinks. I found myself nodding in agreement with and/or laughing at almost all of the Vidal lines that Hitchens quotes as supposed evidence that the man is a loco crackpot.
Hitch’s sense of humor seems to be fading as well. For instance, he writes,
Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Good grief.
Good grief what? Vidal was obviously exaggerating for a humorous effect. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but I found the line both witty and funny. I thought the entire interview with Hari, which Hitch found so despicable, hilarious and at times as funny as Vidal has ever been. Hitch then asserts that Vidal’s fans only laugh at his jokes because we’re trying to pretend that we’re having a good time (or some such nonsense). I was among Vidal’s audience in New York. The laughter was authentic, spontaneous, uncontrollable.
More dishonesty: Hitchens writes,
Vidal’s phrasings sometimes used to have a certain rotundity and extravagance, but now he has descended straight to the cheap...
This is a distortion, unless Hitchens is somehow unaware of the plain fact that Gore Vidal has always been accused of taking what are considered ‘cheap shots’ by the Serious people. For an extended essay on this, check out Robert Boyers’s criticism of Vidal published in 1992.
Fault lines, and all of this, sort of boil down to the issue of who you believe lost their mind after 9-11? Hitchens, or every single one of his former comrades on the left? What we consider sharp wit or well played irony is, I think, in large part a reflection of our beliefs and political opinions. It’s not that Vidal isn’t witty anymore. It’s that Hitchens is the one who has changed, and he may be the last person to realize it. If the Hitchens of today were alive back in the 70’s, he’d have been railing against Vidal with his buddies Buckley and Podhoretz.
(On the issue of Vidal allegedly naming Hitchens his literary successor, I’ll leave that for them to hash out. I concede that I believe Hitch on this particular front. But I think it’s possible that Vidal quite simply forgot about the letter in question he sent to Hitchens. Who knows? It’s really quite a trivial thing. Hitchens was almost worthy of the title at the time. This was back when Vidal and Hitchens subscribed to similar ideologies and Hitchens was undeniably a great polemicist with an unparalleled ability to amuse.)
You're gonna have a good laugh at this one. Or at the very least, it will leave you smiling broadly. High fives for creative genius to FlywinEvolutions!
What nicer way to start the New Year than with a pleasant and informative wildlife documentary by David Attenborough. Sadly, David isn't available at the fees this site can afford to offer, but somebody else has gone to great pains to stick a feed consisting of a microphone and a stomach camera on the end of an optical fibre down into the burrow where that singular and semi-mythical beast, the Greater Highbrowed English Hitchens, is rumoured to hibernate until Groundhog Day. And to scare off any marauding moles and rouse the creature from its slumber, they uncorked a decent bottle of claret too.
Here Christopher answers questions from users of reddit.com, while simultaneously trying to see how high he can build a pile of books without them tumbling down and how far down the end of his nose he can get his specs to perch without them falling off the end. I sympathize with people who suffer from presbytism — and no, it's not a religion but an affliction that afflicts most of us who get past the age of 50 — and if it were in my power as a genie, I'd happily grant the Hitch younger, stronger eye muscles.
He obviously did this rather early in the morning before the sleep was out out his eyes and the acetaldehyde was cleared from his bloodstream, which explains away some of the rather drowsy, laboured, "I've-just-had-a-stroke" demeanour. But, well-polished thinker and speaker that he is, Hitch can do this sort of thing beautifully even when he's hungover.
There's a lot of utter bullshit in this first half hour about Iran, Afghanistan, Islam, the Caliphate and religion that I'm convinced he doesn't really believe but is only running through as an aid to remembering the substance of his regular brief as a neocon presstitute. But there is also a lot of genuine Hitchensian opinion and anecdote on view here that any true Hitch Watcher will find riveting.
And if you click on the screen and visit YouTube, you'll find some more of the same.
Well I never! Who would have thought our very own Duke of Decency, Oliver Kamm, would be getting involved in what is beginning to shape up as "TriggerGate"? And on the side of clarity at that!? Well if you did, you deserve a pat on the back. So, for your efforts at exposing the truth as well as damage limitation, well done, Ollie! As for Christopher, your handlers seem to have hung you out to dry with your pants around your ankles yet again, and the watchers are laughing not with you but at you.
New revelations about two documents leaked to The Times of London to show that Iran is working on a "nuclear trigger" mechanism have further undermined the credibility of the document the newspaper had presented as evidence of a continuing Iranian nuclear weapons programme.
A columnist for the Times has acknowledged that the two-page Persian language document published by The Times last month was not a photocopy of the original document but an expurgated and retyped version of the original.
A translation of a second Persian language document also published by The Times, moreover, contradicts the claim by The Times that it shows the "nuclear trigger" document was written within an organisation run by an Iranian military scientist.
Former Central Intelligence Agency official Philip Giraldi has said U.S. intelligence judges the "nuclear trigger" document to be a forgery, as IPS reported last week. The IPS story also pointed out that the document lacked both security markings and identification of either the issuing organisation or the recipient.
The new revelations point to additional reasons why intelligence analysts would have been suspicious of the "nuclear trigger" document.
On Dec. 14, The Times published what it explicitly represented as a photocopy of a complete Persian language document showing Iranian plans for testing a neutron initiator, a triggering device for a nuclear weapon, along with an English language translation.
But in response to a reader who noted the absence of crucial information from the document, including security markings, Oliver Kamm, an online columnist for The Times, admitted Jan. 3 that the Persian language document published by The Times was "a retyped version of the relevant parts of that original document".
Kamm wrote that the original document had "contained a lot of classified information" and was not published "because of the danger that it would alert Iranian authorities to the source of the leak".
In offering the explanation of the intelligence agency that leaked the document to The Times, Kamm was also damaging the credibility of the document. A document that had been both edited and retyped could obviously have been doctored by adding material on a neutron initiator....
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Credible warnings or more weapons of mass deception from the boy who cried Wolfowitz?
The rabies shots obviously haven't worked, as Christopher is foaming at the mouth about Iran again. And apparently on top of all his other symptoms — including the profuse sweating, growling and dripping saliva at the sight of anyone in a turban, veil, cassock or habit (although fortunately those little Jewish hats don't seem to set him off) and the fear of water in his whiskey, he's developed the delusion that he knows a thing or two about nuclear physics. Indeed, he's trying to lecture his Slate readership on the uses and abuses of something called UD3.
Apparently, he picked up all the relevant knowledge from Catherine Philp, the diplomatic correspondent of The Times. How much more authoritative can you get than that?
I encourage you to view the Iranian documents for yourselves: The Times subjected them to considerable expertise before publishing them and is confident of their provenance. I quote here from an excellent summary by the newspaper's diplomatic correspondent Catherine Philp:
"UD3, when used in a neutron initiator, emits a stream of neutrons that ignite the core of a bomb, either weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. The stream of neutrons is released using high explosives to compress a core of solid UD3, creating fusion."
But this in turn presents a difficulty for the surreptitious bomb-makers, because the testing of such a trigger could not be explained away as a detonation of a conventional high-explosive weapon. In other words, it would allow monitors to detect the traces of UD3. The whole interest of the newly leaked documents lies precisely in the way in which a further level of cheating is therefore so carefully discussed. A smaller scale of test, according to the regime's scientists, could be attempted using titanium deuteride instead. By this means, a useful flow of neutrons could still be produced but without the incriminating trace elements. The apparent idea, according to one quoted expert, was "to test the match without burning it."
The chance that this is not a militaristic and messianic design intended to harden the carapace of the dictatorship and help extend its powers of regional blackmail seem ridiculously close to zero. Iran has had numberless offers from the West to help it acquire the faculties of peaceful nuclear energy and reduce its wasteful use of oil and gas. If it would permit the most elementary transparency, it could also be enabled to purchase uranium at far less cost on the open market, as other nations do. But the mullahs prefer to risk isolation and sanctions in order to construct off-the-record sites and to conduct deception operations that would be almost pathetically crude if they were not so self-evidently sinister.
The stridency and urgency in Hitchens's warnings are palpable, although you'll have to make your own minds up about whether they are either earnestly held or remotely credible. In so doing, please do bear in mind that the Boy who Cried Wolfowitz turned out to be dead wrong about Iraqi WMD and about the authenticity of the documents alleged to have proven Saddam was shopping for yellowcake in Niger. Embarrassingly for the contrition-free contrarian, Wikipedia now has a page entitled "Niger uranium forgeries". And furthermore, our boy is currently singing from the same talking-points hymnbook as the same "Bomb Iran!" choir that used to sing "Bomb Iraq!"
When scientifically illiterate journalists start pretending to talk science and using this as a basis for fanning the flames of war, it falls to real scientists to step in and inject a little proper science into the journalistic arena. And fortunately at this juncture we have Norman Dombey, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex and occasional contributor to the London Review of Books on matters nuclear and weaponry. Norman, as some of us remember fondly, blew away the entire Hitchensian case on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as early as February 2004. (Even Tony Blair has since been forced to concede that the pesky things didn't exist, although he still thinks "We" did the right thing in removing Saddam.) So on at least two counts, Norman deserves to be listened to concerning Iran's bomb-making plans or lack of.
Here's his article in the Guardian for December 22, 2009. (Original here.)
This is no smoking gun, nor Iranian bomb
Nothing in the published 'intelligence documents' shows Iran is close to having nuclear weapons By Norman Dombey
even years ago Condoleezza Rice said "there will always be some uncertainty" in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon, but "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud". Now the focus is on Iran, not Iraq. Iran's nuclear projects are in the news again. According to the Times last week, alleged "confidential intelligence documents" show Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb. The notes, the newspaper claims, describe "a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion". President Ahmadinejad yesterday denounced the documents as more American forgeries. But even if we take them as genuine, is this a real "smoking gun" – and what do the documents show anyway?
In my opinion they should be read recognising the long Iranian interest in the physics of nuclear fusion. Jim Callaghan, then British foreign secretary, visited Iran in March 1976. The shah told him that he was particularly interested in the UK's fusion programme and "if any opportunity arose whereby Iran could come in on the programme, they would be happy to do so". That interest has continued for more than 30 years. In 1993 Iran agreed with China to co-operate in the study of fusion and there is an continuing programme of work in Tehran.
Nuclear fusion is the mechanism whereby the sun shines and sustains life on earth. Nuclear reactors and atomic bombs rely on fission; hydrogen bombs rely on fusion. There are as yet no fusion reactors that produce energy because, even after 50 years of trying, more energy is needed to produce fusion than is obtained from the output. Nevertheless, industrialised countries persist in research in this field. At present the joint EU-US-Japan-China-India-Korea-Russia Iter project is building a fusion reactor prototype at Cadarache in France. Research in this area is allowed by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
The "intelligence documents" published by the Times describe a four-year project, so if the Iranians were to build a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon it is not being treated as a matter of urgency. By contrast, the Manhattan Project scientists arrived at Los Alamos in early 1943, and the Trinity test occurred in July 1945.
Then the documents state that "policy is to develop co-operation with research and university centres in order to carry out the projects outside of the centre" and that samples are to be produced "by mutual co-operation … [then presented] to other research centres for marketing purposes". It is unlikely that nuclear weapon projects would be distributed among several universities, or weapon parts marketed to research centres.
The documents call for two physicists with PhDs and two with masters degrees to carry out the work. That doesn't sound like a top priority national programme. That sounds more like a university research project.
Then there is uranium deuteride, or UD3. According to the Times: "Critically, while other neutron sources have possible civilian uses, UD3 has only one application – to be the metaphorical match that lights a nuclear bomb." That is a surprising statement. In fact the document's only mention of UD3 states that it would prefer not to use it but to replace uranium with titanium. That gives a clue about what the Iranians are doing.
Titanium deuteride is used to store deuterium gas so that the gas can be generated when it is heated. It seems to me, therefore, that the function of UD3 is to generate deuterium gas so that it can be used in a plasma focus neutron generator. The neutron generator could then produce isotopes for use by other laboratories, hence the reference to market samples. UD3 is not known to be used as a neutron initiator in nuclear weapons: it was not used as an initiator in American, British or Soviet weapons when those weapons were developed.
So why the emphasis on UD3 as a initiator for a weapon? First, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced Pakistani scientist who stole centrifuge designs from the Dutch uranium enrichment plant at Almelo and began Pakistan's weapon project, claimed that UD3 was used as an initiator by Pakistan. Second, Chinese physicists reported they had imploded UD3 using chemical explosives and thus obtained a beam of neutrons. So the argument is that China now uses UD3 as an initiator, passed the design to Pakistan, which in turn passed it to Iran.
This is possible, but not demonstrated by the documents. A neutron initiator for a weapon needs precise timing: this is difficult using implosion by chemical explosives. Khan is a highly unreliable source. The document does not discuss obtaining neutrons by implosion: it discusses using pulsed neutrons presumably obtained using oscillating magnetic fields.
Perhaps I am wrong. Both fusion and fission physics involve processes which can be used either in military or civil applications. But I have read nothing in the documents published by the Times to be able to conclude that they are describing an initiator for a nuclear weapon.
“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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