Saturday, January 01, 2005
Hitch salvos
It's best to be sitting on your helmet when you read Christoper Hitchens - no matter what your position you're going to take some flak. For some time though, some of his most potent blasts have been at the anti-war left. In a recent interview with FrontPage Magazine he expresses his lack of patience for those who, even after 9/11, can't bring themselves to see the unappeasable deadliness of radical Islam.
"Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It's amazing how many people refuse to see this."
His prescription is the same one that over 59 million Americans recently endorsed:
"What I keep saying is: they wish to be martyrs and we must help them to achieve martyrdom by every method at our disposal."
Fans of Michael Moore will want to look away, as Hitch holds this paragon of fashionable leftism in sheer contempt. Calling him "an obvious huckster and a jerk", he was likewise pointed in his review of F911:
"...the review of Moore's mendacious film involved me in very little mental effort: it was more like an exercise in logical and moral hygiene. The movie was so idiotic and so sinister that it more or less condemned itself: a tiny shove is all it took."
Hitchens notices in Moore a
"combination of nativism and populism (stirred in with a nauseating dose of sentimentality and an absolutely breath-taking contempt for objective truth)". [He is] "an addict of crowd-pleasing and demagogy, and also an addict of "secret financial government" rhetoric. He also affects a certain plebeian and blue-collar style. When he thinks it will work, he will pretend to believe that "American jobs" are migrating to Mexico, or that "American boys" are being duped into war by hidden cabals."
Hitch sizes things up:
"With the Left, which is supposed to care about secularism and humanism, it's a bit harder to explain an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats. However, it can be done, once you assume that American imperialism is the main enemy. Even for those who won't go quite that far, the admission that the US Marine Corps might be doing the right thing is a little further than they are prepared to go - because what would then be left of their opposition credentials, which are so dear to them?"
It never falls all one way with Christopher Hitchens, though. There's enough shrapnel to go around, and conservatives will take their fair share too. Even if you don't agree with him, it's bracing to read him.
POSTSCRIPT: Readers of the comments section of the Belmont Club blog will be familiar with the notorious site pest who goes by the blog handle "Double Standard". DS has made a reputation for himself by his frequent interjections of disparate non-sequiturs, neo-Marxist cant and the familiar talking points of the Bush hating left. His method is to attempt to show that we (knowingly or unknowingly, depending on the source) employ a double standard when we discuss, to take one example, the recent battle in Fallujah. What is to us a battle against a vicious enemy, he takes delight in characterizing as murder of innocent Iraqis by Rumsfeld's (duped) killers. In this way he can accuse Americans of the ultimate sin, hypocrisy and double standards.
Well, Hitchens, while surely not addressing dear Double Standard directly (in fact he's referring to Noam Chomsky), does nevertheless deliver a severe body blow to this kind of thinking:
"The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school..."
"Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It's amazing how many people refuse to see this."
His prescription is the same one that over 59 million Americans recently endorsed:
"What I keep saying is: they wish to be martyrs and we must help them to achieve martyrdom by every method at our disposal."
Fans of Michael Moore will want to look away, as Hitch holds this paragon of fashionable leftism in sheer contempt. Calling him "an obvious huckster and a jerk", he was likewise pointed in his review of F911:
"...the review of Moore's mendacious film involved me in very little mental effort: it was more like an exercise in logical and moral hygiene. The movie was so idiotic and so sinister that it more or less condemned itself: a tiny shove is all it took."
Hitchens notices in Moore a
"combination of nativism and populism (stirred in with a nauseating dose of sentimentality and an absolutely breath-taking contempt for objective truth)". [He is] "an addict of crowd-pleasing and demagogy, and also an addict of "secret financial government" rhetoric. He also affects a certain plebeian and blue-collar style. When he thinks it will work, he will pretend to believe that "American jobs" are migrating to Mexico, or that "American boys" are being duped into war by hidden cabals."
Hitch sizes things up:
"With the Left, which is supposed to care about secularism and humanism, it's a bit harder to explain an alliance with woman-stoning, gay-burning, Jew-hating medieval theocrats. However, it can be done, once you assume that American imperialism is the main enemy. Even for those who won't go quite that far, the admission that the US Marine Corps might be doing the right thing is a little further than they are prepared to go - because what would then be left of their opposition credentials, which are so dear to them?"
It never falls all one way with Christopher Hitchens, though. There's enough shrapnel to go around, and conservatives will take their fair share too. Even if you don't agree with him, it's bracing to read him.
POSTSCRIPT: Readers of the comments section of the Belmont Club blog will be familiar with the notorious site pest who goes by the blog handle "Double Standard". DS has made a reputation for himself by his frequent interjections of disparate non-sequiturs, neo-Marxist cant and the familiar talking points of the Bush hating left. His method is to attempt to show that we (knowingly or unknowingly, depending on the source) employ a double standard when we discuss, to take one example, the recent battle in Fallujah. What is to us a battle against a vicious enemy, he takes delight in characterizing as murder of innocent Iraqis by Rumsfeld's (duped) killers. In this way he can accuse Americans of the ultimate sin, hypocrisy and double standards.
Well, Hitchens, while surely not addressing dear Double Standard directly (in fact he's referring to Noam Chomsky), does nevertheless deliver a severe body blow to this kind of thinking:
"The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school..."
# posted by mds : 10:25 PM
