At 4:46 PM +1000 4/10/01, Siviour, Craig wrote:
>G'Day All,
>
>Have you seen Christopher Hitchens
>take on the comments of Chomsky et. al.
>on S11 ?
>
>Hitchens despises US Foreign Policy,
>thinks Kissinger should be arraigned on war crimes
>and yet supports war against the Taliban.

I think what he's trying to say is this:

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of moral
crisis, maintain neutrality" - Thomas Aquinas

It is not pleasant to have to choose sides, between the Taliban and US "imperialism". Both are cruel, stupid and backward. But the Taliban is clearly more backward.

So it isn't a difficult choice. This Hitchens fellow seems to go over the top about it of course, but he's essentially right. The only problem is that his analysis seems to confuse cause and effect somewhat.

He seems to be arguing that the Taliban's religious zealotry is the "root cause". I've seen this argued before, but I don't think its true. In the sense that religious zealotry itself doesn't just materialise out of nowhere, it has causes.

Hitchens angrily and contemptuously rejects the "chickens [...] coming home to roost" argument, but offers effectively no alternative reasoning. The environment that suckles the sort of barbaric zealotry may not be entirely the responsibility of US foreign policy, but it seems inarguable that US foreign policy is not entirely blameless. Hitchens even agrees that the US has some responsibility for cleaning up its mess. But he displays no comprehension of the causal relationship.

Philosophy and morals are the product of a people's material circumstances, not the other way around. Material circumstances don't get much baser than in Afghanistan, it should not be a surprise to any thinking person that philosophy and morals adapt to suit the base material conditions.

It usually takes a generation for morals to adjust to circumstances though. That's also how long it takes to adjust them back, but the moral decline only begins to reverse itself after the physical circumstances become civilised. merely destroying the Taliban won't be nearly enough.

The awful sobering truth is that Hitchen's "we have met the enemy and the enemy is not us" is dead wrong. Rather, "there, but for the grace of God, goes us". The enemy is as human as us, we would be just like them if we had been brought up in hell.

But Hitchen is in no mood to be sober. We have to understand that too, his philosophy and morals are just as much a product of his circumstances as that of the religious zealots he despises. And I'm no better than him, just a lot further away and luckily quite a bit more "relaxed and comfortable."

Bill Bartlett
BRacknell Tas