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"Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education. "
Bertrand Russell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sebastian Budgen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: "PSN List" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, October 05, 2001 8:17 PM
Subject: FW: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS JOINS THE POSSE
>
> ----------
> From: Sebastian Budgen <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 05 Oct 2001 11:14:53 -0700
> To: Marxism-Thaxis <[log in to unmask]>, Marxism List
> <[log in to unmask]>, Socialist Register List
> <[log in to unmask]>, Debate List <[log in to unmask]>,
> Aut-op-sy <[log in to unmask]>, IPE List
> <[log in to unmask]>, WSN List <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS JOINS THE POSSE
>
> CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS JOINS THE POSSE
>
>
> Christopher Hitchens has in the past two decades established himself as
one
> of the finest writers of the left in the English speaking world. It is,
> therefore, nothing short of tragic to see him, in his polemic with Noam
> Chomsky and others over how the left should respond to the atrocities of
11
> September, descend into a repellent mixture of casuistry, moral blackmail,
> and law-and-order ranting.
>
> Hitchensıs declaration of solidarity with George W. Bush rests on three
> propositions:
>
> (1) What happened on 11 September was a wicked crime;
> (2) It is morally disreputable to compare it with the crimes committed by
> the US government;
> (3) It is equally disreputable to seek to trace the causes of this crime.
>
> (1) is of course indisputable. Hitchensıs prose gains such power as it
> possesses from his constant efforts to remind us of the enormity of the
> events of 11 September. But the aim of his bullying rhetoric appears to be
> to stop us thinking calmly about their significance. But, having
discovered
> (or, perhaps better, been reminded) that we live in a world where such
> things can happen, we need calm thought more than just about anything.
> Hitchensıs articles are the literary equivalent of shouting, apparently
> intended to drown out such thinking. If only for this reason, they are as
> morally and intellectually sleazy as anything he attributes to others.
>
> When we ignore the shouting and try to think things through, we confront
the
> issues that Hitchensıs proposition (2) seeks to shut down. For very many
> people in the South, and quite a few in the North, any attempt to weigh up
> 11 September are led to compare it to other atrocities most notably
those
> that flow from Anglo-American policy, particularly, but not solely, in the
> Middle East. Now Hitchens wants to ban such comparisons. The reason he
gives
> in his latest reply to Chomsky is that what he acknowledges to be crimes
> such as the cruise missile attacks on the Sudan in 1998 arenıt of the same
> order of moral turpitude as the atrocities committed against Manhattan and
> Washington. The Clinton administration did not intend thousands of
Sudanese
> to die when it ordered the destruction of the countryıs main
pharmaceutical
> factory, even though these deaths were the consequence of this action,
while
> the suicide bombers of 11 September consciously sought the mass killings
> they caused.
>
> This doctrine makes it very hard to judge the atrocities of the past
> century. For those are composed, probably in equal measure, of planned and
> organized massacres and preventable mass deaths caused by bureaucratic
> callousness and negligence. For example, despite the efforts of Robert
> Conquest to prove the contrary, I doubt if Stalin actually intended that
the
> forced collectivisation of Soviet agriculture would lead to several
millions
> dying in the Great Famine of the early 1930s. These deaths were,
> nevertheless, the predictable result of the measures Stalin ordered, and
> they represent, I would say, his greatest crime and one of the outstanding
> atrocities of the 20th century. But, for Hitchens, the holocaust in which
> millions of Russian and Ukrainian peasants died is presumably less worthy
of
> condemnation than the Great Terror of the late 1930s, when the Cheka put
yet
> more millions to death of the orders of the Politburo.
>
> The issue is an important one because the preferred method of
Anglo-American
> warfare since Napoleonic times has been bombardment and blockade rather
than
> direct combat. Often the larger number of the victims of this method are
not
> the intended target but as the Pentagon likes to put it collateral
> damage. For those waging war in this way, many of the deaths they inflict
> are a regrettable but unavoidable by-product of their strategy, a kind of
> overhead cost of pursuing the right policy. Madeleine Albrightıs notorious
> comment that bringing down Saddam Hussein was Oworth S the priceı of half
a
> million Iraqi childrenıs deaths exactly sums up this kind of obscene
> accounting. Sure, Clinton didnıt want to take thousands of innocent lives
> when he ordered the missile attacks on Sudan. He wanted stave off
> impeachment and to hit bid Laden. But he took those lives all the same:
> their effacement was a predictable consequence of their actions.
Hitchensıs
> last book was a splendid indictment of Henry Kissinger as a war criminal:
> what was that all about if not holding the wielders of state power
> accountable for such consequences?
>
> Drawing such comparisons is necessary in order to set the atrocities of 11
> September in their context and thus to begin to explain them. But
Hitchensıs
> proposition (3) is indeed to block any move from judgement to explanation.
> His thought seems to be that the crime is so great that explanation is
> unnecessary: all that is called for is support for the posse that his
> President is rounding up to catch or kill the perpetrators. But this just
> seems terribly wrong. The point of trying to understand the causes of a
> crime is to help prevent its recurrence. Does Hitchens really believe that
> killing bin Laden and his associates (assuming that they are indeed
> responsible for 11 September) will bring terrorism to an end?
>
> It is the awareness that seeking retribution is likely at best to be
> ineffective, at worst to intensify the hatred of the United States that is
> already widespread in the world and thereby to encourage yet more and
> perhaps worse acts of terrorism that informs the growing unease about, if
> not outright opposition to a Western military response. The irrelevance of
> retribution is so obvious that even Tony Blair had to promise the Labour
> Party conference the other day that the Bush coalition will root out
global
> injustice as well as seek vengeance for 11 September. This promise must
have
> caused great surprise in the White House, but it should also have provoked
> outrage in the Hitchens household. From Hitchensıs vengeful perspective,
> even the apostle of the Third Way shows dangerous signs of getting
> rhetorically at least all mushy and liberal.
>
> Reflection on the causes of 11 September further undermines Hitchensıs
case
> because of the harsh light it throws on his preferred agents of
retribution.
> Letıs suppose that bin Laden and Al-Qaıida were indeed responsible for the
> attacks on Manhattan and Washington. As Hitchens himself acknowledges, the
> briefest trawl around the Internet will produce masses of material
revealing
> the links connecting this network to Washington and its allies, dating
back
> of course to the role of the CIA in funding, arming, and organizing the
> Islamist resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan but embracing
> also the role of the Saudi elites and Pakistani military intelligence in
> backing bin Laden and his allies in the Taliban. Why is the Bush
> administration treating so gingerly if not for fear that an indiscriminate
> military response will subvert key allies such as the Pakistani, Saudi,
and
> Egyptian dictatorships? But a more Otargetedı attack is likely to involve
> precisely the murky network of intelligence agencies and special-forces
> operators that first released the genie of Islamic terrorism from the
> bottle. Does Hitchens really believe that the CIA and the Pentagon, along
> with their British askaris in MI6 and the SAS, will not, in destroying bin
> Laden, unleash yet more murderous forces to haunt our future? If he does,
> heıs a lot more naïve that his knowing prose lets on.
>
> Defending his governmentıs promise to get tough on crime back in the early
> 1990s, the then British Tory prime minister John Major said: OWe must
> understand less and condemn more.ı Understanding wasnıt in any case an
> option for poor Major, but it is for Hitchens. Some of his best work has
> been devoted to exposing the ways in which Establishment intellectuals
have
> mentally subordinated themselves to the demands of Western raison dıEtat:
I
> have in mind especially the superb essay in which he revealed Isaiah
> Berlinıs complicity in the crimes of the American state during the
> Kennedy-Johnson era. But Hitchens now seems also much more noisily and
> aggressively than the prudent and politick Berlin to be placing his
brain
> and his pen at the command of the Empire. From a critic of power he is
> becoming one of its mere servants. This melancholy spectacle should not
stop
> us rallying the widest possible coalition against the coming war.
>
> Alex Callinicos
> 5 October 2001
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
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