RIP Christopher Hitchens

[Lord Zentei]

Did you read any of the hysterical shit he wrote about The Clenis, or see him on TV calling Clinton a rapist? I did.

No I did not. And while I'm not a fan of that kind of low-blow political attack journalism by any stretch of the imagination, I have to wonder whether you'd be as indignant about it if his target had been Bush, for example.

As for the email: so, basically Hitchens, in his fervor, managed to get punked by a fake email which was written by someone to smear Sheehan. Hardly commendable, especially since he's a journalist. Calling Sheehan a LaRoushie (lol) is silly, but honestly, I don't see the justification for pissing all over his RIP thread for all that.

Cockburn's piece on Hitchens' death is just as scathing:

<snip>

Seems to me that the main beef here is that Cockburn is sore about Hitchens not sharing his political views during the latter half of his career.

He courted the label “contrarian”, but if the word is to have any muscle, it surely must imply the expression of dangerous opinions. Hitchens never wrote anything truly discommoding to respectable opinion and if he had he would never have enjoyed so long a billet at Vanity Fair. Attacking God? The big battles on that issue were fought one, two, even five hundred years ago when they burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiore. A contrarian these days would be someone who staunchly argued for the existence of a Supreme Being.

Yeah, you lost me there.

But Norman Finkelstein had him pegged best of all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgB20YmqN6A

Snore.

[Grumman]

Cockburn's piece on Hitchens' death is just as scathing:

...Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity....

How obscene, to hold up a miser like Mother Teresa as a symbol of charity. At least when Hitchens failed to give money to help the poor, it wasn't money expressly given to him for that purpose.

[Thanas]

This says it pretty well about Hitchens:
http://gawker.com/5868761/christopher-h ... le-mistake

In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Hitchens' friend Ian Buruma, who told the New Yorker in 2006 that Hitchens was "always looking for the defining moment — as it were, our Spanish Civil War, where you put yourself on the right side, and stand up to the enemy." He shared that impulse with George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz, and they found their moment in the stupid decision to invade Iraq. For Hitchens, it was the opening maneuver in a grand, imagined clash of western civilization against the Islamofascist hordes.

It was something else for 113,000 civilians who died in the chaos unleashed. The great tragedy of Hitchens' life was that, toward its end, he aligned himself so stridently with the very fools, cowards, and charlatans who most desperately invited exposure by his prodigious skills as butcher. How can someone who devoted so much of his life to as noble a cause as destroying the reputation of Henry Kissinger blithely stand shoulder to shoulder with Rumsfeld?

People make mistakes. What's horrible about Hitchens' ardor for the invasion of Iraq is that he clung to it long after it became clear that a grotesque error had been made. In September 2005, he defended the debacle in Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard in terms that are simply breathtaking in their lack of concern for the victims of his Mesopotamian adventure. It was headlined "A War to Be Proud Of."

Torture and murder by feckless American troops at Abu Ghraib? "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad," he wrote. How clever! Anyone objecting to the occupation of Iraq on the grounds that torturing and murdering people is wrong and illegal is now obligated to defend the "abattoir" that existed prior to our arrival.

Anyone complaining that the chief rationale for the invasion—the indisputable presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—turned out to have been a fantasy is being "childish," he wrote. "'You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire.' I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra." How tiresome you are with your boring insistence that wars be justified! Hitchens' answer to that whine is a trivial list of ominous fragments, conspiratorially arrayed: "Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad." If you don't recognize the immediate global danger that the presence in Iraq of a man who built a bomb that killed six people ten years ago presents, you are a child.

If you dispute the Bush Administration line that "terror" must be fought in Iraq lest it be fought on our soil, Hitchens alleged, you are guilty of dispensing "sob-sister tripe pumped out by the Cindy Sheehan circus and its surrogates." Sheehan's son had been dead scarcely a year at the time Hitchens wrote this.

But surely Christopher, you recognize that the war has been badly bungled even if all your hearts were in the right place, right? "We need not argue about the failures and the mistakes and even the crimes, because these in some ways argue themselves." For Christopher Hitchens to identify a subject about which no argument is required is a rare thing indeed. Abu Ghraib—why argue? The $9 billion in cash that simply disappeared—what's to argue? Two months after the Hitchens wrote those words, U.S. Marines massacred 24 men, women, and children in Haditha. No need to argue.

"If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated," he closed, "I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat." The rest of Hitchens' life turned out to be unjustly circumscribed. But his demilitarized federal and secular democracy is a mirage. More likely a future Iranian client state and Shi'ite stronghold awaits. Those words would not wear well on his headstone.

Hitchens' style—ironically, given his hatred for tyranny and love of free expression—brooked no dissent. There was little room for good-faith disagreement or loyal opposition. His enemies were not just wrong, they were stupid or mean or small-minded or liars or cheats or children or cowards. It was thrilling and gratifying to see that articulate viciousness deployed against the Clinton cartel, or Mother Teresa, or Henry Kissinger—against power and pretense. To see it deployed in favor of war, on behalf of a dullard and scion, against the hysterical mother of a dead son was nauseating.

In the months and years since Hitchens publicly proclaimed his pride in the invasion of Iraq for Murdoch's ideological crib-sheet, 78,708 Iraqi civilians and 2,548 U.S. troops have been killed. He did immense good in his life, and unforgivable harm.

[General Mung Beans]

Mr. Hitchens certainly was not a blind supporter of the Bush administration even in foreign policy-he denounced waterboarding as torture for example. And time has vindicated Hitchens' opinion of Cindy Sheehan-she has degenerated into a typical conspiracy nut of the left.

I also find it interesting nobody is criticizing Hitchens for the time when he said he hoped a civil war would break out in the US if the Christian Right took over.

[Thanas]

Mr. Hitchens certainly was not a blind supporter of the Bush administration even in foreign policy-he denounced waterboarding as torture for example.

Oh booo hooo. He still was a war cheerleader till the end.

And time has vindicated Hitchens' opinion of Cindy Sheehan-she has degenerated into a typical conspiracy nut of the left.

Really. Do tell how this vindicates Hitchens.

I also find it interesting nobody is criticizing Hitchens for the time when he said he hoped a civil war would break out in the US if the Christian Right took over.

Because people might not have known about that?

[General Mung Beans]

Oh booo hooo. He still was a war cheerleader till the end.

I agree about that, but then again nobody is ideologically perfect.

Really. Do tell how this vindicates Hitchens.

In response to Bin Laden's death she basically said "If you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid".

Because people might not have known about that?

Well then it is amusing that a fairly mainstream (if wrong) opinion has caused more controversy than a ridiculous view.

[Thanas]

Oh booo hooo. He still was a war cheerleader till the end.

I agree about that, but then again nobody is ideologically perfect.

When one cheers for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and refuses to accept that one was wrong about the reasons for the war (notice how neatly he sidestepped from "WMDS. WMDS. WMDS." to "DEMOCRACY. DEMOCRACY. DEMOCRACY." - a concept that is as missing from Iraq as the WMDS) then that makes one a despicable, morally bankrupt and ideologically corrupt person.

Really. Do tell how this vindicates Hitchens.

In response to Bin Laden's death she basically said "If you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid".

Again, how does that vindicate Hitchens or the fake email?

Well then it is amusing that a fairly mainstream (if wrong) opinion has caused more controversy than a ridiculous view.

Let me put the following to you:
a) Cheerleading resulting in a real war with over a million dead
b) Cheerleading for a hypothetical war which would never happen

Which one is worse?

[General Mung Beans]

I agree about that, but then again nobody is ideologically perfect.

When one cheers for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and refuses to accept that one was wrong about the reasons for the war (notice how neatly he sidestepped from "WMDS. WMDS. WMDS." to "DEMOCRACY. DEMOCRACY. DEMOCRACY." - a concept that is as missing from Iraq as the WMDS) then that makes one a despicable, morally bankrupt and ideologically corrupt person.

He certainly wasn't cheering civilians dying. Hitchens genuinely believed that removing Saddam was a good thing and the world was better off and that Hussein would eventually have developed WMDs anyways.

In response to Bin Laden's death she basically said "If you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid".

Again, how does that vindicate Hitchens or the fake email?

If you meant that, that certainly was not justifiable.

Let me put the following to you:
a) Cheerleading resulting in a real war with over a million dead
b) Cheerleading for a hypothetical war which would never happen

Which one is worse?

The Iraq War while mistaken did have some legitimate reasons to fight while the other war does not.

[Thanas]

Let me put the following to you:
a) Cheerleading resulting in a real war with over a million dead
b) Cheerleading for a hypothetical war which would never happen

Which one is worse?

The Iraq War while mistaken did have some legitimate reasons to fight while the other war does not.

What are those? And do they justify a war of aggression and over a million dead?

[Patrick Degan]

The Iraq War while mistaken did have some legitimate reasons to fight

Actually, none whatsoever. The Iraq War was justified by a tissue of outright lies, half of which were being exploded in the run-up to hostilities even while the war party were blithely ignoring every revelation which did not conform to their propaganda. Take away all the actual non-existent threats Iraq allegedly posed from the equation and all that's left for a "case" for war was that Saddam was a Very Very Bad Man. And that is simply not good enough.

[Count Chocula]

Combat in Afghanistan, based on the ruling party's support for bin Laden and company, was justified IMO and should have been handled with a Congressional declaration of war. Iraq OTOH, from the information we have available, not so much. And that just makes Hitchens even more of a tool for his support of it.

[Crown]

I find it rather ironic that people are expressing the sentiment 'disagreed with him on Iraq but appreciated his views/crusade/activism regarding religion and atheism ...' while completely tap dancing around the fact the later directly influenced his stance on the former.

The nut actually thought that the Iraq war was a good thing, and that it was the right thing to do to promote atheism ... even after having met George Bush.

Has anyone paused to think that the cancer wasn't in his brain?

Anyway, no one's perfect after all, RIP.

[Simon_Jester]

There was at the time a certain school of thought which had catastrophically misunderstood the nature of Islamic terrorism- mostly by taking their propaganda at its word, without grasping the underlying context that made them want to say it in the first place.

If the tenets of this school of thought were accepted, then one would conclude that Western civilization was genuinely in danger from an outside ideological force, one that would try with all its (unknown and possibly larger than we thought) resources to destroy that civilization. You can find plenty of examples of this line of thought on this very forum if you go back to the time of the Iraq War, and quite a few of the people who believed this were... for lack of a better term, sane. Their overall system of beliefs were not all that far out there. They just overestimated the danger posed by Islamic fundamentalism, because they perceived it as a global, powerful, evangelizing force that could crop up in great strength anywhere, rather than a regional, limited force whose ability to project power is limited to the occasoinal Hail Mary pass.

When you understand how people could overestimate the threat they were dealing with, and the need to get rid of the threat by maintaining overwhelming power in the Middle East and democratizing the region, a lot of things start to make sense. Wishful thinking about the Iraq War and other neoconservative foreign policy ambitions are among them.

But the original idea here has faded a great deal over the past five to eight years. Because we now know that Islamic terrorism is nowhere near as dangerous as we thought it was, at least outside the Muslim world. We see how quickly they were reduced to gimmicks like underwear bombers and individual unstable loonies whose actions are indistinguishable from background levels of crime and domestic terrorism.

But to understand people who publically supported the Iraq War in that timeframe, and yet who were not totally brainless on other issues, it's important to understand just how far today's awareness had to go in 2003. It took a long time before it could become a universal, undeniable thing.

[Crown]

There was at the time a certain school of thought which had catastrophically misunderstood the nature of Islamic terrorism- mostly by taking their propaganda at its word, without grasping the underlying context that made them want to say it in the first place.

<snip>

First, I'll reply to this in the general sense; yep, I agree there were some legitimate cockups back in the day leading to the Iraq war. No doubt, there were some learned people who were perhaps a little more ignorant than savant on this matter, and sure they made some unfortunate decisions, point taken.

Hell this board was around back then, you can sort the N&P Forum by going to the last page and having a read of the tragic comedy unfolding for yourself. Perfectly preserved for ever on the interwebs. Hell if real people hadn't actually died it would even be funny! \o/

But real people actually did die because of this fucking idiocy, and while I can excuse the voiceless plebs on the forums for their moronic idiocy, Hitchens was a rather loud, obnoxious, apologetic, cheerleader of the whole scam from start to finish. And what is worse, is that while some people might have been honestly deceived by the scam (and do remember I'm trying to be generous here, one of the claims was Saddam was building WMD's because he bought Aluminium tubing for crying out loud, like that was the only reason to buy Aluminium tubes ...), Hitchens had the intellect to see right through that shit and either didn't, or just did and didn't give a fuck.

That is the worst kind of asshole right there.

[Simon_Jester]

First, I'll reply to this in the general sense; yep, I agree there were some legitimate cockups back in the day leading to the Iraq war. No doubt, there were some learned people who were perhaps a little more ignorant than savant on this matter, and sure they made some unfortunate decisions, point taken.

Hell this board was around back then, you can sort the N&P Forum by going to the last page and having a read of the tragic comedy unfolding for yourself. Perfectly preserved for ever on the interwebs. Hell if real people hadn't actually died it would even be funny! \o/

But real people actually did die because of this fucking idiocy, and while I can excuse the voiceless plebs on the forums for their moronic idiocy, Hitchens was a rather loud, obnoxious, apologetic, cheerleader of the whole scam from start to finish.

Yes. I don't fault the people who thought that there was a genuine war for Western civilization going on, and that fighting in Iraq to democratize the place would be a big victory... in 2003. I'll even give them a pass up to around '05, maybe '06 if I'm feeling generous.

The longer it took them to wake up and smell the coffee, the more respect I lose for them, modulated by how easy it was to expect them to learn the lesson at all. Sixty year old men are often bad at learning lessons; I don't think that this invalidates an entire career in one stroke. I could go on about that at length, about how easy it is to outlive your reputation and disgrace yourself in old age, but maybe I'd better not.

Multiple strokes, many cases of acting in poor taste or backing the wrong cause, yes, at some point it erases any respect I may have for someone as an intellectual. But in Hitchens' case, I extend a little more understanding because I understand the chain of logic that led him over the cliff- I was part way down it myself for a few years in 2004-05, and it was mostly the sliminess of watching it come from Dick Cheney that made me stop and reconsider.

Hitchens, well before 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq, bought into the idea of radical Islam as the next existential crisis for Western civilization. This idea should not be foreign to anyone on this forum who is deeply anti-religious. It's not as if we don't talk about radical Christians as a threat to modernity- despite the relative dearth of Christian suicide bombers. It was that idea that radical Islam was The Enemy and must be neutralized by tiling the Middle East with secular democracies that drove Hitchens' support for the Iraq War.

We can see analogies in the people who thought communism had to be contained and rolled back, or who thought fascism had to be contained and rolled back. If you think there is a great clash of ideals and all that you value in your culture will be destroyed if you lose, you start getting desperate and calling for extremely bloody deeds. It's a predictable pattern, and history is often harsh to those who fall into it, but it's so natural for intellectuals who love something about their own society that I have a hard time deliberately insulting them for it.

I'm not sure I'd be happier with the alternative, which would be intellectuals who have no instinct to rally to the defense of their society when they see it in danger.