Sunday, September 30, 2001

Remora

I like Christopher Hitchens, even if sometimes I think he is batty. His latest blast at the "no-brain" pacifist left has produced some small echo, and it is definitely worth reading, even if I felt it was fueled by temper working on the nerve more than by the painstaking charcuterie of H.'s analytic intelligence at its best.
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Especially as he lets loose in the penultimate paragraph, he loses his grip on what he usually does very well -- making sure that his invective is undergirded by a strict sense of definition:

"But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings - yes, even in the Pentagon."

Falwell and Robertson have become a rhetorical convenience of the unity crowd -- you invoke them, you invoke some lefty protesting against US policy, and you say, same dif. Well, that's not really true ( - and I have to make a sidenote here: I have a theory that Pat Robertson bullies the roly-poly Falwell, making him say awful things that Falwell wouldn't say otherwise -- it is a playground dynamic widespread among first graders. I remember once being bullied by Jacky Barnhart, when I was six, to swear on a Bible. Now, I'd been told that you couldn't swear on a Bible, or you'd go to hell. Surely I wasn't told this by my mother -- I think it was some schoolkid superstition I picked up somewhere. And I definitely knew, back in those days, that hell was a lurid and awful place. I swore anyway, not because Jacky would beat me up, but in order not to lose face with Jacky and his cohorts.). Two groups can oppose one action for completely different reasons, and one of those reasons can be irrational, and one can be rational. That should be obvious to CH, since his notorious opposition to Clinton put him in the same group as the Newt Gingriches of the world, but the content of his opposition was at the other end of the political spectrum from Newt's.

Similarly, the fascism with an Islamic face line works as a jibe directed against, say, Saddam Hussein, with his oily embrace of Allah in the period of the Gulf War and the consciously fascistic structure of the Ba'athist party, but not against the hijackers. There was nothing really fascistic about their tactics or motives -- the assault upon unarmed civilians, the invocation of God, the alarmingly childish, self-hypnotic memo released by the FBI last week (apparently composed to put steel in the spines of the slackers among them), reveal a mindset that the term 'fascism' simply doesn't describe.

CH thunders about the pacifist Chomsky -- Znet axis. He's been a consistent critic of that line since the Serbian invasion of Bosnia. But Hitchens own view of the extent to which American interventionism is justified has a Wilsonian tone that is annealed against reality by the rhetorical heat of its idealism. Hitchens takes the view, practically, that American soldiers have a historical role similar to Napoleon's soldiers, spreading the enlightenment, by force, over the cobwebbed principalities of Central Europe. To make this case, he has to overlook the reality of American interests, which is a pretty big blind spot. And so every use of American soldiers is sure to produce some disappointed thunder from Hitchens.Reality betrays theory, the oppressed Albanians become the terrorist and drug-running Albanians, the American soldiers show a disconcerting carefulness about their own hides, and enlightenment is stymied once more. To be fair, if Americans consistently pay out of their pockets a premium to sustain a military in gross disproportion to their real needs, it is easy to see someone thinking, why not take that military surplus value and use it to right wrongs? but History has not annointed the Yank as today's crusaders, to be shuffled about the planet when evil rears its head, because a, there is no support for that kind of thing in this country, and b, like the reallife crusaders, the Yank is more interested in the profit motive than liberte, egalite and fraternite. This isn't really to criticize. The bright side of the profit motive is that it operates like a brake against the perils of imperialism, however idealistic. Fighting for money has a way of being a self-limiting enterprise.

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