Christopher Hitchens, supporter of imperialist wars. Oh the horror, the horror.
In reading Hitchens in the Guardian today (9/11/2011) we read a specious apologia. He is ridiculous, and yet the Guardian, drawing inspiration perhaps from its own Janus faced support for interventionism, exhibits Hitchens vulgar self justification on the anniversary of 9/11 as if his words were pearls.
Hitchens presents his mental puppetry to us as insight. It isn't. He 'illumines' us, or does he? Atta was a cold hearted loveless zombie. Mohamed Bouazizi was sick of tyranny. We know that zombie does not accurately describe Atta. He was not a zombie. To call him a zombie sheds no light. Sound and electronic letters signifying absolutely nothing. Puppet play.
In second place we also know that despite the fact that he was a catalyst for the events he sparked off, Mohamed Bouazizi was in fact suicidal long before he decided to politicize his suicide. If he did ever politicize it. Hitchens need not mention this; cavalier with facts and the motivations of his dramatis personae.
Moreover, to claim that the hodge-podge fighting against tyranny in Tunisia and Libya were fully paid up democrats and that the majority of fighters were people longing for western freedoms is a also a convenient lie. The moral backbone for the rebellions came from Islam. The insurrection in Syria has been catalysed by the story of a soldier slapping a young man around the face and saying to him: 'For you there is only one God and his name is Bashar-al-Assad.' This is the rocket fuel of rebellion, and it is hardly Saul Bellow.
What over-weaning presumption of Hitchens; presenting his autistic geopolitical puppet play to us as our reality.
Along come the ridiculous parallels with Czechoslovakia - ridiculous to a Marxist anyway. Ernst Gellner might have drawn some parallels, but no Marxist. Hitchens claims he is 'non totalitarian left'. Apparently this makes him a Blairite. He, like so many Trotskyists and lapsed Trotskyists before him, worked as ideological hit-men against socialism and were paid well for it. He offers no other explanation and simpers in the general direction of the American public. He admires their constitution and their 'variety'.
Hitchens is 'non-totalitarian' enough to support US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some anti-imperialist! An anti-imperialist lauded and lionized in the liberal and right wing British press; in the US and the UK. If Christopher Hitchens rhetoric held then it would also have justified the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the war against Frelimo and the MPLA.
He observed the different strands of rebellion and gave them his papal benediction. Without saying so Hitchens implies that he predicted the Arab Spring. Show me the article or speech he gave where he predicts it. Moreover, the 'Arab Spring' is not as he defines it as.
Hitchens ends with co-option and a not so subtle allusion to his own impending 'martyrdom'. He co-opts Nadine Gordimer. I wonder if Nadine Gordimer took his position on the war in Iraq; on the intervention in Libya; on the continuing war in Afghanistan. We can find out if we ask her.
Finally, we end, not with an argumentative bang, as Hitchens promises in the title of his book, but with apologetic whimpering. I am going to die, so please believe me. Well I am sorry that you will die. And I am sorry that at least 250,000 Iraqis; men, women and children; had to die in a war that you supported.
An earlier Christopher Hitchens would have ripped the corrupt, self indulgent roue he became to shreds. He reminds me of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse now, a man troubled by his actions and incoherent. A man who has made bad decisions and is excusing himself to us, expecting that we will go along with his nonsensical, ridiculous, self defense and that we will see things from his point of view.
Hitchens, in supporting Blair and Bush's wars went into intellectual bankruptcy a long time ago. The only people who see and saw things from his point of view were the are neo-cons and the neo-imperialist liberal interventionists make believing they are 'progressive. The hypocrites who run the Guardian and Fox News, hand in hand with Christopher Hitchens.
Amen. No one ever held that scumbag Hitchens feet to the fire for his blatant hypocrisy.
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