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CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND GENOCIDE
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar.com, CA
Oct 17 2007
He's for it...
I'm not surprised that Christopher Hitchens, the village atheist,
is now advocating genocide. His recent speech to a conference of the
Freedom From Religion Foundation, in Madison, Wisc. - a portion of
which can be seen here - dramatizes the completion of his evolution
from a trendy leftist of the Trotskyist variety into a full-fledged,
foaming-at-the-mouth neocon, whose homicidal tendencies have
crystallized into a program, as he says in his talk, to "demolish"
not only Iran but all religion everywhere.
Because, you see, it's not okay to be religious; it makes you, in
Hitchens' book, a "positively wicked" person, and this necessarily
involves "coercion" - so it's a war to the death. To his "credit,"
Hitchens doesn't discriminate: all religions come in for a vicious
and quite emotional assault - including one riff on the evils of
Judaism, which, I'm sure, will have Abe Foxman up in arms - but,
not unexpectedly, he displays a particular animus for Islam. The
portions of his speech posted on YouTube omit the more reprehensible
pronouncements, but we have this account by Professor P.Z. Myers of the
University of Michigan at Morris, which tells us all we need to know:
"It was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most
serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already):
it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam,
of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for
what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do
what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy.
Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now -
Rudy Giuliani - and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering
closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all
the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford
to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons
(something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution
is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way
to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question
whether they can bear the mounting casualties....
"This was made even more clear in the Q&A. He was asked to consider
the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish
an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused
the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not
well-phrased, I'll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said
that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one
less Moslem to fight you ... which is only true if you assume that
every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing
to do so.
"Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least,
wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they
are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are
unable to resist us in any way, ever again."
Myers says Hitchens wasn't noticeably drunk, so he doesn't have his
usual excuse for inexcusable behavior, such as in this previous
instance. In any event, such antics are the logical extension of
his increasingly warlike thought. This ex-Trotskyist, whose support
for militant secularism led him to idolize the founder and first
commander of the Red Army, has gone so over the top with his crusade
against all religion that he has come to advocate wiping out entire
populations. "Demolish it!" he said, when asked about Iran - with
apparently no more moral compunctions about the slaughter of the
innocent than one might normally exhibit toward a swarm of midges.
Myers is right: Hitchens is advocating genocide. Now, what we normally
do with such people, in these sorts of situations, is isolate them:
they are, after all, sick, and, furthermore, as history has shown,
their sickness is sometimes very contagious.
I'm not advocating banning this sort of speech: he has the right to
express his views, physically unmolested. That doesn't mean, however,
that we are obliged to give him a forum.
After all, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, or any other
respectable organization, would not invite a Nazi or some other
proponent of mass murder to speak at their conference. There is a taboo
against having any association with those who deny the Holocaust, and a
similar outcry against deniers of the Armenian genocide has been in the
news lately. Why, then, are we so lenient with the advocates of a new
genocide, one perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Middle East?
It's well known that an upper-class British accent allows the speaker
to get away with practically anything, but, really, there is - or
ought to be - a limit to our tolerance, and in this case such a loud
proclamation of the desire to kill large numbers of people ought to
motivate us to crack down on this sort of thing once and for all.
For all his charm and genuinely likable public persona, bad boy
Hitchens needs to be taught a lesson, and this means ostracism: no
organization that wants its reputation to remain unsullied ought to be
inviting him to speak anywhere, on any subject, even if he offers to
do it for free. No television station should solicit his appearance,
no radio station should entertain its listeners with his ranting -
in short, no decent person should have anything to do with him,
period. Send him to intellectual and social Coventry, where he can
commune with his fellow rogues and miscreants, and do as little harm
as possible.
I hasten to add that Hitchens isn't alone in his genocidal jihad:
the Objectivists, the latter-day followers of Ayn Rand, also advocate
dropping nuclear bombs on Iran and any number of Arab countries,
on the grounds of "self-defense." They, too, are militant atheists,
ideologues of a secularist creed based on their rather distorted
interpretation of what Rand believed. Although I am not religious,
I'm acutely aware of the dangers posed by radical secularists in the
course of modern history, and the death of communism has left people
like Hitchens still itching for Armageddon, the final showdown between
the forces of Modernity (represented by his fat, smug self), and the
forces of medieval Reaction (represented by Iran, or the Muslim enemy
of the moment).
Hitchens is quite clearly marketing himself as a contemporary
Robert Ingersoll, the spokesman for atheism and secularism in the
English-speaking world, although, clearly, looking at the bestseller
list, he has a lot of competition for that title. If someone with
that kind of a public platform should use his status to spread and
popularize the suggestion that it's a good idea to kill off the world's
Muslims, then we, as a society, are poisoned by his prominence. Decent
people cannot allow it.
Of course, television producers and radio talk show hosts will continue
to book Hitchens, and publishers will no doubt continue to buy the
rights to his written works: Vanity Fair will continue to employ him
as a regular columnist, in spite of his increasingly indefensible
views. But he's endangered all that and no longer deserves a platform:
he's just begging to be treated like Don Imus - who, at least, was
immediately and properly remorseful, quite unlike Hitchens.
At the Freedom From Religion conference, he was given the "emperor
has no clothes" award for supposedly being a daring "freethinker,"
but the truth is that it is Hitchens who most resembles the emperor
in that little parable. No one dares to say what everyone knows to
be true: he's gone 'round the bend and over the top, and it's high
time someone said so.
It's bad enough, as one wag pointed out - I think it was in Radar
magazine - that all of the most prominent pundits who were the loudest
voices in favor of the Iraq war have not suffered one whit for being
so wrong: indeed, they have been rewarded with even more pulpits
from which to preach their doctrine of perpetual war in the Middle
East. So Hitchens isn't all that unique, in that sense, although
his case is singular in one important respect: none of the neocons,
not even the bloodthirsty Max Boot, has come out openly in favor
of wiping out large numbers of Muslims by design. The implication
is always there, of course: after all, what else can we expect if
we invade Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Pakistan but large numbers of
civilian dead? Hitchens, however, is the first one to plainly state
that this ought to be one of our war aims: mass extermination as a
deliberate policy, not the unfortunate result of "collateral damage."
So the next time you see this advocate of genocide on television,
or hear him bloviating over the radio, take the trouble to write
the station a note, expressing your displeasure that they would
give Hitchens a platform. Would they have an advocate of the Khmer
Rouge on as a guest? The next time he shows up at your university,
you might show your displeasure in many ways, least of all being an
inquiry into the expenditure of public funds to bring a well-known
genocidal maniac to the campus. Who's next on the list of guest
speakers - Charles Manson?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid= 11768
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar.com, CA
Oct 17 2007
He's for it...
I'm not surprised that Christopher Hitchens, the village atheist,
is now advocating genocide. His recent speech to a conference of the
Freedom From Religion Foundation, in Madison, Wisc. - a portion of
which can be seen here - dramatizes the completion of his evolution
from a trendy leftist of the Trotskyist variety into a full-fledged,
foaming-at-the-mouth neocon, whose homicidal tendencies have
crystallized into a program, as he says in his talk, to "demolish"
not only Iran but all religion everywhere.
Because, you see, it's not okay to be religious; it makes you, in
Hitchens' book, a "positively wicked" person, and this necessarily
involves "coercion" - so it's a war to the death. To his "credit,"
Hitchens doesn't discriminate: all religions come in for a vicious
and quite emotional assault - including one riff on the evils of
Judaism, which, I'm sure, will have Abe Foxman up in arms - but,
not unexpectedly, he displays a particular animus for Islam. The
portions of his speech posted on YouTube omit the more reprehensible
pronouncements, but we have this account by Professor P.Z. Myers of the
University of Michigan at Morris, which tells us all we need to know:
"It was Hitchens at his most bellicose. He told us what the most
serious threat to the West was (and you know this line already):
it was Islam. Then he accused the audience of being soft on Islam,
of being the kind of vague atheists who refuse to see the threat for
what it was, a clash of civilizations, and of being too weak to do
what was necessary, which was to spill blood to defeat the enemy.
Along the way he told us who his choice for president was right now -
Rudy Giuliani - and that Obama was a fool, Clinton was a pandering
closet fundamentalist, and that he was less than thrilled about all
the support among the FFRF for the Democratic party. We cannot afford
to allow the Iranian theocracy to arm itself with nuclear weapons
(something I entirely sympathize with), and that the only solution
is to go in there with bombs and marines and blow it all up. The way
to win the war is to kill so many Moslems that they begin to question
whether they can bear the mounting casualties....
"This was made even more clear in the Q&A. He was asked to consider
the possibility that bombing and killing was only going to accomplish
an increase in the number of people opposing us. Hitchens accused
the questioner of being incredibly stupid (the question was not
well-phrased, I'll agree, but it was clear what he meant), and said
that it was obvious that every Moslem you kill means there is one
less Moslem to fight you ... which is only true if you assume that
every Moslem already wants to kill Americans and is armed and willing
to do so.
"Basically, what Hitchens was proposing is genocide. Or, at least,
wholesale execution of the population of the Moslem world until they
are sufficiently cowed and frightened and depleted that they are
unable to resist us in any way, ever again."
Myers says Hitchens wasn't noticeably drunk, so he doesn't have his
usual excuse for inexcusable behavior, such as in this previous
instance. In any event, such antics are the logical extension of
his increasingly warlike thought. This ex-Trotskyist, whose support
for militant secularism led him to idolize the founder and first
commander of the Red Army, has gone so over the top with his crusade
against all religion that he has come to advocate wiping out entire
populations. "Demolish it!" he said, when asked about Iran - with
apparently no more moral compunctions about the slaughter of the
innocent than one might normally exhibit toward a swarm of midges.
Myers is right: Hitchens is advocating genocide. Now, what we normally
do with such people, in these sorts of situations, is isolate them:
they are, after all, sick, and, furthermore, as history has shown,
their sickness is sometimes very contagious.
I'm not advocating banning this sort of speech: he has the right to
express his views, physically unmolested. That doesn't mean, however,
that we are obliged to give him a forum.
After all, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, or any other
respectable organization, would not invite a Nazi or some other
proponent of mass murder to speak at their conference. There is a taboo
against having any association with those who deny the Holocaust, and a
similar outcry against deniers of the Armenian genocide has been in the
news lately. Why, then, are we so lenient with the advocates of a new
genocide, one perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Middle East?
It's well known that an upper-class British accent allows the speaker
to get away with practically anything, but, really, there is - or
ought to be - a limit to our tolerance, and in this case such a loud
proclamation of the desire to kill large numbers of people ought to
motivate us to crack down on this sort of thing once and for all.
For all his charm and genuinely likable public persona, bad boy
Hitchens needs to be taught a lesson, and this means ostracism: no
organization that wants its reputation to remain unsullied ought to be
inviting him to speak anywhere, on any subject, even if he offers to
do it for free. No television station should solicit his appearance,
no radio station should entertain its listeners with his ranting -
in short, no decent person should have anything to do with him,
period. Send him to intellectual and social Coventry, where he can
commune with his fellow rogues and miscreants, and do as little harm
as possible.
I hasten to add that Hitchens isn't alone in his genocidal jihad:
the Objectivists, the latter-day followers of Ayn Rand, also advocate
dropping nuclear bombs on Iran and any number of Arab countries,
on the grounds of "self-defense." They, too, are militant atheists,
ideologues of a secularist creed based on their rather distorted
interpretation of what Rand believed. Although I am not religious,
I'm acutely aware of the dangers posed by radical secularists in the
course of modern history, and the death of communism has left people
like Hitchens still itching for Armageddon, the final showdown between
the forces of Modernity (represented by his fat, smug self), and the
forces of medieval Reaction (represented by Iran, or the Muslim enemy
of the moment).
Hitchens is quite clearly marketing himself as a contemporary
Robert Ingersoll, the spokesman for atheism and secularism in the
English-speaking world, although, clearly, looking at the bestseller
list, he has a lot of competition for that title. If someone with
that kind of a public platform should use his status to spread and
popularize the suggestion that it's a good idea to kill off the world's
Muslims, then we, as a society, are poisoned by his prominence. Decent
people cannot allow it.
Of course, television producers and radio talk show hosts will continue
to book Hitchens, and publishers will no doubt continue to buy the
rights to his written works: Vanity Fair will continue to employ him
as a regular columnist, in spite of his increasingly indefensible
views. But he's endangered all that and no longer deserves a platform:
he's just begging to be treated like Don Imus - who, at least, was
immediately and properly remorseful, quite unlike Hitchens.
At the Freedom From Religion conference, he was given the "emperor
has no clothes" award for supposedly being a daring "freethinker,"
but the truth is that it is Hitchens who most resembles the emperor
in that little parable. No one dares to say what everyone knows to
be true: he's gone 'round the bend and over the top, and it's high
time someone said so.
It's bad enough, as one wag pointed out - I think it was in Radar
magazine - that all of the most prominent pundits who were the loudest
voices in favor of the Iraq war have not suffered one whit for being
so wrong: indeed, they have been rewarded with even more pulpits
from which to preach their doctrine of perpetual war in the Middle
East. So Hitchens isn't all that unique, in that sense, although
his case is singular in one important respect: none of the neocons,
not even the bloodthirsty Max Boot, has come out openly in favor
of wiping out large numbers of Muslims by design. The implication
is always there, of course: after all, what else can we expect if
we invade Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Pakistan but large numbers of
civilian dead? Hitchens, however, is the first one to plainly state
that this ought to be one of our war aims: mass extermination as a
deliberate policy, not the unfortunate result of "collateral damage."
So the next time you see this advocate of genocide on television,
or hear him bloviating over the radio, take the trouble to write
the station a note, expressing your displeasure that they would
give Hitchens a platform. Would they have an advocate of the Khmer
Rouge on as a guest? The next time he shows up at your university,
you might show your displeasure in many ways, least of all being an
inquiry into the expenditure of public funds to bring a well-known
genocidal maniac to the campus. Who's next on the list of guest
speakers - Charles Manson?
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid= 11768
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress