Hitchens

[Mark Pavlick]

>
>Dear All:
>
>     Some points that I believe are worth raising with David Schweickart over
>his Nov. 30 commentary on Christopher Hitchens' show at the University of
>Chicago.  More another time.  (Feel free to circulate.  Comments welcomed.)
>
>
>     * First, I'd like to thanks Loyola University Professor David
>Schweickart for starting this discussion.  Christopher Hitchens' work
>definitely does merit a serious consideration, as does his prominence as a
>political commentator.  It's just that his work really deserves is
>vivisection, and for very different reasons than most people would have us
>believe.
>
>     * Schweickart says he found Hitchens "behavior repellent."  That's good
>to hear someone say--for a change.
>
>     * But Schweickark also says that Hitchens' "talk was arresting" and that
>he "has to be taken seriously."  That's pretty sad to hear.  Hitchens is an
>empty rhetorician.  A windbag.  Period.  But he is also--and this point is
>crucial--a heavily fettishized figure, particularly among the Left and
>liberal sects.  (Or what locally around Chicago I like to call the Hot House
>Cafe Klatch.)  This phenomenon needs to be explored  far more thoroughly.
>How can this windbag manage to fool so many people so much of the time?  The
>collapse of the Left indeed.
>
>     * Schweickart  says that "Hitchens' main point was that the Taliban
>should be seen as a fascist organization with transnational designs that is
>truly dangerous and needed to be stopped," and repeats later that "5) Like
>Nazism, Islamic fundamentalism has an expansionary ideology...."  That this
>appears to be a sound paraphrase of Hitchens goes without saying.  But (a) I
>don't agree with these statements at all, and (b) I wonder whether
>Schweickhart himself does?  The problem is, based on his Nov. 30 commentary,
>we really can't tell.  So this--as well as several other things--demand to
>be clarified.
>     But like I said previously--and leaving the world's 1.2 billion or so
>Muslims out of it--I mean what on earth does Islam have to do with this
>war?--and focusing our eyes where we should, namely on the people now being
>wiped out and whoever else may come into Washington's crosshairs next, does
>it really make sense to accuse THEM of having an "expansionary ideology,"
>when in point of fact they are rapidly contracting under the weight of the
>world's greatest military powers, which at the same time are expanding quite
>nicely into Central Asia and beyond?  Two questions follow.  One: Which
>powers in the world today fit the profile of having an "expansionary
>ideology"?  Two: Which powers in the world today actually have the muscle to
>pull it off?  Of course, no one needs me to answer these questions.  The
>facts speak for themselves.
>
>     * Schweickhart says that Hitchens said that "Bush's war is our war," the
>"our" referring to the Left.  Of course I vehemently disagree with this
>statement right down to the very use of the third-person plural 'our'.  The
>statement betrays the extent to which Hitchens has devoted himself to
>hijacking the Left and crashing it into the ground. But once again, can we
>tell whether Schweickhart agrees with Hitchens, or disagrees with him?  this
>uncertainty is rather troubling to say the least.
>
>     * "What...are the U.S. aims?" Schweickhart asks.  Clearly, policing the
>world in defense of human rights and avenging humanitarian wrongs are not
>among them.--From the most immediate to the longer term ones: wiping out Al
>Qaeda and imposing a controllable regime in Afghanistan; extending the "war
>against terrorism" to other targets of choice and locking other regimes into
>the same bloody effort (in a sense there really is a war going on right now
>against terrorism, but a highly selective and asymmetrical war, to use one
>of the establishment's favorite terms of the moment); the promotion of the
>"war against terrorism" as a saleable post-Cold War system of propaganda
>(i.e., namely the constant refrain that this is an "unconventional war" and
>it could last years); "Homeland Defense," meaning expaning the power of the
>state to deal with whomever it wants to, whenever it wants to; the expansion
>of the infrastructure of American power projection to ever larger areas of
>the world and the sustenance of the military-industrial complex (this one is
>always true, however); and, last but not least, gaining control of the
>Caspian Sea region's oil and gas reserves and other natural resources (e.g.,
>minerals).
>
>     * Schweickart says that "combating Islamic fascism is not one of
>them...."  This is partly true, and partly false.  And by the way, were the
>Italian fascists really "Christian fascism"???  We definitely need to clear,
>analytically sound concepts of (a) fascism, (b) Islam, (c) Islamic fascism
>(that's assuming that such a thing really is possible and really does exist
>in the instances as hand), and (d) militarism,  which seems to me what we
>should be calling it: heavily militarized Islamicismismismism, or something
>like that.  What this suggests is that not only Al Qaeda, but the Supercult
>of American Power, are very much of the same nature, just not the same
>scale.
>
>     * I strongly disagree with Schweickart when he writes that "The easy
>victory over the Taliban may be a good thing--a very good thing--insofar as
>it breaks the momentum and mystique of Islamic fundamentalism, but the other
>side of that coin is the encouragement it gives to our policy-makers to
>pursue their quite different agenda.  (I wish the world weren't so
>complicated, so 'dialectical'.)"--Buy, these guys really love playing God.
>Imagine the moral incongruity between making the judgment "good" and all of
>the human suffering that is caused in the meantime.  Was World War II a
>"good" war?  Are 50 million deaths and untold human suffering and
>destruction simply "good" things? Ask the dead, for one.  These guys just
>can't get over their very bad case of theodicy (i.e., "History," but spelled
>with a capital 'H').
>
>
>Sincerely Yours,
>David Peterson
>davidpet at mindspring.com

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