An earlier example of Hitchens' disregard for non-official victims can be seen by looking back at a column he wrote for the Nation on October 19, 1992. In it Hitchens ridiculed the attempt being made that year by some progressives, including David Dellinger, to remember the mass murder of Native Americans during the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Columbian era.
From the essay "The Politics of Genocide Scholarship" by David Stannard in Is The Holocaust Unique? edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum (Westview, 1996):
And in the person of Christopher Hitchens, writing in the Nation, the political left then sounded its voice. To Hitchens, anyone who refused to join him in celebrating "with great vim and gusto" the annihilation of the native peoples of the Americas was (in his words) self-hating, ridiculous, ignorant, and sinister. People who regard critically the genocide that was carried out in America's past, Hitchens continued, are simply reactionary, since such grossly inhuman atrocities "happen to be the way history is made". And thus "to complain about[them] is as empty as complaint about climatic, geological, or tectonic shift". Moreover, he added, such violence is worth glorifying since it more often than not has been for the long-term betterment of humankind - as in the United States today, where the extermination of the Native Americans - the American Indians - has brought about "a nearly boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation".
One possible exception Hitchens allowed to his vulgar social Darwinism, with its quasi-Hitlerian view of the proper role of power in history, was the Euro-American enslavement of tens of millions of Africans. But even then, Hitchens contended, those centuries of massive brutality only "probably left Africa worse off than they found it". Clearly, however...if it could be shown to Hitchens' personal satisfaction that Africa was in fact "better off" following the enslavement and simultaneous mass killing of 40 million to 60 million of its people, he would celebrate the abominations of the slave trade with the same vim and gusto that he did the genocide against the native peoples of the Americas.
These are, of course, precisely the same sort of retrospective justifications for genocide that would have been offered by the descendants of Nazi storm troopers and SS doctors had the Third Reich ultimately had its way; that is, however distasteful the means, the extermination of the Jews was thoroughly warranted given the beneficial ends that were accomplished. In this light it is worth considering again what the reaction would be in Europe and elsewhere if the equivalent of the actual views of Krauthammer and Schlesinger and Hitchens were expressed today by the respectable press in Germany - but with Jews, not Native Americans, as the people whose historical near-extermination was being celebrated. And there is no doubt whatsoever that if that were to happen, alarm bells announcing a frightening and unparalleled postwar resurgence of German neo-Nazism would, quite justifiably, be going off immediately throughout the world. -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20011205/69fa48e2/attachment.htm>