Raimondo does Hitchens

[Peter K.]

Raimondo:
>Pointing to the Western Stalinists, whose hosannas to the Soviet Union
>dominated the intellectual world when Paterson's book was published, she
>averred:
>
>"We have the peculiar spectacle of the man who condemned millions of his own
>people to starvation, admired by philanthropists whose declared aim is to see
>to it that everyone in the world has a quart of milk."

RangerCat67:
>The implication being that Stalin had good intentions?

Raimondo goes on:
"The spectacle, in all its peculiarity, rolls on. Hitchens has his own softness for Stalin & Co., as
chronicled in a new book by Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, in which Amis takes Hitchens to task for
calling Lenin "a great man, and, toward the end, addresses his old friend directly:

"So it is still obscure to me why you wouldn't want to put more distance between
yourself and these events than you do, with your reverence for Lenin and your unregretted
discipleship of Trotsky ... Why? An admiration for Lenin and Trotsky is meaningless without an
admiration for terror. They would not want your admiration if it failed to include an admiration for
terror. Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom"

Ah, the humanitarian with a guillotine would reply, but there is no freedom without the terror.
Whether "left" or "right," neo-Leninist or neocon, our war-birds are uniformly shrikes."
-----
This Raimondo is strange bird. Seems a somewhat propagandistic and reactionary position to take in
regards to the Soviet Union and humanitarians and idealists who use force. And I don't completely
buy the line that the Soviet Union forced the West
to grant concessions to its workers.

          In the Observer article Raimondo attacks, Hitchens actually wrote:

"It's important to beware of arguments that depend upon the mantra 'the enemy of my enemy', and it's
likewise important to be immune to charges of keeping bad company. In the days of Vorster and Botha
I didn't mind in the least working with Stalinists in the anti-apartheid movement (anyway, it's
better to have them where you can see them), and when it came to helping imprisoned dissenters in
Czechoslovakia I couldn't care less that Roger Scruton thought it was a good cause as well."

So Raimondo would have sided with Botha and Vorster against the Stalinists, the ANC, and other
anti-apartheid forces? He equates Lenin with humanitarian interventionists?
Here's Hitch's response to Amis and therefore also a critique of Raimondo's
view of the left, intellectuals and Stalinism: basically it's an insult to
the left-wing opponents of Stalin to erase them from history.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm

Peter