The Mystery of Hitchens's Mind (was: Re: Bush Names Kissinger to Head 9/11 Probe)

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Sat Nov 30 07:24:55 PST 2002


Anthony Tothe:
> >> I agree with both comments below...I always found Hitchens almost
> >> unreadable. He always wants us to see how smart he is. One of the
> >> reasons
> >> I use to read his Nation column was to just see how many words he used
> >> that
> >> I did know. I frankly hate that...the political world is not so complex
> >> that it can't be explained in plain simple English. Hitch is not alone
> >> in
> >> this...many politicos write in such a way that only other members of
> >> their
> >> class can decipher what the hell they are trying to say. Maybe "Empire"
> >> being the most recent and prime example.

G.:
> >In the case of Hitchens, I don't believe there's anything to
> >decipher. Of course, I haven't read the complete _oeuvre_.
> >The thought of focusing on someone as odious as Henry Kissinger
> >for the length of a whole book is beyond my imagination, so
> >something must be said for Hitchens's fortitude even if he
> >is ideologically compromised.

Yoshie Furuhashi:
> What makes me wonder is why anyone should focus on Henry Kissinger,
> rather than the social relations that demand the sort of work he did.
> It is not as though he is the only US secretary of state who is
> guilty of enforcing the rule of the empire either.

Of course. In fact, this is an example of what I was saying before. I haven't read the book, though, and it's possible that I'm wrong and that Hitchens uses Kissinger to illustrate the nature of other Secretaries of State and their works. But I don't think he does, because nothing I've read by him shows this kind of theoretical grasp, and nobody who has read the book, that I know of, has said that he does. Actually, the notion of trying Kissinger as a war criminal, while appealing, argues that there are _nice_, _good_ Secretaries of State who should _not_ be tried as war criminals, along with the whole system they belong to; so in effect it's a rather conservative idea.

-- Gordon



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