"Hitchens' nervous breakdown"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>  > Suppose Chomsky had chosen a different example that you thought more
>>  apt and delivered it with a tone that you approved of.  That would
>>  not have changed your and Hitchens' support for the war on
>>  Afghanistan, as you two's convictions, I believe, are neither
>>  thoughtlessly adopted nor lightly held.  Sometimes, people who used
>>  to be on the same political side part company, developing substantial
>>  political differences in the face of changed politico-economic
>>  conditions, which, for all his erudition, Chomsky as an individual
>>  cannot undo.
>>  --
>>  Yoshie
>
>I wasn't looking for Chomsky to change my mind (though in a way he did,
>since at that time I was more in his camp) -- a simple statement of grief
>and outrage might have been nice. But instead the Prof. turned away from the
>rubble in lower Manhattan and aimed his pointer at a map of Sudan.
>
>I got an email from Chomsky on 9/11. He joked that maybe the Israeli Air
>Force hit the towers, and that if the terrorists were smart they would
>"stagger" their attacks to really spread panic. Though he said that he
>dreaded what might come next, there was not one word about the victims, the
>numbers of which in those early hours were suspected to be much higher.
>
>Not a word.
>
>DP

In one sense, being a leftist (who seeks and gets information from 
which others are protected by the mass media) is a little like being 
a soldier in a combat zone or being a nurse in an emergency room, 
where detachment and gallows humor serve as protective devices. 
Folks often debate here how many people might have died and suffered 
because of capitalism, imperialism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., etc., 
speaking of tens of millions, not without occasional bantering.  If 
we really took in the enormity of the singular loss of each and every 
life in the stories of tens of millions of deaths that we talk about 
(of which 9.11 is a part), how could we live our daily lives?
-- 
Yoshie

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