I'd still rather have him around than not.
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 6:19 AM, Lenin's Tomb <leninstombblog at googlemail.com
> wrote:
> On 17/12/2011 04:57, James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> Michael Smith: 'Oddly enough, Doug, I believe you're the first person so
>> far to have used the term 'racism' in connection with Hitchens.'
>>
>> no, that was Eric Beck, quoting Richard Seymour's obituary
>>
>
> Just to be absolutely precise, since this has been the subject of some
> misunderstanding. I do not describe Hitchens' atheism as such as thinly
> disguised racism. Hitchens always had roughly the same basic opinion about
> religion, going back to his disdain for 'liberation theology'. But what
> happened after 9/11, and particularly as the occupation of Iraq began to
> fail, was that this concern was given a new prominence and a new set of
> inflections and emphases. His decision to make 'anti-theism' his main
> issue was transparently motivated by the need to explain 9/11, the Iraqi
> resistance, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, etc etc in the terms of
> religious 'totalitarianism' (rather than imperialism, nationalism,
> capitalism, etc). /God is Not Great/ is filled with this sort of colonial
> wisdom about natives torn apart over irrational superstitions - Ulster,
> Kashmir, Iraq, etc etc. Moreover, he did reproduce several racist myths
> about Muslims - buying into the 'demographic threat' to Europe,
> 'Londonistan', hounding Tariq Ramadan as if he was Bin Laden's emissary,
> and so on.
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