Grievance Indeed
This is a highly interesting interview with Christopher Hitchens by Johann Hari. It’s discomforting in some ways – but discomforting things often are interesting, aren’t they. At any rate, Bush or no Bush (and it’s some of the people around Bush he respects, rather than the W-man himself, apparently), Hitchens says some outstanding things, things that need saying. And saying and saying and saying.
The world these fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we’ve seen. It’s the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society…I just reject the whole mentality that says, we need to consider this phenomenon in light of current grievances. It’s an insult to the people who care about the real grievances of the Palestinians and the Chechens and all the others. It’s not just the wrong interpretation of those causes; it’s their negation…Does anybody really think that if every Jew was driven from Palestine, these guys would go back to their caves? Nobody is blowing themselves up for a two-state solution. They openly say, ‘We want a Jew-free Palestine, and a Christian-free Palestine.’ And that would very quickly become, ‘Don’t be a Shia Muslim around here, baby.’
Nor, of course, an atheist – they’re the first to go.
He is appalled that some people on the left are prepared to do almost nothing to defeat Islamofascism. “When I see some people who claim to be on the left abusing that tradition, making excuses for the most reactionary force in the world, I do feel pain that a great tradition is being defamed. So in that sense I still consider myself to be on the left.”
And then this bit, which is just about word for word what I posted in a comment at CT awhile ago, when someone (not a CT-er) immediately after Beslan said that such extreme acts were a sign that the people who perpetrated them had very deep grievances:
Hitchens was on a TV debate with the leader of a small socialist party in the Irish dail. “He said these Islamic fascists are doing this because they have deep-seated grievances. And I said, ‘Ah yes, they have many grievances. They are aggrieved when they see unveiled woman. And they are aggrieved that we tolerate homosexuals and Jews and free speech and the reading of literature.'”
Exactly. Exactly exactly exactly. Of course they have grievances. Al Qaeda has grievances – feminist atheist women running their own lives, for example: that’s an enormous grievance, worth blowing up any number of people. It’s so elementary, isn’t it – a grievance is not necessarily a reasonable grievance, or one that anyone ought to respond to or sympathize with, or a sign that the person who has it is right-on and a brutha. Dang – how hard is that to grasp? Hitler was a mass of grievances, so was Timothy McVeigh (he was really pissed, man), so was the Ku Klux Klan, so were the guys who murdered Emmet Till, and the ones who murdered Medgar Evers. So the hell what. People can feel horribly aggrieved if they are prevented from pushing other people around, if they are unable to extort labour and obeisance from people they consider their inferiors, if someone looks at them without sufficient awe and submissiveness. So what. Grievance shmievance. Hitchens nailed that one.
Update: Normblog has a post on the Hitchens interview. Norm has some pointed things to say on the matter.
Hmm, all that enemy of my enemy talk is a bit sad.
I note the way he cleverly conflates the long running, and initially quite secular, Palestinian-Israeli conflict with more recently prominent Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
He really is one of the modern masters of sophistry.
I always wonder about these once-of-the-left, now-of-the-right ‘intellectuals’, there’s a certain group similarity about them, I think its that posh background/radical university politics/journalism/comfortable middle class life progression that makes it all seem so inevitable.
“I note the way he cleverly conflates the long running, and initially quite secular, Palestinian-Israeli conflict with more recently prominent Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.”
Oh? Where? I can’t seem to find that. In fact I can’t find anything like it.
“Well, as a _first_ step, we might listen to what the Islamic terrorists have to say.”
Definitely. And Hitchens has done a better job of that, it seems to me, than the people who remain convinced that bin Laden is some kind of friend of the underdog.
“Interestingly, Hitchens seems to believe that the neocon “faction” within the Bush administration is genuinely pro-democracy, on both pragmatic and “bleeding heart” grounds. I don’t believe it, but we’ll see, perhaps.”
I know, I was struck by that part too. I’m skeptical myself, and yet…Well, as you say, perhaps we’ll see.
What are the “extreme positions” towards which Hitchens is supposedly trending, PDH? Voting Republican? Wishing to combat and defeat theocratic fascists? I don’t always agree with Hitchens, but I’ve never considered his views particularly extreme.
“I note the way he cleverly conflates the long running, and initially quite secular, Palestinian-Israeli conflict with more recently prominent Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.”
>Oh? Where? I can’t seem to find that. In fact I can’t find anything like it.
Hmm, now that i read it again he seems to explicitly -not- do that – don’t nowhow i didn’t spot that the first time – must be cos I let my dislike filter it…very worrying.
Connie, [snicker] I know, that did come out sounding all relativist. I knew it would as I was starting to type it, but went ahead anyway.
But it’s just a basic vocabulary point. I certainly don’t disagree with people who point out that the meaning of some words can be unclear, ambiguous, misleading, etc. (All I disagree with is the absurd notion that that is some new discovery of postmodernism.)
PM
Cheer yourself up – read the bit of Martin Amis’ (otherwise rebarbative) memoir where he turns his foot black and blue kicking Hitchens under the table because Hitchens persists in arguing with Saul Bellow about Israel even though he had promised M.A. on the drive up that he would refrain from doing exactly that.
I give him a lot of credence on this whole subject because he was absolutely right about Rushdie and the fatwa when many right-on people were dead wrong. He really is being consistent, I think.
There’s a nice bit of sophistry in Hitchens which works because the left, generally and losely speaking, is so much more self-reflective and self-critical than the right: “He is appalled that some people on the left are prepared to do almost nothing to defeat Islamofascism.”
I am appalled at the degree to which people on “the right” (not real conservatives, mind you, but quiet revolutionaries) are prepared to do almost anything to defeat not only Islamofascists, but anyone who stands in the way of global capitalism and Christianity. I am appalled at the degree to which so many in the middle are willing to tolerate misdirection and waffling on important issues. I am appalled at the way in which postmodernism has been turned from an analytical tool to a cultural fetish, then, to add insult to injury, diluted into a mushy, paralyzing relativism (that’s the “left” Hitchens is babbling about).
And I continue to be deeply disappointed in a public discourse which allows so many blowhards to blow so hard and so long and so often…..
Wasn’t Bruce Willis in Blowhard ?
The left is more self-critical than the right? Could have fooled me.
To Robin Green: What would be your view if Islamic terrorists would offer to close down shop in exchange for evacuating the Jewish population not just from the West Bank/Gaza but also from Israel?
After all for Hamas, al-Aqsa etc. it’s all “occupied Palestine”.
You could buy a chance at Chomskyesque utopia with just one ethnic cleansing. Would you do it?
Firstly, Bin Laden for one wouldn’t offer any such thing, so it’s an impossible scenario. Secondly, no – what do you take me for?