Hitchens Tipped His Foul Hand

Peeps,

I've been watching Christoper Hitchens's post-9-11 politicking with
disgust, starting with his preemptive strike on Chomsky and Ed Herman,
which festered into a series of indefensibly bad jabs at Chomsky,
moved quickly to justifying bombings of Afghanistan -- in the most
ghoulish and gleeful terms -- and seems destined to end somewhere in
the vicinity of the editorial page of the WSJ, from which flows a
daily stream of praise and service for all things Bush, Cheney,
reactionary, repressive, and right-wing.

But heretofoe I had read most of Hitchens's books and found plenty to
admire or learn. Hell, the first thing I ever wrote for Monkeyfist was
a review of a Hitchens book.

But it seems he couldn't get through the 500 year anniversary of
Columbus's "discovery" of the "New World" without tipping his
reactionary hand.

From the essay "The Politics of Genocide Scholarship" by David
Stannard in Is The Holocaust Unique? edited by Alan S.  Rosenbaum
(Westview, 1996):

And in the person of Christopher Hitchens, writing in the Nation, the
political left then sounded its voice. To Hitchens, anyone who refused
to join him in celebrating "with great vim and gusto" the annihilation
of the native peoples of the Americas was (in his words) self-hating,
ridiculous, ignorant, and sinister. People who regard critically the
genocide that was carried out in America's past, Hitchens continued,
are simply reactionary, since such grossly inhuman atrocities "happen
to be the way history is made". And thus "to complain about[them] is
as empty as complaint about climatic, geological, or tectonic
shift". Moreover, he added, such violence is worth glorifying since it
more often than not has been for the long-term betterment of humankind
- as in the United States today, where the extermination of the Native
Americans - the American Indians - has brought about "a nearly
boundless epoch of opportunity and innovation".

[Which, one supposes, would work equally well for both the African
Diaspora or the genocide of European Jewry... Just imagine all the
progress the German volk could have made had they been able to free up
all that Lebensraum, surely it too would have been a "nearly boundless
epoch of opportunity and innovation"? Does this equally horrifying
defense not occur to Hitchens or is he too clever or too cowardly to
profess it?]

One possible exception Hitchens allowed to his vulgar social
Darwinism, with its quasi-Hitlerian view of the proper role of power
in history, was the Euro-American enslavement of tens of millions of
Africans. But even then, Hitchens contended, those centuries of
massive brutality only "probably left Africa worse off than they found
it". Clearly, however...if it could be shown to Hitchens' personal
satisfaction that Africa was in fact "better off" following the
enslavement and simultaneous mass killing of 40 million to 60 million
of its people, he would celebrate the abominations of the slave trade
with the same vim and gusto that he did the genocide against the
native peoples of the Americas.

[And there it is. First, that "probably ... worse off" reveals an
absolute ignorance of pre-colonial Africa -- even *if* the Afrocentric
claims about the origins of civilization were to prove mistaken, it's
*clearly* the case that Africa is worse off for having survived the
countless horrors of colonial exploitation and rule. Second, and
considerably more revealing, Hitchens seems to have anticipated David
Horowitz's argument -- as a purported defeater of reparations -- that
African American descendants of African slaves are better off than if
their ancestors had been let along in Africa. Hitchens and Horowitz,
it seems, share a common moral idiocy.]

These are, of course, precisely the same sort of retrospective
justifications for genocide that would have been offered by the
descendants of Nazi storm troopers and SS doctors had the Third Reich
ultimately had its way; that is, however distasteful the means, the
extermination of the Jews was thoroughly warranted given the
beneficial ends that were accomplished. In this light it is worth
considering again what the reaction would be in Europe and elsewhere
if the equivalent of the actual views of Krauthammer and Schlesinger
and Hitchens were expressed today by the respectable press in Germany
- but with Jews, not Native Americans, as the people whose historical
near-extermination was being celebrated. And there is no doubt
whatsoever that if that were to happen, alarm bells announcing a
frightening and unparalleled postwar resurgence of German neo-Nazism
would, quite justifiably, be going off immediately throughout the
world.

[Heh, I should have finished reading the excerpt before I started
adding to it. I like this Rosenbaum even more now! :> ]

Kendall
-- 
If rich White people are oppressed, no one is.