What would we do without Christopher Hitchens (may he please continue, and never tire)?
How on earth, or how the hell, did we arrive at this sordid terminus? How is it that the anti-war movement’s favourite MP, George Galloway, has a warm if not slightly sickly relationship with dictators in Baghdad and Damascus?
How comes it that Ramsey Clark, the equivalent public face in America, is one of Saddam’s legal team and has argued that he was justified in committing the hideous crimes of which he stands accused? Why is the left’s beloved cultural icon, Michael Moore, saying that the “insurgents” in Iraq are the equivalent of the American revolutionaries of 1776?
I believe there are three explanations for this horrid mutation of the left into a reactionary and nihilistic force.
(via normblog)
Hitchens goes on to enumerate the reasons and goes on to endorse (in his inimitable fashion) the Euston Manifesto, which I support, because it is a strong, principled statement against totalitarianism and for democracy.
Everyone is always talking about how the Middle East needs a Nelson Mandela. I think the United States needs a Christopher Hitchens. Urgently.
We have a singularly inarticulate president and a ruling party that has been unable to make the case for its own policy, much less make the case stick**.
Some of the most articulate architects of that policy, having been denounced as a cabal that owes its allegiance to a foreign power, have (understandably) receded into the background. Those formerly entrusted with executing the policy now speak out against it.
The president’s predecessors and their entourages have distanced themselves, sometimes gleefully, from his policy.
As it stands, the most articulate, stubborn, principled, and convincing spokesmen for American foreign policy vis-a-vis Iraq are two Brits: Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens.
As far as I can tell–and I’ve been watching–there is no one on the American left with credibility and a megaphone who is passionately interested in making the case against totalitarian Islamism and for democracy. How is this possible when we are engaged in an (endless) information war with an enemy that makes use of the crudest possible propaganda?
Will America retreat from this battle in the Middle East?
The news that consummate fixer James Baker has been chosen by George W. Bush to find an honorable way out fills me with dread.
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** One day I hope to get around to writing about Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, and his concept of “stickiness” (as relates to marketing messages).
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[...] Coming from a different political place than Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens but sounding some of the same notes (see this post), British-Dutch writer Ian Buruma gets prickly about Radical Chic, vintage 2006: The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines. [emphasis mine] [...]
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