“You’re Evil; I Love You!”
Came across this old Christopher Hitchens interview while looking for something else. It’s funny how accurately he pegged the neocons whom he would eventually join:
LAMB: In this piece in [Harper’s] in 1990, “How [Neo]-conservatives Perish,” you talk about “key words and phrases uttered with the proper sneer[: dis]-information, dupe, ripe fruit, choke point, fellow traveler, fifth columnist, Chamberlain’s umbrella, captive nation, peace through strength, moral equivalence.” What are you getting at here?
HITCHENS: Do you remember what it was like? Don’t you remember what a hooligan atmosphere there was in American intellectual life for a long time because of the Cold War? Anyone who had any doubts that this war was worth fighting and worth the risk of a nuclear exchange was accused of being a dupe or a secret sympathizer or a fan of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella or all these other things. People were constantly being crushed and coerced and derided and driven out of the argument. I wanted to put that down before people forget it.
LAMB: “All these people were ostensibly there,” meaning a conference of [neo]-conservatives.” to take personal credits for the final collapse of communism. Why, then, do they look and sound so lost and deflated, like a herd of ants in search of a climax.”
HITCHENS: No, it’s a herd of antis in search of a climax.
LAMB: Excuse me, my eyes are bad.
HITCHENS: I was convinced that partly because they’d lost their ability to be able to bully and blackmail the opposition and accuse it of treachery and sympathy for the other side that that was one of the reasons that the right wing is nostalgic for the Cold War, that it’s lost its free pass as being the patriots where everyone else is disloyal. It’s not the whole thing. They’ve also lost a lot of their subsidies, which, I think, makes them squeal even louder. These people used to have very fat foundations supporting any project of theirs, however mediocre or, “crackpot,” Now they don’t have that anymore. We’re also beginning to count the cost of the Cold War to the United States, which is pretty enormous, to say nothing of the damage that it did to other countries around the world.
Let’s briefly note Brian Lamb’s ability to ruin a great line. Also, observe that Hitchens knew exactly what he was getting into when he flirted with the neocons over the Lewinsky scandal and the Bosnian War, then consummated his relationship with them (to the point of publicly prostrating himself like a eunuch beneath Paul Wolfowitz’s dais) on the subject of the War on Terra in general, and the Iraq War in particular. These issues are interesting and amusing in a hah-hah-pathetic way, but beside my real point…
…which is about the nature of neoconservatism. Unlike traditional conservatives, the neocons aren’t stupid. But like traditional conservatives, they are evil — only much more so. As such, neocons know precisely what kind of political climate they need in order to flourish, and will go great lengths to manipulate the environment accordingly. They need a “long war,” and will ceaselessly agitate for one in times of peace, or inflame and enlarge one that’s already existing. Hitchens’s observation nicely dovetails with what Francis Fukuyama said about Bill Kristol:
I think that for some neoconservatives… In a sense, they wanted to have an enemy. The end of the Cold War was a tough time because they didn’t know who the enemy ought to be. I think in the case of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard there was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because I think that they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well if foreign policy wasn’t a big issue.
The late 1990s was the, you know, the period of the stock market bubble and Monica Lewinsky and they didn’t really have an issue in all of that, I thought, that they thought was particularly important or had much traction with the voters and with the public. I think they initially picked on China as their target — and I always thought right from the beginning that was a big mistake because, first of all, foreign policy shouldn’t be driven by the needs of the Republican Party and domestic politics and secondly, I just don’t think that China is particularly useful to think of as an enemy comparable to the former Soviet Union. So in that sense, September the 11th was a big godsend because we were attacked and didn’t have to invent an enemy at that point. But I think that, just that general tendency to think of the world as extremely dangerous and full of big threats is something they try to carry forward.
Neocons got power during the Cold War by fear-mongering and demonizing everyone to their Left, whether Liberals or even (gasp!) the super-wingnut and master war criminal himself, Richard Nixon, who, though bloodthirsty and devious when it came to Indochina, was considered an appeaser because of his policy of detente. So the neocons, latching themselves onto Reagan (who in a moment of candor in 1976 said what he really thought of Nixon’s detente-practicing heir, Gerald Ford, calling him a communist), destroyed detente, ratcheted up the Cold War, and almost killed us all during the 1980s. When the Soviet Union disintegrated — thanks to Gorbachev, Reagan’s belated recognition of Gorbachev’s sincerity (an apostasy that infuriated Richard Perle and Norman Podhoretz at the time), and the decline of the price of oil (more or less in that order) — the neocons were suddenly out of power. Those of us who lived through the 90s can remember their squeals of rage whenever Clinton would bring up the “peace dividend.” For neocons, no war means having no political power.
At last, they were deprived of their first-worst dirty trick; they could no longer gallop through op-ed pages howling, “the Russians are coming!” So, addicted to fear-mongering and itching to get back into power, they wanted to turn China into the next monolithic enemy —
The same top Bush administration neoconservatives who leap-frogged Washington’s foreign policy establishment to topple Saddam Hussein nearly pulled off a similar coup in U.S.-China relations — creating the potential of a nuclear war over Taiwan, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell says.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, the U.S. Army colonel who was Powell’s chief of staff through two administrations, said in little-noted remarks early last month that “neocons” in the top rungs of the administration quietly encouraged Taiwanese politicians to move toward a declaration of independence from mainland China — an act that the communist regime has repeatedly warned would provoke a military strike.
— And would have, I daresay, pulled it off had Osama bin Laden not forced them to change their tune (but not the reasons for which they sing). So, the neocons never did get to full-throatedly yell “the Chinese are coming!” though that slogan no doubt still occupies a special place in their songbook, its page dog-eared for future performances. Instead, they croak “the Muslims are coming!” in a voice that, over six years now, has gone increasingly off-key and shrill. They never get hoarse; they can always get a gig; they keep making new albums but basically their song remains the same. Critics can pan them; we Weird Al Yankovics of the Internet can parody their songs; but the only thing that can truly effect change is if the public refuses to listen. The looming economic recession depression might be what finally plugs everyone’s ears. If so, it’s a pity that that’s what it takes.
Hitchens, 1990:
“All these people were ostensibly there to take personal credits for the final collapse of communism…”
Hitchens, June 2006:
“It is glorious, and it is my war because it needed Paul Wolfowitz and myself to go and convince the President to go to war.”
Hitchens came in the night and drank all my booze, but WordPress sunk the Andrea Doria.
Hitch is the one neocon I’d gladly go to war for. I know, I know. Just sayin.
There are too many people in this country who think that war is really, really cool.
I actually prefer “…like a herd of ants in search of a climax”!
Little tiny worker ants, all female, out looking for satisfaction. It’s an interesting image!
And WordPress is campaigning for John McCain this year.
Jonathan Raban described a dinner with Hitchens a few days after 9/11:
Hitchens understood what was coming – and yet he enthusiastically participated in the evil. Creepy.
D.N.
You need to get out more if you think Hitch is all that!!
And WordPress is the fourth member of the Axis of Evil.
Shorter (slightly) neoconmen: Although the backslapping was good clean fun, it was harder to steal at the end of history. So we restarted it.
Glad to see you’re back, HTML.
I blame video game designers. Specifically, Nintendo. Can the hemisphere survive another round of the Flower Wars?
“Judgment at Nuremberg” should be required viewing in this country. Hitch?
Little tiny worker ants, all female, out looking for satisfaction. It’s an interesting image!
We have the technology to develop an ant-sized divorce aid, but it would be the end of ant civilization.
(WordPress told his El Salvadorian housekeeper that the government harvests Latinos for organs)
Test.
I began to worry about Hitchens when he published his usual ‘condemnation of the recently deceased’ upon the death of the Queen Mother. His main insult was that she was an unreconstructed Imperialist (duh) and a lush. For Hitchens to denounce anyone else’s drinking habits revealed a marked lack of self-consciosness.
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We have the technology to develop an ant-sized divorce aid, but it would be the end of ant civilization.
Yes! Ant divorce. The biggest threat ants have faced in the entire history of antdom!
And WordPress told his El Salvadorian housekeeper in Spanish that the government harvests Latinos for organs
Because what is said in Spanish stays in Spanish.
I remember the build-up to Chicom hysteria. It was pretty obvious that someone was crossing out “Soviet Union” on prooganda and substituting “China.” We still have Lou Dobbs for yellow peril scares, but those Muslim arrived just in time for the neocons.
I think it’s going to take an awful lot of suffering in America before this country realizes war is bad.
WordPress wrapped itself in a flag and carried a cross.
At some point, Hitchens’ admiration for George Orwell veered from one which I shared. You see, I appreciated George Orwell not just for his powers of withering sarcasm and his ability to portray the individual thinking against some conformist horde.
I appreciated Orwell’s basic human decency and his humanitarian sense even about war — that even though they are on occasion necessary, they are still horrible and the fact that one engages in propaganda is still horrible; and that the main problem with war is not that people die, but that people are made to kill.
Hitchens looked at the humanist ghost motivating Orwell’s machine and decided that the machine was the good part, and has ever since ignored the ghost.
HTML & Sadly Staff,
Good news! You are going to have much more material soon. Apparently, The Atlantic has hired Jeff Goldberg.
And WordPress is uncouth, feckless, and licentious. Furthermore, it yearns to bowdlerize all unfavorable descriptions of its opuscula.
Given that Hitchens’ opinions diverge greatly from that of neoconservatives in politics unconnected to the War in Iraq does the label suit him? Perhaps a new label needs to be created for those on the left (see the Euston Manifesto) who embraced the stupidity of the British and American governments and parrot the same (now discredited) Talking Points of the hawkish right?
I’d go with ‘assholes’, but mayhap something more descriptive is in order.
Hitchens lives perpetually in a hazy Harry Lime period:
I’d go with ‘assholes’, but mayhap something more descriptive is in order.
I think decents as in the decent left is the agreed upon term.
Or cruise missile liberals.
Oh, I know he’s full of horse hockey. It’s that, for a quasipseudoneocon, he has his high points:
1) Drinking. Always good.
2) Made Sean Hannity and Ralph Reed plead for mercy on the air.
3) His post-mortem Reagan column. Encompassed liberals’ frustrations during the 80s perfectly.
“Because the whine remembers…”
All you need to know to understand Hangover Hitchens’ motivations is this:
He’s on the side of whoever is buying the drinks.
After 9/11 he quite rightly assumed that PNAC would be in the best position to pick up his bar tab.
I guess that makes sense D.N.
Thing is, I can never forget that “The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.”
D.N.,
Photographic evidence refuting your 1.) has been posted above. Although I have to admit the lampshade and steinhat versions were funnier…
I’ll grant you 2.) and 3.), but they’re still not enough for me! I’m going to have to concur with SomeNYGuy.
And WordPress enslaves his daughters and granddaughters in a sunless basement for decades.
Ah yes… the wonders of nanotechnology.
WordPress is the tyrant of a future dystopia.
1) Drinking. Always good.
Except that Hitchens is probably on the other side of his “Drinking. Always good” phase, still addicted to the stuff, still talented enough to get paid well but facing feebleness, old age and death.
In other words, moral quandaries are irrelevant.
Christopher Hitchens = Peter Fallow from Bonfire of the Vanities
Hitchens=Baltar
Hitchens = Gargamel
“we Weird Al Yankovics of the Internet can parody their songs”
Ouch.
“We have the technology to develop an ant-sized divorce aid”
…but we cannot yet deliver ant-sized matchbooks.
“Walla Walla, Washing- ton(sic)”
I think he misspelled that…it should be “Warshing-ton.” Fucking East Coasters.
And wordpress is in charge of choosing the forms of the Remade.
Hitchens understood what was coming – and yet he enthusiastically participated in the evil. Creepy.
Welcoming the new ant overlords, so to speak?
That was me. I was in a hurry when I cut and pasted that passage from the original article, and didn’t notice that the word ‘Washington’ had been cut and carried over to the next line. I don’t think Raban actually has anything against the great state of Washington and its many upstanding, God-fearing citizens.
I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t know the details of Hitchens’ career – and I don’t really want to know – but I believe he has a long record of betraying close friends and dumping seemingly strongly held principles. The guy seems unstable, with a powerful self-destructive streak.
Meanwhile, check out this Onion classic: Christopher Hitchens Forcibly Removed From Trailer Park…
2) Made Sean Hannity and Ralph Reed plead for mercy on the air.
Somehow I missed this. Is there audio somewhere.
But yeah, Hitch is generally a cantankerous contrarian.
Welcoming the new anti overlords you mean, pedestrian?
Anyway, I’m not so sure if it’s a matter of Brian Lamb ruining the punchline as much as Lamb playing Chanlder van Horton to Hitchens’ Jules Farber … and aren’t neo-cons merely non-funny but instead evil versions of Jules Farber? So I guess the writing was on the wall for Hitchens even then?
“I think we’ve just entered the reign of piety and iron,” Hitchens said.
MMM, fresh baked piety. Make mine blueberry, please.
And WordPress was just evacuated from the YFZ compound for showing too much licentious flesh!
Video. Just go to Teh YouTubes and search “Hitchens” and “Hannity.” Should take you there.
Saddam Hussein’s projects are so rife with ignorance, erroneous information, and poorly conceived notions of deconstructionism that I hardly know where to begin. Even disregarding obvious errors like his insistence that our unalienable rights are merely privileges that he can dole out or retract, the fallacies of his claims are glaring to those of us who have educated ourselves about the implications of Stalinism. When writing this letter, I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact in his comments from the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute. I eventually decided against that approach because you should not ask, “Why do we put up with Saddam?”, but rather, “Where do pertinacious, nugatory pinheads like Saddam come from, and what are we going to do with them?”. The latter question is the better one to ask because Saddam is extremely dictatorial. In fact, my handy-dandy Dictatorial-O-Meter confirms that some people don’t seem to mind that Saddam likes to make my worst nightmares come true. What a hostile world we live in!
(glug glug glug)
I ack basid on what I dink is rite, not who I dink is rite. Dat’s errrr, why I try allays t’ halt de adulashun heapid upon amoral airheads. Uhhh….It’s also errrr, why I say dat if you’be read any of de homophobic slop dat he has concocted, uh uh uh uh, you’ll real recall his descripshun of his plan t’ commit senseless acks of bioless against anyone darigg t’ challenge his reboltigg deories. GEE danks.If you haben’t read any of it, uh, webuhll, all you real neid to know dat the, uh, the whole of Sabbam’s predaceous worldbiew may pehhaps be expressid in one siple word. Dat word is “matehialism”. Let me explain: Sabbam is like a magician who produces a dobe in one hand while de odeh hand is biddy tryigg t’ inculcate de hehmeneutics of suspicion in odehwise open-mindid peoble. I habe now said ebehydigg dehe is t’ say. So, t’ summarize it all, Sabbam Hussein’s diatribes are fillid wid a numbeheh of behy clear-cut ‘n blatant lies — lies of bod omisshun ‘n commisshun.
Perhaps a new label needs to be created for those on the left (see the Euston Manifesto) who embraced the stupidity of the British and American governments and parrot the same (now discredited) Talking Points of the hawkish right?
I’d go with ‘assholes’, but mayhap something more descriptive is in order.
I’ve become fond of Atrios’ “serious liberals” and “serious people” schtick.
Shalom, gentlemen.
Nothing very extraordinary in Hitchenstein going over to The Dark Side. I don’t see contrarianism, I see opportunism.
Neoliberals & neoconservatives have MUCH more in common than their names imply … & like that recurring Nixon-Bush Axis Of Weevils, it’s more than a few of the exact same folks involved.
Many of the neocons were originally lefties – some downright Maoist or Trotskyist – who became disillusioned when they realized they weren’t about to become bloated ruthless apparatchiks in The New Regime Of The People’s Replublic. Pretty easy to change sides when you really don’t give a damn about the rhetorical trappings you wrap your realpolitik in – even easier when the neocon agenda, as it applies to corporate culture, has more in common with Stalin or Mao than it does with Adam Smith – so they “converted” to the far right as easy as you or I change socks. Which is why these critters are so vile: ideology for them is just a way to obtain & increase power – they don’t have time for principles or scruples. To them, any allowance for humanity or compassion is weakness.
If America’s political landscape ever goes back to being left-of-centre, they’ll gladly go right back to being political cousins of the Shining Path in a heartbeat, so long as there’s an opportunity to gain control in it for them.
Oh NOESSSS!!!! Hitchens has discovered the complaint generator!!
Here we go again.
And I have it on good authority that WordPress drinks its own pee. Ewwww.
Which is why these critters are so vile: ideology for them is just a way to obtain & increase power – they don’t have time for principles or scruples. To them, any allowance for humanity or compassion is weakness.
What worries me is that, in order to kick their asses, it seems to me that we might have to get much, much more ruthless ourselves.
Hanx, atheist. It’s good to be back.
Snorg, thanks a bunch for the quote. I’ll use it sometime when I can find that transcript of Hitchens telling Peter Robinson and Anne Applebaum that the Left is stupid for thinking that war benefits the right wing.
What worries me is that, in order to kick their asses, it seems to me that we might have to get much, much more ruthless ourselves.
I disagree. I think that we do need to work smarter, be more organized and be less sabotaging of each other. Someone mentioned the circular firing squad on some other thread today and it’s a good point.
If someone is on your side, it’s psycho to work to mess them up.
And WordPress is a lazy, shiftless bastard who doesn’t even wash its socks on a regular basis.
As such, neocons know precisely what kind of political climate they need in order to flourish, and will go great lengths to manipulate the environment accordingly.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2008/04/high-level-officials-warns-of-fake.html
HTML,
your words are just fine. But really, you didn’t need them in this post. The two pairs of before-and-after photos say everything that needs to be said.
HTML Mencken:
Umm, Doug Feith?
.
Three cheers for HTML, a fine man in godawful times.
What little remained of my sorely-abused soft spot for Hitchens is long gone. He’s always been bombastic, but it wasn’t quite so bad when his abuse was directed at the likes of Kissinger. My patience finally run out when he started hacking at the corpse of his old comrade Edward Said.
Online autopsies of the Hitch are ten a penny these days but for those still reading and caring my two favourites are below. Enjoy ’em.
Richard Seymour: The Genocidal Imagination of Christopher Hitchens
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/seymour261105.html
Norman Finkelstein: Hitchens as Model Apostate
http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein09102003.html
To see how really evil the neocons are, you should look up a BBC program called “The Power of Nightmares”. The neocons starting with neo-fascist Leo Strauss believe that it is necessary to create myths or start myths to pacify the hoi polloi. They really believe that they are the ubermensch, but not for themselves personally as Nietzsche meant, but for everyone.
These guys are far worse than you can probably imagine.
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares
On a side note the Muslims are actually far more useful boogeymen than the Chinese. By selling a ‘war against religious extremism’ , certain belicose secularists (behold the Eurabia related threads at RichardDawkin.net) and muscular liberals of the Euston Manifesto type can be persuaded to come along for the ride.
To see how really evil the neocons are, you should look up a BBC program called “The Power of Nightmares”. The neocons starting with neo-fascist Leo Strauss believe that it is necessary to create myths or start myths to pacify the hoi polloi. They really believe that they are the ubermensch, but not for themselves personally as Nietzsche meant, but for everyone.
I saw that flick. That thing was really, really good. I keep trying to get my freinds to watch it. I wish it was not so hard to get it in the USA!
[…] era and the last years of the Cold War, after all). Bullying and fear-mongering are defining characteristics of movement conservatism, and authoritarianism in general, of course. A discussion of any policy on its merits, or any event […]
Von Psued, the sheer tenacity of Islam also makes it an ideal bogeyman. Historically, the only way to turn a Muslim land in to a non-Muslim land was by expelling or exterminating its Muslim population (eg Spain, the Balkans, Israel).
This means that in a war with Islam, no final victory is possible unless you’re willing to exterminate a fifth of the world’s population.
This means that in a war with Islam, no final victory is possible unless you’re willing to exterminate a fifth of the world’s population.
How would you have a war with a religion in the first place?
How would you have a war with a religion in the first place?
Legalize and subsidize dope and hookers?
[…] where the votes are. But what’s non-negotiable and what trumps all other causes is the War on China Eurasia Terra, the prosecution of which is the main thing that makes America […]
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