One hates to kick a man when he's down -- and Christopher Hitchens, facing an almost certain doom from cancer, is certainly down. But as he has lived his life pulling no punches against those whom he felt (by whatever standards he held at the time) to be spewing murderous bullshit, let us honor this cherished principle of his by applying it to his own words.
à ? ¨Ã ? ¨Hitchens was given a lavish and almost entirely adulatory spread in The Observer this weekend, holding forth in his usual "young trendy leftist turned aged imperial apologist" manner. There is not much of interest in the interview, and I would have passed over it in silence if not for one extraordinary passage, in which Hitchens demonstrates to perfection the wilful self-blindness of all those who end up worshipping at the altar of the militarist Moloch.à ? ¨Ã ? ¨
In defending his advocacy for the unprovoked, illegal invasion of Iraq -- and reiterating his still-staunch support and glowing approval of this ongoing war crime, Hitchens makes this statement:
à ? ¨Ã ? ¨"I'm glad we're not having an inquest now, as we would be [if there had been no invasion], into why we allowed a Rwanda or a Congo to develop on the Gulf, an imploding Iraq right in front of our eyes, a vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society beggared and fractured and traumatised, waiting to fall to pieces."
à ? ¨Ã ? ¨Of course what Hitchens is doing here -- as even his sycophantic
interviewer realizes -- is describing exactly what has happened in Iraq because
of the invasion. It is in fact an excellent description of the
conquered nation's fate at the hands of the monstrous assault that he
has championed. à ? ¨Ã ? ¨
And yet he has somehow convinced himself that the rape of Iraq has prevented
what he has seen happen right in front of his eyes, year after year
after year. Obviously, somewhere in his mind, he dimly knows the truth;
that is, his brain has registered the undeniable fact that that Iraq has
indeed become a "vortex of violence and meltdown, a whole society
beggared and fractured and traumatised." But this present reality -- which has come about precisely because and only
because of the invasion and occupation which he still defends -- has been
transposed into what he now believes were his fears of what could
happen if Iraq had not been invaded.
à ? ¨Ã ? ¨One could charitably attribute this befuddled backward projection
to the wretched side effects of chemotherapy -- were it not for the fact
that Hitchens has been demonstrating this same moral blindness for
years, indeed since the days when he was openly exulting in the 9/11
attacks, seeing in those mass murders the glorious promise of a
worldwide conflagration -- yea, verily, a Biblical Armageddon, "a war to
the finish between everything I love and everything I hate." The
thought of such a tsunami of blood and destruction, which would -- and
is -- consuming the lives of thousands upon thousands of innocent people
left him "exhilarated," Hitchens declared.à ? ¨Ã ? ¨
But it was ever thus with religious extremists. Hitchens may have
shifted from from Marx to Moloch in his zealotry, but his blind and --
not to put too fine a point on it -- dimwitted adherence to the doctrine
of sacred violence (whether it be Trotsky's "permanent revolution" or
the American imperium's Terror War) has remained steadfast. And even as
he stares into the last abyss, he is dosing himself with pure delusion
to avoid the realization of his complicity with evil.
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