Hitchens on the Simplistic Sloganeering

Christopher Hitchens, while not singling out Obama, certainly takes to task Barack's main rhetorical advantage: the simplistic slogan.

Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps 10 keywords: Dream, Fear, Hope, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together. Fishing exclusively from this tiny and stagnant pool of stock expressions, it ought to be possible to drive all thinking people away from the arena and leave matters in the gnarled but capable hands of the professional wordsmiths and manipulators. In the new jargon, certain intelligible ideas would become inexpressible. (How could one state, for example, the famous Burkean principle that many sorts of change ought to be regarded with skepticism?) In a rather poor trade-off for this veto on complexity, many views that are expressible (and "We the People Together Dream of and Hope for New Change in America" would be really quite a long sentence in the latest junk language) will, in turn, be entirely and indeed almost beautifully unintelligible.

I highly recommend reading Hitch's whole column, as usual.

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Hitchens on Ford

If you're looking for someone who isn't just repeating the same lines over and over about what a great man Gerald Ford was - the healer, etc - read Christopher Hitchen's latest Slate column:

Bob Woodward has gone into print this week with the news that Ford opposed the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq. But Ford's own interference in the life of that country has gone unmentioned. During his tenure, and while Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, the United States secretly armed and financed a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. This was done in collusion with the Shah of Iran, who was then considered in Washington a man who could do no wrong. So that when the shah signed a separate peace with Saddam in 1975, and abandoned his opportunist support for the Kurds, the United States shamefacedly followed his lead and knifed the Kurds in the back. The congressional inquiry led by Rep. Otis Pike was later to describe this betrayal as one of the most cynical acts of statecraft on record.

Ford's ultra-realism was also felt in Indonesia:

In December 1975, Ford was actually in the same room as Gen. Suharto of Indonesia when the latter asked for American permission to impose Indonesian military occupation on East Timor. Despite many denials and evasions, we now possess the conclusive evidence that Ford (and his deputy Kissinger) did more than simply nod assent to this outrageous proposition. They also undertook to defend it from criticism in the United States Congress and elsewhere. From that time forward, the Indonesian dictatorship knew that it would not lack for armaments or excuses, both of these lavishly supplied from Washington. The figures for civilian deaths in this shameful business have never been properly calculated, but may well amount to several hundred thousand and thus more than a quarter of East Timor's population.

Like Hitchen's I don't believe that the death of a President is the time to gloss over his misdeeds, instead, it is the time to cement the truth in the history books. As long as the MSM is going to spend 10 days covering this man, let's have a bit of honest reflection instead of endless repetition of conventional wisdom.

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Latest Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, says, "James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq." I tend to agree. Read the whole thing here.

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Hitchens' Latest

We simply can't drawn down (surrender) in Iraq. Anyone who even whispers about pulling out or as the Dems call it, redeployment, just doesn't get it.

Read this.

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Remember Sanctions?

Christopher Hitchens remembers the sanctions the United Nations imposed against Saddam, more accurately, against the innocent people of Iraq. He compares the figures thrown around by the anti-sanctions crowd pre-war versus the latest figures thrown around by the anti-war crowd today. They all come up suspect.

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Hitchens on Bali

Christopher Hitchens on the Bali bombings: (read the whole thing)

Never make the mistake of asking for rationality here. And never underestimate the power of theocratic propaganda. The fanatics look at the population of Bali and its foreign visitors and they see a load of Hindus selling drinks—often involving the presence of unchaperoned girls—to a load of Christians. That in itself is excuse enough for mayhem. They also see local Muslims following syncretic and tolerant forms of Islam, and they yearn to redeem them from this heresy and persuade them of the pure, desert-based truths of Salafism and Wahhabism. (One of the men on trial in Bali had been in trouble before, in his home village, for desecrating local Muslim shrines that he regarded as idolatrous.) And then, of course, Australians must die. Why would that be? Well, is it not the case that Australia sent troops to help safeguard the independence of East Timor and the elections that followed it? A neighboring country that assists the self-determination of an Indonesian Christian minority must expect to have the lives of its holidaymakers taken.

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