Press Action ::: Hitchens: The Lesser of Two Evils

Saturday, November 30, 2002

Hitchens: The Lesser of Two Evils

David Rieff vs. Christopher Hitchens. That was the scene at the Miami Book Fair last weekend, as captured by C-Span’s television cameras. The debate was over whether the Pentagon should invade Iraq. Hitchens definitely favors it. Rieff, I think, is opposed, but don’t quote me on that, because his mod intellectual facade was shielding any clear articulation of where he stood on the issue.

Christopher Hitchens may be a warmonger and a propagandist for the imperial way, but at least he still holds some views that can make the establishment squirm. That, I guess, is his modus operandi these days: offering up contrarian opinions that get him noticed but not enough to get him excommunicated from the empire’s intelligentsia.

Kissinger is an easy target, but where else among the reasonable punditry would you find someone calling for the former secretary of state to stand trial for war crimes. Nowhere.

I think Hitchens still believes Israel has been on the wrong side during the past 55 years for its treatment of the Palestinians. But when he praises Bush for being the first U.S. president to say the words “state” and “Palestinian” in the same sentence, my opinion of his perceptiveness on the Palestinian question diminishes. It would seem that if Bush really cared about the creation of a Palestinian state and if he were the great statesman that many establishment pundits are calling him today, he would have succeeded in getting the Israelis out of the West Bank and Gaza in the two years since he assumed the emperor’s throne. I don’t support military strikes on Israel, but maybe we should quit providing Israel with the American-made weapons that have allowed Israel to inflict so much damage and instill so much fear on the Palestinians for the past 35 years.

If security is what Bush seeks for us, it’s obvious that the U.S. government’s sponsorship of Israel surely will diminish the safety of residents inside U.S. borders and those stationed at the empire’s outposts. Just like the Israelis who bulldoze the homes of the innocent families of Palestinians suspected of committing violence against innocent Israelis, those who don’t like the U.S. government’s bankrolling of Israel will inflict the most harm on innocent Americans who had nothing to do with the insane policy orchestrated by the U.S. government to back Israeli government policies.

About 15 years ago, I remember a Palestinian-American acquaintance listing his three most-admired commentators on the Palestinian question: Hitchens, Said, and Ruhi Ramazani, a professor at the University of Virginia and expert on the history of the modern Middle East, who has since retired. I wonder whether Hitchens would still make that list, given the softening of his stance against Israeli terror since the beginning of the second intifada. When Blaming the Victims, the book on how Israel is treated by the world’s press, co-edited by Hitchens and Edward Said, had just been published in 1987, so many were embracing Hitchens as a champion of freedom for the Palestinians.

Hitchens still may be a champion of Palestinian freedom from Israeli violence, but you’d be hard-pressed to find recent evidence of this position.

And still, despite Hitchens’ view that the United States should serve as the world’s policeman, I find his stances on U.S. foreign policy easier to digest than those of the likes of David Rieff.

Like Hitchens, Rieff and his mother, Susan Sontag, were great supporters of NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia.

During NATO’s bombing campaign to free Kosovo from Milosevic’s grip, Sontag got a piece published in the May 9, 1999 issue of the New York Times Magazine suggesting that there is such a thing as a just war. Here’s a sample paragraph: “War is a culture, bellicosity is addictive, defeat for a community that imagines itself to be history’s eternal victim can be as intoxicating as victory. How long will it take for the Serbs to realize that the Milosevic years have been an unmitigated disaster for Serbia, the net result of Milosevic’s policies being the economic and cultural ruin of the entire region, including Serbia, for several generations? Alas, one thing we can be sure of, that will not happen soon.”

Now we know where Rieff gets his flair. A couple years later, Sontag was making more sense. But too bad her post-9/11 analysis that ran in the New Yorker also didn’t rub off on her son.

The section that most aroused the thickheads in the United States was Sontag’s lambasting the “Why Do They Hate Us?” contingent:

“Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others.”

Why weren’t the NATO bombers who killed from high in the sky over Yugoslavia fair game for Sontag’s in May 1999?

Perhaps Edward Herman was speaking for the post-9/11 Sontag when he offered a comparison in Z Magazine of the U.S. bombing in Afghanistan to NATO’s military campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999:

“On the other hand, where the imperial power and/or its proxies are doing the killing, as in Afghanistan from October 7, 2001 onward, or in Panama in 1989, or in Iraq from January 1991 to the present; or where client states like Israel, Turkey and Indonesia in East Timor are doing the killing, the establishment collective has little interest in civilian casualties [exception: ISRAELI civilians], fails to pursue refugees to get their stories of suffering, and does not engage in any search for dead bodies. In fact, its members tend to be skeptical of stories of suffering and estimates of dead bodies made by others, in a direct reversal of their position on such stories and estimates for ‘worthy’ victims of ‘another Hitler.’”

Rieff, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with the turn in his mother’s post-9/11 thinking. When an audience member at last weekend’s Miami Book Festival said there were some similarities between AG Ashcroft’s campaign against freedom here in the United States and what the Nazis were doing in the 1930s, he denounced the audience member’s attempt at a comparison as bunk.

Slobodan Milosevic
The terror of the Nazis, just like the Holocaust, are totally unique events in history that are off-limits for comparison, according to Rieff’s type of thinking, even if someone simply is trying to highlight the similarities of current-day actions with only certain aspects of the Nazi’s conduct during their reign in Germany.

In his book the Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein highlights the wrath faced by those who might compare the great suffering that occurred before and after the Nazi Holocaust. Don’t even try to compare the 250 years of slavery in the United States to what happened to Jews across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. American Indians? Their suffering was nothing compared to the Holocaust.

“A subtext of the Holocaust uniqueness claim is that The Holocaust was uniquely evil,” Finkelstein writes in The Holocaust Industry. “However terrible, the suffering of others simply does not compare. Proponents of Holocaust uniqueness typically disclaim this implication, but such demurrals are disingenuous.”

Many, however, are not afraid to use the Nazi analogy when it is foes of the West that are being targeted by the comparison. John Rosenthal writes in the Feb. 1, 2000 issue of Monthly Review that the association of Albanians in Yugoslavia with Jews under the Third Reich and of Serbs with Nazis permeated coverage of the Kosovo crisis in the Western media. “The Milosevic/Hitler association was, of course, part of the same schema,” Rosenthal said. “Such associations effectively served to undermine the possibility of dispassionate discussion of NATO policy. Who, after all, would want to be thought accomplice, even by omission, to another ‘Holocaust?’”

The same thing is occurring today with the U.S. government and its allies often trying to associate a regime or group with Al Queda. Few people would seek to support the cause of group that has been linked with Al Queda.

In Z Magazine, Herman explains that the supporters of military intervention may have taken the campaign for intervention a step farther than just using Nazi analogies. In his book Slaughterhouse, Rieff says there were more than 250,000 Bosnians killed by Bosnian Serbs. But Rieff, according to Herman, uses the word Bosnians to mean Bosnian Muslims only and “he gives no source, and he is clearly regurgitating claims of Bosnian Muslim officials. ... The propagandists on his side are truth-tellers. For Rieff, Susan Sontag, Hitchens, et al., this was ‘genocide,’ but the thousands of Serbs killed by Naser Oric and bin Laden’s cadres was not genocide; in fact, those slaughters and mass graves (at least 53 claimed by the Bosnian Serbs) never show up on the screen of the collective or reach the U.S. public.”

In his most recent book, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, Rieff argues that nongovernmental humanitarian organizations weren’t as effective in offering aid in places like Rwanda and Bosnia as they claim. In some cases, the NGOs may actually have helped the bad guys, instead of the victims, Rieff argues.

“What Afghanistan demonstrated was that humanitarianism was too important a matter to be left to humanitarians,” Rieff writes in A Bed for the Night.

Rieff urges the pesky NGOs to stand down, even if they do support Western military intervention, as was the case in Kosovo, because their work will get in the way of the real humanitarians with the bombs and the guns who are the only ones who can destroy the brutal dictatorships that created the humanitarian crises in the first place.

In the 1999 issue of the Carnegie Council of Ethics and International Affairs’ journal, Rieff writes:

“If anything is to be done either to prevent or at least curtail a horror like the siege of Sarajevo, only the United States has both the political and the military power to do it. Human rights activists might prefer a standing U.N. army or a genuinely multilateral response, but they know from bitter experience that these are not realistic possibilities at present. Over the course of the 1990s, this recognition has caused many human rights activists to believe that American-led military operations are often the best available alternative and it has involved them in cooperating with and sometimes even lobbying the U.S. military itself and the U.S. political establishment and the Congress to deploy the military.”

--Mark Hand

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