Terry Glavin writes: Christopher Hitchens was not lonely when death came to him and he is being mourned aloud and well. "No ululations, no wailing, no shooting in the air, no tossing of the coffin on the shoulders of a mob, no hoarse and brutal cries for revenge and suicide and murder," as he once put it, in a lecture in memory of his friend, the murdered Daniel Pearl. "No, we won't have that." Instead, an astonishing chorus of tributes is being offered up.

• You Never New What Hitchens was Going to Say. Terry's excellent tribute in the pages of the Ottawa Citizen. "Against all claims that he’d drifted rightwards, Hitchens insisted that he remained a Marxist in his habits of thinking, and in his final years he emerged as a one-man atheist movement, doing more to banish priests and pastors from respectable American circles than the combined efforts of the American secular left had ever done."
• Tributes paid to journalist Christopher Hitchens. The BBC's roundup.
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I couldn't help but notice this topsy-turvy column by Chris Hedges that is pretty well the antithesis of my morning column on the terrorism of Anders Behring Breivik. His point can be summed up neatly in this line:

I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.

For those keeping score, we have precisely one case of terrorism by a Norwegian right wing nutjob and 17,000 attacks and counting just from the past decade by a global movement of violent Islamists.

Good to see Hedges has his priorities straight.

Sam Harris, accused in the piece (not for the first time by Hedges) of being a fundamentalist maniac advocating a nuclear first strike on Arab nations, responds:

I hope Truthdig readers appreciate the irony here. In his latest fever dream of an essay, Hedges declares that Christopher Hitchens and I (along with our pals on the Christian right) are incapable of “nuance.” Amazing. Nuance is really what one hopes Hedges would discover once in his life—if for no other reason than it would leave him with nothing left to say.

 

I don’t think I have ever met anyone so determined to live as a

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The political far-right certainly has its own share of idiots and lunatics. But the far-left's conspiracy-theorists and identity-politics chieftans have gained a significant amount of mainstream acceptance over the years. Their views have often given (pseudo-)intellectual support to clerical fascists and power-mad thugs.

Time to cut them down a notch.

First, the indomitable Christopher Hitchens lashes out at Noam Chomsky for his less-than rigorous intellectual stance about Osama bin Laden and 9/11:

It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew'

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Rachel Reid, Human Rights Watch’s Afghanistan analyst, was quoted in the NYT (via Christopher Hitchens):

There is a real need for more pressure and open dialogue with insurgent forces for their violations of the laws of war.

Open dialogue with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

It's easy to ridicule her and others that think along those lines. Too easy. Dialogue is of course the best solution for settling problems.

The West has largely been a peace-bubble for the last decades. Wars? Not here. Robbery? Call the Police. Quarrel? Go to court. Jimmy pulled Jenny's hair? Off to the psychologist.

The largest part of Western society and certainly most of the chattering classes live in a sort of bubble, completely disconnected from the use of physical force to achieve any goals. That is first of all a most remarkable achievement. 

But the basic problem remains: there are still men who just want to see the world burn. They don't understand any other language than force..

Daniel Fallenstein is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist...More >>