Comments on: Pol Pot or Christopher Hitchens?

By: Alexander Wolfe

Alexander Wolfe — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 03:34:03 +0000

Literary “allusions” aside, Christopher Hitchens is still an idiot when it comes to all things Iraq (this quote above being from his most recent column on Iraq in Slate.) His columns have the whiff of desperation, as he clings to every last rational for having supported the war in Iraq as if his very sanity is riding on it. I for one hope that he does crack soon, and will disallowed from accessing the internet or pen and paper while he recovers in an asylum somewhere. Is that harsh? Yes. Does he deserve it? Certainly. It’s no harsher than what he directs at any critics of the war.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:17:08 +0000

Hahaha

That’s the entire post, by someone who clearly has no idea that Hitchens is alluding to the sentiment usually (though inaccurately) attributed to Diderot that “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Oh dear, Oliver is such a fucking cunt.

(of course, only an idiot would fail to recognise my allusion to the sentiment usually (though inaccurately) ascribed to the late Peter Cook that “you’re a fucking cunt, you are”)

By: dipnut

dipnut — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:48:07 +0000

Right you are, Anthony. This is exactly where.

Pol Pot was all Chomsky’s fault.

By: harry b

harry b — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:23:18 +0000

Why on earth does Kamm think that the post implies that Belle doesn’t recognise the allusion?

He might, furthermore, do well to wonder why people don’t immediately assume that his self-deprecating humour is such, given his interpretation of this post.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:27:09 +0000

Hey, isn’t this where someone ought to say Pol Pot was all Chomsky’s fault anyway?

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 12:11:21 +0000

hey, kids, take heed! if you don’t want to be compared with pol pot, try to avoid stating as a positive thing that iraq has been turned into a “killing field.” been to tuol sleng recently, anyone? not exactly happy fun time is it? when I hear “killing field”, I think about bullet-saving measures that led to infants being brained on the roots of ficus trees. if someone cites this in a positive way, and then follows up with some entrail-strangling…weeeellll. charitable interpretation does not exactly jump to the fore at this point.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:36:45 +0000

Although some of Kamm’s remarks can be interpreted as self-deprecating, he has also stated in the past that his soi-disant ‘objectivity’ is “not a gag but a statement of fact”, and at such length as to indicate he wished to be taken seriously.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:10:47 +0000

Oh, sorry, I see now that Matt Weiner already responded to this.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:08:39 +0000

I dunno… I’ve been heard to mutter “Shoot them all like rabid dogs!” when the local city council does something stupid.

Normally city concilmen do not getting killed, and if they are, inflammatory rhetoric will be cited as a factor.

Iraqis, otoh, are getting killed every single day, often massacred, tortured and abused by US soldiers who, apparently, take the “killing fields” rhetoric quite literally.

Hitch&Co are an equivalent of the writers for Der Sturmer. I don’t see them advocating killing fields in Alabama for chrisitanofascists or in Israel for jeudeofascists; their appeal is unmistakably racist. They have a group of people singled out for extermination because of who they are, for the brand of religion they’ve been practicing for centuries.

It is not a joke when people with guns are acting on it.

By: lurker

lurker — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 07:51:48 +0000

@posts 37 & 19
The writer Matt refers to also wrote that to bring the story of Jack the Giant Killer up to date you have to make it Jack the Dwarf Killer.
He was quite nasty to intellectuals who side with the strong against the weak and think that any politics dirty enough justifies itself. Clearly he was on the other side.

By: roger

roger — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 05:30:56 +0000

Ahem, Mr. #40: Pomposity descending to levity is pomposity still.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:40:38 +0000

Dereck at 40: I wasn’t convinced by the rest of the post, but I’m convinced by the last paragraph here that O.K. does do self-deprecating humor. So my apologies to Kamm. (I will defend to my dying breath, however, the claim that some of the rest of the time he is pompous.)

radek, sure, but you don’t publish it. And good point pithlord, given that some priests and kings did get killed it’s not a great idea to use this bon mot when you don’t intend violence. Sorta like disparaging your opponents as rootless cosmopolitans.

By: radek

radek — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:14:06 +0000

I dunno… I’ve been heard to mutter “Shoot them all like rabid dogs!” when the local city council does something stupid. I think the hyperbole just comes from having been exposed to a lot of commie rhetoric. It’s humor, dark humor, but humor.

By: Pithlord

Pithlord — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:08:47 +0000

Diderot’s bon mot was hardly without nasty consequence in the real world. Tom Nairn’s influence is fortunately pretty limited.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:34:57 +0000

Henry: The Orwell/Connolly line is brilliant. The whole discussion is well worth it for producing that.
As for the Hitchens quote (the antecedents of which are given in Chris Brooke’s blog:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2006_02_01_archive.html#114017837951131018 )clearly comparisons to actual genocidaires can’t be serious. But there is, I think, a valid point to be made about Hitchens’s propensity for violent, false-macho rhetorical over-kill (ahem); all the chest-thumping and self-delighted revelling in saying brutal things for the sake of being shocking and appearing tough—well, it does seem to me a fair target for mockery. Even if Hitchens were right, such talk would be uncalled for. And as it is …