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Christopher Hitchens’ subconscious covertly confesses to being an ass in his review of the anniversary edition of Darkness at Noon for Slate:
What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be “historically” right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide.
In this case, suicide of reputation only – so far. But it’s very tempting to cast the parts of the novel as Hitchens describes it with elements of the reviewer’s own psyche. Meanwhile, an irony sinks in: Hitchens’ image of himself is as the champion of rationality against the irrational – he ostensibly defends the Bush version of the war on terror as a struggle of secularism against theocracy, and castigates the late Koestler for “between various forms of rationalism and pseudo-science.” But the more Hitchens justifies the course of recent history in terms of “the liberation of the Kurds” and digresses lengthily on Kurdish virtues, the more he sounds like one more footloose Brit orientalist, fallen madly, irrationally in love with a people sufficiently foreign to make a satisfying Other. Not unlike Tim Cranmer in John LeCarré’s Our Game, who falls in love with the rebellious Ingush of the Russian Caucasus, or TE Lawrence and even Byron, enthusiast of the Greek Revolution.
The pseudonymous Werther, “a Northern Virginia based defense analyst,” is the latest to whack the Victor Davis Hanson pinata. Hanson grumbled in National Review about an apparently massive scanting of America’s role in the Second World War by Hollywood, academe and Jacques Chirac. Excerpt:
Has Mr. Hanson never heard, that far from being unheralded, General Patton was the laudatory subject of an Oscar-winning film that is a staple of Turner Classic Movies? Did the overwhelmingly favorable public response to Saving Private Ryan bounce off his consciousness like so many Swedish peas off a steel helmet? [2]. Was there no notice of the recent dedication of the World War II Memorial in Reader’s Digest or other publications appropriate to Mr. Hanson’s Rotarian tastes? The History Channel is All World War II, All The Time – largely from the American perspective; Mr. Hanson is apparently too busy watching Fox News to notice.
One weakness of Werther’s piece is that he casts aspersions on Hanson’s professional work in his area of expertise – Ancient Greece – without backing it up. It would be outside the scope of the article, but better surely not to go there in the first place, or at least provide some links to critics of his academic work.
James Joyner finds a report that the Army has a wartime exception to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” If true, the decision represents the final proof of the incoherence of the policy. Recall that the respectable case against allowing out homosexuals to serve in the military is that it will undermine unit cohesion in the stress of battle. Keeping gays and straights apart in hostilities is what the policy is supposed to be for. If the problem isn’t enough to keep gays out of the wartime Army, it’s certainly not enough to keep them out of the peacetime Army.
What we don’t have is confirmation that the Army has actually suspended the policy. There was an ostensible “don’t ask, don’t tell” separation this summer of a soldier serving in Iraq, blogger and Spec. Jeff Howe. Howe suggests that his sexuality may have been a convenient excuse to retaliate against a photo he published on his blog. But Gay.com also reports that
At least 10 other service members have faced similar discharge proceedings for online ads this year, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN).
Has the 1999 exception policy been ignored at the behest of the current Republican administration, or was it created originally at the behest of the Democratic one then in power? Is it business as usual or has the rate of discharges dropped because of the war? I dunno. And this is a quick links item, so I’m not gonna find out either.
UPDATE: Scharf versus Henley, Cranmer versus Pettifer, LeCarré versus Monte Python and the Provos versus everyone, in comments.
UPDATE UPDATE: Jason Kuznicki will tell you whether DADT discharges have gone up or down during the last four years.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
September 15, 2005 @ 1:51 am
Apropos of very little: it was Larry Pettifer who romanticizes the Ingush in LeCarré’s Our Game; Tim Cranmer was Pettifer’s handler.
Does anyone know why LeCarré has never seriously dealt with Northern Ireland?
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 15, 2005 @ 6:20 am
“Does anyone know why LeCarré has never seriously dealt with Northern Ireland?”
I’ve always had the same question about Monty Python, only with “humorously” instead of “seriously”.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 15, 2005 @ 6:25 am
Eric: Now it’s a matter of honor!
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Perhaps the end of the book is just a shade (deliberately) ambiguous, but the last thing Cranmer does is grab a rifle and NOT head immediately downhill, right? I recall the strong implication that he stays with the tribe.
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On the Northern Ireland question, I wondered it myself from time to time, and settled on “cowardice.” (Same for Len Deighton.) We have HARRY’S GAME anyway, which is probably enough. Reading that book has certainly kept me from being surprised by anything that’s happened in Iraq.
Trackback by Positive Liberty —
September 15, 2005 @ 7:25 am
Military to Gays: You Can Still Die for Us
Jim Henley links to a report by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military finding that it is indeed written U.S. military policy to send gay and lesbian soldiers into combat–even where, in peacetime, these same soldiers would…
Comment by Sven —
September 15, 2005 @ 7:29 am
Speaking of VDH, did you hear about his battle with the War Nerd?
Pingback by Positive Liberty » Blog Archive » Military to Gays: You Can Still Die for Us —
September 15, 2005 @ 7:50 am
[...] 05, 8:21 am
Military to Gays: You Can Still Die for Usby Jason Kuznicki
Jim Henley links to a report by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the M [...]
Comment by John Emerson —
September 15, 2005 @ 7:51 am
If an individual is doing necessary job well, you’d want to keep him. And otherwise, if you really dislike a guy for any reason , you could probably do things to make it likely for him to be killed. But in either case, in the field you wouldn’t primarily thinking about voting blocs back home, or legality.
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As I remember, once Byron met the Greek freedom fighters he found out that they were treacherous local bandits and petty thugs who made the Mafia look noble and statesmanlike. (Though I forget — after watching the movies, most Americans think that Mafiosi ARE noble and statesmanlike.)
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(To make paragraphs, enter twice, type a period, and enter twice again.)
Comment by Rasselas —
September 15, 2005 @ 8:12 am
Re: Byron, isn’t it a tradition of long standing for bourgeois and bohemian Brits and Americans to visit Greece and come away disappointed that modern Greeks are not as morally or physically beautiful as the best of the Achaeans?
Hence the joke, “What is a Greek? A Turk pretending to be an Italian.”
Comment by Barry —
September 15, 2005 @ 9:36 am
On September 15, 2005 at 7:51 am, John Emerson wrote:
“If an individual is doing necessary job well, you’d want to keep him. And otherwise, if you really dislike a guy for any reason , you could probably do things to make it likely for him to be killed. But in either case, in the field you wouldn’t primarily thinking about voting blocs back home, or legality.”
John, if gays are kept for battle, and discharged afterwards for being gay, then that gives the lie to the Pentagon’s policy (and it is their policy; they wanted it, and Congress gave it to them). If, in peacetime, a soldier was reported to be gay, could his commander retain him/her against a higher command’s wishes?
Comment by washerdreyer —
September 15, 2005 @ 10:36 am
Barry, in responding to John you’re eliding the much discussed distinction between explanation (how I read his comment and how I would heavily bet he intended it), and jusification. The reasons he speculated on aren’t supposed to make it a good thing.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
September 15, 2005 @ 12:00 pm
Jim: Well, I thought the point was to characterize Hitchens’s journey to Mosul, and I believe the development of Hitchens’s devotion tracks Pettifer much more closely than it does Cranmer. Pettifer is clearly the Byronic figure in Our Game, identifying with the oppressed tribe well before and long after his patrons see any interest in supporting them. Cranmer is very late to the, er, game, and only when his loyalty to his friend and disgust with his superiors overcomes his jealousy of his friend does he even consider throwing in with the Ingush, and even then he has no hope of winning their freedom. Like many other LeCarré protagonists, Cranmer despairs of the world and indulges in a Flucht nach vorn. I don’t know enough about contemporary political journalism to properly identify who would play Cranmer to Hitchens’s Pettifer; perhaps Michael Kinsley.
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The problem with the analogy, of course, is that we haven’t quite reached the Our Game stage yet. We’re well past The Tailor of Amman, but as long as withdrawal is officially off the table with the Bush Administration, I’d say we’re still in the Kowloon/Phnom Penh passages of The Honourable Schoolboy. But this is not to say that Hitchens wouldn’t actually prefer to be in Our Game; as useful as he finds the neocon affectations of Bush-Rumsfeld, defending that gang of anti-democratic kleptocrats has to grate on Hitchens. As unlikely as it appears to us from our proximity to the 2004 election, one of the more plausible outcomes of the Iraq adventure has always been an ignominious American retreat following the Bush Administration’s exhaustion of the public’s money, our servicemen’s blood, and their own political capital. Under that scenario, the Kurds would be left to fend for themselves, and Hitchens would be able to claim the moral high ground of having been their advocate and being deserted by that scoundrel Bush. All it would take would be one more unfortunate comparison to Orwell, and Hitchens would be forced to put on his jodhpurs.
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What is Hitchens’s best case scenario? Not that far-fetched, in fact: indefinitely U.S.-enforced partition. The West Bank of the Euphrates will resemble the West Bank of the Jordan for thirty years, but hey, we’ve got some experience with that now. If he stays on message Hitchens could help sell it, but he’d do best to steer clear of Jon Stewart for a while.
Comment by Eric Scharf —
September 15, 2005 @ 1:07 pm
For Matthew (incomplete and could probably be improved upon):
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John Le Carr̩ РMonty Python Equivalencies
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy = Monty Python and the Holy Grail
A Murder of Quality = the “Salad Days” sketch
The Looking Glass War = the “My Hovercraft is Full of Eels” sketch
A Small Town in Germany = the “Killer Joke” sketch
Call for the Dead = the “Exploding Penguin on the Telly” sketch
The Honourable Schoolboy = the “Lemming of the B.D.A.” sketch
A Perfect Spy = The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Our Game = Yellowbeard
The Russia House = A Fish Called Wanda
The Little Drummer Girl = The Life of Brian
The Constant Gardner = The Secret Policeman’s Ball
The Tailor of Panama = Time Bandits
The Night Manager = Fawlty Towers
Smiley’s People = The Fisher King
The Secret Pilgrim = The Meaning of Life
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold = Brazil
Single & Single = And Now For Something Completely Different
Comment by Diana —
September 15, 2005 @ 1:34 pm
Hitch is very dull.
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 15, 2005 @ 3:09 pm
Eric -
I suspect that explicit avoidance of Ulster by LeCarre and Python have the same fear-filled roots. (Actually Python took some jabs in Life of Brian “We the People’s Front of Judea, Brackets Provisionals brackets”
Trackback by Political Animal —
September 15, 2005 @ 4:17 pm
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
DON’T ASK DON’T TELL….Jim Henley points us to a report from the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military that suggests the military is not quite as anti-gay as it claims to be:Scholars studying military personnel policy…
Trackback by UNCoRRELATED —
September 15, 2005 @ 10:04 pm
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Think, Don’t Question
Israel’s inclusive policy belies the objection that the strong religious beliefs of some soliders make it impossible for them to serve with gays or lesbians.
Comment by Diana —
September 15, 2005 @ 11:50 pm
Jim,
I’ve been thinking about this Hitchens/Kurdish thing, and while I was reading about the Hitchens/Galloway debate on some other blogs it hit me: this is his “dog in the fight.”
He’s been romanticizing the Kurds for years. I remember reading a fulsome intro to some picture book about the Kurds that he wrote. So noble, so pure, so oppressed.
That was THE thing to do among a certain sector of the left until Jonathan Randal’s book kind of exposed what a bunch of squabblers they are. But he never gave up the ghost.
Supporting the war in Iraq is just a covert way of supporting Kurdish independence. I don’t think he cares about “Iraq” — which to him is just an abstraction, at all.
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 16, 2005 @ 7:42 am
Little Miss Muff– oh never mind –
Big Mr Hitchens/
Stopped All His Bitchin’s/
To Free Up the Kurds At Bay/
But Along Came Big Failure/
To Sell the War’s Grandeur/
And It Frightens Chris Hitchens All Day/
Comment by Ken MacLeod —
September 17, 2005 @ 2:32 am
I haven’t read much of Le Carré, but I wouldn’t be too quick to accuse him of cowardice for not writing about Northern Ireland. I don’t think the Provos would shoot someone for writing a novel. But for the novel to be credible, you’d have to do research on the greound, and that would be both dangerous and very easy for someone like Le Carré to get wrong in various embarrassing ways.
Comment by Jim Henley —
September 17, 2005 @ 7:41 am
Ken, I didn’t mean physical cowardice. This is a man who did on-site research in 1970s Cambodia and 1980s Lebanon. Maybe squeamishness would be a better word – and again, more political-moral than physical.
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