Hitchens: The Devil Hoi Polloi Made Them Do It
By Mona
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And with this, I have lost every measure of respect I had long held for Christopher Hitchens. My emphasis:
“I know something for a sure thing,†Hitchens continued. “The demand for torture and other methods I would describe as illegal, the demand to go outside the Geneva conventions — all this came from below. What everyone wants to say is this came from a small clique around the vice-president. It’s not educational. It doesn’t enlighten anyone to behave as if that were true. This is our society wanting and demanding harsh measures.†Therefore, he went on, the demand for prosecution or other measures against Bush administration officials would likewise have to come from below, via the grassroots. “Otherwise it’s just vengeful, I suppose, and partisan.â€
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It’s not educational?! To hold those who violate the Geneva Conventions regarding torture (brief ad click-through) to the law? Gawd double dang me. It’s not educational?!
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Just where were these pitchforked mobs demanding that the CIA and DoD torture people in violation of domestic and international law? And even had they existed, this would excuse government officials and lawyers conversant with relevant law from endorsing/ordering torturing people?
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Christopher, I guess I hardly knew ya.
Comment by Curmudgeon —
January 19, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
It’s undeniable that a large swath of the ‘below’–specifically the GOP voting base–was clamoring for torture and worse. I believe Cheney would have authorized torture regardless of what the GOP base wanted, but to say that culpability for torture rests exclusively with a clique of Cheney’s associates lets the American people off far too easily.
America needs to take a good look at itself and decide if it wants to be a torture state. If it does not, then prosecuting Cheneyites is a good first step but permanently cleaning the stain of torture would require going far beyond that–into the trailer parks, septic tanks and think tanks of the GOP base and either convincing them that torture is wrong or banishing them from the political process.
Comment by Mona —
January 19, 2009 @ 11:41 pm
And this “clamor for torture” is demonstrated where?
Comment by A Squirrel —
January 19, 2009 @ 11:57 pm
I’m surprised it took you this long to turn on Hitch, Mona.
Now, I’m no great fan of the judgment of the hoi polloi, but the reasoning in his speech here is just silly. Had we nuked the middle east to high hell, he could have said the same thing and just swapped out a few words.
Yeah, way too many people support brutality as policy. This unfortunate fact absolves the administration of nothing.
Comment by Mona —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:14 am
A Squirrel sez:
I liked his work on Mother Theresa, atheism and Kissinger. Hated his recent support of ME war. But with this, he totally lost me.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:37 am
I know; let’s prosecute cases of larceny and b&e from the grassroots, too. Instead of having prosecutors and juries do so. No, wait, that would be idiotic.
It’s criminal law, right? We do this all the time, right?
This is crazy. This is just ass covering by connected politicians.
Christopher Hitchens has joined the Village.
Comment by Curmudgeon —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:40 am
A clamor for torture can easily be found in places where the GOP base hangs out. For example, FreeRepublic and places with comment threads for the likes of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin.
As for a clamor for torture among the more respectable right, look at the wingnut welfare thinktanks.
I’m not saying administration is absolved for anything but the desire for torture extends far beyond Cheney’s office.
Comment by A Squirrel —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:43 am
Yeah, the Kissinger stuff I found rather enlightening in my youth – “Hey! There might be more to history than what’s in my textbook!”
He’s spent most of this decade rather unhinged. Kinda disappointing.
Comment by A Squirrel —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:46 am
Curmudgeon,
Yeah, the Freepers, I guess. But I think the support from the “respectable right” was ex post facto.
Maybe it’s just less unpleasant to remember it that way.
Comment by Mona —
January 20, 2009 @ 12:58 am
ASuirrel sez:
Exactly. I mean, c’mon. Freepers?
I don’t know what huge clamoring for torture Curmudgeon means, but even if it existed (and I see no evidence that it did), this does not relieve the govt officials who approved of, ordered torture, or who tortured of legal and moral responsibility.
Hitchens was once so teh awesome. It is pitiful what he has become.
Comment by js —
January 20, 2009 @ 1:06 am
“This is our society wanting and demanding harsh measures.”
Even if some GOP voters were clamoring for torture since when are GOPs voters “our society”. What about all the non GOP voters?
Comment by Bob —
January 20, 2009 @ 1:12 am
Plenty of them non GOP voters clamoring, too.
Comment by Mona —
January 20, 2009 @ 1:30 am
Bob sez:
In the months after 9/11, were not many-or-most of us bereft of moral and rational thinking? I was. But I’d like to think that I wouldn’t sign onto a John Yoo memo after a few months, and time to reflect on who and what our nation aspires to be.
Comment by Bob —
January 20, 2009 @ 1:35 am
We are who we thought we were.
Comment by Kolohe —
January 20, 2009 @ 2:27 am
but even if it existed (and I see no evidence that it did)
Is 24 a leading or lagging indicator?
Comment by Mona —
January 20, 2009 @ 2:40 am
Is 24 a leading or lagging indicator?
It is fiction; a TeeVee program. Little House on the Prairie was popular, too.
But again, even if some metric could show a large plurality of Americans–or even a majority–approved of torture, that is not the law for those who are assigned to carry out policy in accordance with law.
If felonies are committed, it does not matter a whit if Jack Bauer fans approve.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 20, 2009 @ 2:50 am
The rule of law means that sometimes officials have to refrain from committing criminal acts that the mob would approve of.
Comment by albatross —
January 20, 2009 @ 2:54 am
Yep. By a popular vote, I suppose you could get convicted child molesters burned alive or drawn and quartered or something. But that isn’t (and shouldn’t be) the way the law works.
Even ignoring the huge moral issue involved in torture, a policy of torture is a lose for us if we’re looking ahead very far. I’ve seen the claim several times that stories of our mistreatment of prisoners, and especially the horrible pictures from Abu Girab, were major recruiting aids for terrorist groups in Iraq. It also alienates the citizens of the civilized countries that ought to be our allies, and thus makes it harder for us to count on positive feelings from those countries when we need them.
This kind of viscerally satisfying but stupid policy is just the sort of thing a representative democracy is intended to damp down a bit, right?
Comment by Kolohe —
January 20, 2009 @ 3:51 am
If felonies are committed, it does not matter a whit if Jack Bauer fans approve.
In the context of what we can actually expect to happen, it certainly does.
Comment by Kilo —
January 20, 2009 @ 8:48 am
“Just where were these pitchforked mobs demanding that the CIA and DoD torture people in violation of domestic and international law?”
Why, they were in the public opinion poll results, of course. Where else do you look for measures of public opinion, unless you’re deliberately trying to avoid seeing them.
You remember. The poll results where people saying torturing terrorism suspects was never justified never got above 32% between 2004 and 2007.
So what’s next for you ? Where was these people who supported the Iraq invasion ?
Comment by derek —
January 20, 2009 @ 9:35 am
There are two egregious falsehoods in Hitchens’ argument. First, that the drive for torture came from the people but not the Republican elite. And second, that the drive for impeachment comes from the Democratic elite, but not the people.
Comment by Barry —
January 20, 2009 @ 10:10 am
I would add that, from memory most Americans approve of policies far, far to the economic left of the GOP leadership. Which the GOP leadership is not bothered by.
Mona, I would say that you’re letting prior respect for somebody cloud your judgement, when the person in question has been working very, very hard to prove that he’s a total sh*thead. A few lapses are one thing, but Hitchens has been a nasty piece of work for years now. It’s just that sometimes he’s getting nasty about things that you think are justifiable.
Comment by dhex —
January 20, 2009 @ 11:01 am
though his phrasing here is ludicrous and if there’s reasoning at work, i’m not sure where it is, but he’s probably not that wrong about how a lot of “regular” people view torture and “the other” and all that fun stuff.
Comment by Jon H —
January 20, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
Not to defend Hitchens overall, but I think the ‘not educational’ bit is in reference to the idea that the demand for torture existed only at the top levels of government.
ie, he’s saying “to accept that explanation is not informative” because by his lights it ignores the full scope of the situation, which was that there was demand from the grassroots for extreme measures.
I can see his point.
However, it’s government’s duty to be the responsible adults overriding the crisis-heated desires of public factions. Someone needs to have a cool head and, say, send the National Guard to integrate a school, rather than kowtowing to the howling mob of thugs and the governor.
Also, Hitchens ignores that, to the extent that the public supported torture, it was in no small way because the administration itself and its toadies in the media had worked hard to foster that very attitude.
Comment by Chris Quinones —
January 20, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
Jon H, exactly; how many of the American people really supported torture unprompted? The administration and the media went for the hindbrain early and often after 9/11 and the apologists for the war never really have let up.
Comment by dhex —
January 20, 2009 @ 5:01 pm
how many people support torturing those whom they fear? probably somewhere between many and a whole fucking lot? we all support putting convicted rapists into a cage, often without human contact, for many decades. everyone has some degree of punishment they feel is acceptable for crimes xyz of their fellow citizens.
taking a blank “other” like “terrorist” or “enemy” – how much is their (conceptual) life worth?
Comment by Mona —
January 20, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
Kilo: Opinion polls do not demonstrate what Hitchens said:
Oh, so poor W and Dick Cheney were met with mass protests and demands “from below” that forced their oh-so-unwilling hands? pfffft
Comment by gil mann —
January 20, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
Hate to defend the guy—the goodwill he earned by taking down Mother Theresa with extreme prejudice wasn’t enough to excuse some of the crap he’s spouted recently—but I read it as an indictment of the American people, and we deserve that shit, yo.
I dunno who Mona hangs with, but they must be super-awesome, because I definitely heard “the people” clamoring for brutality, and I’m talking about fuzzy-headed one worlders, not the types you’d expect to spit “kill ‘em all” through their teeth.
I don’t think he’s letting our leaders off the hook, necessarily (does he really have to consign them to it? They live on the hook as far as histpory’s concerned), I think he’s saying we don’t get to take ourselves off the hook.
Mona’s point seems to me to be “Bush and Cheney are evil and they shouldn’t be evil,” which is fair enough, I suppose, but we could do with a good long look at why we allowed them to be.
Comment by gil mann —
January 20, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
Histpory. Yep. Histpory will judge us harshly indeed.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 20, 2009 @ 8:22 pm
Well, Christopher’s friend Sam Harris is all for it.
What there was was a push to legalize torture from the chatterati. To most Americans, the answer to the ticking bomb question is obvious. I mean as a private person, if I knew that kneecapping some guy would save a city from nuclear annihilation, sure, I’d say do it. Who wouldn’t. So, when you put the question like that out to the public after something like 9/11 you’re going to get a reaction, and people took advantage of it.
Of course, that situation is so unlikely you don’t need a law for it. Really, if you were a prosecutor, a judge, or a jury dealing with a cop who kneecapped a terrorist, but saved a city from atomic death, would you prosecute, sentence or find him guilty? Even if he’d violated the law? So why ask for the law? The only answer is to widen that gray area.
Comment by dhex —
January 21, 2009 @ 2:16 am
this is neither here nor there, but sam harris is in the business of being a complete ding-dong, so any position he takes should be of no surprise to anyone.
Comment by Kilo —
January 21, 2009 @ 9:04 am
Well, yeah. Where the fk were you when this was going on ? Seriously, if you are not less than 8 years old, what’s your excuse ? Were you in a drug induced coma in the wake of 9/11 ?
You say this as though you weren’t on the planet at the time. Nobody needed to protest in the street because there was nobody left to convince.
I’m absolutely intrigued by what you thought all those people talking about wiping out huge swathes of humanity in the middle east were proposing, somehow within the limits of the geneva conventions. Do tell.
The US *were* greeted as liberators in Iraq, is a more truthful claim than yours.
Comment by CJColucci —
January 21, 2009 @ 12:40 pm
I suspect there’s a disconnect with the meaning of “demand.” Former President Cheney, et al, would have tortured whether people demanded it, liked it, or opposed it. And I won’t deny that a depressingly large share of the public actively approves of torture. But I suspect that most “support” for torture is actually rather soft — they support torture if they think the government thinks it’s needed. But our government didn’t torture because of public opinion. It just tortured, and counted (probably rightly) on public opinion to let them get away with it.
Comment by Kilo —
January 23, 2009 @ 7:53 pm
What’s Cheney got to do with it ? The piece questioned if the Dems were in change.
Al Gore enthusiastically endorsed sending terrorism suspects off for torture. And when I say torture, I mean the middle-east secret-police bodybag-guaranteed kind.
That was before 9/11. Not to put too fine of a point on it — because the author here has strived so hard to avoid it — but the only thing that happened between that and Cheney was Al Gore not being sworn in and 9/11.
You don’t know what Cheney’s position was on torture before 9/11. You know what Al Gore’s was though. And you don’t know a liar big enough to claim 9/11 would have made Gore softer on terrorism suspects.
Hence, when Hitchens states that if the Dems were in charge you likely would have ended up in the same place, it’s not exactly a stretch.
Then again, if you avoid that point and pretend the US public were the complete opposite of what they were in the wake of 9/11… well, where’s that end.
Why not just pretend Hitchens said the complete opposite of what he did in your alternate reality. Happy days again.