[lit-ideas] Hitch on his leftist dismay
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:22:20 -0400
Lawrence may agree with Christopher Hitchens' 2001 account,
"Stranger in a Strange Land: The dismay of an honorable man
of the left," where he considers why some Leftists side with
the Islamofascist arguments.
Having paged through the combined reactions of Sontag, Noam
Chomsky, and many others, I am put very much in mind of
something from the opening of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte. It's not the sentence about the
historical relation between tragedy and farce. It's the
observation that when people are learning a new language,
they habitually translate it back into the one they already
know. This work of self-reassurance and of hectic, hasty
assimilation to the familiar is most marked in the case of
Chomsky, whose prose now manifests that symptom first
captured in, I recall, words by Dr. Charcot—"le beau calme
de l'hysterique." For Chomsky, everything these days is a
"truism"; for him it verges on the platitudinous to be
obliged to state, once again for those who may have missed
it, that the September 11 crime is a mere bagatelle when set
beside the offenses of the Empire. From this it's not a very
big step to the conclusion that we must change the subject,
and change it at once, to Palestine or East Timor or Angola
or Iraq. All radical polemic may now proceed as it did
before the rude interruption. "Nothing new," as the spin
doctors have taught us to say. There's a distinct similarity
between this world view and that of the religious dogmatists
who regard September 11 in the light of a divine judgment on
a sinful society. But to know even what a newspaper reader
knows about the Taliban and its zealous destruction of all
culture and all science and all human emancipation, and to
compare its most noteworthy if not its most awful atrocity
to the fall of the Bastille ...
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/hitchens
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