[D66] Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

[Henk Elegeert]

Foo Fighters oorzaak aardbeving
Update: donderdag 15 dec 2011, 11:53

De Amerikaanse rockgroep Foo Fighters heeft er tijdens een concert
letterlijk voor gezorgd dat Nieuw-Zeeland op haar grondvesten schudde. Toen
de Fighters op het podium stonden mat een nabijgelegen seismologisch bureau
trillingen die gelijk waren aan vulkanische onrust.

De oorzaak is de uitzinnige gekte van 50.000 meespringende fans. Vooral op
de hoogtepunten van de nummers sloegen de meters van het instituut uit.

Het is echter niet voor het eerst dat het seismologische bureau trillingen
meet die veroorzaakt worden door een evenement. Eerder namen ze al
trillingen waar tijdens het WK Rugby.

"

Wat nou Trotski intelligent? Die krijgt werkelijk nog geen
sigaretenvloeitje in beweging, man. :)

Henk Elegeert (wiens moeder ook stof verzameld, met de stofzuiger. Wellicht
ook delen van de tot stof vergane Trotski. :) )


2011/12/16 Antid Oto <protocosmos66 at gmail.com>

> (Zelf nooit veel belangstelling gehad voor deze renegaat en pseudo-Trot.
> Zijn
> boekje over Thomas Paine ligt nog ergens stof te verzamelen.)
>
> Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
> by Alex Callinicos
>
> The news of the writer Christopher Hitchens’s death fills my mind with
> contradictory images and feelings.
>
> I remember the young Christopher. He was a couple of years ahead of me at
> the
> same Oxford college in the late 1960s. He was then the best known activist
> of
> the International Socialists (IS, now the Socialist Workers Party) at
> Oxford.
>
> Chain-smoking, elegant even in the donkey jacket that was standard issue
> on the
> revolutionary left, he was a brilliant orator. It was from him that I first
> learned, often with the force of revelation, many of the main ideas of the
> Marxist tradition.
>
> Even then it was clear that Christopher was hedging his bets. In his
> autobiography Hitch-22 he concedes he led a double life, “speaking with a
> bullhorn from an upturned milk crate outside a factory, and then later
> scrambling into a dinner jacket and addressing the Oxford Union debating
> society
> under the rules of parliamentary order”.
>
> This tension became stronger after Christopher left Oxford and became a
> journalist in London. He became a central figure in a famous literary set,
> including Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, and drifted towards Labourism.
>
> The Portuguese Revolution of 1975-6 brought the reformist Socialist Party
> into
> confrontation with self-organised workers and soldiers. It marked,
> Christopher
> writes, “the end of the line” for his relationship with the IS.
>
> The last time I saw Christopher was in the summer of 1980, when he was
> about to
> move to the US—permanently, as it proved. America was the making of his
> career.
> Chatshow audiences loved watching pompous grandees being skewered and
> insulted
> by someone with a posh English accent.
>
> This isn’t to diminish the political role that Christopher played during
> the
> 1980s and 1990s. Being at the very centre of the empire seemed to provide
> the
> pressure that allowed him to flourish as a critic of US foreign policy and
> champion of the Palestinians. He also became a fine writer, capable of
> producing
> superb essays.
>
> And then he flipped, responding to the 9/11 attacks on New York and
> Washington
> by rallying to what would soon become his adopted flag and supporting
> George W
> Bush in his wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.
>
> I still find this hard fully to explain. Christopher had developed earlier
> a
> weakness for “progressive” patriotism, supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war
> against Argentina over the Falklands.
>
> He managed to convince himself during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s that the
> Bosnian Muslims were the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish
> Republicans of
> the 1930s.
>
> But whatever the explanation, nothing can excuse Christopher’s reactionary
> rantings against Muslims. His attempt to provide intellectual cover for
> these
> with a superficial and ignorant polemic against religion in general was
> memorably demolished by Terry Eagleton.
>
> I remember first reading in an early article by Christopher this passage
> from an
> essay by the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre, then a Marxist:
>
> “Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay … The
> one is
> of JM Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky … The one the intellectual
> guardian of
> the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation
> to
> keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal
> fortune in the process.
>
> “The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and
> under
> Stalin, providing throughout his life a defence of human activity, of the
> powers
> of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes
> with
> his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. They are the twin lives
> between which intellectual choice in our society lies.”
>
> This passage stuck with Christopher, who quoted it a few years ago in an
> essay
> where he expressed his continuing admiration for Trotsky. But how would he
> think
> his own end matched up compared to those of Keynes and Trotsky?
>
> He seems to have faced his death sentence from cancer bravely enough. But
> he
> died firmly in the embrace of the establishment, a literary celebrity
> lavished
> with praise by mainstream non-entities. This is a sorry end for someone
> who, at
> his best, could articulate much nobler aspirations.
>
> https://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=27053
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