12/29/2004|||110433864116124732||||||
HITCH THE KNIFE

Christopher Hitchens puts on a barnstorming display in a wide-ranging, book-plugging interview with Front Page. Agree or disagree, there's no one quite like him.

Here he is on the modern Left's worldview:

"Even the environmental movement seems to resent modernity and be nostalgic for agrarianism. I'm perhaps over-speculating here, but another trope of 'anti-Americanism' could be one that resents the United States as the country par excellence of disturbing change and innovation and, via regime-change, of revolution. The Right often makes a version of this mistake, as with stem-cell research and Buchanan-type isolationism and nativism. But the Left is really doomed if all it wants is a quiet life."

On his atheism:


"Some agnostics and even Atheists say that they are sorry that there are no grounds for belief, but I am glad. It would be horrible if we were the objects of a permanent supervision by an unassailable power, which kept us under control even after we were dead. At least in North Korea, you can escape the divine leader by dying."

On his spectacular assault on Fahrenheit 9/11:


"[T]he review of Moore's mendacious film involved me in very little mental effort: it was more like an exercise in logical and moral hygiene. The movie was so idiotic and so sinister that it more or less condemned itself: a tiny shove is all it took."

And on his former friend, Noam Chomsky:

"Has he declined morally and politically? I probably differ from you in saying that I think he has. I recently looked up some of his old polemical classics - on the Vietnam war, for example, and on East Timor and on Sharon's conduct in Lebanon in 1982 - and found them still to be highly cogent and lucid. I think even someone who had disagreed with him then would be compelled to say the same. He was always slightly bad at taking criticism, but then he had often been unfairly attacked as well. In some awful way, his regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs. This is not at all like watching the implosion of an obvious huckster and jerk like Michael Moore, who would have made a perfectly good Brownshirt populist. The collapse of Chomsky feels to me more like tragedy."
|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/12/hitch-knife-christopher-hitchens-puts.html|||12/29/2004 04:44:00 pm|||||||||
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