Stranger in a Strange Land (Hitchens Alert)

The Atlantic ^ | December, 2001 | Christopher Hitchens

[jalisco555]

Another awesome Hitchens article.

[RLK]

This should provoke serious thought, but won't.

[ambrose]

bump

[JohnHuang2]

Thanks, ambrose. Will read.

[Harp]

They are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In other words, all the learned and conscientious objections, as well as all the silly or sinister ones, boil down to this: Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government.

How contemptible it is, and how lowering to the spirit, that America's liberals should have cried so loudly before they had even been hurt, and that they should have been able to be so stoic only when ignoring the cries of others.

December thunderbolts from Hitchens.

This has to be one of his best essays ever.

[BobbyK]

"Stone drew applause for his assertion that there was an intimate tie between the New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington attacks and the Florida ballot recount, which was, he asserted, "a complete vindication of the fact that capitalism has destroyed democracy.")"

Nothing Stone says shocks me anymore, he's just an idiot.( no lelf or right assessment) just a dipstick.

Marxist would come the closest.

He furthermore HATES America, it's obvious.

[pt17]

bump for later read

[imperator2]

Stone is a follower of Chomsky, and parrots his guru's words.

[SubMareener]

Rush says we should always keep one Liberal around to remind us of what they are like. I say lets keep Chris Hitchens! HE is a sensible liberal who can tell us what the idiots were like!

[aculeus]

Oliver Stone is the Joe McCarthy of today, an alcoholic false accuser.

[truthkeeper]

I believe I know an enemy when I see one.

He does indeed. Another Hitchens bttt.

[aculeus]

My daughter goes to school just across the river from the Pentagon; her good-hearted teachers proposed an "Amity Walk" for children of all nations, to culminate at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Massachusetts Avenue. The event would demonstrate that children had no quarrel with anybody. It would not stress the fact that a death squad had just hit a target a few hundred yards away, and would have liked to crash another planeload of hostages anywhere in downtown Washington, and was thwarted in this only by civilians willing to use desperate force. But I had my own reasons, which were no less internationalist, for opposing anything so dismal, and for keeping my child away from anything so inane.

Inane it is. And good for him for keeping his child away from such fatuity.

[Mamzelle]

You know, I don't want this guy on the other side. Let's give him an honorary Chair of Conservative Studies in the Free Speech Wing of Liberals Worth Listening To. What an incisive essay--clear, coherent, lacking in mannerism but clever nonetheless (listening, Jonah?)...

[True Capitalist]

It's the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know.

...Members of the left, along with the far larger number of squishy "progressives," have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought.

Extremely well stated!

[True Capitalist]

This article is well worth a read. Kudos for Hitchens!

As a rule, the intellectual left gain supporters for their cause (socialism) by identifying with others they see as victims of capitalism (the poor), but by justifying and embracing the terrosits' hatred of America they will gain few supporters outside the ivory towers.

[Stentor]

Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government. (The words "our own" should of course be appropriately ironized, with the necessary quotation marks.) To do so would be a betrayal of the Cherokees.

LOL.

[BobbyK]

"This should provoke serious thought, but won't"

Do you and Ms.Cleo work with the same modus operandi?

[BobbyK]

"This should provoke serious thought, but won't"

Do you and Ms.Cleo work with the same modus operandi?

[bulldog905]

Hurray for Hitch! What intellectual courage and honesty, to realize the ideology he previously held was wrong!

A greater man, X40, was once a liberal Democrat. Hitchens is travelling the same road to sanity, only, in his case, the distance is much greater.

[Cruising Speed]

Bump