Open with care
Talk about the body not even being cold yet. Much as I am loathe to do so, I think the occasion merits actually posting the written musings of the "Great Independent Scholar with a PhD from Princeton", Norman Finkelstein-direct from his blog, no less. In this below-linked piece de resistance, Finkelstein comments favorably on the passing of Christopher Hitchens, and compares it to the passings of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/a-brief-comment-on-the-passing-of-christopher-hitchens/
Hitchens, of course, was a man of strong, controversial opinions and great excess. Finkelstein doesn't tell us what he didn't like about Hitchens, except possibly, Hitchens offended the wrong religion in his universal criticisms of such. I have no idea what he had against Havel, who by most accounts, was a great figure. To compare either in any way to Kim is ridiculous in the extreme.
But then, so is Norm.
I would suggest someone send this piece to an FBI profiler for analysis. It strikes me as similar in style to the Unibomber.
The Unabomber has already been caught.
ReplyDeleteIf Finkelstein wrote favorably about anyone, they would be turning over in their graves. So will each of the people he did write about, when they think of the company he is has put them in.
I think we are all in full agreement. A nice way to close out the year. Norm may think he has enhanced his own prestige by commenting in Hitchens, but he has to stand on a soap box to reach high enough to kiss his subject's posterior, and that's a low bar.
ReplyDeleteOn August 19, Christopher Hitchens published one of his most hypocritical pieces of work ever, smearing bereaved military mother Cindy Sheehan.
ReplyDeleteHitchens charged that an email allegedly sent by Sheehan to a Nightline producer evidenced her "real opinions on politics (a weird confection of pacifism and paranoid anti-Zionism)." He characterized Sheehan's alleged statement as "anti-Israel" and an insinuation of President George W. Bush's manipulation by "a Jewish cabal." Finally, speculating on the results of a hypothetical referendum of the American public on the occupation of Iraq -- something which has never been proposed by Sheehan or any other prominent opponent of the occupation -- Hitchens wrote, "The ultra-right anti-Zionist forces of David Duke and Patrick J. Buchanan, both of whom approvingly speak of Ms. Sheehan's popular groundswell, would still lose the vote." (What a relief!)
Reading Hitchens' screed, it occurred to me that he was using Sheehan to exorcise his own demons, attacking her as a projection of his former Trotskyist self. He posed as the calculating sadist, so frustrated with what he perceives as the left's pacific sentimentalism he almost seemed to pleasure in reducing a politically inexperienced military mom to a bloody pulp. Yet Hitchens assailed Sheehan for taking positions he had evinced for decades -- positions he had staked his career on. Reading Hitchens' attempted take-down of Sheehan was to watch him wander into his own, personal intellectual leather dungeon, lie on his back, and surrender his soft belly to the sharpened stilleto heel of a peacenik dominatrix he fabricated in the liquidized recesses of his mind. It was little more than a naked exercise in masochism.