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0c30b6e Anti-Americanism may indeed have grown fiercer than it was during the cold war. It is a common phenomenon that when the angels fail to deliver, the demons become more fearsome. politics bigotry united-states leftism cold-war Ian Buruma
0d2ece0 Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty--or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne's thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or 'Eurocentric'; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the 'radical'; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly 'committed'. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the 'smelly little orthodoxies'--tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote . My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann's point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo'. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between. enlightenment progress irony lies socialism literature humanism politics faith religion science truth apoliticism berlin bought-priesthood cape-coloureds eurocentricism george-hw-bush german-people groupthink left-wing-politics margaret-thatcher munich personality-politics polytheism potus radical-politics tribalism xhosa-people zulu-people ronald-reagan sectarianism monotheism solipsism argument critical-thinking self-pity self-love south-africa totalitarianism journalism right-wing-politics george-orwell soviet-union united-states conviction orthodoxy los-angeles film individualism atheism hedonism thomas-mann populism russia communism postmodernism cold-war germany literary-criticism euphemism Christopher Hitchens
7eff9ca "Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called "a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda" by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Milos Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries--Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others--that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. --it still moves, all right." television freedom milos-forman postcolonialism ronald-reagan moscow czechoslovakia despotism liberation zimbabwe mao-zedong journalism dictatorship spain soviet-union united-states propaganda colonialism russia communism greece cold-war Christopher Hitchens
6cb5df8 "Psychology's service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a "Faustian bargain." In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association's collective silence, ethical "numbing," and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that "the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil"; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War "role of ...American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency...for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation." 4" cia cold-war collective-silence conspiracy-of-silence ethical-violations faustian-bargain human-rights-abuse nazi-doctors psychological-manipulation selective-amnesia torture traumatic-amnesia unethical-treatment human-rights-violations mind-control evil Alfred W. McCoy
5a3122f And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay 'The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.' This rather shallow piece appeared in the magazine, and took us over the usual jumps. Gone are the days of , Delmore Schwartz, Dwight MacDonald etc etc. No longer the tempest of debate over Trotsky, , Orwell, blah, blah. Today the assimilation of the Jewish American, the rise of rents in midtown Manhattan, the erosion of Village life, yawn, yawn. The drift to the right, the rediscovery of patriotism, the gruesome maturity of the once iconoclastic Norman Podhoretz, okay, ! I have one question which Atlas in his much-ballyhooed article did not even discuss. The old gang may have had regrettable flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged 'neo-conservative' movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the can be found in unforced alliance with openly obscurantist, fundamentalist and above all anti-intellectual forces. In the old days, there would at least have been a debate on the proprieties of such a united front, with many fine distinctions made and brave attitudes struck. As I write, nearness to power seems the only excuse, and the subject is changed as soon it is raised. I wait for the agonised, self-justifying neo-conservative essay about necessary and contingent alliances. Do I linger in vain? anti-intellectualism anti-semitism authoritarianism commentary-magazine debate delmore-schwartz dwight-macdonald james-atlas jeane-kirkpatrick leon-trotsky neoconservativism new-criterion new-york-times norman-podhoretz obscurantism partisan-review ts-eliot right-wing-politics george-orwell manhattan intellectuals fundamentalism patriotism power jews communism cold-war new-york Christopher Hitchens
d90fcc7 It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him--the winning of a democratic election. time history truth crisis british-empire conservative-party-uk elections imperialism soviet-union united-states winston-churchill power britain democracy russia cold-war Christopher Hitchens
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