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e32d551 "[ :] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. 's thought was not taught in Germany; was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, , and were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms - the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome - if it's an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of , that says that he's doing God's work and executing God's will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making evolution science albert-einstein barbaric fascistic fuhrer mein-kampf superstitious separation-of-church-and-state einstein nazi charles-darwin sigmund-freud freud pope vatican nazism catholicism united-states hitler darwinism darwin fascism jewish germany Christopher Hitchens
56bf74f Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. big-lie post-factual post-truth reality-control donald-trump adolf-hitler totalitarianism fascism propaganda Hannah Arendt
b7409f2 When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship--though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved... enlightenment irony literature hate stupidity religion friendship humor love bastille demagogy fatwa first-amendment satanic-verses washington-post united-states-constitution george-hw-bush iran khomeini theocracy intimidation dictatorship united-states rushdie individualism fascism principles bullying free-speech censorship Christopher Hitchens
ac95d48 "The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill." politics plutocracy right-wing-politics fascism Sinclair Lewis
ad4d40f The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies. laws fascism John Lescroart
643ade0 "Are you a communist?" "No I am an anti-fascist" "For a long time?" "Since I have understood fascism." war spain fascism communism Ernest Hemingway
e2d4922 "1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger's undisclosed reason for the 'tilt' was the supposed but never materialised 'brokerage' offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was 'a basket case' before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA's plan to kidnap and murder General Rene Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger's urging and with American financing, just between Allende's election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him 'Doctor' is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion--'I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible'--suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger's, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. 'Spare me the civics lecture,' replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with 'deniable' assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The of the day was: 'foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.' Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. war india murder morality politics 1971-bangladesh-atrocities 1972-nixon-visit-to-china 1973-chilean-coup-d-etat 1974 1975 bangladesh bangladesh-liberation-war chile china-pakistan-relations doctors-of-philosophy east-timor ecclesiastical-coup foreign-policy-of-the-us greek-cypriots indo-pakistani-war-of-1971 indonesia indonesian-national-armed-forces israeli-lebanese-conflict jakarta junta kurdish-iraqi-conflict lebanon military-of-chile mohammad-reza-pahlavi monroe-leigh news-leaks pakistan-united-states-relations portugual portuguese-empire rene-schneider richard-nixon salvador-allende schneider-doctrine second-kurdish-iraqi-war shah sino-american-relations slaughter thomas-d-boyatt yahya-khan central-intelligence-agency iran makarios-iii international-law athens henry-kissinger turkish-invasion-of-cyprus turkey partition foreign-policy missionaries war-crimes coup-d-état walter-isaacson kurdistan marxism iran-iraq-war iraqi-kurdistan kurdish-people iraq pakistan saddam-hussein cyprus united-states doctors civil-war fascism assassination democracy diplomacy israel china greece refugees Christopher Hitchens
b679947 I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history. history religion argentina british-jews expansionism french-jews haifa israelis hebron zionism law-of-return jewish-diaspora gentiles israeli-palestinian-conflict nuclear-weapons united-states atheism fascism antisemitism britain colonialism france israel jews palestine Christopher Hitchens
711fa7b Like the Nazis, the cadres of jihad have a death wish that sets the seal on their nihilism. The goal of a world run by an oligarchy in possession of Teutonic genes, who may kill or enslave other 'races' according to need, is not more unrealizable than the idea that a single state, let alone the globe itself, could be governed according to the dictates of an allegedly holy book. This mad scheme begins by denying itself the talents (and the rights) of half the population, views with superstitious horror the charging of interest, and invokes the right of Muslims to subject nonbelievers to special taxes and confiscations. Not even Afghanistan or Somalia, scenes of the furthest advances yet made by pro-caliphate forces, could be governed for long in this way without setting new standards for beggary and decline. racism islamic-banking somalia caliphate death-of-osama-bin-laden nazis theocracy nihilism osama-bin-laden jihad nazism fascism islam Christopher Hitchens
84f5b26 Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always--and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject--what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming--I want to say 'unsettling'--precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then--belatedly you may say--to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not be a moral or ethical action. andalusia ariel-sharon azmi-bishara bosnia-and-herzegovina caliphate chemical-weapons fatah halabja halabja-poison-gas-attack israelis knesset leftists politics-of-israel takbir gaza national-security iran henry-kissinger balkans hamas plo noam-chomsky catholics war-crimes theocracy bosnian-war oil kosovo kosovo-war bill-clinton christians muslims baath-party saddam-hussein nazism edward-said spain imperialism united-states fascism islam islamism propaganda antisemitism fanaticism israel palestinians religious-extremism cia Christopher Hitchens
b906f72 Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And--how many of us do know it? future psychosis german totalitarianism nazism government fascism power Philip K. Dick
2b9935e The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. dictatorship fascism rules Christopher Hitchens
3bd5c63 " While anarchy can often turn a humdrum weekend into something unforgettable, eventually the mob must be kept from . And while it would be nice if that "something" was simple human decency, anybody who has witnessed the "50% Off Wedding Dress Sale" at Filene's Basement knows we need a backup plan--preferably in writing. On the other hand, too many laws can result in outright tyranny, particularly if one of those laws is " ." Somewhere between these two extremes lies the legislative sweet-spot that produces just the right amount of laws for a well-adjusted society--more than zero, less than fascism." legislature anarchy congress fascism Jon Stewart
6abd487 When I was a schoolboy in England, the old bound volumes of Kipling in the library had gilt swastikas embossed on their covers. The symbol's 'hooks' were left-handed, as opposed to the right-handed ones of the Nazi , but for a boy growing up after 1945 the shock of encountering the emblem at all was a memorable one. I later learned that in the mid-1930s Kipling had caused this 'signature' to be removed from all his future editions. Having initially sympathized with some of the early European fascist movements, he wanted to express his repudiation of Hitlerism (or 'the Hun,' as he would perhaps have preferred to say), and wanted no part in tainting the ancient Indian rune by association. In its origin it is a Hindu and Jainas symbol for light, and well worth rescuing. 1945 adolf-hitler fascism-in-europe swastikas rudyard-kipling hinduism symbols nazis world-war-ii england fascism europe school Christopher Hitchens
c20c6d7 For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart's desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never--and I say so not with pride but with shame--has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths. fascism vienna Stefan Zweig
462f9cd Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal. beauty art fascism Louis de Bernières
2800aa0 As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street. mass-murder death-of-osama-bin-laden obituary osama-bin-laden september-11-attacks fascism Christopher Hitchens
0e9cebc Censorship is the child of fear the father of ignorance and the desperate weapon of fascists everywhere. fear fascism ignorance Laurie Halse Anderson
4dcb552 So, whenever the subject of Iraq came up, as it did keep on doing through the Clinton years, I had no excuse for not knowing the following things: I knew that its one-party, one-leader state machine was modeled on the precedents of both National Socialism and Stalinism, to say nothing of Al Capone. I knew that its police force was searching for psychopathic killers and sadistic serial murderers, not in order to arrest them but to them. I knew that its vast patrimony of oil wealth, far from being 'nationalized,' had been privatized for the use of one family, and was being squandered on hideous ostentation at home and militarism abroad. (Post-Kuwait inspections by the United Nations had uncovered a huge nuclear-reactor site that had not even been known about by the international community.) I had seen with my own eyes the evidence of a serious breach of the Genocide Convention on Iraqi soil, and I had also seen with my own eyes the evidence that it had been carried out in part with the use of weapons of mass destruction. I was, if you like, the prisoner of this knowledge. I certainly did not have the option of un-knowing it. ba-athist-iraq crime-family genocide-convention nationalisation nuclear-reactor-technology privatisation wmd national-socialism militarism psychopaths serial-killers genocide oil bill-clinton ba-ath-party invasion-of-kuwait iraq kuwait united-nations iraq-war stalinism fascism Christopher Hitchens
d9ccef5 There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don't much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world--or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world--I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk. christianity christendom intermarriages jewish-question law-of-return leo-strauss mosaic-law nuremberg-laws victor-klemperer exile religious-conversions civilisation christians israeli-palestinian-conflict muslims atheism fascism honour islam redemption ancestry antisemitism israel jerusalem Christopher Hitchens
cce4ac1 "[Free trade agreements] are trade agreements that don't socialism politics brilliant bush corporatocracy coup-d-état democratic dictator free-trade gore green-party inefficiency lincoln nader reform protectionism ralph-nader transparency intelligent washington progressive corporations terrorism corruption rich obama genius jefferson government fascism capitalism communism Ralph Nader
1cea2db "He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as "Wotan's Mickey Mouse." politics plutocracy liberal right-wing-politics fascism Sinclair Lewis
5cd976f NASSER: In this damn country that we hate and love, you can get anything you want. It's all spread out and availble. That's why I believe in England. You just have to know how to squeeze the tits of the system. tits system immigrant england fascism Hanif Kureishi
be4faff Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication. politics friendship al-quaeda lrb muslims paul-wolfowitz pogroms quarrel september-11-attacks edward-said united-states fascism arabs Christopher Hitchens
95cdb48 The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely. fascism utopia Norman Davies
1527041 For all its outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset, so I did take that trip to the great plains where the epics had been written, and I did manage to eat a couple of the famous : the Argentine barbecue fiesta (once summarized by Martin Amis's John Self as 'a sort of triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks') with its slavish propitiation of the sizzling gods of cholesterol. Yet even this was spoiled for me: my hosts did their own slaughtering and the smell of drying blood from the abattoir became too much for some reason (I actually went 'off' steak for a good few years after this trip). Then from the intrepid Robert Cox of the I learned another jaunty fascist colloquialism: before the South Atlantic dumping method was adopted, the secret cremation of maimed and tortured bodies at the Navy School had been called an . In my youth I was quite often accused, and perhaps not unfairly, of being too politicized and of trying to import politics into all discussions. I would reply that it wasn't my fault if politics kept on invading the private sphere and, in the case of Argentina at any rate, I think I was right. The miasma of the dictatorship pervaded absolutely everything, not excluding the aperitifs and the main course. politics asado dictatorship fascism Christopher Hitchens
4b4a59f I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francisco Franco. His car blew up, killing only him and his chauffeur with a carefully planted charge, and not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco's rule was vaporized in the same instant. The dictator had to turn instead to Crown Prince Juan Carlos, who turned out to be the best Bourbon in history and who swiftly dismantled Franco's entire system. If this action was 'terrorism,' it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high. 1973 basque-people dictatorship eta francisco-franco house-of-bourbon juan-carlos-i-of-spain luis-carrero-blanco terrorism spain fascism assassination Christopher Hitchens
57abcd4 There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation'). hitler fascism Russell Shorto
68e2e02 "He feels that most high-placed Nazis are refusing to face facts vis-a-vis their economic plight. By doing so, they accelerate the tendency toward greater adventures, less predictability, less stability in general. The cycle of manic enthusiasm, then fear, then Partei solutions of a desperate type--well, the point he got across was that all this tends to bring the most irresponsible and reckless aspirants to the top." Mr. Tagomi nodded. "So we must presume that the worst, rather than the best, choice will be made. The sober and responsible elements will be defeated in the present clash." megalomania totalitarianism fascism Philip K. Dick
35c7689 "Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!" "Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen." "The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?... Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting down people just because they be transporting liquor--no, that couldn't happen in ! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!" dictatorships us united-states-of-america usa fascism democracy hysterics Sinclair Lewis
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