« Johnny Come Lately | Main | Surreal »
Homo Homini Monstrum, Again
For the likes of Zarqawi, Hitchens' quip could hardly be better:
"Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting ... against the scum of the earth."
September 21, 2004 | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834205dc953ef00e55032c0908834
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Homo Homini Monstrum, Again:
Comments
Scum can't be wretched?
Posted by: Aaron at Sep 21, 2004 7:16:09 PM
Point taken - but any hair-splitting would've vitiated the rhetoric.
Posted by: Paul Craddick at Sep 21, 2004 9:40:14 PM
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the scum of the earth, but I'm afraid only a complete moral idiot would fail to notice that so are many members of the administration that Hitchens has been unwaveringly supporting for the last three years.
At any rate, there is a comforting elision in Hitchens' dessicated one-liner. Suppose "we" are now ranged against the majority of Iraqis who are indeed "the wretched of the earth"? Voluntarily or not, the 'coalition' is being drawn into a war against the majority of Iraqis, who simply wish they would leave. Only Hitchens, Bush and Blair continue to pretend that the resistance movement is hegemonised by "regime loyalists" and "foreign fighters".
Bush last night told the UN that those who used terror believed that suicide and murder were justifiable in the pursuit of their ends. Well, this murderous war has no proven to be, as Seymour Hersh has put it, "the original suicide mission". And when Bush offered the world a choice between supporting the continuing war in Iraq and allowing the risk of terrorism to spiral out of control, someone adviser should have whispered in his ear that this was a choice that no longer had to be made.
Posted by: lenin at Sep 22, 2004 12:15:54 AM
It is interesting how both sides squeeze propaganda points from the beheading of those poor guys. If we are indeed fighting the scum of the earth, as Hitchens says, then that they were kidnapped in broad daylight from an upper middle class neighborhood shows that we are doing a piss poor job of it.
I keep thinking of the thesis of an article I quoted on my site by Lisa Wedeen, Seeing Like a Citizen. It is a case study of a revolt in Yemen. The revolt was precipitated not by the State's uniform oppression, but by its non-uniform oppression -- the state was able to rid itself of college student radicals easily enough, but it couldn't pick up the garbage or arrest burglars.
This has obviously deteriorated the government we put in place in Iraq.
As for Hitchen's rhetoric -- sometimes, understatement is the best invective. Along with his credibility, he seems to have lost his eloquence. A pity. To call the torturers of those hostages 'scum of the earth' is petulance, not moral thundering. The scum, by the way, called Bush a dog. The shabby level of violence seems to be reflected in the level of rhetoric.
Posted by: roger at Sep 22, 2004 10:54:37 AM