No problem criticizing Vidal -- the point was the disingenuousness of trying to associate the mentioned viewpoints as somehow as decrepit as Vidal is said to be. Reason gets bled into rhetoric.
Again, looking at it from my POV, the ideological reversal isn't at all "curious". That's my point, and why the article is oxymoronic. These guys, including their former selves as Trotskyites and the present flip-flopping Hitchins, are simply seduced into a new version of their old ways, namely big-government, intervening everywhere for such good and righteously ideological reasons.
It is only the reasons that change -- the intervention doesn't...
You may ask yourself, "why do these intellectuals on the right and left so vigorously debate such things as where big gov't sticks its nose?".
The answer: because that's where the money and power is. Hitchins is the same as the rest.
I laughed out loud hearing Hitchins remarks on "Tough Crowd" last week when asked where he stayed and how he lived when visiting Bahgdad recently. "Oh, with the 101st Airborne, in one of the Palaces". Here's a guy who knows where the money is, and all his previous socialism-should-rule-the-world arguments are now intervention-and-occupy arguments.
Great effort is expended by people such as Hitchins and Buruma, in making as complex as possible the simpler facts of the arrogance of "wannabe power" among intellectuals.
Combined with the real power of the command-and-control predators in gov't, we're heading off the cliff into Armaggeddon, my friend.
I know you are defending Buruma's claim to be arguing about intervention vs non-intervention, but when you get into the details, its ALL interventionism, only arguing about which type.
Read the last two paragraphs again, and tell me if you still think otherwise.
IMO much better to have commonsense citizen politicians deciding policy. I often mention Dean, but as an example relevant here, he gets massive criticism for saying we should treat the ME "evenhandedly", a good example of the disconnect between politically-correct bankrupt Washingtonian intellecualism and reality. It's as if we are beholden now to Israel as "with Israel or with the terrorists", as if Israel can do no wrong, but more importantly, as if the US is entitled to, once again, intervene and has an obligation to be involved in blood feuds of other countries. |
