Every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something

 -- Christopher Hitchens, in

Fire in a Crowded Theatre 

. . . from David Irving’s edition of the Goebbels Diaries . . . I learned more about the Third Reich than I had from studying Hugh Trevor­ Roper and A. J. B. Taylor combined when I was at Oxford.

 

Denise Spellberg is making much of a young Thomas Jefferson's tolerant views of Islam at the expense of the older's war on it

Here:

As a 22-year-old law student in Williamsburg, Virginia, Jefferson bought a Qur’an – 11 years before drafting the Declaration of Independence. The purchase is symbolic of a longer historical connection between American and Islamic worlds, and a more inclusive view of the nation’s early, robust view of religious pluralism.

An older, wiser Jefferson, along with Madison, realized peace was better than war, but that war was better than paying tribute to Muslim pirates in exchange for it, something America ignobly did for fifteen years between 1785 and 1800.

Christopher Hitchens and David Hunter are better guides, here and here.  

The British Knee Is On The March!

“It’s quite impossible that the man who had invented Sir Roderick Spode in 1938 was prey to any covert sympathy for fascism.”

-- Christopher Hitchens on P.G. Wodehouse, quoted here

The Hitch on G.K. Chesterton as Fascist Fellow Traveler

Seen here:

"[Chesterton's] idea of a body [the Roman Catholic Church] that actually did all the official thinking was probably not unrelated to the Mussolini concept of the corporate state. This would be repulsive to the English and American tradition."

Only until FDR, of course, who paved the way in America for the acceptance of the concept of the president as the blended strong man, as described in the memoirs of President Herbert Hoover.

In Spengler's phrase: "There is no contradiction between economic liberalism and socialism."

Can there be any other explanation for the three year somnolence of the 30 million strong Catholic Church in America while a ne'er-do-well poseur attempts to overthrow the country? Roman Catholics are incapable of recognizing tyranny, let alone stopping it, since they actually identify with a divine one. In fact, until recently Obama's social program and Catholics' have been virtually indistinguishable. Which is rather the point of Hitchen's critique of religion, and its heaven as the "Celestial North Korea."

Like many religious groups in America, Catholicism represents a country within the country and is only the most recent but vivid example of our continuing Balkanization and inevitable dissolution as one nation under the Protestant God.

The wall separating church and state in America was not built by Rome.

The Economy is NOT Improving: 3rd Estimate of Real GDP Falls to 1.8 Percent from 2.0 for Q3 2011

What a joke the news is today. GDP is revised down and all you hear on the news is Ho! Ho! Ho!

Q2 GDP was 1.3 percent, and Q1 0.4 percent, for an average growth rate in 2011 so far of barely 1.0 percent.

One percent. From 1930 to 2000 growth averaged 3.5 percent a year. That's the normal America, and it isn't anywhere in sight and hasn't been in over a decade.

If the economy were improving truly, GDP would be much in excess of 2.5 percent, the minimum growth needed to accomodate just the natural growth of the population. The last time we had such growth ended a year ago September, spurious as it was, consisting primarily of parasitical spending by government. It wasn't even tax money the government spent. It was borrowed money. For all that, 2010 growth overall was merely 3.0 percent, in 2009 -3.5 percent, in 2008 -0.3 percent.

The personal savings rate since September 2010 has fallen 30 percent.

The ratio of the number employed to the size of the population has fallen back dramatically to levels last seen in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The growth in employment in the post-war period has stalled with the stall in GDP:

Household net worth has fallen 12 percent since 2006, 85 percent of that from the housing collapse.

Without jobs there is no growth in the savings which form the foundation of housing wealth. Without housing wealth there is no middle class which consumes the products whose aggregate value comprises 70 percent of GDP. And hence no advance in GDP.

A rich man can smoke only so many cigars, a Christopher Hitchens only so many Rothmans.

Data here and here from The Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Or Else Tyranny Wins

From Aaron MacLean here:

If one wanted to be unkind to Hitchens, a claim could be made that, as a natural belligerent and contrarian, he was in the end drawn naturally to soldiers, whose aggressiveness and courage he admired. Less generous formulations of this argument can be encountered among his critics, but all versions of it are essentially false. It wasn’t so much the fighting which was the point, as the fact that there was so much for a free man​—​if he wanted to deserve the name​—​to fight against. If -others were unwilling to challenge the slavemasters of the world; well, then, as with Orwell before him, the willing slaves could come in for some rough treatment, too. 

I remember that at our first meeting, a lunch in Dupont Circle shared while I was still a student, an old man came over to our table and hoarsely exclaimed the motto of the Greek Cypriot struggle: “eleftheria i thanatos”​—​freedom or death. (It isn’t every day .  .  . ) In the end, Hitchens went to war with death itself. Not just by means of his treatment​—​a delaying action which was destined to fail in the end​—​but, characteristically, by going to war in print with the sentimentality and dishonest fluff that attaches to the fact of death. Practicing his craft in a condition in which most of us would be content merely to continue breathing, he went on shattering icons and offending pieties even from his hospital room: a free man, telling the truth about one final tyrant.

Religion exists because some men are unwilling to bow even in death.

Kim Jong Mentally Ill Leaves Terrestrial for Celestial North Korea, Meets Christopher Hitchens!

The Associated Press announces tonight, tonight!, that Kim Jong Il has died.

What a week for Christopher Hitchens. The Iraq war ends, he dies, and now he's stuck with a dwarf playboy, forever.

Kim Jong Il supposedly died of heart failure at the age of 69 on a train.

Hitch: A Stalinist to the End . . .

. . . at least in the mind of George Eaton, in the New Statesman:

In his boisterous advocacy of the [Iraq] war there was more than a hint of the Marxist belief in the necessity of violence in order for history to progress. As Stalin once grimly phrased it, "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."

A shoddy little slam on a dead follower of Trotsky who can no longer defend himself if you ask me.

I'm With Hitch: Secret Scripts and 3D Glasses are Kooky and I Don't Want a President Who Believes In Them

If Rick Perry had any brains, he'd have said as much:

[W]e are fully entitled to ask Mitt Romney about the forces that influenced his political formation and—since he comes from a dynasty of his church, and spent much of his boyhood and manhood first as a missionary and then as a senior lay official—it is safe to assume that the influence is not small. Unless he is to succeed in his dreary plan to borrow from the playbook of his pain-in-the-ass predecessor Michael Dukakis, and make this an election about "competence not ideology," he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil.

Read the whole thing here from Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens: You Can Take the Liberalism out of the Brain Dead Liberal . . .

. . . but he'll still be brain dead.

"From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise."

In the New York Times, here.

And for someone who has concluded that the founders were playing swine off against each other in writing the constitution in the way that they did, the absence of the discussion of Attic tragedy is doubly disappointing.

A hole in his education, and that of his Republican rabbi, perhaps. No one knows everything, not even Hitch. Tragedy at 11.