America, land of the planters

A 1914 painting of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony

I use the title ironically, since for zealous Irish republicans "planter" is the epithet and pejorative of choice for the unpersuadable and defiant unionists in Ireland. Yet, if Ireland's protestants are planters, what of America's white christians?

Christopher Hitchens said in a TV debate:

"It goes back as I said to the initial beginnings of Islamic fundamentalism. The first attack on this country was in 1788 by Muslims who said that, "The koran gives us the right to punish and enslave infidels.” That is Bin Laden’s ideology. Bin Laden wants the restoration of the Caliphate. The Caliphate is an empire, he’s pro-empire, not anti-imperialist… He’s for the banning of all music, all books, all philosophy. And this because he cares about the Palestinians? Any one who believes this is a fool."

Christopher Hitchens on Northern Ireland, Ctd

A generation of journalists cut their teeth in Northern Ireland covering the Troubles: Robert Fisk, Max Hastings, Jeremy Paxman, John Simpson and Kevin Myers. You can add Christopher Hitchens to that incomplete list.

Being a Protestant atheist

Martin Luther, theologian (1483–1546)

I'm a Protestant atheist, a cultural Calvinist. The Reformation brought to the world the Protestant faith and the Protestant culture of individual autonomy, enterprise, trade and self-direction. Being a Protestant and an atheist is not an oxymoron. 

Christopher Hitchens said, "I'm a Protestant atheist." Gore Vidal said:

"I am an atheist but I am powerfully influenced by the protestantism with which I was brought up. We must bear witness to what we do and to what the nation does."

Why we need to know Sayyid Qutb

There is no such thing as the End of History or the inevitable ascent of man and liberal democracy. Ideas are in sempiternal competition and anyone can win out and dominate, but there is no such thing as hegemonic finality. Triumph and Disaster are two impostors just the same. People make a particular fetish out of claiming their generation as particularly afflicted, and of their epoch of especially violent and unstable. W.B. Yeats wrote about "the growing murderousness of the world." Those words apply today; proving that history teaches us we learn nothing from history; and that madness and murderousness is inevitable and unavoidable. All we need to ensure is that good men do not do nothing.

Being of planter stock

British planter in Jamaica, by George Spratt

John Hewitt, of "planter stock", wrote he was 'As native in my thought as any here.' Belfast poet and son of a British soldier, Michael Longley said that Hewitt's verse taught people not to be embarrassed or ashamed of their connection to colonialism. It's not something I was conscious of growing up. I was always Irish and British, I watched the BBC and lived on the island of Ireland.

Christopher Hitchens on partition

W.H. Auden

W. H. Auden wrote, "Two peoples fanatically at odds, With their different diets and incompatible gods." Marya Mannes wrote in 1959 

"Borders are scratched across the 
hearts of men

By strangers with a calm, judicial 
pen,

And when the borders bleed we 
watch with dread

The lines of ink across the map 
turn red."

The vanity and narcissism of the small difference in Ireland

Thomas Nast, ‘St. Patrick's Day, 1867--'The day we celebrate.'’ Harper's Weekly, April 6, 1867.

[UPDATE - Interesting and relevant comments from David Trimble and Daniel Hannan here and here.]

Tomorrow the world will celebrate Saint Patrick's day. Tomorrow the Irish in the troubled Northern region will continue to celebrate and cherish the minutiae that divides them. John Hewitt, Ulster protestant and Irishman, wrote:

‘St Patrick’s Eve,The country came to wake him, men and boysSmoking round the hearth’

Christopher Hitchens - "Islamic fundamentalism is not created by American democracy"

Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens wrote in 2001 in The Nation magazine, 'Against Rationalization', a counter to Chomsky and the Left, who, in response to 9/11, suggested that the attacks against America were the causal effect of American action in the Middle East. He said:

"I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft."

For Christopher Hitchens, islamic grievance long pre-dates the Blair-Bush intervention. He said:

Politics is division by definition. Polarisation is what clarifies things.

Israel Shahak, Jewish critic of Israel and long friend of Christopher Hitchens

Sometimes you have to repeat it: politics is division by definition. You could forget it in the fog of media coverage pleading for unity and collaborative decision making. This is not what politics is about. George Eaton wrote in the News Statesman in 2010:

"In a culture where consensus and bipartisanship were viewed as unqualified goods, Hitchens stood out as a contrarian (a term that he perhaps unsurprisingly rejects) prepared to challenge the orthodoxies of both left and right."

Christopher Hitchens said during a 1993 panel discussion:

Christopher Hitchens' regret - Not writing more to people

Christopher Hitchens by Martin Rowson

The combative and confrontational Christopher Hitchens died of cancer in 2011. In 2010 he spoke with Jeremy Paxman, reflecting on his past and politics. At the end he shared a regret: 

"In case you are watching this anybody, and you ever wonder whether to write to any one, always do, because you’d be surprised by much of difference it can make. Here’s a regret: I regret not doing it more often myself." 

"Tout Est Pardonné" - The Charlie Hebdo front cover and Christopher Hitchens on cartooning the prophet

In 2006 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and the people of Denmark were subjected to a coordinated campaign of intimidation, sabotage and murder following the publication earlier in 2005 of the image of the prophet of Muhammed. Christopher Hitchens wrote in response, ‘The case for mocking religion’:

"There is a strong case for saying that the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and those who have reprinted its efforts out of solidarity, are affirming the right to criticize not merely Islam but religion in general."

The eloquence of Oscar Wilde

A cartoon of Oscar Wilde at the end of his visit to America in 1882, The Judge magazine.

[UPDATE - Martin Amis on the perfect paragraph rhetoric of Hitchens here and below]

Christopher Hitchens was a man of inimitable intellect and staggering, effortless eloquence. I've often pondered how he possessed such mastery and control of the language and rhetorical flair. I feel that James Joyce, speaking to Vanity Fair in Paris in 1922, gives a hint:

"All the great talkers have spoken in the language of Sterne, Swift, or the Restoration. Even Oscar Wilde. He studied the restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening."

Irish Americans looked and sounded like Orangemen



Cartoon of Bernadette Devlin by Aislin (Terry Mosher)

The words in title are the words of Bernadette Devlin, the youngest person ever to be elected to Westminster, and the figure in the cartoon. You can read her Maiden Speech in the Commons, April 22 1969, here. On her rise to the London parliament and prolific profile her face was seen around the world and she travelled widely, including to America. She was the figurehead of Ireland's discriminated-against and the disposed and had the sympathies of Irish-Americans. A hearing from Irish-America was as natural so as to breath, since animosity based on "England's historic wrongs" were closely and long held. As the Spectator wrote in 1882:

"The hatred of England is cultivated by the American branch of the Irish race “as a sort of religion,” we can well believe. The history of the last two or three years shows it to be so."

The anti-Columbus movement, Ctd

Michael Ramirez cartoon of Paul Krugman, arch-opponent of Niall Ferguson

The self-described classic Scottish enlightenment liberal, Niall Ferguson said:

"I think it’s hard to make the case, which implicitly the left makes, that somehow the world would have been better off if the Europeans had stayed home. It certainly doesn’t work for north America, that’s for sure. I mean, I’m sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison. But had they been left to their own devices, I don’t think we’d have anything remotely resembling the civilisation we’ve had in north America."

He also talks about the moral simplification urge here. Christopher Hitchens discussed the progresses versus retrogresses of imperialism. He looked at the Marxian analysis which saw British imperialism as ending the "Millennial stagnation and isolation of India." And said, "if you have to be colonised, don’t be colonised by the Belgians."

Christopher Hitchens in response to Noam Chomsky who is charged by Hitchens of saying that America was not a good idea. Hitchens also notes the change of name from Jefferson elementary to Sequoia.

Christopher Hitchens on militant Islam's "Imperial nostalgia as well as imperialism". George Orwell said:

"Instead of taking the mechanically anti-British attitude which is usual on the Left, it is better to consider what the world would really be like if the English-speaking culture perished. For it is childish to suppose that the other English-speaking countries, even the U.S.A., will be unaffected if Britain is conquered."

You can read Niall Fergsuon with some thoughts on what Britain did for Ireland here and Roy Foster on the positive aspects of Britain in Ireland here. My previous posts in this series here and here.

Christopher Hitchens on the Falklands War

A cartoon by Ralph Steadman of Margaret Thatcher being haunted by the ARA General Belgrano

The cartoon is by Ralph Steadman of Margaret Thatcher being haunted by the ARA General Belgrano, an Argentine cruiser leaving the British Declared Exclusion Zone that was ordered to be sunk under her instructions.

In all the polarisation around Thatcher and controvery about the Falklands War, Christopher Hitchens brings some clarity. He held that line that he could not agree more with Thatcher and her position on the Falklands War. Hitchens shared his position on the Falklands War in a conversation with Salman Rushdie, where he said:

Colm Tóibín on his daily routine and the cult of Law School

Colm Tóibín's explained his daily routine to the Irish Times: 


"Breakfast? No! None of that eating rubbish. You get down with an empty stomach. So you create this system of rewards – if you do this, you can have that. Otherwise you’d never get any work done… I take an hour off and work for an hour. And I work until late, six days a week. The other general rule is, no lunch with anybody. That’s an awful waste of time. And I would never drink in the day. Ever."

Shane Smith - The media and establishment is inherently conservative

In 1993 Christopher Hitchens said, "there is one party - that is a beltway party, a Washington party, a permanent party, the party of those in power and most of those in the leadership of the Washington equipe of which the press are members of it and proud of it and lucky and afraid of the possibility of falling out of favour." Shane Smith also speaks critically of the US politico-media establishment. He said:

Comparison and self-doubt are the thief of creativity

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that "comparison is the thief of joy." Comparison is also the thief of production and creativity. It is deadly and antithetical to the artist, the creator and the creative process. Philip Larkin said to the Paris Review:

"Everyone envies everyone else."

He also wrote a poem, 'On Being Twenty-Six':

"I feared these present years, 
The middle twenties, 
When deftness disappears, 
And each event is 
Freighted with a source-encrusting doubt, 
And turned to drought."

Quentin Blake said: "As soon as I knew something was intended for print, I tightened up."

Hitchens wrote, embrace the doubt and comparison:

"The main thing as I keep saying, I never tire of saying is, to keep testing yourself against other writers who are better than you. That’s what qualifies one as a writer I think, permanently running the risk of having to say I don’t know why I bother."

He elaborated on this:

"[With George Orwell] you don’t get the sense for example when you’re reading Proust or Nebokhov or George Eliot that you shouldn’t be in the writing business."

Christopher Hitchens - We are in need of a renewed Enlightenment

Benjamin Frankling, a pillar of the American Englightenment, by Gerald Scarfe, here

Christopher Hitchens said:

"Above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone."

Jenni Russell (@jennirsl) wrote that there's nothing inevitable about the victory of enlightenment values. In an earlier post I wrote that Christopher Hitchens said that enlightenment principles need to be fought for and defended by every generation. Scottish historian Niall Ferguson (@nfergus) noted that "the greatest thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were not nationalists but cosmopolitans".

In Northern Ireland, where tribal acrimony and antipathy govern all levels of public discourse these principles are exceptionally necessary. We need to move away from what David Hume called "the vulgar motive of national antipathy."

In a Letter to Lafayette Monticello in May 1817, Thomas Jefferson said:

"Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government."

I earlier wrote that we could say that sectarians are mentally and morally unwell. And so as Christopher Hitchens said, "condemnation of bigotry and superstition is not just a moral question but a matter of survival."

The protocol, convention and etiquette for public figure deaths

Scanlan's Monthly cover by Ralph Steadman of Richard Nixon getting punched

When a prominent public figure dies we are guaranteed a steam train of piety and praise. The media will compliment where compliment is due, this is right, but it is wrong for the media to allow any public figure eulogy to go unchecked. There must be a recognition, public airing, examination and learning from the bad, their wrongs and their mistakes, their misrule, misdeeds and misbehaviour. The deceased public figure is not untouchable, the deceased public figure is not a sacred cow; a unifying consensus of reverence does a disservice to the public and to posterity.

I will punch that sacred cow. Yet the establishment wont. Glenn Greenwald calls this The Protocol For Public Figure Deaths.  A convention and etiquette that outlaws honest criticism and imposes a vow of silence. In his obituary for Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Greenwald criticised both the convention of non-criticism and Hitchens himself,  saying here:

"The death this week of Christopher Hitchens and the remarkably undiluted, intense praise lavished on him by media discussions... Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writings but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent. 

Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda: 

I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch. And in addition to all this, he’s now revising what he said during the buildup to the Iraq war."

And so:

"Nobody should have to silently watch someone with this history be converted into some sort of universally beloved literary saint. To enshrine him as worthy of unalloyed admiration is to insist that these actions were either themselves commendable or, at worst, insignificant. Nobody who writes about politics for decades will be entirely free of serious error, but how serious the error is, whether it reflects on their character, and whether they came to regret it, are all vital parts of honestly describing and assessing their work. To demand its exclusion is an act of dishonesty.