Friday, August 04, 2006

A Letter to Christopher Hitchens

In the May 2006 issue of The Atlantic Christopher Hitchens writes a fairly standard Hitchens review of Peter Beinart's The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. At points ascerbic and smart, the review nonetheless veers off into territory where Hitch is either uninformed or simply obtuse. I wrote a letter in response, but it has been three months and obviously has been discarded into the bin, but I wanted to share that letter, because someone needed to address a couple of shortcomings in the review:


To the Editors:

Christopher Hitchens makes at least two significant errors of interpretation or fact in his review of Peter Beinart’s new book The Good Fight. (“Blood for No Oil!” May 2006).

First, he writes, “Beinart gives due credit to the unjustly forgotten Bayard Rustin, who was perhaps the true genius of the civil-rights and democratic socialist movements . . .” One might quibble with the very idea of there being one “true genius” in a movement that was both vast and for the most part locally driven by many folks, geniuses or otherwise. And it is well and true that Rustin deserves a great deal more credit than the general public has granted him in the past. But since he is addressing a reading audience that is arguably more engaged than average, one has to ask about his peculiarly constructed passive voice assertion: Overlooked by whom? Hitchens implies that Beinart rescues Rustin from obscurity. Perhaps someone ought to tell Mr. Hitchens about recent Rustin biographies that have antedated Beinart’s (and by extension Hitchens’?) supposed discovery: John D’Emilio’s 2003 Lost Prophet (from the less-than obscure University of Chicago Press) or Daniel Levine’s 2000 Bayard Rustin and the Civil Rights Movement (Rutgers). Going back only slightly farther, in 1997 Harper Collins published Jervis Anderson’s biography of Rustin. (That same year James Haskins even published a children’s book about Rustin.) If the public has forgotten Rustin, it seems clear that those who have made the greatest effort to bring his memory back to the fore deserve recognition.

The second, and to my mind more problematic assertion comes when Hitchens writes: “The other great argument of the time – over the imposition of sanctions on South Africa – gave the Left the moral high ground for a year or two, but was eventually co-opted by Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as well.” This assertion is flabbergasting in its fundamental erroneousness. “The Left”,” whatever that is, had been calling for sanctions not for “a year or two,” but rather for decades. The American Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) extended back to the end of the Second World War, with the first serious calls for sanctions emerging in the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in March 1960. Leaders of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), including Martin Luther King, Jr., very clearly called for sanctions in April 1960 and on many occasions thereafter. These calls only accelerated in the decades ("year or two”!) that followed. As for whether President Reagan “co-opted” the calls for sanctions? On September 25, 1986 Reagan vetoed the Dellums Bill (the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986) in keeping with his administration’s policy of Constructive Engagement, the architect of which was Undersecretary of State Chester Crocker, who to this day defends his policies. When the Senate (majority Republican, but the anti-Apartheid legislation was Democratic at the core) overrode Reagan’s veto on October 2 it not only marked Reagan’s most serious foreign policy defeat, it also marked the first time Congress had overridden one of his vetoes. Admittedly, In 1985 the Reagan administration had tried to appease his South Africa critics by passing an Executive Order restricting some computer sales to South Africa, an action that met with derision, and rightfully so. Co-opted indeed.

If forced to be honest with ourselves, most of us enjoy a good eviscerating book review more than the run of the mill assessment full of praise and encomia. But the burden on the acidic reviewer is higher – he needs to have his facts right and his interpretations screwed on straight. Hitchens’ snarky review fails these tests because Hitchens oversteps his bounds. He writes about what he does not know, presents misinformation as facts, and then uses this disinformation to smear Beinart for transgressions real and imagined.

I was sort of hoping for Hitchens to come back with one of his patented retorts. I suppose there is little chance that he reads dcat.

8 comments:

Unknown said...
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dcat said...

Abhinav --
Wow. Very, very prsumptuous of you. Clean sheet? Why don't you ask any of my colleagues from my time as a fellow at then Foundation for the Defense of Democracies about that clean sheet? Why don't you ask them in how many meetings did I raise that very same issue, to point out that while I think the "apartheid" analogy is unfair it is a fact that Israel did support apartheid South Africa. Why don't you ask them about the South-African -born Israeli General whom I asked that question point blank? Why don't you ask about the meetring we had with another Israeli official where I asked the question three times and never received a satisfactory answer?
Who is "forgetting" anything, and who is giving them a "clean sheet"? Is every blog post really supposed to be a comprehensive treatment of every subject? In fact, to mention Israel in the context of the letter that I wrote would have been idiotic -- Hitchens' article had nothing to do with Israel. So let's see -- Abhinav is gently taking me to task for omissions that in fact I have addressed at other forums in the past, and for not addressing an absolutely irrelevant question in the context of this post. This is an accusation that is breathtaking in its obtuseness and in its cluelessness.

Unknown said...
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dcat said...

Instaed of fuming? Your comment was an accusation, Abhinav. Why feign being the wounded naif? You accused me of being derelict by not dealing with irrelevencies in the context of the gist of the post, which itself was a letter in response to Hitchens.
Of course Israel does not have clean hands. But my post had nothing to do with Israel. I cannot help but notice that your comment did not mention taiwan, which also supported apartheid South Africa. And on and on and on.
So if I was "fuming" it was in response to your petty little attempt at gotcha journalism. Don't ask a question loaded with implications and then act shocked when those implications are blown out of the water!

dcat

Unknown said...
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dcat said...

Abhinav --
I agree with you 100% on Israel and the Reagan Admin's role in South Africa in the 1980s.
But here is the thing -- Israel will never have to confront its "racial" (a more problematic word than most realize in the context of Israel) issues, which are very real, as long as it is threatened from without by terrorists and their allies and states that want to see it destroyed. If we care about, say, the plight of Arab-Israelis, we are never going to see that status improved as long as Israel can plausibly claim to be under siege. Israel will never have to prioritize these issues, and thus those who claim to speak for minorities in Israel do those minorities no favors by rationalizing or justifying terror.

Israel is not a state of Angels. And I don't buy chosen people claims by anyone. But Israel is more right than wrong on how it deals with terrorism, and so until that becomes a nonissue, Israel will always be able to defer, defer, defer. No one wins in that situation, but on the priority issue Israel cannot afford to lose. In a sense, one can blame Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah for the lack of progress on civil rights issues in Tel Aviv.

dcat

Unknown said...
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dcat said...

Abhinav --
While I tend to be very wary of blame the US news from the Middle East, I will say that this administration has burned an awful lot of bridges. Some were inevitable and probably even needed to be burned. But it seems to me that an administration that not only does not seem to prize diplomacy, but at times ultimately derides it, is going to find itself blamed, fairly or not, for a lot of problems in the world.

dcat