Rene — Hitchens — A few words of fraternal admonition to "Norm" Finkelstein
Topic(s): Internal Affairs | Comments Off on Rene — Hitchens — A few words of fraternal admonition to "Norm" FinkelsteinA few words of fraternal admonition to “Norm” Finkelstein
which is a riposte to the essay on Finkelstein’s website
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/id138.htm
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editorial note:
rg: we posted the finkelstein article a few weeks ago, and after reading this, I thought it was an interesting rebuttal. Clearly Hitchens has not lost his sense of humor, nor his sharp wit; furthermore, this text shows a remarkable capacity to address points raised by Finkelstein, while at the same time dodging the larger question of his own intellectual/political turn. Of course, he likes to point out that to remain the same is more conservative than changing, but really, who can really follow that line of thinking when the change is in lock step with the most reactionary and conservative minded people in this country? What is also missing is a response to the larger question of what exactly prompts his repudiation of (if not his entire past, at the very least) his position and critiques against the US for intervening in Iraq in the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, worth a read.
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In his delightful memoir of his father, Alexander Cockburn recalls Claud’s method of dealing with unwelcome bills, and with the ominous red-tinted follow-up letters that often succeeded them. The old man composed a fantasy-response, informing his creditors that every six months he would throw all his unpaid bills into a basket, stir them with a stick, and then take out or two or three and pay them at random. “One more nasty letter from you and you’re out of the game.”
I could spend a lot of my time replying to attacks on my person, but I now play a version of the Cockburn roulette. (I don’t respond to assaults from the “Counterpunch”source at all: this is because I like Alexander and his family, and because I think there’s something satisfying in having him much more fascinated by my writing than I can any longer be by any of his.) Every now and then, though, kind friends hasten to send me a collector’s item of abuse and the recent one from the Norman Finkelstein website is a keeper. Out of the basket it comes.
It is headed “Fraternally yours, Chris”, which is supposedly the way that I “used to sign off” my correspondence. I very often still do end my letters with the old salutation of the British Labor movement, but it’s usually without the “yours” and I have never signed a letter “Chris” in my life – chiefly because it isn’t my name. I tried everything I knew to stop Norman calling me “Chris” but I couldn’t get him to desist. This is a detail, but it does indicate a man who – even his friends would agree on this – was a slightly more ardent talker than listener.
The essay is a study in apostasy and will apparently form part of a new introduction to Finkelstein’s book “The Rise and Fall of Palestine.” Since that’s a serious subject, I’m hoping that its publisher sees this in time and avoids the embarrassment of conflating Finkelstein’s ill-argued personal grudges with the fate of a struggling people.
My book “A Long Short War”, about the liberation of Iraq, is a fairly terse and modest pamphlet, made up of handy bite-sized polemics, each of them dated to see how well or badly it holds up in retrospect. It’s not a work in which one can easily get bogged down. But Finkelstein manages to get himself entangled in the text to a wince-making degree. Thus he says that I describe the followers of the anti-war demonstrations as “ex-flower children” or “neo Stalinists”, while that was my description only of the organisers. His appreciation of irony and contradiction, very keen in his own mind, is klutzy in the extreme when laboriously downloaded from that mind onto the page. Thus, he reminds me that I witnessed “indiscriminate” bombings by the Provisional IRA in the 1970s, which I certainly did. He then triumphantly counterposes this to a statement on another page, where I say that after 11 September 2001 “civilians are in the front line as never before”. This dull attempt at a “gotcha” collapses instantly upon itself – unless you are ready to believe that the Al Quaeda movement hasn’t promoted anti-civilian warfare to a newer and higher degree. (I don’t actually know Finkelstein’s answer to this question: in December 2001 he gave an exhaustive interview, reprinted in Counterpunch, in which he stated: “Frankly, part of me says – even though everything since September 11th has been a nightmare – ‘you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things bin Laden says are true.” Which part of you, Norman, was that? And which part am I arguing with? And wasn’t September 11th also “a nightmare”: not just “everything since”?
Some of the things the Nazis said were “true”, too (about Stalinism, say, before they made a pact with it, and about the Treaty of Versailles). This is a subject on which Finkelstein rightly claims some expertise, but he seems willing to make a fool of himself on his own turf in a crass attempt to insult me. I define terrorism as “the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint.” Judging by this, says Finkelstein, “the Nazi Party wasn’t terrorist because it posited a world without Jews.” He really must be more careful. First, we do not lack words of condemnation for the Third Reich, and “Nazi” is the least of these, because it is the most literal. Second, the other definitions we possess – of which “genocidal” would be one – are terms that don’t exhibit the same ambiguity as “terrorist” does. “Terrorist”, indeed, is almost a euphemistic word when compared to “totalitarian”. Third, I am presuming that Norman Finkelstein will agree with me that Nazism did manifest a high degree of irrationality, not only in its attempt at Judaeocide but also in its declaration of war on three fronts against three great powers, aimed at the preposterous fantasy of Aryan world domination. I do think that Al Quaeda is doomed because of similar jihadist and millenial delusions. In my essay, I was attempting to distinguish it from, say, Hezbollah, which is a local politico-clerical-military faction with (relatively) limited and defined aims. I’m not sure, though, that this distinction would lead me to emulate Finkelstein, who called in public and in print for “solidarity with Hezbollah” on his notorious visit to Lebanon. The reason that he gave for this wild piece of promiscuity was that Hezbollah was being targeted for elimination by the United States and Israel. Tempting though it might be – and though his own logic might seem to necessitate it – I shall not accuse Norman Finkelstein of demanding solidarity with Al Quaeda on what would be the precisely identical grounds. But from someone who identifies with Hezbollah and half-sympathises with Al Quaeda, I am not sure I am ready to hear that it is I who have capitulated to the forces of reaction.
In other words – and to return to my book for a moment – I was attempting to enforce distinctions rather than blur them. I think that any fair-minded reader, who had my little book to hand while reading Finkelstein’s screed, would agree that he fails to bring off any of the rhetorical or logical coups on which he rushes to congratulate himself. It’s true that I am sometimes rude – always on purpose, I trust – but not as crude as Finkelstein’s own use of references to flatulence, psychopathy or the “bursting windbag” Vaclav Havel. Anyway, do please purchase a copy of my reasonably-priced pamphlet and let me know if you disagree.
Much more absorbing than all this is the question of motive – which seems to fairly obsess Finkelstein – and also of authenticity. Throughout his essay, he seems to argue that nobody could criticise the Left except for the most mercenary and opportunist reason. There are and have been such defectors of course, but the idea of treason and pelf being at the root of it all is a flat negation of a long history of honorable and courageous re-thinking, from Kautsky to Koestler. I wouldn’t claim to be on this chart at all, but it must at least be thinkable, to anyone except Finkelstein, that I could have succeeded as a mere journalist while writing nothing at all about Noam Chomsky. In fact I wrote a long and much-circulated defense of him in the 1980s, and have never repudiated it. (As Finkelstein knows, though he falsely states the contrary, I have never disowned, in the auto da fe sense, any of my past on the Left.) I had some kind words for Chomsky in a book of mine that was in proof when 11 September hit, and didn’t remove them as I could have done. Unlike many on the Left, who circulate Stalinist defamations of Orwell, Chomsky for example has always taken an “Orwellian” position as regards objective and historical truth. I had begun to disagree with him very seriously over his lenience towards Milosevic and his opposition to the military rescue of Bosnia and Kosovo from attempted ethnocide, and if Finkelstein thinks that this position of mine was inspired by the lust for gold from major magazines he is welcome to the thought.
I looked up some earlier Chomsky a while ago, to see how it held up in retrospect, and I was pleased to find that some of the classic essays – on B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, on the press and East Timor, and on the Kahan Commission into Sabra and Shatila – are still imperishable. This will not be said, I think, of the 2001 talk in which Chomsky described the American intervention in Afghanistan as “a silent genocide”. Finkelstein appears to think that any criticism of that stupidity would only indicate severe moral decrepitude in the person making it. He’s thus put in the position of one to whom Chomsky is above all criticism: not exactly a compliment to the once-great skeptic and inquirer.
Finkelstein himself has not achieved guru status and may not desire it (though I insist that anyone reading this far should pay a visit to his website and scan the cartoon which he thinks makes him look good. It’s a real eye-opener for students of repressed narcissism). I have profited very much from his work on Palestine, and on Germany. His demolitions of Joan Peters and Daniel Goldhagen will be in any future anthology of the best investigative scholarship, and Edward Said and I, when we put together the collection “Blaming the Victims”, essentially structured it around the Peters essay.
Obviously therefore I can’t be the best judge when this great cold and clear eye is trained upon myself. But what is all this gunk about “armchairs”? He can’t seem to stay off the subject. As it happens, I have been in Iraq three times, very cautiously and prudently, during time of war. This doesn’t necessarily give me any edge in any argument. If the “armchair” point has any value, though, it must apply to those who argue against the war as well, and who can view the struggle against Saddam Hussein with a neutral spectator’s eye. (I may be optimistic when I describe this stance as neutral: I do sometimes lapse into generosity.) I would perhaps do better in making this point if I made it on behalf of Kanan Makiya, who did not conduct his battle only in Boston and in London, as Finkelstein spitefully and sneeringly says, but who exposed himself to considerable danger in embattled Iraqi Kurdistan and has returned to his volatile country to live and to take part in the very arduous conflict over its future. Incidentally, I don’t know by what grandly-assumed right Finkelstein refers to the Iraqi and Kurdish dedicatees of my book as my “newly acquired friends”. I have known them all for quite some time, and my solidarity with them is indeed in part a solidarity with people who have taken more risks than I have.
As you will see if you look up my chapter on the “armchair”, I point out that if soldiering were to be a qualification for comment in wartime, we would have to discount the views of most women, and of all men over military age, all well as all those whose disabilities prevented them from fighting. This would also obviously entail disqualifying all pacifists and anti-warriors, almost by definition. Such an outcome would I hope be detestable to Finkelstein, who has spent some useful time as a civilian observer on the West Bank. So why does he embrace an argument that would so clearly tell against him? Or is he willing to leave all the fighting to Hezbollah?
A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one’s attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target. Finkelstein’s essay begins with a lugubrious self-interrogation about his own “Marxism”, and his staunch unwillingness to repudiate it lest he be suspected, even by himself, of “selling out”. But mark the sequel. In another attempted “gotcha” he trips over the rug by writing: “In one sentence [Hitchens] claims to be persuaded by the ‘materialist conception of history,’ but in the next sentence he states that ‘a theory that seems to explain everything is just as good at explaining nothing.’” Now, anyone who knows anything at all about the materialist conception of history knows that it is not a theory that seems, or even claims, to explain everything. It is a method of examining the dynamics of the economy and society, now adopted because of its relative rigor by a number of non-Marxist historians. [For a good explication of the ABC, see Professor Gerry Cohen’s “Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense.”] Only the philistine and the ignorant continue to maintain that it is a “determinist” or “predictive” procedure. But in order, or so he imagines, to score a point at my expense, Finkelstein happily joins with this reactionary crowd. Don’t fret, Norman – nobody will notice if you cease proclaiming your adherence to an ideology you do not understand. Marx understood contradiction: you can’t even rise to the level of paradox.
This cheap turn to anti-intellectualism does not, it seems to me, reach the standard of Finkelstein’s previous work. So we both seem to be lamenting each other’s degeneration. He says it’s axiomatically reactionary to change: I would warn him that it can be very conservative to remain the same. I however don’t know him well enough to make the ad-hominem insinuation that his alteration of tone is due to some impulse of corruption or to secret and shameful worship of violence. And he certainly doesn’t know me well enough (even to call me by my right name). Not all changes of mind, I would urge on him softly, are symptoms of decay. There is the equal and opposite danger of ossification, dogmatism, party-mindedness and sclerosis. And yes, it does and will show in the style.
PS I don’t want to be accused of avoiding Finkelstein’s unbelievably facile challenge about moral equivalence. Should the United States, he asks with the triumphant cackle of a hen laying an outsize egg, have been liable to invasion for sheltering Kissinger or cossetting Saddam? I’d actually like to know Finkelstein’s answer to his own question. I imagine he would have to reluctantly say no, unless Messrs Putin and Chirac and the Arab League gave their permission for the strike, or unless Kofi Annan was in vindictive mood. However, the kernel of the question isn’t necessarily diminished by the shallowness or hypocrisy of the person asking it.
Let me give an example of how this matter may nonetheless be taken seriously. In a recent debate with Turkish spokesmen on Capitol Hill, I found myself for the hundredth time involved with the issue of the Armenian genocide. (Finkelstein’s willingness to take Turkish opinion at its face value is incidentally one of the many deformities of his piece: Turkey disliked regime change in Iraq because it feared the growing power of Iraqi Kurdish autonomy: a topic which Finkelstein continues to airbrush from the entire discussion.) As usual when the Armenian question comes up, Turkey’s apologists at first deny that the massacres ever took place. But as the argument persists, they invariably say that the Armenians took the Russian side in the First World War and were thus asking for trouble. In other words, the Armenians deserved the massacre that never took place. At this point I ask the Turks to invert the argument and apply it to themselves. Turkey took the side of Germany; many Armenians the side of Russia. Had Armenians been stronger, would they have been justified in putting all the Turks to the sword? I’ve never heard a coherent reply to this challenge but, when speaking with Armenian comrades, I do not encourage them to apply Turkish logic in reverse.
Moral equivalence needs careful handling. In the two slipshod examples given by Finkelstein, I think that the answer would be no but that the US ought to be putting its own war-criminals on trial. Indeed, that would been a far better cause for the American left than its sterile campaign of neutralism in respect of men like Milosevic and Saddam. In the case of the rocket attack on Sudan in August 1998, conducted by Clinton without any demand for inspection, any recourse to the United Nations, any discussion with allies or any consultation with Congress, I can’t see any reason in law or morality why the Sudanese government, repellent though it is, wouldn’t have been entitled to conduct a retaliatory strike, provided that it was against a military target. I wrote about this war-crime extensively at the time, and received exactly zero support from the Finkelstein-Chomsky faction, who avoided all mention of the atrocity until it could be flung into the scales after September 11, in order to cancel or balance out the Al Quaeda aggression against civilians of all nationalities living and working in New York. One can only have contempt for casuistry on this scale, and for those who think it clever to ask serious questions in an unserious way, and who then run away from the answer.
PPS. Finkelstein’s words about me have been freely available on this website for some time. I hope that my response will also be available on his. (And, when you surf in to the Finkelstein world, don’t forget to check out that cartoon.)