via samharris.org
"Over at Truthdig, the celebrated journalist Chris Hedges has discovered that Christopher Hitchens and I are actually racists with a fondness for genocide. He has broken this story before—many times, in fact—but in his most recent essay he blames “secular fundamentalists” like me and Hitch for the recent terrorist atrocities in Norway."
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-chris-hedges/
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31 comments:
What a moron, Hedges.
Hedges is a joke. There should be a youtube of his debate with CH somewhere. Watch it, and you'll understand the true source of his hatred. He was utterly humiliated.
I enjoyed reading Sam's God-bashing work because I'm an ex-Muslim. I understand the folly of Islam. And then I asked myself why it was, among the long list of great free thinkers thinkers down the line from Russell to Nietzsche to Sartre, I was drawn to the work of an exterminationist advocate of torture and war.
I sold Sam's books on eBay and bought myself the anti-clerical and anti-war books of Hedges. Much better. I may be an atheist, but I'm not a demented Rightwinger. I'll stick with progressive writers this time. It's time you fangirls here expanded your reading list.
Islam is evil. Just its treatment of women alone is enough to qualify it as evil.
Hedges is a joke. Sam destroys him.
Hedges' claims here are indeed really stupid, but Harris's paranoid stories about Islam are much worse, and he does indeed advocate pre-emptively nuking any "Islamic country" that obtains nuclear weapons.
And I'm no fan of Islam or any other religion.
Look how intelligent and edgy my posts are. - ANONYMOUS.
Sam Harris has never advocated the extermination of Muslims--get your facts straight. But there certainly are muslims who advocate the extermination of Jews and other non-muslims, and even their fellow muslims who are not fundamentalist enough.
Not to oppose such evil with force when necessary is in itself evil. And all you self- proclaimed "progressives" had better be thankful that there are those out there willing to step up to the plate, especially with the mullahs in Iran, and the nutcase extremists in Pakistan armed with nukes.
You, as an ex-mulslim and current non-believer would be one of the first they'd put to death if they had the chance.
I don't understand how anyone can consider Sam Harris either right wing or pro-war. It only makes sense if one has read none of his books or articles, or if one obsessively focuses on part of a sentence.
Hedges is probably still reeling from his beatings in debate by both Hitch and Sam.
Hedges really went low there, to say Harris and Hitchens inspired Breivik is just disgustingly dishonest mudthrowing, nothing else. With this Heges lost any credibility in whatever he wanted to say and his books must be complete tripe if he either doesn't understand basic causality or is so depraved to use "guilt by association" to make such a label stick.
Hitchens and Harris btw. had some disagreement before in connection to Mark Steyns book "America Alone".
In an essay called "facing the Islamist menace" (I remember I wrote a post in the Sam Harris forum about it ) Hitchens said about Sam Harris "irresponsible remark that only fascists seemed to have the right line":
I murmured to myself: “Not while I’m alive, they won’t.” Nor do I wish to concede that Serbo-fascist ethnic cleansing can appear more rational in retrospect than it did at the time. The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders."
Thus Hitchens clearly distanced himself from right-wingers that obsess over birth rates and ethnic purity or that lump all Muslims together with the Islamists. This point is actually not so difficult to understand. We are atheists and at the same time secularists in favour of religious freedom as much for Muslims as for us or anybody for that matter like Raelians or Pastafarians. This is miles away from right-wingers like Wilders and others, not even to mention the narcissistic deluded nonentity that murdered so many people in Norway.
And anonymous, read the progressive writer Kenan Malik on Multiculturalism and you will understand what the real problem is and how this is not a progressive concept anymore regardless of what ideologues like Hedges say.
Maybe CH should clarify this one more time, even though I think that Hedges trolling maybe should better be ignored.
wow, for a bunch of free thinkers you moronic new atheists sure toe the party line and defend your leaders to the death. hedges is right and has proven himself to be right in his debate with harris. i haven't watched his debate with hitchens but i doubt most idiots who argue that hitchens won that debate, have neither. why, because it is not available online.
harris and hitchens are warmongering zealots, them and their followers are more of a threat to human life than islamists, period.
It used to be online before it was removed by the radio station that recorded it. There is a still a highlight clip of hitchens giving hedges one of the heftiest hitchslaps of his career.
Cosign the Kenan Malik article... he is right on the money with this.
I have watched the debate. I think Pacifica (?) filmed it, and took it down so that the bozo Hedges wouldn't be shown for the feather-weight he is.
CH sat back, propped his feet up and quite literally put Hedges through the meat grinder--even though the audience where a bunch of anti-war types and clearly on Hedges' side. Hedges is so intellectually inept, Christopher seemed bored and irritated by the end.
It was masterful.
And Hedges has made a lame career out of Hitchens Bashing ever since. He, Dennis Perrin and Scott Lucas need to get together and do a book. I'm sure it will be a laugh-fest like their other efforts.
Where can I find the complete debate of Hedges and Hitchens?
>hedges is right and has proven
>himself to be right in his debate
>with harris.
Hedges, is that you?
To the Hedges defender "to the death" speaking in absolutes and offering mere ad-hominem attacks with no evidential basis for those attacks:
"I haven't watched his debate" (Yet I can definitely comment and make conclusions on said debate). This makes me suspect your reading and comprehension style.
Before expanding your reading list (and recommending that others do so without evidence), why not comprehend your past readings so you can bring some evidence of your claims next time?
Ye, I want to see Hitch slap him really bad. Somebody got a link?
Dawson-- Harris did not "advocate" nuclear first strike-- he said, we as a society would have to consider it and even if it were our only option for survival it would still be a crime. He called it a crime. So, I know nuance is not anyone's strong suit here, but read what he actually wrote and then form an opinion.
As far as Chris Hedges goes, and the rest of the "Nation Institute/Pacifica" crowd for that matter, when the Muslim Brotherhood's clap trap is identical to the party line, you know that you're no longer progressive, but something completely different...Nothing new though, most of the self-described "left" has been a force for and of reaction, moral decay and intellectual brain rot for quite some time now. Why do you think the Hitch ditched them?
“We might have no choice but a nuclear first strike…” The vast majority of Muslims in any given nation in the world would be totally against the use of nuclear weapons by their countries (in spite of their having many other crazy beliefs).
The majority of leaders in these countries are about as religious as our own, and exploit religion cynically for their own economic interests.
Where did the nuclear weapons come from? The US is the ONLY country to ever make nuclear weapons from scratch. They’ve approved the expansion to Israel and India and even tried to prevent ex-enemies like Russia from pushing for full disarmament (on the grounds that it would make our own arsenal less ideologically justified). And on and on.
People who blame “religion” for all this are giving a smokescreen to the real fat cat bad guys.
Okay, I stand corrected. Sam Harris (kind, sort of) qualified his endorsement of pre-emptively nuking Islamists with the bomb. But he certainly left the door open to the idea, as the quote Christian posted clearly shows.
So, the nuance is that Sam Harris is semi-open to having his own nation-state commit the ultimate war crime.
How lovely.
BTW, where's is Harris's outrage at the Middle Eastern religious-apartheid state that undoubtedly possesses nukes?
"Where did the nuclear weapons come from?"
What an ahistorical idiot. Both Japan and Germany were working on an A Bomb during the war, and the Soviets would have eventually come up with the technology without stealing it from the US via the Rosenbergs. I for one am glad that if we had to have a first, it was the US and not any of the above mentioned. And don't kid yourself, it was going to happen.
Which brings up another point--mutually assured destruction, which brought us through the Cold War without another bomb blast, only works if you have RATIONAL actors--rabid radical islamists are not RATIONAL. So, if Sam Harris says that at some point a first strike may be necessary, he's just being reality based--it may have to happen if it is necessary to prevent a nuclear strike from the people who want to bring the 9th Imam out of the well, and have no problem killing millions to do so. Very sad, but that's the world we live in.
quote .. wow, for a bunch of free thinkers you moronic new atheists sure toe the party line...
...well, sometimes 2 +2 ready does equal 4 ...
what's your point??
"Christopher seemed bored and irritated by the end.
It was masterful."
You thought Christopher seeming bored and irritated was...masterful? Jesus Christ, man, get a fucking life. Stop your hero worshipping.
Yep, The Hitch is my hero. No one is better at pricking the over-inflated egos of arrogant douche bags like Chris Hedges than Christopher.
"The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies."
Chris Hedges...
This statement is the pinacle of the numb noggen, multi-culti, equivocating, kumbaya bull shit that got us here in the first place.
It has been estimated that from 13-7% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are radical fundamentalist--at the low end, that's 90 million potential little Bin Ladens. And he wants to say that because one lone nutcase killed 90 of his fellow NORWEGIANS, all christians and athiests are just as bad--no, WORSE.
Well, tell it to the people in New York, Mumbai, Bali, Thailand, Kashmir, Madrid, London, Beijing, Moscow, and hundreds of other places around the world where human beings are being shot, blown-up, beheaded, burned, mutilated, and disfigured in the name of Allah.
And Hedges, the next time you find a fundi Christian throwing acid in the face of a woman because a wisp of her hair is showing in public, let us know.
One logical flaw that keeps coming up here from the Hedges side is that of proposing a dichotomy between "anti-war" types and "warmongers". While one can be anti-war with respect to specific wars, one cannot be opposed to war in principle, as its necessity has not been outlived.
It's kind of like being opposed to police forces in principle, rather than critical of their specific actions.
Some of you seem to be proposing a national defense policy based on pacifism (an objectively unethical position) or, even worse, masochism.
Undoubtedly, fundamentalism kills, as Hedges puts it. Are Harris and Hitchens "fundamentalists"? Not bloody likely. Is there even such a thing as "fundamental atheism"? Not sure. I'll have to look into it...
I think there's a good argument to be made that Hedges is a fundamentalist post-modern peacenik. Here are the golden rules of his religion--
a)America is ALWAYS the force of evil, the empire can never have the high moral ground in any conflict.
b)Non-christian, non-western victims of racist Euro-centric cultural hegemony and the global market economy are blameless. If they do anything bad, it's the fault of the US.
c) All cultures are equal and must be respected--except for evangelical christians and athiests. We rich white sinners have no right to pass judgement.
That, and I'm beginning to suspect that the guy has serious mental issues that have caused him to fixate on Hitchens and Harris.
Ryan, that is it. The problem is that 1st world white bourgeois liberals become these 'pacifists' because they have no idea why violence is still necessary. They live insular and inured lives. They live extremely privileged lives that only exist due to the incessant violence of the state; but don't recognize it. All the violence that protects their privilege is exported to the periphery so they think it unnecessary. The prefer it when cops beat the indigent on the other side of the tracks and the IMF strangles the poor of the 3rd world quietly. But no loud bombing! They are trying to get some sleep for crying out loud!
The whole idea of civilization is predicated on violence. You cannot even have cities without importation of resources -- and that importation requires theft/violence from others; whether the colonial model or the neo-colonial model (see:IMF). But THAT they can live with (shit, they need that iPod!) just no loud F16 strikes... even against right-wing religious fascists who subjugate women like some 7th century warlord. Leave those nice wackos alone but keep those 1st world privileges coming (even if we have to starve the poor around the world and let them be ruled with an iron fist by some dictator we secretly LOVE!)
These kinds of bourgeois pacifists are tools. Fuck them.
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