Hitchens "No Journalist": Insider
A person of long and wide experience with journalism and politics writes an interesting analysis of the Hitchens affair:
'Hitchens has been in a spiral for a long time, more than a decade, and he threw in with the neocons sometime in the mid-1990s, and with David Irving about that time, too. As you know, he's close to David Horowitz as well . . .
On Hitchens: On the one hand, he seeks attention and will cover himself with excrement to get it. On the other hand, he's given important platforms for his ugly and sick efforts. In the latest case, you are once again too kind to consider him a "journalist." He behaves like a member of a sectarian political movement. He does little that a journalist does, like call for comment, ascertain the facts, etc.
He has been given private email by a political comrade because he's a reliable outlet and no one else in the right wing food chain will handle this particular matter right now. This isn't "journalism," it's a political op. He's delighted to be a tool, because it feeds his sense of importance, not least for the sensation of the underhanded, clandestine nature of the action. (People who like that sort of thing don't usually engage in [only] one form of it.)
I think it's important to raise the question of where he received the emails, that he deliberately distorted their contents, and that he acts as a political operative, not a journalist. Cobban's point about Slate is very, very, very well directed. Editors have responsibility too.'
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/05/2006 12:05:00 AM
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4 Comments:
Well perhaps that's true, but if these editors did not catch the ethical problems in Hitchens's story, then they were simply not doing their jobs.
I would question his work upon receiving it rough.
And then I wouldn't publish.
He has no expectation of publication no matter what.
I don't understand why editors don't do their jobs any more.
He has been given private email by a political comrade because he's a reliable outlet and no one else in the right wing food chain will handle this particular matter right now. This isn't "journalism," it's a political op.
Sounds more like an enema.
Look, the only reason Hitchens has any caché with the right is because he repeatst their cant with a British accent, giving it a sort of verisimilitude of validity. I guess George Will has competition, now, as intellectual fig leaf for a proudly know-nothing political movement. Part compensation, part translator, like the difference between how a rapist speaks to his victim and how his lawyer addresses the jury.
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Hitchens gets his ass kicked continually by Galloway.
http://hnn.us/comments/52934.html
Silber and Taylor on Hitchens (#52934)
by Irfan Khawaja on February 8, 2005 at 10:00 PM
This essay reaches a new low, even for Arthur Silber.
I wonder if I could pose a question for Silber: had you honestly read the Hitchens articles before you posted this?
A few specific points:
(1) Hitchens does not “defend” Irving in either article. In the 1996 article, he accuses Irving of anti-Semitism, fascism, inconsistency, and paranoia, and describes Irving's ideas (without irony) as “depraved.” In the 2001 article, he intensifies and adds to those criticisms.
I’d like to challenge Arthur Silber, Charles Taylor, or anyone else to find a passage in either article that amounts to a “defense of Irving,” i.e., of David Irving as a person. It is not there to be found. Read out of context, there are passages there that might sound like defenses of Irving's historiography. But read critically and in context, Hitchens is not defending that, either.
What Hitchens defends in the first article is the dialectical utility of Irving’s historiography, however meretricious, in clarifying the assumptions of bona fide historiography. The point is not that Irving himself is defensible as a person, nor even that his historiography is defensible as historiography, but that Irving's work serves a useful purpose because (a) he is a fascist and (b) we are not. Historians are biased by their ideological predispositions, and Irving's biases are an important challenge to our liberal ones.
Not being a defender of dialectical method myself, I don’t happen to agree with Hitchens. In my view, historiography should be judged and published on its own merits, not on the “gadfly” role it might play in public discourse. By that measure, Irving’s books are a failure (as, I might add, are Silber’s posts and Taylor’s journalism). But regardless of that disagreement, the fact remains that neither of Hitchens’s articles is a defense of Irving, and Hitchens is simply NOT accurately described as an “Irving defender” (he is not now, was not in 1996, and was not in 2001).
By the second article (2001), Hitchens asserts that he regards Irving as humiliated, discredited, and refuted. But he insists that it was necessary to engage him in public debate to get to that stage. This article is in no intelligible sense a "defense" of or apologia for Irving, and anyone who wants to claim that it is ought to come forth with the textual evidence that supports that claim--or to borrow Taylor's language, had "damn well better" come forth with the textual evidence that supports that claim.
It should come as no surprise that the besides Taylor and Silber, one of the few people to regard Hitchens as having defended Irving “to the hilt” is… David Irving. He says this of the 1996 article in which Hitchens describes his ideas as “depraved” and accuses him of anti-Semitism, fascism, inconsistency and paranoia. Irving, alas, seems to have missed the significance of these latter claims. But then, so have Taylor and Silber. Welcome to the club!
(2) Both Taylor and Silber deny that Irving was “censored”—while gliding effortlessly past the problematic claim that Irving’s contract with St. Martin’s press was “canceled.”
What does the word “canceled” mean in this context?
According to Hitchens, who read the correspondence between Irving and St. Martin’s, it means that the contract was legally “breached” (“Strange Case of David Irving,” p. 260 of “Love, Poverty, and War”).
I myself don’t know the legal details of the contract or correspondence, but if the contract really was breached as Hitchens says, then St. Martin’s initiated force against Irving, i.e., used initiatory force to prevent Irving from exercising a legal right to free speech. Breach of contract may not be the usual method of censorship, but qua force-initiation, it is censorship just the same.
I admit that a reasonable person without access to the relevant documents could justifiably wonder whether the cancellation really was breach of contract (I am such a person). But a reasonable person in the same predicament could just as easily wonder whether it might be (I am also such a person). So obviously, the legal details are crucial here.
Naturally, neither Silber nor Taylor makes any attempt whatsoever to discuss the legal issue. Confronted with the breach of contract issue, Silber (who does not seem to have read Hitchens on the subject) ignores it, and Taylor (who clearly has read Hitchens on the subject) openly evades it.
None of this, of course, stops Silber from lecturing us fatuously about “intellectual accountability.” In Silber’s universe, “accountability” evidently consists in appealing to the concept of “accountability” to make random accusations--while violating norms of accountability when it comes to backing them up. (Haven’t quite outgrown “Fact and Value,” have we?)
Taylor claims that Irving was NOT censored because while St Martin's deprived him (Irving) of one publication venue, it left others open to him.
The claim is a blatant non-sequitur. If X forcibly deprives Y of one of Y’s rightful alternatives at time t, the violation at t is not excused, mitigated or erased because Y will have other rightful alternatives at time t +1.
Free examples: If I force you not to wear magenta shirts, I have still violated your rights even if I give you the choice to wear shirts of any other color under the rainbow. If I breach a contract with you, I have violated your rights even if your neighbor keeps your contract with you. If I assault you, I have violated your rights even if I give you a chance to run away.
Do I really need to belabor this any further? I find it remarkable that Silber, the self-appointed defender of Ayn Rand’s “radical” legacy, doesn't seem to have grasped these elementary facts about the nature of rights. But he hasn’t.
At any rate, there is a sense in which the whole “censorship” issue is a red herring. Though Hitchens uses the word “censorship” once (in the 2001 article, not the 1996 one), his main complaint is not so much that Irving was censored, but that St. Martin’s acted in an unprincipled or cowardly way in canceling his contract.
I personally would not have put the point that way, but Hitchens’s claim does contain an element of truth: even if the cancellation was not a breach of contract, it is true that St. Martin’s, which claimed to be upholding historical truth, refused to defend its actions in a rigorous way on historical grounds, and so deferred the issue of how Irving’s claims were to be confronted (p. 258 in “Love, Poverty and War”). The confrontation, as we know, took place in a libel trial. Hitchens’s point is that it should have taken place earlier.
Of course, if the cancellation really was breach of contract, the use of the word “censorship” turns out literally to be true.
(3) Taylor insinuates that Hitchens has systematically excused Irving’s mendacity and scholarly malfeasances and cites (of all things) Hitchens’s reaction to Richard Evans’s scholarship as his primary evidence for the claim.
The assertion is an Orwellian inversion of the facts: Hitchens’s 2001 piece is in fact a favorable review of Richard Evans’s book, and it seconds both Evans’s main claims (“Evans was quite devastating,” p. 262 of “Love, Poverty and War”) as well as those of D.D. Guttenplan (another critic of Irving), while defending Guttenplan’s claims against Evans’s criticisms.
(4) Taylor complains that Hitchens doesn’t mention the falsifications in Irving’s Goebbels biography, insinuating that Hitchens was unwilling to admit Irving’s capacity for systematic misrepresentation of evidence.
This claim is about as preposterous as the preceding one. It is obvious to any HONEST reader of Hitchens’s 2001 piece that Hitchens doesn’t belabor the issue of Evans’s discovery of the falsifications in the Goebbels book because the article as a whole endorses the court findings against Irving: “I mentally closed the book [against Irving] when I reached this stage [Evans’s testimony in the court case].” Hitchens also describes Guttenplan’s case against Irving as a “QED” (both claims on p. 263 of Love, Poverty, and War), and describes Evans as “reducing” Irving’s claims “to powder” (p. 264).
I am simply at a loss to see how an honest, intelligent reader could misread Hitchens’s essay as a defense of Irving. It is, of course, no mystery at all how a dishonest imbecile might do so, however.
(5) Taylor claims in his article that Irving’s “very real attempts to quash the work of historians are never mentioned by Irving’s defenders.” To use his own language, Taylor “seemingly chooses not to mention” the fact that Hitchens offers a direct counter-example to this claim (p. 262 of “Love, Poverty and War,” end of the first full paragraph).
I will not take the time here to quote or cite any more passages of Hitchens that support my claims—though I could. There are limits to my patience and time. But if anyone wants to argue the point, I invite THEM to produce what they regard as the offending passages from the two Hitchens essays in question (“Hitler’s Ghost,” Vanity Fair June 1996; and “The Strange Case of David Irving,” orig. LA Times, May 20, 2001, reprinted in “Love, Poverty, and War”). Quote them in full and tell me why they contradict what I say. I may not agree with everything Hitchens says, but nothing he says contradicts my defense of him here.
Silber offers up his garbage dump of a post with the bewildered plea that well gosh, he isn’t a historian, so what’s a fella to make of all this history stuff? It’d be a nice try—if we were dealing with Forrest Gump. As it happens, I’m not a historian either. But you don’t have to be a historian to read documents before you use them to engage in a smear campaign. Nor do you have to be a historian to want to avoid smear campaigns.
I have a piece of advice for Arthur Silber. If you read HNN’s “rules for discussion,” you’ll find the following:
Please do not post any comments that are defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive, or unlawful. If you violate the law or are guilty of defamation you may be held legally responsible.
Please be civil. No ad hominem attacks.
If those standards were enforced more scrupulously here, Silber would be tossed unceremoniously off of this site, never to be invited back again. And if I were running the site, that is exactly what I would do. Nor would I worry about accusations of “censorship.” It wouldn’t be censorship. It would be intellectual hygiene.
By the way, should anyone feel the need to accuse me of violating the norms I’ve quoted, I anticipate that criticism in this way: the tone of my post is exactly calibrated to respond to Silber’s; it is Silber who is initiating the problematic tone, not me. I don’t feel obliged to be civil to those who are not themselves civil, and if Silber can get away with endless defamation (as he has with impunity for months), there is no reason why he shouldn’t be paid back in the appropriate way.
I cannot be the only person to have discerned that even if we put aside this post, Silber’s posts contain absolutely nothing in the way of argument, evidence, or information. The only mildly interesting question they raise is why anyone as ignorant as he is should be writing here, and why his colleagues insist on ignoring that patently obvious fact about his “work” and keep him on. Happily, that’s their problem, not mine. I’ll leave it to them to work out its ramifications.
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