Prostitution of the pen and the dark side of the free market

[fpb]

Four years ago, the government of the French Republic took the lead in refusing to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. The French, who had taken a very active and successful part in the first Iraq war, simply did not think that an invasion followed by the occupation of an Arab country was a good idea. That was their prerogative (see under "sovereign state").

(My position was that I loathed Saddam Hussein so much that anyone who wanted to drive him out was fine by me. I would even have supported an Iranian invasion. But I would not have started to insult people who disagreed.)

The idiot part of the American right suddenly made France the bout of all their hatred. Someone spotted a market opportunity, as Americans do (the French do that as well, but when the French do it, that's evil!) and prostituted a certain amount of historical knowledge in the search for a quick buck, producing some sort of tract which rewrote history with the claim that "France have always been our enemy, but they have concealed it under a pretence of friendship".

I would dismiss this intellectually contemptible and factually fraudulent thesis in as many words, and not even bother about it, were it not that one of the finest minds in my f-list seems to have been taken in by it. As it is, I want to ask how you imagine you can trace a consistent attitude of hatred, and what is more, of subtly disguised hatred, in a nation that has, since the foundation of the United States, experienced three royalist constitutions, five republican ones, two bonapartist ones, and one fascist tyranny, and completely boxed the compass in terms of attitudes, views, and alliances. This is the kind of things that rabid anti-Semites postulate about Jews - attitudes consistent across the centuries, constant vicious subtlety in carrying them out, hatred fertile in invention but completely barren of reason. The French ought to be proud: they have been promoted to the rank of Chosen People, next to that other target of unreasoning, blind, stupid, despicable hatred. In case anyone had any doubts, I regard Jew-bashing as a stain on the face of mankind.

No doubt the prostitute or prostitutes who set out on this bit of free enterprise got out of it what they wanted - money, admiting letters from ignorami and fanatics, and the odd spot on TV talk shows; rewards that serious historians get rather less often. But as we are still free people here, I want to use my own freedom of expression, rather less despicably than the prostitute or prostitutes concerned: first, by calling whoredom by its proper name; and second, by stating clearly that there shall be no pity here for such views. The historical slag or slags who sold their integrity for popular success will not be treated as anything but filth, and anyone who takes them seriously is warned that I will do what is in my power to restore them to sanity.

Comments

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Oh, we can kill them. We can kill them.

Of course, to do so we'd have to engage in the largest act of barbarism that the world has ever seen, mass-murder on a scale that, horrible though it was, would dwarf even the Holocaust. We're probably also permanently damage the habitability of the planet, and doom countless future generations of *every* nation to shorter, radiation-poisoned lives.

But, I'm just saying, we have the ability to kill them all. The United States has the largest stockpile of nuclear weaponry in the entire world. It has more warheads than the entire rest of the world's nuclear arsenal's put together, several times over. (Which, of course, creates some hypocrisy whenever the US scolds other countries for seeking to develop nuclear weapons.)

If the Jihadists, God forbid, ever actually got the massive "war of civilizations" that they want, with every muslim in the world rising as one in some kind of horde, they'd lose. They'd all become martyrs. Because, while they have suicide bombers, we have Strategic Bombers.

So, let's hope that they never, ever manage to push things that far.

[kulibali.livejournal.com]

I don't think that it's hypocrisy to say that signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran, say) should abide by it. And further, that preventing further totalitarian states (as opposed to liberal democracies) from gaining nuclear weapons is a Good Thing.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I forbid you to discuss genocide on these columns. For your information, one of my dearest friends is a Muslim. For this reason, and for the subsidiary reason that genocide never succeeds (the most elaborate attempt ever seen was followed by the successful establishment of Israel, and even the Armenian nation is with us still), this kind of argument is not allowed on these columns.

P.S.: it is the first time I have ever forbidden an argument.

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

Ok.