Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
19, 2003
Hitchens Smears Edward
Said
Responding
to the Words of a Weasel
By CLARE BRANDABUR
When I first discovered Edward Said's Orientalism
I was overwhelmed but also overjoyed: though I knew I lacked
sufficient erudition to read the book as it deserved, I also
knew that I had found a source which could challenge and direct
my study and gradually allow me to fill in the blanks, especially
about the Arab world. It was the most brilliant book I had ever
read.
Later in a bookstore in Amman, where
I found myself in a queue clutching a new copy of the book for
a friend, a well-dressed professorial-looking bystander commented
on my purchase. "Orientalism," he said frowning
knowingly. "I find it somewhat overwritten." Unusually
for me--I usually think of the proper response much too late--I
managed to contain my indignation. "Oh good, then,"
I said deliberately. "Since you know how the book should
have been written, I trust you will now write the book as it
should be." Later I reflected on how sad it was that an
obviously educated Arab could not just acknowledge and take pride
in the fact that another Arab--or another human being for that
matter--had achieved such an impressive, learned, and original
piece of work.
Christopher Hitchens betrays a similar
need to denigrate a book from which he has obviously learned
a great deal, though his comments suggest that he has understood
it imperfectly. He too knows how Said "should" have
done his life work-- the title: "Where the Twain Should
Have Met" [1] reeks with condescension. The sub-sub-title
"What Went Wrong" is an allusion to Bernard Lewis,
the doyen of contemporary Orientalists, whose article by that
name in an earlier The Atlantic (January 2002) was all
about Muslim rage. Reading this kiss of Judas ("I was with
him in the garden") in the flagrantly Zionist The Atlantic,
which doubtless paid him more than thirty pieces of silver,
what first strikes me is the frequency and oddity of words that
Hitchens puts in quotation marks. " it was still just possible
in those days to imagine that a right 'side' could be discerned."
This a propos of the Lebanese civil war, implying that
in his new wisdom, he now knows that both sides were equally
to blame, even though most observers understand that Israel,
the US and Opus Dei all exercised Machiavellian influence in
Lebanon to instigate ethnic rivalries and foment violence. Next
he puts in quotes "settler" in the parenthetical mention
of the "messianic 'settler' movement among the Jews".
What is this supposed to imply? That Jewish settlers on Palestinian
land are only called "settlers" by those who don't
acknowledge them as legitimate residents of the Occupied Territories?
And on and on.
Most denigration of Said's Orientalism
comes through damning with faint praise, though at times
in addition Hitchens misrepresents what Said's text actually
says. An example of denigration occurs in Hitchens' calling
Culture and Imperialism "a collection of essays showing
that Said has a deep understanding, amounting to sympathy, for
the work of writers such as Austen and Kipling and George Eliot,
who--outward appearances notwithstanding--never did take 'the
Orient' for granted." I can't tell whether that
last phrase applies only to George Eliot or to all three writers.
Does Hitchens imply that Said's analysis of these writers amounts
to accusing them of taking "the Orient" for granted?
Or that only if you look at Austen, Kipling and Eliot from a
purely superficial point of view could you think they took "the
Orient" for granted? Said's view of these writers is so
nuanced and so elegantly articulated that Hitchens' remark is
inane and trivial. To suggest that Said had "sympathy"
for such writers is like saying that Louis Pasteur realized his
patients were sick.
In another example of the minimizing
of Said's accomplishment, Hitchens says:
It is easy enough to say that Westerners
had long been provided with an exotic, sumptuous, but largely
misleading account of the Orient, whether supplied by Benjamin
Disraeli's Suez Canal share purchases, the celluloid phantasms
of Rudolph Valentino, or the torrid episodes of T. E. Lawrence's
Seven Pillars of Wisdom. But it is also true that Arab,
Indian, Malay, and Iranian societies can operate on a false if
not indeed deluded view of "the West."
Notice the same arrogance as that of
my friend in the Amman bookstore: "It is easy" followed
by a complete trivialization of the whole point of Orientalism,
followed by the non-sequitur that Easterners may have false stereotypes
of the West, as though this point had somehow escaped Said!
From this blinding non-point, Hitchens
then leaps to "I am willing to bet that I know more about
Mesopotamia than Saddam Hussein knows about England." After
which he quotes Adonis as warning "there exists a danger
in too strong a counterposition between 'East' and 'West'."
Is Hitchens pretending to lecture Said about the danger of
"too strong a counterposition" between East and West?
I find this merely pathetic.
But Hitchens also indulges in plagiarism,
the journalistic equivalent of dressing oneself up in borrowed
finery, a sorry symptom of intellectual dishonesty. Throughout
this essay, he takes lines from Orientalism without letting
the reader know they are not his own. For example, when he says
that Lord Macauley was "a near perfect illustration of the
sentence (which occurs in Disraeli's novel Tancred) 'The
East is a career'." That line, correctly attributed, occurs
on page 5 of Orientalism. But you would not know that
from Hitchens' text. From there he moves to discuss Karl Marx,
again taking passages that appear more fully in Said's text including
a passage in which Said quotes Marx quoting a stanza from Goethe
(pages 153-4 of Orientalism). Hitchens says:
Said spent a lot of time "puzzling"
(his word) over Marx's ironies here: how could a man of professed
human feeling justify conquest and exploitation? The ultimate
answer--that conquest furnished an alternative to the terrifying
serfdom and stagnation of antiquity, and that creation can take
a destructive form--need have nothing to do with what Said calls
"The old inequality between East and West" (The Roman
invasion of Britain was also "progress," if the word
has any meaning.)
Now in the first place, Said does not
say he spent a lot of time puzzling over Marx's ironies here.
What he does say is that there is a dissonance between Marx's
awareness of the suffering of people whose entire lives were
uprooted by conquest, and his acknowledgment of the benefits
which the conquerors would introduce. In this passage, Said
quotes Marx quoting Goethe, an allusion which, Said observes:
"identifies the sources of Marx's conceptions about the
Orient". Next Said quotes Marx as saying that England had
the task of "laying the material foundation of Western society
in Asia." Said comments on this passage:
The idea of regenerating a fundamentally
lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Orientalism, of course, but
coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human
suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. (p. 154)
Why would Hitchens misrepresent Said's
text? It is not Said who is puzzling--and spending a long time
puzzling at that--it is the apparent inconsistency within the
text of Marx under discussion that he finds puzzling.
In that inserted throw-away line above
about the Roman invasion of Britain being "progress",
Hitchens gives a clue to his fundamental argument with Edward
Said whom he blames for "taking one side." Hitchens
has come to see imperialism as "progress" and all indigenous
societies as backward and primitive. So Hitchens is now the
defender of the Imperial cause, a position that obliges him to
see the Bush/Blair invasion and occupation of Iraq as "progress."
Witness his refusal to believe the evidence that the destruction
and looting of Iraqi cultural treasures was deliberate and systematic
as implied by Said (in his Window on the World,
an article adapted from his introduction to the publication of
the new edition of Orientalism). Hitchens finds this
a "fantastic allegation" though it has been attested
by more than one reliable observer among them Robert Fisk. Stephen
Smith has written an insightful analysis in which he gives long
quotations from Fisk and other eyewitness observers who have
gone on record testifying to the deliberate destruction of Iraqi
cultural treasures by US forces. (See Art, Music, and Culture:
Furious Envy--Baudrillard and the looting of Baghdad,
4 September 2003, electronicIraq.net)
Said says Orientalism was meant
to be partisan, so Hitchens is right to say he takes sides.
"I have called what I do humanism, a word I continue to
use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by
sophisticated postmodern critics. By humanism, I mean first
of all attempting to dissolve Blake's "mind-forg'd manacles"
so as to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally
for the purposes of reflective understanding. Moreover humanism
is sustained by a sense of community with other interpreters
and other societies and periods: strictly speaking therefore,
there is no such thing as an isolated humanist." (Edward
Said in: Window on the World, Guardian Unlimited,
August 2, 2003).
Rather than waste time over Hitchens'
pathetic effort to trivialize and seem to scold Edward Said for
imagined shortcomings, it is important to recognize the positive
thrust of all of Said's work: he advocates the hard work of
"patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities
of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding
instant action and reaction." In the same article,
"The secular world is the world of history as made by human
beings. Critical thought does not submit to commands to join
the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy."
Said's constant message continues to be what he asserts in Culture
and Imperialism, "There is the possibility of
a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world the opportunities
for liberation are open' (p. 230) Why don't we all stand up
and cheer and exchange the kiss of peace, rather than standing
in line to give him the kiss of death. "I was with him
in Cyprus"
Clare Brandabur,
at present on the Faculty of English Literature at Do'u' University
in Istanbul, holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from
the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, taught at Birzeit
University in Occupied Palestine for three years, at Al-Ba'ath
University in Syria as a Fulbright Lecturer, and in Bahrain and
Jordan. She can be reached here: cbrandabur@dogus.edu.tr
Endnotes
[1] Christopher Hitchens, Where the Twain Should Have Met: The
cosmopolitan Edward Said was ideally placed to explain East to
West and West to East. What went wrong?, The Atlantic Monthly,
September 2003.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|