Christopher Hitchens: Even wierder and more despicable than you thought.
This self-promoting buffoon should be exposed for the what he is. He went to Lebanon last year to film his one-man crusade to impose Liberal Democracy on the "unwashed Arab masses", he made a fuss about being attacked by Nazis in Lebanon! In reality, him and his photographer went to certain Beirut neighborhoods and provoked the locals until he was slapped around by teenagers.
Let me say that again: Hitchens went to the Middle East to pick fist fights. Yeah, very intellectual.
Most countries that have limited interaction with outsiders are often very racist. We are very lucky to live in an open society and in addition we are a country of immigrants that is why we don't see too much of that. In fact, we are the exception and not the norm.
You get xenophobic racism when you never see outsiders, but you also get racism when you see a bunch of outsiders in the wrong kind of context. A lot of black writers historically reported experiencing better treatment in Europe than in America, during an era where America had millions of black people and Europe had barely any. Now that Europe has millions of black immigrants, they have race issues.
If your society systemically creates a vast underclass of impoverished, poorly educated people who are oppressed as such because of their race, people are going to have their racism confirmed by those very effects. Likewise, if your society is flooded by a vast number of impoverished, poorly educated immigrants, people are going to hate the immigrants. (Judging from America's experience, this seems to be a temporary problem in most cases.) In either situation, you create racism by having more people of a different race, so long as those people are poor, segregated, or different enough to piss people off.
American racism was not as much xenophobic, it was always based on the difficulties of integrating immigrants and on the ongoing, cyclical oppression of the black population. You had some xenophobia during wartime (http://img.moonbuggy.org/superman-says-you-can-slap-a-jap/) but we tend to forget how much we hate other people after the war's over.
I assume that by "we" you mean Americans. It sounds a lot like you are saying that America hasn't seen much demagogy, racism or xenophobia which sounds like a delusion of the type that might disprove your point.
Some part of the country, i.e. the red states are still having this problem but overall, we are much better then we were. The bottom line, we are a working progress.
How about wording it like this: the density of racists in a red state is statistically significantly higher than that of a blue state.
But I'd agree, considering America is a salad bowl of cultures, it's probably more tolerant than most homogenous countries out there. Of course being a salad bowl, you'll get more collisions too which is why it may seem like America is less tolerant of different cultures. More homogenous countries simply have less foreigners to be racist towards.
As you can see the blue states and the red states are fairly well represented, with CA having the most. The southern states which are typically red have a significant amount. But the western states that are red have less than the western blue, so as I said before I don't think you can draw any conclusions. Also the majority of the southern red states used to be blue, so that's something else to consider.
This is totally meaningless though. The existence of a hate group is just a geographically local group of people who are racist AND like forming clubs.
A map of the per-capita hate crimes committed would be more educational, but again it would not be a measure of racism. To have hate crimes you need 2 things, people who hate some group, and members of that group they can act against. In the areas that were most heavily racist they chased out all hated minorities 50+ years ago.
The town I grew up in had 5000 residents and no black families (actually, some have moved there, but only when I was in about 3rd grade did that start). I didn't see any racism at all in that town, but how could I? Driving 30 minutes away to the nearest sizeable black population center and you see tons of it. Look at the school zones and you see tons of it. Hate crimes were non-existent however, just because you can't hit someone who isn't around. Finally, if one did happen, how would it get reported? In areas where hate crimes are super rare I would assume they would also be under reported since the justice system would be unfamiliar with recording and prosecuting them.
Finally, saying one area (red states) is 'more racist' than another is the exact same in-group out-group dynamic that feeds racism in the first place. Due to the stuff I listed above, I would expect blue states to have far more racist acts, just because there are more cross-race interactions and boundaries (which are the only 'opportunity' people have to commit racist actions). There is no discrimination against minorities for jobs if there are no minority applicants, and there is no discriminatory school zones or public service allocation if there are no minority communities in a city. The unanswerable question is, "Would there be if there were minorities there", but that can't be captured in these sorts of statistics.
Well my response was partially tongue in cheek, but you do realize CA also holds about 1/5 of the US population? I said "density", which takes population into account.
I think you're attributing the statement "red states" to Republican party. I think that's an unfair statement, but "red states" is a measurable geographic location, not a political ideology. And I'm pretty sure the map still would show that the density (if you take the total racists and divide by the total population of the red states) of hate groups is greater in the red states.
I don't think a reasonable person who knows anything about NK and its regime would take away from the title that Hitchens is calling the North Korean people crazy and despicable.
The point is, there's no good reason, most of the time, to leave it to the interpretations of a 'reasonable person'. An equally reasonable person can just leave the original title alone - problem solved. Oh and spell the author's name correctly.
I think it's pretty fair (and easy) to write accurate, correct titles. We can dance all night about what's 'reasonable' and what assumptions and on and on. The article was poorly retitled. No getting around that.
I find this kind of comments dangerous. Yes, technically he is calling North Koreans and some South Koreans insane. But taking this from the article can be done only by ripping it out of context. It's not the people who are evil, but the regime, the ideology. The meme complex, if you will. The distinction may be small, but missing it implies the author is himself crazy.
"It's not the people who are evil, but the regime ..."
I'm not sure about the North Korean case, but an author argued a few years back in the book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" that most WWII-era Germans were happy and willing to go along with the despot's genocide and total war.
"1984" ends with Smith Winston seemingly coerced into the attitude "[I] loved Big Brother". I'm not so sure he had no choice ... I think people usually are complicit in that which they tolerate and support.
People can be evil. In the U.S. we are too, in ways we usually don't acknowledge.
And sure, I broke the rule "if you have to bring up Hitler in an argument, you've already lost". So be it.
I thought it was common knowledge that WWII era Germans supported Hitler. I doubt they also supported the genocide, or at least the harsh reality of it - I remember reading that even Hitler avoided giving direct orders about it.
If you want to call that evil... I guess you may. But I'd say all it shows is that in certain contexts we can all support evil things.
I just started reading this, but I want to add something immediately: It's my understanding that South Koreans are also very racist. So I'm not sure if the regime is at fault for that one.
...
Yeah, I dunno. It's Hitchens and he seems to be writing a sideglance apologia for Communism. (As in, "See these shrunken slaves: It's nationalism that made them this way, not Marxism.") Nothing new really. China is doing something very similar actually, and they have been replacing Communist rhetoric in schools with nationalistic rhetoric, and for them it seems to be not a problem.
The difference between China's democides/labor camps/external aggression and North Korea's democides/labor camps/external aggression is largely that China got rich doing it and North Korea got poor. (Well, "rich", at any rate. About 10% of China is a fast growing dynamic economy which has eventual aspirations of being a world power -- and the other 90% lives in grinding poverty.)
Anyhow, since China is rich, it is considered sort of impolite to say "China, please stop committing genocide" or "Hey, China, working people to death in your laogai camps is sort of uncool." (This is sort of related to how it was tres gauche to mention that Soviet Russia was a brutal, genocidal dictatorship and how a huge portion of the American and European intelligensia supported that model and wanted it for their own countries. Which is itself related to it earlier being quite undiplomatic to talk about what the Austrian chap was doing in addition to his economic reforms.)
Be that as it may, reluctance to confront evil in China should not lead to reluctance to confront evil in North Korea.
That's a very japanese point of view you have there. Why does nobody speak of the exploitation of china (nanjing massacre, etc) as part of what made Japan rich.
People do discuss Japanese wartime atrocities. Frequently.
It would have been a bad example for the above post, though, because people actually opposed Japan's conduct in Manchuria contemporaneously (whereas China's conduct in the status quo, the Soviet Union's conduct for its entire existence, and the first few years of German fascism were/are dealt with limp-wristedly when they were not actively applauded).
For example, the United States hit Japan with a steel/oil embargo after Japanese refused to withdraw from Manchuria, which was the proximate cause of Japan deciding to go to war with the United States. (Funny little historical note: the US didn't actually intend the embargo to be a total embargo. When it was conceived in Washington it was as a temporary cutback to force Japan to the negotiating table. A minor bureaucrat misfiled something, though, and the planned periodic review never happened, which turned it into a total embargo. "Whoops.")
As an aside, essentially none of Japan's present economic prosperity is owed to wealth stolen from China. Most of that got very comprehensively burned, along with the rest of the country. Japan was pretty desperately poor postwar prior to the US' Korean war buildup, which they largely sourced in Japan, re-laying the industrial base which ignited the Period of High Economic Growth (高度成長期) that brought Japan from "substantially poorer than Mexico" to "really freaking rich".
They aren't worse than the Japanese, and Japanese aren't really extremely racist (they appear so to people who never had to experience "race consciousness" in their country of origin).
My experience with South Koreans is that they are generally proud of their accomplishments (rightfully so) and there is a subgroup that is abysmally ignorant. You could compare the second group to "rednecks" (and whatever the equivalent is wherever you are), except for the fact that it is much more difficult for a South Korean to travel than for a westerner.
Throwing the racist epithet around in this case seems overblown.
Hitchens is a sort of dying breed, a disillusioned communist. He takes Orwell's position: Communism and opposition to totalitarianism. Adherence to the latter led to abandonment of the former. Most of his atheist stuff boils down to hatred of totalitarianism.
He is definitely not immune to bias, but I would bet the bias is hatred of the North Korean regime.
And yet he drank the neoconservative koolaid. Mostly I think he is a hell of writer that just wants to be read. I'm not sure the content matters much to him.
He's an awesome writer with a knack for argumentation.
He's also rare in that he boasts of the merits of Western liberal democracy yet is mostly scornful of the Right. He doesn't let bastardized concepts of multiculturalism force him to tolerate flagrant intolerance.
I think content content matters to him a lot. My theory on his axis of evil theory is that it comes from the same opposition to totalitarianism and internationalism. I think he wants to believe in internationalism also. The UN (which was never intended to be a guardian of democracy, human rights or such things) was failing. It would never 'liberate' Iraqi, Afghanis, Burmese, North Koreans or anyone else. So, he turns to the US for this job with, I think, the hope that this will eventually result in a paradigm shift empowering internationalism in general. Remember that he comes from a very internationalist socialist "heritage."
Afganistan and Iraq were (and still are) oppressive totalitarian regimes where the individual's mind was being invaded. He supports liberation. Iraqis largely see the coalition as occupiers, not liberators (apart from the Kurds who never saw themselves as part of Saddam's Iraq) regardless of their views of the previous regime. Accepting that Iraq was not in fact liberated is accepting that liberation is not possible. His solidarity is delusional. That's got to be a bitter pill for someone like Hitchens.
The thought of North Koreans rejecting liberation from their regime to Hitchens is like the thought of an American slave rejecting abolition to some lingering flag bearer of the Black Panthers, like Hatians begging for the return of the French.
Oh come on. China is not totalitarian and has not been for decades. It is authoritarian at most, and considering the effective one-party nature of most long-lasting "democratic" states these days, I'm not even sure that word means anything anymore. It is impossible for non-establishment actors to organise politically in most big countries and the only difference is the fertility of the grounds for political unrest, and the mechanism by which opposition is put down.
Mostly-competent entrenched ruling class (with token democracy) vs. mostly-competent entrenched ruling class (without the token democracy). That's what we're looking at here, and quite honestly, I am not sure that the periodic input of a disinterested and politically naive bunch of voters is all it's cracked up to be.
Hitchens' central claim thesis is that North Korea is really right-wing since it's racist and militaristic. In making that claim, his problem is that N.K. is a communist dictatorship, and he can't find any way to spin that as right-wing. The problem then reduces to showing that it's not really communist.
He does this by saying that, since one recent government document doesn't mention the word communism, the country's not really communist at all. No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of communism.
A few notes: All dictatorships are militaristic in some important sense. That's because all dictatorships crush dissent, and sometimes you need a tank when all else fails.
As for racism: Stalin launched numerous pogroms against the Jews (and, in a nice Stalinist touch, put a jew in charge of the operations). The Soviet Union had only one non-Russian on the Central Committee, despite a large number of ethnic minorities in the USSR.
A guess on the Deeper Subtext behind this mess: "Yeah, I supported the war in Iraq, and I've lost readers like crazy. But I'm really a leftie. Here, watch me establish my bona fides."
> No mention about whether actions count more than words, or how that worked in years past, when there was plenty of racism and plenty of mentions of communism.
Good then you agree that North Korea was never a proper communist state since it never really showed any of the classic characteristics of communism.
Some may also remember from the news a few years ago another Korean War defector, Charles Robert Jenkins, who was able to move to Japan with his wife in 2004 during a period of Japanese-North Korean rapprochement:
Even though it is obvious you are intentionally misreading the article to try to find something to offend your feigned sensibilities, for some reason I respond.
He is comparing north and south Koreans. Genetically basically the same people. Nevertheless the Northerners are 6 inches shorter due to lifelong malnutrition.
I don't think most people realize that the North Korean regime is nearly as bad as the Nazi and Soviet Stalinist regimes. The only difference is that the impact of that regime has been comparatively limited outside of the country. Which in many ways is very sad for the unfortunates trapped inside, since it seems to mean that the world pays very much less attention to their plight.
To call a group of our fellow humans "a sort of new species" - as the author does - is offensive, no matter who the target. That legitimately offends my sensibilities, as I consider myself to fall under the same umbrella as North Koreans - that of humanity at large. As you stated yourself, these people are physically different from others due to a lifetime of malnutrition, NOT a genetic evolution, which would be necessary for a new species to emerge. Also, using the term "dwarf", which is a colloquial term for a medical disorder, is simply inaccurate, and hints at the superiority bias of this author. The rest of the piece follows a similar tone, and to me does no good in bringing us to a more civil position with North Korea.
I think one of Hitchens' points is that there may be no good to be done with a civil position toward North Korea. In discussing the book, The Cleanest Race, he says the conclusions of the book could "mean that peace and disarmament negotiations with [N. Korea] are a waste of time—and perhaps a dangerous waste at that."
You appear to be either a troll or someone who gets off on feeling offended.
Nonetheless, to clarify the title for you:
a) The author cites several examples of pervasive racism in NK society (this is where the racist part comes from).
b) The author indicates that North Korean citizens are six inches shorter than their genetically identical South Korean counterparts. (This is where the dwarves part comes from).
Hence 'A Nation of Racist Dwarves' is merely a statement of fact.
To be fair, so is Hitchens, in a sense. The difference is, Hitchens just does is so much more eloquently than you, and has a good point hidden behind all the invective. You're just giving voice to a cliche.
This author holds an air of bias about him. Even in the title "...more despicable than you thought" suggests this is more of a tabloid than anything factual.
I'm interested in knowing what's going on in North Korea, and he does have some facts in here, but on the whole I'd prefer something a little more informative.
Alright, here's some factual discussion for you. I'm about to make claims which you may not think I mean literally. I mean them literally.
1) North Korea runs concentration camps, in which inmates are worked to death in mines and factories to increase industrial production.
2) North Korea is a military dictatorship which has used democide via famine against its own people to make it impossible to resist its dictatorship. If you're on the winning side with the army, your family gets to eat better than grass. In the late 90s a famine killed about 3 million people. That's the regime's estimate, incidentally. (Communists tend to have rosy accounting about such things.) The population of North Korea is about 23 million.
3) North Koreans are some of the most desperately poor people on earth. They don't have much, and what they do have gets forcibly expropriated to maintain one of the largest standing armies in the world. Its number one enemy is its own people, though if you believe the propaganda it has crushed the imperialist Yankee under its boot and exacts tribute from him, which explains all the bags of rice bearing American flags without which the population would again starve.
4) The regime is supported by a personality cult of Kim Jong-Il and his father, Kim Il-sung, who has been essentially deified. That is not an exaggeration -- North Korean propaganda has attributed the creation of the world to him.
Any educated person should know the above four facts already. If you know them, "Wait, hold on a second, let's not rush to judgement or use overly emotional language when discussing this country" sounds like you're so open-minded your brain has fallen out.
Slate is a politics and culture magazine, not a newspaper, that features essays and columns often expressing the opinions of mostly well-known regular writers. Hitchens is one of Slate's better-known writers and is most famous for his work in Vanity Fair magazine.
Usually when someone reads a Hitchens article, they know what to expect. He definitely has a bias. He is a hawk, a bit of a neo-con, and an infamous hater of the Clintons. He is also known for his zealous atheism (heh) and enormous ego. I don't often agree with Hitchens, but I generally enjoy his work and appreciate his surly intellectualism and penchant for turning over rocks to reveal the dirt. His pieces are usually opinionated but factual.
This self-promoting buffoon should be exposed for the what he is. He went to Lebanon last year to film his one-man crusade to impose Liberal Democracy on the "unwashed Arab masses", he made a fuss about being attacked by Nazis in Lebanon! In reality, him and his photographer went to certain Beirut neighborhoods and provoked the locals until he was slapped around by teenagers.
Let me say that again: Hitchens went to the Middle East to pick fist fights. Yeah, very intellectual.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchens+Lebanon+brawl
:-|
I value his take on North Korea as much as I value Octomom's opinion on Cuba.