Flashback Friday

I intend to make the Flashback Friday a weekly thing from now on. Although it's going to be hard for me not to continually pick on Christopher Hitchens. He wrote some of the most hair-brained, illogical crap you can imagine after he suddenly switched from being a radical "lefty" to being a neocon cheerleader. Case in point, on December 31, 2002, he dropped this condescending turd to lecture all of us silly "liberals" about the definition of "evil". I'll spare you the meat of his argument (some semantic reasoning about how the word "evil" actually means something), and just give you the last paragraph:

Probably no journalist in the current discourse has had more fun denouncing Bush as a reactionary simpleton than Robert Fisk of the London Independent. His dispatches have an almost Delphic stature among those who decry American "double standards." Yet I still have my copy of the article he wrote from Kuwait City soon after the expulsion of Saddam's forces. He described as best he could the contents of certain cellars and improvised lock-ups and the randomness of the carnage and destruction and waste (remember that Saddam blew up the Kuwaiti oilfields when he had already surrendered control of them), but there was an X-factor in the scene that he could smell or taste rather than summarize. "Something evil," he wrote, "has happened here." I think I agree with him that we do indeed need a word for it, and that this is the best negative superlative that we possess.

Hitchens used this as a way to convince us that Saddam was evil, and therefore any liberal who doesn't agree with taking out Saddam is a hypocrite like Fisk. Of course, no one was arguing that Saddam wasn't evil, but that the evil that Fisk described was not attributable solely to the man who started the war in 1990, but about war itself. Forgetting that any kind of war is also "evil", Hitchens never looked at the debate over Iraq as having to choose between the lesser of two evils, but instead as an overly simplistic struggle between "good" and "evil". This "Lord of the Rings" view of the war still exists today, as those mired in the most serious denial out there continue to ignore the other "evil" of Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and thousands of dead and wounded. Instead, in their mind, there's only one "evil", and since we're "good", we have no other choice but to do whatever is necessary to win.

Unfortunately though, Fisk was right all along. And the "double standards" that Hitchens scoffed at exposed themselves when we began to use Saddam's "evil" tactics in order for "good" to prevail. It's foolish to deny that war is sometimes necessary. But it's also dangerous to forget that even then, it's still a necessary "evil".

UPDATE: Filkertom in the Eschaton comments pointed out to me that my "Lord of the Rings" reference doesn't quite work.

The original books and all three films -- especially in the Extended Editions -- continue with the theme that the Ring corrupts. Aragorn is one of the only men with the will to resist it. The hobbits, as a race, seem better suited to resist its lure because they really don't have a need or inclination to lord it over anyone. Sorcerors like Gandalf and Galadriel, already accustomed to wielding power, were actually more susceptible to it -- think of all those jokes about someone whose last words are, "Don't worry, I got i-"

I originally began using that term based upon arguments I heard from wingnuts on Slate that used LOTR to explain why we needed to take out Saddam (I'm not really familiar with the movies myself). I guess they're too stupid to figure out movies too...