Despair, hope and contempt

Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, has a good message. Those who protest and fight against injustice of one kind and another should not despair; joy doesn't betray, it sustains, that fight:

"I'm a natural contrarian," she says, "and a lot of what I felt contrary about was the griping and the finding fault that is so prevalent in some parts of the left."

All of which is very much to the point. Beware of those who pretend to be looking towards a better future world, but do not recognize, and try to share in, the pleasures and the marvels of the world they have - as Richard Rorty calls them, ascetic priests.

But then we get, from Rebecca Solnit, this:

"... I am certainly not saying that terrible things have not happened in Iraq. But what we forget are the things that did not happen - the wars, the diseases, the people who didn't die." Indeed, she says that she hopes to see George Bush indicted for war crimes during her lifetime... [and so forth].

Yep, 'what we forget', that's what she says. And she only forgets that one of the things that happened thanks to the war in Iraq was the overthrow of a regime responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And she only forgets what has stopped happening since the fall of that regime. Or perhaps she remembers inwardly; but she doesn't remember to say anything about it.

Christopher Hitchens was on Night Waves last night, talking to Philip Dodd. Dodd has just asked him about losing friends on the left for being part of the 'small band of people' who think that what's happened since 9/11, 'from America and Britain', should have happened rather than shouldn't have. Hitchens replies:

The liberation of 40 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan from different variants of absolutism and totalitarianism - and cruelty - it seems to me is a case that argues itself without my help. I might add that I've made some good friends on the Afghan and Kurdish and Iraqi left that more than make up for the creeps on the left who made apologies for the Taliban and for Saddam Hussein, [and] who I should have quarreled with much sooner than I did.

[Dodd: What I don't understand, apart from temperament, is why you use the word 'creeps'. You don't need it.]

Yes, I do.

[Dodd: Why?]

Well, in order to give you and your listeners an impression, just a tiny one, of the utter contempt that I feel for these people. And also knowing what I can and cannot say on the BBC. I think 'creep' is the least of it.

Yes, contempt for the apologists, and also for those who, in the balance of what they remember to say and what they forget, treat these issues as if there could not have been any good reasons for supporting the overthrow of the Taliban and/or Saddam Hussein. I've said this many times before so I'll try to say it now in a different way: respect has two sides; let you be in mine if I can be in yours. It isn't easy to respect those unable to conceive of any good reasons for the war they opposed.

Update: More on Yasmin and The Dude from Scott of the Ablution.