Guilt By Association. posted by Richard Seymour

Hitchens Watch has been so effective as to prompt the target of its critique to respond. A hit indeed - a very palpable hit. Of interest, he defends his guilt-by-association attack on Cindy Sheehan by saying:

She can speak about her son, but not for him, and perhaps especially not in the terms that LaRouche and Duke and the anti-war Right have been employing.

...

I do not go for guilt by association: a reactionary group is quite welcome to quote me, or even invite me. But I give the same speech on Jefferson and secularism wherever I go (as in the case of the FRC). Mr Duke will never be quoting me because I shall never say anything that gratifies him. Easy enough, and a distinction I think worth making.

This will have to be recorded as adding to the impacted faecal matter that now fills out Hitchens bloated corpus. He does guilt-by-association like few others. I distinctly remember him calling the antiwar left "auxiliaries to dictatorship", for instance. There is a thesaurus of similar instances, but in this case, he has attempted guilt-by-association on Cindy Sheehan, which prompted Alex Cockburn to get a retraction from him. It was like pulling teeth from a boar, but he did it.



In the article, Hitchens uses the fact that David Duke 'defended' Ms Sheehan to damn her, and translates a claim that the war was "to benefit Israel" into a rather more sensational claim that it was "for a Jewish cabal". What is more, Hitchens goes on in his missive to offer a rather mealy-mouthed defense of his tactic: "Mr Duke will never be quoting me because I shall never say anything that gratifies him." If this is "a distinction worth making", then I wonder whether it matters that Hitchens was quoted on David Irving's website? Not about the war or Israel, you understand, but in praise of Irving:

"Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a great historian of Fascism."

I hate to direct you to that hideous site, and I won't link to it, but you can copy and paste this into your viewfinder if curiosity grips you: http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/99/02/Hitchens.html

The site also reproduces an entire article from him: http://www.fpp.co.uk/StMartinsPress/Hitchens0696.html

Hitchens did indeed expend a great deal of energy in defense of Irving, who may well be a fascist but isn't a historian by any reasonable application of that term. About which, you can read more here.

Cockburn was not merely clacking his teeth together, then, when he wrote:

[U]nder Hitchens' rules of polemical engagement, was does that make Hitchens? A holocaust denier, a guy who has Faurisson and David Irving's books under his pillow. A Jew hater, or if you believe his sudden discovery (privately denied by his own brother on at least one occasion) at a mature age that his mother was Jewish a Jewish self-hater.

These tactics are not unfamiliar. The entire diapason of pro-war liberal opinion-formers has indulged in this revolting ad hominem habit, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. Add your own Latin tags. But the ubiquitous use of this tactic is to be read as a sign of weakness. The argument for imperialism was never particularly strong, but it has taken knocks in both credibility and morale that anyone who still spouts it needs all the fortification they can get. The Maginot Line in Hitchens' mind, and in those of his ideological confederates, is erected from pastiche, pretense and disavowal. It is buttressed by the ritual denunciation of selected foes, and its cynosures are provided by the lingua franca of hysterical defamation, intimidation and calumny redolent of the anti-Dreyfussards, of Vyshinsky and McCarthy.

Contrarianism and conformity, united at long last.