Christopher Hitchens

It’s conventional to refer to the Kennedys as America’s royal family,
and they are indeed almost dysfunctional enough to deserve the title.
What distinguished John Jr. — as people took to calling him — was
more the noblesse oblige than the pseudo-nobility. He did not act
with a sense of entitlement, or assume that he was owed a seat in the
Massachusetts delegation to congress. Nor did he inflict himself on
everybody with packaged opinions. The tone of George magazine was
decidedly liberal, but for its Washington editor he chose Tony Blankley,
the portly and jovial Englishman who had been chief spokesman for
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Superstitions gather around fetish objects, and people who are normally
quite rational can be heard referring unironically to the “curse” that
surrounds the Kennedy name. (To take just two examples, his uncle Teddy
was nearly killed in a plane crash in the 1960s, and off the island of
Martha’s Vineyard, where John Jr. was bound when he was lost, is the
notorious resort of Chappaquiddick. By a macabre coincidence, this
weekend is the 30th anniversary of the sordid and watery end of
poor Mary Jo Kopechne.) Thus it was always with a slight crossing of
fingers that people spoke of John Jr.’s charmed life. Like charisma,
the word “charm” is overused to the point of tedium, but he did possess
charm, and exerted it effortlessly. He could have had anything or anyone
he wanted, but there has never been a story about his doing anything
tawdry. No nasty breakup, no starlet with a black eye, no heroin, no
bystander sacrificed to greedy celebrity or narcissism. “He was a good
man, quite simply,” I was told by his friend Inigo Thomas, who also
worked at George. “Given the context in which he lived, a really
extremely good man. Very fair, very witty and very loyal.” In
journalism, which was the nearest he came to a chosen profession, he
admired the self-starters and the mavericks — Hunter Thompson being a
favorite.

Richard Reeves, one of the more critical historians of the Kennedy
dynasty, said that he’s sometimes doubted whether it’s really true that
the gods punish those to whom they have first given everything, but that
he doesn’t doubt it any more. I suppose that the image which endures the
longest is the one which the young man had the least conscious influence
in producing. It is that of the little boy saluting at his father’s
coffin, as his beautiful mother wears her widow’s weeds and the entire
world bites its lip and strives not to weep. Since then, the funeral has
been the measure and benchmark of the Kennedy family reunion. (When his
plane went down, John Jr. was en route to the wedding of his cousin
Rory, who was in her mother’s womb when her father Robert was
assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968. The family chapel at the Kennedy
compound in Hyannis, which was to have been used for a nuptial, will now
be used for a memorial again. And a whole new generation of Americans
will have their own personal Kennedy to mourn.)

On a small plane to Martha’s Vineyard the weekend before last, I met the
newlywed Christiane Amanpour of CNN (an old friend of John Jr.’s
since his Rhode Island college days) and Jamie Rubin, chief spokesman for
Madeleine Albright. They were off to stay with John and Carolyn and to
recover from the rigors of Kosovo. I mentioned the encounter to one or
two people, including some pretty hardened local hostesses. “You mean
he’s on the island?” one of them — more than used to celebrity
– exclaimed. I can only begin to imagine what people will have said
when they heard these latest tidings, but it is not impossible that they
will start by saying where they were, and what they were doing, when
they received the latest proof of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s most
frequent presidential sayings, which is that life itself is unfair.

Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, “Afghanistan, where the world’s most open society confronts the world’s most closed one”? “Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.” “Where the world’s most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world’s most accurate ones.” “Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.” I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the “doves” to paste into their scrapbook.

Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to reread themselves saying things like, “The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.”

If the silly policy of a Ramadan pause had been adopted, the citizens of Kabul would have still been under a regime of medieval cruelty, and their oppresssors would have been busily regrouping, not praying. Anyhow, what a damn-fool proposal to start with. I don’t stop insulting the Christian coalition at Easter time. Come Yom Kippur I tend to step up my scornful remarks about Zionism. Whatever happened to the robust secularism that used to characterize the left? And why is it suddenly only the injured feelings of Muslims that count?

A couple of years ago, the same people were striking pompous attitudes about the need to avoid offending Serbian and therefore Russian Orthodox sensitivities. Except that those sensitive people, or their leaders, were engaged in putting the Muslims of Europe to the sword.

There’s no pleasing some people, but as a charter supporter of the nuclear disarmament campaign, I can remember a time when the peace movement was not an auxiliary to dictators and aggressors in trouble. Looking at some of the mind-rotting tripe that comes my way from much of today’s left, I get the impression that they go to bed saying: What have I done for Saddam Hussein or good old Slobodan or the Taliban today?

Well, ha ha ha. It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done. It was also obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: Should that be the case, there are many, many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too.

Reprinted with permission from the London Guardian.

It’s almost impossible to distill all one’s dislike of Clinton into one valedictory article, but this is the moment to try. In the past eight years, he has hugely shrunk the area of the possible while greatly expanding the area of the thinkable. When he took office, there was everything to play for with Russia and China, and a real chance for serious disarmament. Our first post-Cold War president now faces us with a renewed missile race, even more expensive and inefficient than its predecessor, and a sterile confrontation with post-Communist authoritarians with whom he is otherwise on much too easy terms.

But then, when he took office, the idea that a sitting president would rent the Lincoln bedroom to the nearest bidder was also a remote one to most people. Washington was to belong to those who worked hard and played by the rules, not to the Riadys and Tamrazes and the other riffraff to whom (through the agency of the lovely Dick Morris) this president repeatedly sold his office.

In between, and taking up much more of his real commitment and energy than any reform program, we have had a president who, while in office, has had to settle a sexual harassment suit to the tune of nearly a million bucks, has had to face disbarment for lying to a federal judge, has been cited by another judge for a criminal violation of the Privacy Act, and has been plausibly accused of rape. To the suggestion that he induced the aforesaid Mr. Riady, emissary of the Indonesian military dictatorship, to use some of his funny money to pay off a disgraced and imprisoned deputy attorney general, the former master of detail and king of the briefing book now pleads total amnesia.

This is how our time and opportunity has been squandered since 1992. There are those who might want to plead that the economy is sound, but they have Alan Greenspan’s policy to thank for that, as Clinton is, by his endless deference to the man, the first to admit. And if you wanted Greenspan, with all his orthodoxy about unemployment inflation and corporatism, you could have voted for George W(ashington)’s daddy to begin with. Only he would not have asked you to keep quiet, lest you jeopardize his plan for national health care.

Covering Clinton in New Hampshire in 1992, I concluded (and wrote) that he was stop-at-nothing ruthless, that he was exorbitantly lousy about political money, that he was a near-pathological liar and that he was exceptionally foul in his relations with women. I haven’t had to take anything back. Three things about his record still strike me as monstrous. And the silence of liberals on these three points still strikes me as degrading:

1) The execution of Rickey Ray Rector. Lobotomized by his own bullet, this disabled black convict did not understand either his trial or his sentence. Executed by Clinton to draw attention from the Gennifer Flowers flap (about which he also lied) Rector outdoes Willie Horton by every definition of racist grandstanding. His snuffing was not just an election tactic, bad enough though that would have been. In power, Clinton fast-tracked capital punishment to the point where even Republican governors and legislatures have had to try and slow it down.

2) The wag-the-dog bombing of Sudan. Nobody in the political, military or intelligence establishment any longer pretends that the target hit by Clinton in August 1998 was anything but a medical facility. And few pretended even at the time. But something had to be hit in the week of Monica Lewinsky’s return to the grand jury, and Clinton borrowed the movie lines of Michael Douglas from the film “The American President” in order to justify the atrocity. A truly chilling Strangelove moment.

3) The rape of Juanita Broaddrick. This woman’s allegations check out at every point where they can be tested (and are corroborated, in my recent book, by the similar testimony of at least two other women). Clinton refuses to comment, and refused even to help NBC when it tried to establish his alibi for the relevant day. Again, he seems to have counted — successfully — on decent people’s reluctance to face the possibility that such a thing could be true.

The president needs therapy, as even his awful wife has conceded. But this does not excuse the gruesome apologists who have told us that his problems should be kept private. The Oval Office private? It belongs to the people. The Lincoln bedroom, private? The Justice Department, a private law firm? Those who defended Clinton in this way did not just avert their eyes from corruption, violence and injustice, and to the use of state power to slander and defame female witnesses who turned out to be telling the truth. They invented excuses for power that we can be sure his successors will eagerly employ. Did you see the White House claiming that George (W)ashington had borrowed Clinton’s vapid lines for his successful speech? Are these hacks so dumb that they don’t know what they are acknowledging? The fact is that Clintonism has set a lower bar for political obscenity of all kinds, and that we are all the losers for it. All this — and Starr wars, too.

A genuine foe of oligarchy like Ronnie Dugger, co-chair of the organization Alliance for Democracy, with his reasoned case for the public financing of campaigns, really does seem like a quixotic loony to our consensual press. (And since he doesn’t manifest any obvious nostalgia for, say, the Third Reich, he doesn’t even count as a colorful character for style section purposes.)

The brave volunteers of Public Campaign and the Alliance for Democracy took their protest to the Capitol steps recently, but the Washington Post ignored the rally, where the largest groups of attendees were high-school students not yet inured to cynicism and not yet old enough to vote. The defeat of the rather tepid McCain-Feingold initiative in the Senate, which was the proximate cause of the protest, also marked the eclipse of any remaining hope for a fair or open race next year.

The fix is in: The special interests will pretend to have an election, and you, if you choose, can pretend to vote in it. The only recourse I can see is an appeal to the international community and the United Nations, to send accredited observers to monitor the process.

The United States loves nothing better than to certify other countries’ ballots as “free and fair,” so there can hardly be any principled objection to a delegation of monitors, from democratic nations, taking up position, pens in hand, as America makes its “choice.” Indeed, given the awful power of the U.S. president and Congress over the affairs of other nations, it’s surprising that this hasn’t been suggested already.

Here are some of the questions that the U.N. and international monitors would have to consider before validating the 2000 election:

1) Has there already been the open purchase of votes, as seemed to be the acknowledged case in the href="/news/feature/1999/08/16/straw/index.html">Iowa straw poll?

2) Has there already been the open purchase of candidates, as is implied by the immense (and, in point of the source of donations) largely secret fund amassed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush?

3) Are there restrictions placed on the entry of third-party or independent candidates? Have these restrictions been imposed by a collusion of the existing parties?

4) Are there impediments to the placing of minority parties on ballots?

5) Are there impediments to voter registration?

6) Is access to the media fairly apportioned as between candidates and parties, irrespective of wealth?

7) Do the laws barring convicted felons from voting constitute discrimination against any minority group?

Does the allotment of federal matching funds constitute a subsidy to a duopoly?

These questions are not exhaustive. I have not, for example, included the misgivings felt by some experts about the reliability or integrity of the voting machines that are used to count and register ballots. Nor have I space to discuss the flagrant disenfranchisement of voters in the nation’s capital — a grotesque anomaly that seems on the face of it to be decidedly racist in both cause and effect. Conditions vary from state to state, so that question No. 7 for example would need to be measured differently according to local conditions.

But it’s already clear that self-policing is not enough in most jurisdictions. It’s also clear that the American mass media — chief recipient of the largesse raised and spent by candidates — has simply abdicated its watchdog role in the election process.

Some elements of the deficit of democracy in this country should have been put to the test long ago. The Supreme Court ought to have heard arguments about whether campaign donations constitute common-law bribery, and there is no reason not to ventilate the question of the Electoral College, with its inbuilt bias against urban and minority voters. However, these and other options are unlikely to be exercised unless the entire system is challenged in a thoroughgoing way. A monitoring force from the international community seems to me to provide the best chance for such an alteration in perspective. What is needed, therefore, is an appeal from a large group of respected Americans for such a monitoring force to be brought into being.

We have less than a year to refuse the front-loaded, bought-and-paid-for pseudo-election that is being prepared for us. Already, the primary process has been short-circuited, and it looks as if the presidential “debates” will be rigged as they were last time, by the same unelected and unaccountable corporate interests.

All those interested in signing an appeal for inspection, and for the verifying and certifying of an open political process, should contact Public Campaign at 1320 19th St NW, Suite M1, Washington DC 20036.

The best air force, wrote Lindbergh (who had accepted a large and swastika-infested medal from Reichsmarshall Herman Goering himself) was the German one. Now take another look at the date on the article. It’s still springtime for Hitler, but autumn for Poland and, soon, France. Winter is not far behind, for other and lesser peoples.

The question to ask about Lindbergh is not whether he was a crackpot and a racist. The above screed, and his infamous speech in Des Moines (“The greatest danger to this country lies in the large Jewish influence”) make the exercise superfluous. No, the question is, Why is an “isolationist” or a neutralist licking the boots of Goering, or having his own boots licked? Also, why is he echoing the wild theories of a putative “master race”? Surely the whole point of Fortress America is precisely to stay out of European quarrels and avoid taking sides?

Certainly that is how Buchanan himself claims to view matters. In the opening pages of his new book, “A Republic, Not an Empire,” he speaks easily and positively about George Washington’s Farewell Address and Thomas Jefferson’s warning against “entangling alliances.” I must say that I had no idea, when I watched Buchanan flacking for Nixon in Vietnam and shouting for Reagan in Grenada and positively sobbing with ecstasy over Col. Oliver North (his Lindbergh surrogate) that he had been such a closet stay-at-home all along. It would certainly have been impressive if he’d said so at the time. But his latest effort is not presented as any kind of re-think or self-criticism. Rather, it shows how highly compatible the concepts of expansionism and racism are with the ideas of the parochial and the nativist.

Here are two contrasting examples:

1) “Annexation of Texas, the Southwest, and California was Manifest Destiny, not imperialism.” (Page 122).

2) “In mid-March 1939 Hitler took a fateful step. He ordered his army into Prague and declared Czechoslovakia a Nazi protectorate. Poland and Hungary each bit off a chunk, and the Slovaks declared their independence … The injustice and folly of Versailles had now produced disaster.” (Page 258)

In the first example, American annexation is fine because, Buchanan says, it did not make Mexican citizens into a subject people (and because it was ordained by Heaven). In the second instance, he only just distinguishes between a possible German reunion with the Sudeten volk, for whom his heart still bleeds (far as they were from American shores) and a conquest and occupation of the whole of Czechoslovakia. Moreover, he blandly describes the Slovak puppet state, a contemptible subsidiary of the Third Reich, as having “declared independence.” The leader of that Slovak vassal statelet was of course Monsignor Josef Tiso, an ordained Catholic priest.

Having been accused by my critics of Catholic-bashing, and given that current anti-Catholic-bashing crusader Rudolph Giuliani remains one of the few prominent Republicans to have held his tongue on the subject of Buchanan — tongue-holding not being Mayor Giuliani’s everyday mode — I may as well say straightaway that Buchanan’s book is a loopy and inconsistent piece of Catholic fundamentalism and that this, and mainly this, is the reason for its weird and self-destructive sympathy for the fascist cause.

For example, the names Franco, Salazar, Mussolini, Pavelic, Horthy and Coughlin — the Vatican-sponsored clerical fascists — are almost entirely absent from the book. Yet Buchanan has spent a political career, and several essays in other books, defending all of them. A nativist Catholic sectarian is of course well within his rights to hymn local talents like Father Coughlin (and even Cardinal Spellman, though this seems to involve a relaxation of Buchanan’s position on gay rights). But how is it his business to decide the internal affairs of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Croatia and Hungary? Acid test: Buchanan demanded U.S. intervention in favor of the Croats in 1991 and opposed it for the Bosnians after 1992.

Another giveaway comes on Page 153, where Buchanan reveals that he’s been against the Spanish-American war all along: Playing a supporting role was the “black legend,” the “stereotype of Spaniards as blood-thirsty despots that Americans had inherited from their English forebears.” The Protestant press was up in arms over Spanish barbarities and wanted Catholic Spain driven out of the hemisphere in humiliation. “English forebears”? I thought that Buchanan was famous for wanting an Anglo-Saxon, or at least Anglo-Teutonic, immigration policy. But where he doesn’t “think with the blood,” he thinks with his sect. Nothing — nothing — could be more un-American.

I myself would vastly prefer a republic to an empire, which is why I wrote so much against the Buchanan-North campaign against Nicaragua and El Salvador — a campaign that knowingly involved imperialism abroad and subversion of the Constitution at home. It’s depressing to see liberal commentators — even some Nation contributors like Benjamin Schwartz and Christopher Layne — falling so easily for such demagogy and excusing Buchanan because he doesn’t like NAFTA or because he doesn’t care about Kosovo. The blunt fact is that the tradition of Lindbergh and Buchanan would not have kept America out of war, or innocent of overseas adventures. But it would have pledged a not-so-surreptitious neutrality to the other side in that conflict, and perhaps come by its empire that way.

Three things, however, distinguish Medjugorje from the average racketeering religious hub. First, the children claimed to go on seeing the Virgin Mary every day, and some of them keep up this claim to the present moment. Since she exists in their imaginations, and is not a weeping or bleeding statue of the traditional sort — smeared with pig’s fat or otherwise rigged — she is harder to expose than the more palpable frauds at the shrine of San Gennaro, say. Second, the Vatican and the local hierarchy will not, as they have with similar hallucinations at Fatima or Lourdes or Knock, bestow recognition on the supposed miracle. Third, the political element of this miracle is so obvious as to do what no cowled blue lady can do: make a non-believer catch his breath in wonder.

Part of the fraudulence of Medjugorje is manifested in its political opportunism The site is in the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina, but it also lies within the area claimed and occupied by Croatian irredentists. In the unbelievably awful souvenir shops that pollute the entire landscape, the accepted local currency is the Croatian kuna, supposed by the Dayton accords to be illegal tender in these parts.

Here, the wreckage of an entire city and the ruin of an entire society is still open to view. The bridges are down, the minarets are amputated: In many parts of town there is still not one stone piled on another. And all this was done, in plain view of NATO, by Croatian government forces who had pictures of the Virgin taped to their rifle-butts. While the pilgrims chanted only a matter of miles away, and gave out stupid and cupiditous yelps about their rosaries turning into gold, the soldiers of Christ were methodically leveling every sign of the existence of another monotheism — Islam. They were also killing, deporting and torturing those of their fellow citizens who professed the wrong faith, or who didn’t profess the right one, or who professed no faith at all.

This episode of atrocity weighs still on the meditations of serious Catholics. It doesn’t weigh quite enough, or his holiness the pope would not have beatified the late Cardinal Alojzije Stepanic, who was the clerical face of the wartime Croatian Nazi regime led by Ante Pavelic. (If Pat Buchanan were a mere “isolationist,” rather than someone soft on fascism, he would not be such a strong supporter and endorser of the Croatian extreme right, past and present.) Still, even on that dismal occasion the holy father was constrained to utter a few words against genocide and sectarianism. And I imagine that it is this atrocity — unstated yet inescapable — that moves the church to speak softly but skeptically to its over-eager Medjugorje flock. Bad as things are, they are not so counter-ecumenical as to make us bow down before Our Lady of the Ustashe.

There is a principle or saying in the world of Catholic scholasticism: “Whatever is received is received in the manner of the receiver.” An alternative, or looser, rendering of the Latin would be: “Garbage in — garbage out.” The children were asked excitedly and often, and understandably, what the Virgin had said to them. They replied that she recommended prayer, Bible study, fasting and the rosary. The dullest Croatian parish priest could have said as much, a message worse than the pointless burblings from the beyond that are produced at spiritualist seances. A pretty young guide took me to see a statue of Our Lady outside an ugly new basilica in the center of town. “This one,” she breathed reverently, “is the one which the children say looks most like the apparition.” I gazed. The banal stone figure precisely resembled every wayside mass-produced Virgin I had ever seen. Perhaps this is why, from Guadeloupe to Knock, she only ever manifests herself to people who have been trained to recognize her.

By contrast to the reverence of Our Lady’s followers, the hostility of the local church hierarchy and (thus far) even of an extremely Marian pope is more difficult to explicate. But — as with the Vatican’s denunciation of the supposed apparition at Garabandal in Spain in the 1960s — we can make a good guess. People “channeling” the Virgin of Medjugorge have interpreted her as preferring the Franciscans to the Jesuits. None of her purported “healings” has survived even the scrutiny of the clerics at Lourdes. Pagan conduct and superstitious ecstasy has been observed at the site, as has the grossest commercialism. And anyway, as Aaron’s Old Testament competition with Pharoah’s sorcerers can attest, the ability to conjure is not in itself proof of a Christian or even monotheist God, because otherwise the polytheistic sorcerers wouldn’t be able to do it. (The latter point is not made by the pope, but it ought to be.) So holy mother church has reached a compromise, whereby the faithful are neither enjoined to worship at Medjugorge nor discouraged from doing so. On the verge of the millennium, Rome does not need another embarrassing bogus revelation.