Capitalist pigs are attractive even without lipstick on?

A reader comments in response to Arundhati Roy's Chomsky-like rhetoric against capitalism:

Someone must explain why people escape from communist countries to ones ruled by capitalist pigs. Why is there no traffic in the opposite direction if what Arundhati says is true?

 I am no maniacal supporter of the market system--the highly unequal distribution of incomes and wealth is, for instance, something that worries me a lot.  I agree with her on Anna Hazare too.  But, ahem, the lady doth protest too much!

Hitchens takes on Chomsky. Go Hitch!

Two days ago, when I read this Noam Chomsky piece on Osama bin Laden's death, I tweeted that Chomsky has gone off the deep end, and that it is high time he retired.

I may have as well not vented about it, because there is the mother of all responses to Chomsky, from the debater extraordinaire, Christopher Hitchens, who writes that Chomsky is "offensive, inconsistent, and ignorant." 

Hitchens points Chomsky, who claims that there isn't evidence linking bin Laden to 9/11, to the ever mounting evidence against bin Laden, and not all of it is from the US government either:

Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?

It is this bizarre anti-war left of the Noam Chomskys and Arundhati Roys that then makes the anti-war people like me even hide ourselves in a closet.  Because, normal people think that anybody who is anti-war has to be a fanatical nutcase like a Chomsky or Roy!  And the Chomsky faithful think that people like me are sellouts, to whom I know not!

As Hitchens writes, "With the paranoid anti-war "left," you never quite know where the emphasis is going to fall next."  He knows it all too well--after all, he was a darling of the left crowd until he pissed them off by turning colors soon after, and in response to, the events of 9/11.

Hitchens summarizes a Chomsky (world)view as thus:

In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.

Stage left, Professor Chomsky. And his populist sidekick, Michael Moore, too. 

Just give up on Kashmir. End the intifada

Earlier today, when I was jumping from one hyperlink to another, I came across a link to this decade-old paper, which is in the context of the Balkan crisis.  Forget that context and merely read the following sentences:

An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.
Since the establishment of the United Nations and the enshrinement of great-power politics in its Security Council, however, wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course. Instead, they have typically been interrupted early on, before they could burn themselves out and establish the preconditions for a lasting settlement. Cease-fires and armistices have frequently been imposed under the aegis of the Security Council in order to halt fighting.

Isn't this what the Kashmir issue, too, has been for sixty-plus years?  The cease-fire and the "line of control" in place has merely perpetuated the war, instead of ushering in a sense of peace.

I am with Arundhati Roy (such agreement doesn't happen often!) when she says that Kashmir has never been an integral part of India and maybe Indians should just let go of that territory.  I, too, have expressed such sentiments in this blog.  I would extend the same logic to Nagaland, Mizoram, ...

The difference though is that as a nobody, and an American nobody, my words don't invite the Indian government's attention as do Roy's.  The latest news of a mob gathering outside her home doesn't bode well either.

The intifada in Kashmir

I have blogged about the fresh series of violence in Kashmir, which is why I am all the more worried about the escalation in the confrontation there.

The caption for the photo on the left reads:
A man throws a policeman's bamboo shield on a burning government vehicle after protesters set it on fire in Pampore, near Srinagar on Sunday.

According to the same news report, At least eight people were killed in fresh round of violence in Kashmir, taking the death toll in the past 36 hours to 12.

A commentary from across the border, in Pakistan, naturally takes on a completely pro-Pakistani slant, along with anti-Indian and anti-American rhetoric:
India continues to treat the Kashmiri people as if they were not human beings and as if they have no rights. It refuses to acknowledge the uprising to be a home grown insurgency. Instead, it finds it easy to blame it all on groups that it says Pakistan sponsors.

There are even more fascinatingly rhetorical and inflammatory sentences in that commentary.  But then that is what most commentators do anyway--we have quite a few of such shrill ideological voices spouting rhetoric in the television and newspaper outlets here in America.  Stupid ideologues all over this planet!

If only India's Vallabhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru hadn't arm-twisted the Kashmiri maharajah, and quite a few other territories into joining the union.  I suppose this is the one of the rare situations when I agree with Arundhati Roy, who refers to these and other acts as India's acts of territory grabbing and imperialism. 

Meanwhile, there is the other serious internal violence that Roy details.

Booker Prize goes to an Indian

In a previous post, I noted the Indian authors in the Booker Prize shortlist. Well, one, Aravind Adiga, is the winner. Interestingly enough, this is his first novel too. The BBC notes that
"Adiga is the third first-time novelist to win the prize. Previous debut winners were Arundhati Roy in 1997 for God of Small Things and DBC Pierre in 2003 for Vernon God Little.
Adiga is a former correspondent for Time magazine and has written for the Independent, and the Sunday Times."

Roy has gone from being a story-teller to an activist/essayist. Let us see what path Adiga takes, given that he is a journalist to begin with.