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Hazleton on Hitchens

Posted February 3rd, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Last month, Town Hall Seattle ran a program called ‘Three Lives,’  originally touted as eulogies of three public figures — Christopher Hitchens, Kim Jong-Il, and Vaclav Havel — linked by the sole fact that they’d happened to die within four days of each other in December.  I was asked to speak about Hitchens.  “No way,” I said.  “Not unless you’re ready for an anti-eulogy.”

They were.

Here’s the video, in which I start at about the 4.45 time mark, running to 23.10.

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But if you want to see a really great presentation, go back to the video and start at the 57.35 mark, where ACT Theatre artistic director Kurt Beattie and actors Bob Wright and Tom Carrato deliver a stunning tribute to Vaclav Havel, inspiring me to go out and buy a copy of ‘Disturbing the Peace’ the next day, when I also read this moving assessment by his long-time translator, Paul Wilson.  I’m only sorry Havel had to die for me to pay closer attention.  But then that’s kind of Wilson’s point.

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File under: agnosticism, atheism, feminism, fundamentalism, Islam, Judaism | Tagged: Tags: ACT Theatre, antisemitism, Christopher Hitchens, Iraq war, Islamophobia, journalism, Kim Jong-Il, Kurt Beattie, Margaret Thatcher, torture, Town Hall Seattle, Vaclav Havel | 5 Comments
  1. homophilosophicus says:
    February 3, 2012 at 7:56 pm

    Dear Leslie, sycophancy isn’t really what I do best, so I shall keep this brief. Your blog is marvellous. See, that was brief. I have been surfing for this brand of intelligent read for a while, and the reason for this is that I am stuck. Recently ‘homophilosophicus’ (an Irish theology blog) has begun an interfaith project at which I would dearly like you to take a peek. At present we are short on a Jewish voice, female voices in general and a Feminist opinion. You may not have the time, you may not even be interested, but please take a look:
    http://homophilosophicus.wordpress.com/introduction/
    and the contributors so far:
    http://homophilosophicus.wordpress.com/contributors/
    Yes, we run the risk of looking rather pale in your light (there’s that sycophant again!), but this is something we are willing to risk.

    The pay scale is rubbish (non-existent in fact), but if we could entice you in anyway whatsoever please mail me on:
    homophilosophicus.wordpress@gmail.com

    Jason Michael

  2. snow black says:
    February 13, 2012 at 10:12 am

    Bravo, and thanks for reading Hitchens so I don’t have to, as they say. I’ve always prided myself on having grown out of my taste for his brand of bullshit well before the Iraq war made plain his true nature.

  3. Imraan says:
    May 23, 2012 at 10:08 am

    Reblogged this on Heightened Senses and commented:
    Though I have not read her works (yet, and yes, it is on my to read list; I can’t wait for her biography of the Prophet to be published), Ms Hazelton is one of the most articulate (and astute at that) speakers I have heard, and if that is anything to go by, I cannot wait to get started on her books; this might sound sycophantic but I really love the way her mind seems to work, and how she appropriates words in a nuanced and colourful way, without ever distorting her topic.

    Do watch this eulogy

  4. Imraan says:
    May 23, 2012 at 2:27 pm

    What an excellent presentation; your case was cogent, and very sharply articulated! I’m glad that there are those ‘out there’ in the world who don’t drool over him or his work, or can’t help but fawn because of his ability to produce quotes; I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him whilst listening to him- his life appears to have been wasted, and I pray mine does not go the way of his. As George Galloway wrote, “He wrote like an angel but placed himself in the service of the devils.”

    I hope you don’t mind but I have reblogged this.

    Regards,

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      June 2, 2012 at 9:42 am

      I can just imagine him wincing at that Galloway quote!

Iraq in Fragments

Posted August 30th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

The movie to watch tomorrow after Obama’s speech:  James Longley’s documentary Iraq in Fragments, more timely than ever and yet timeless.

I saw it when it first came out in 2006, but maybe I was too focused then on the ‘now-ness’ of documentaries, or I was blinded by my own imagined ‘expertise’ on Iraq as I worked on After the Prophet. I  remember thinking it a good movie, but somehow it didn’t imprint itself on my over-researched brain.

But now the President’s about to declare an end to the American combat mission in Iraq – and to do it even as the violence ramps up again, despite strangely other-worldly assurances from D.C. that it‘s lessened.   Now everyone’s breathing easier because we’re “getting out” of Iraq (we aren’t, of course — we’re just rebranding some combat troops as support-and-assist troops, adding a huge number of Blackwater/Xe-type mercenaries paid by the State Department instead of the Pentagon (as though that will make all the difference), and moving other combat units out of the Iraqi frying pan into the Afghanistan fire).  So it seemed a good time to rent the DVD of Longley’s movie and take a second look.

And this time it both took my breath away and just about broke my heart.

Where was my head in 2006?  How was I not haunted as I now am by the fear and desperate hope in the eyes of Muhammad, the eleven-year-old Sunni boy living a Dickensian working life in a filthy auto-parts repair shop in Baghdad as American helicopters thunder overhead?

How did the pleas of the blindfolded and beaten men accused by Muqtada al-Sadr’s fired-up Shia followers of selling alcohol in the southern city of Nasariya not echo in my ears?

How did I blank out the elderly father dreaming of an independent Kurdistan in a small village in the north, even as his son surrenders his dreams of medical school for work at the local brick oven, shown belching huge plumes of oily smoke into a Ken-Burns-gorgeous sunset?

These are the real lives and dreams affected by America’s war in Iraq, though there’s no attempt to push that point in the three parts of this movie.  In fact there’s no omniscient narrator at all. The only voice-over narration is that of the Iraqis Longley follows with his camera, and they speak about themselves from a place deep inside.  They let him in, trusting him to not to judge, and he doesn’t.  Instead, he makes their stories both utterly of the place and yet universal.

‘Iraq in Fragments’ has been called – rightly – a documentary masterpiece (acknowledged by, among others, Sundance awards for directing, cinematography, and editing, and a nomination for best documentary at the Oscars, where the young Muhammad lost out to Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth).  But its power is all the greater by contrast with the best-known “Iraq war movie” – best-picture Oscar winner The Hurt Locker, which presented itself as a fictionalized documentary.

Trouble is, ‘The Hurt Locker’ wasn’t really about Iraq.  It was  yet another in the long series of American movies where “the meaning of war” is seen entirely through American eyes.  Iraq was all but incidental to ‘The Hurt Locker,’ as were Iraqis.   The place and the people were merely a stage on which Americans played their drama.  ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ by contrast, takes you behind the stage, and quietly and devastatingly shows the effect on those who were merely ‘The Hurt Locker’s’ scenery.

So by all means watch the President’s speech tomorrow, but then be a mensch, and watch this movie.

———————————————————

By way of a coda to both Obama’s speech and ‘Iraq in Fragments,’ you could do worse than consider what General Ray Odierno, the departing commander of American forces in Iraq, said in the NYT today:

“We came in very naïve about what the problems were in Iraq; I don’t think we understood what I call the societal devastation that occurred,” he said, citing the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war and the international sanctions from 1990 to 2003 that wiped out the middle class. “And then we attacked to overthrow the government,” he said.

The same went for the country’s ethnic and sectarian divisions, he said: “We just didn’t understand it.”

To advocates of the counterinsurgency strategy that General Odierno has, in part, come to symbolize, the learning curve might highlight the military’s adaptiveness. Critics of a conflict that killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqis, perhaps far more, and more than 4,400 American soldiers might see the acknowledgment as evidence of the war’s folly.

Asked if the United States had made the country’s divisions worse, General Odierno said, “I don’t know.”

“There’s all these issues that we didn’t understand and that we had to work our way through,” he said. “And did maybe that cause it to get worse? Maybe.”

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File under: art, Middle East, war | Tagged: Tags: 'end of combat mission', Baghdad, documentary, Iraq war, James Longley, Kurdistan, Nasariya, President Obama, Shia, Sunni | 2 Comments
  1. Robert Corbett says:
    August 30, 2010 at 10:15 am

    Lesley,

    There was a good interview about Iraq on Weekday this morning. http://kuow.org/program.php?id=21217. The first speaker was very good at explaining how inside Iraq the voices were (and are) multiplex. And the LRB had a scary piece about the sanctions recently, the link for which I could dig up.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 30, 2010 at 10:30 am

      Thanks for the KUOW link, Robert — and yes, if you find that London Review of Books piece on sanctions, could you post the link as another comment? Thanks again — L.

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