ASA HUTCHINSON, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND A NATION ON THE BRINK

THE ATHEIST AND THE FUNDY AIMING LOW

Solmon P. “Buz” Saul and Mohammed Mata Fein for CPW News Services

     Shortly after Christopher Hitchen’s death Pulitizer Prize winning author, Christopher Hedges ,  was asked to assess the famous athiest’s life.   Hitchens had, after all, gone from being the poster-boy for the leftist publishers Farrar, Strauss & Giroux as well as Verso to being editor of Vanity Fair.   Hedges didn't say it, but  if Hitchen's life was a fair its theme was certainly----vanity.  And maybe Hedges did say it....."It's all about Hitchens."   Yes, but there's much more to this story, too.

     Hitchens, you may remember, was appointed by Lewis Lapham as editor of Harper's in 1986 saying that Hitchens was the only journalist who would bite the hand that feeds him.  As it turned out, Hitchen's contrarian character fed the octopus that pulled on him from so many different directions and reminded Hitchens who was really in charge, much as Lapham would remind young students in his documentary film, The American Ruling Class, that was essentially propaganda for the Council on Foreign Relations or in his book The Wish for Kings: Democracy At Bay....less a rumination on the decline of American democracy than on the Order's success in suppressing it.  In the end, Hitchen's devilish dialectic served the power elites' ordered dumbing and doubling down on the America populace or as Winsip Custer has correctly stated: "In the devilish dialectic of dominance the fascist right depends on the language of the liberal left."  Lapham's lap dog served the Order in other decades under different names and all the way back to before Lewis Lapham's father's frolicking in the San Francisco Opera House with names like Henry Potter Russell, son of Charles Howland Russell, Arthur Merrill Brown and Randolph C. Walker or with the Bohemian Grovers who assembled annually just up the California coast, but a continent away from where they began as the New England China Traders....opium smugglers.

      The penetrating analysis of Hitchen’s contrarian ways was laid bare by Hedges.  Hedges chronicled Hitchens’ evolution from a Trotskyite to a Neo-Con after 911.  “Hitchens became a close friend of Paul Wolfowitz,” said Hedges who described how his own worldview was informed  by  Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr.  Hedges’ simple explanation for Hitchens’ vacillation is the atheist’s lack of a moral compass, a missing centered core of belief in goodwill or love as an ultimate concern.  When in one of  his last interviews before his death, Hitchens spoke of some divine longing  it was for Greece's Parthenon never crumbling.  If we are to believe him, he was centered by a love of democracy.  Of course the ancient Greek republic did not see all members of society as deserving of a voice in the world’s destiny and neither did Hitchens.  He could hate Henry Kissinger for his part as a high paid prostitute in the oppressive projection of American power and influence, but Hitchens could not see that Kissinger was not really the powerful man behind the curtain that he wanted the world to believe he was.  Hitchens was closer to Oz when he traveled to Texas to film his documentary and tauted the brilliance of George Walker Bush, but even this Texas “cowboy” was not really a Texan, nor a cowboy….the mythic line which modern writers like Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and others are continually dissecting.

     On the surface, Hedges’ critique seemed to provide a depth of circumspection in Christian thought that rattled Hitchens in his inability to easily categorize and dismiss Hedges.  Hitchens, a man of apparently wide-ranging talents, but broad inconsistencies, led Hedges to describe him as a man without a centering ethic.   As Hitchens was physically declining with esophageal cancer he became, according to Hedges,  mean-spirited to others suffering from cancer, too, and summarily dismissed old friends he had embraced in his early years including Noam Chomsky.  Chomsky has explained how easily the transition from Lenninist to Capitalist occurs when seen as a migration toward power....the kind of shift that occurred with, for example, Alister Crowley from a family of Plymouth Puritans to a leading occultist. 

     According to Bertrand Russell St. John of Edinburgh, Scotland, President of the Society for the Deeper Understanding of Disparate Ideologies, “one cannot understand Christopher Hitchens without understanding his mental migration from the left to right poles of the ideological spectrum.   Conservatives argued that like Winston Churchill wise people become more conservative in their old age.   Christopher Hedges, on the other hand, has remained anchored by some non-migrating core value, presumably his Christian faith, as he recently resigned from PEN a worldwide human rights organization of writers (Poets, Essayists and Novelists) founded in London in 1921.  Hedges cited PEN’s selection of a Hillary Clinton aide as their new president, one who promoted preemptive war, as his reason for leaving. 

     "It's deeper than that," said St. John who is well aware of Bill and Hillary Clinton's history with the Arkansas-based CIA's Mena Airport operation that funded not an open pre-emptive military strike like Iraq, but a covert war against the sovereign nation of Nicaragua during the Reagan-Bush administration.  "The NRA's president, Wayne LaPierre, has appointed NRA member and Fundamentalist Bob Jones University graduate, Asa Hutchinson, to take the lead on lobbying for an armed guard on every school campus.  Hutchinson was the highest ranking law man in Arkansas that during the Clinton Governorship in the state that commissioned the Bank of Credit and Commerce International that was closed with the Iran-Contra scandal and the investigation into the U.S.'s secret government.  For his part in protecting the leading witness against this secret government, Barry Seal, who was murdered before he could testify, Asa Hutchinson was appointed Director of the Drug Enforcement Administration.  From the CIA airport in Mena, Arkansas overseen by Seal, Eugene Hasenfus flew drugs and weapons to the Contras before he was downed in Nicaragua and Seal's operation could not have flown without knowledge and compliance of Clinton's Governor's office and the silence of the Arkansas State Police.  So quit wondering why GHWB and Bill Clinton are now so chummy." said St. John. 

     “I believe that Hitchen’s shift to Neo-Con from Trotskyite was because he understood Anthony Sutton’s thesis in America’s Secret Establishment.  This secret establishment operates without a moral core in order to fulfill its mission: domination,” said St. John.  “Domination and empire, an Anglo-Germanic empire.   Every major political ambition in America since 1833 aligns with this Anglo-Germanic focus.  Ralph Nader aside, Ross Perot was the last real independent Presidential candidate to take on this octopus knowing from his catbird seat as a Texan, a U.S. Navy officer and established U.S. business leader who made his fortunes as both a computer guru and service provider for General Motors as well as the Social Security Administration, just what he was dealing with….a two-headed hydra in the Democratic and Republican government,” said St. John.

"Bush is a cowboy. Like Ghandi and Mandella.  They're cowboys"
-Kinky Friedman in Christopher Hitchens documentary
 Texas: America Supersized

 

    “Hitchen’s self-produced documentary about Texas and his promotion of a cowboy myth that is described by Kinky Friedman as including Mahatma Ghandi,  Nelson Mandella and George W. Bush as a triad of modern “cowboys” when joined in Hitchen’s documentary with a critique of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 911, is disingenuous,” said St. John.  "Ghandi didn't eat cows, and Bush didn't spend most of his life in prison to end oppression," St. John quipped.

  “The Lone Ranger…like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, would have rounded up all the witnesses after 911 including the Bin Laden family, close friends of the Bush family and Saudi royal family and held them all for questioning.  Especially when they owned an airport in Houston that was purchased by the Saudi royal banker, Khalid bin Mafouz with help from James R. Bath, George W. Bush’s Air National Guard roommate and the one name about which Michael Moore’s film was especially concerned,” said St. John.  “Bath held the fuel concessions at the nearby Ellington Field  from which I am sure the CIA flew on a regular basis to its various world-wide operations."

     “Hitchens was a chameleon ideologically speaking and that reveals his embrace of the power elite’s overarching dialectic that is also served by both the Republican and Democratic parties.   Were not GWB and LBJ from the state of mind….really?   Their nation?  Domi-Nation!  The dialectic, exposed by Anthony Sutton, was affirmed by Zbigniew Brzezinski,” said St. John.

     “Anthony Sutton had been a member of the Stanford’s Hoover Institute before writing about what he called The Order which is essentially what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the Military Industrialist Complex and what Danny Casalaro called The Octopus.

     According to St. John, Sutton documented how during the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, The Order….yes, Skull & Bones and Lapham's beloved CFR of which even Brzezinski is a member,  provided Western technology and funding in the same way that it backed through the Thyssen Banks in New York and Berlin the Nazis war machine. U.S. National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, father of the MSNBC’s anchorwoman on the morning program Morning Joe, validated Sutton’s assertions in his book Between Two Ages:  America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970):

For impressive evidence of Western participation in the early phase of Soviet economic growth, see Antony C. Sutton's Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development: 1917–1930, which argues that 'Soviet economic development for 1917–1930 was essentially dependent on Western technological aid' (p.283), and that 'at least 95 per cent of the industrial structure received this assistance.' (p. 348).

      Christopher Hitchens may have been and atheist, pure secularist and a pragmatist who enjoyed a modicum of creature comforts, but taken as a whole he appears also to have been an Anglophile shill for the Order….a double-edged propagandist for the chaos upon which The Order depends for its war profiteering.

   “We see it when in criticizing Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 Hitchens asks if Americans should apologize for the fact that American power elites paid poor American inner city minorities to fight for them in America’s bloodies war....the Civil War.  That war like the civil war in Iraq…that The Order had from 1833 to 1860 to fuel....was contrived to conceal under the skirt of abolitionism the real motive....war profits to build a railroad to the opium market of China and poppy fields of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan,” said St. John who pointed out that George Luther Stearns, Caleb Cushing, Alexander Brown, William Russell and a host of lesser tyrants laid the groundwork for what today is the Military Industrial Complex, the Octopus, The Order that fuels the war profits of Kellogg Brown and Root, Halliburton, USIS, Blackwater and other companies funded increasingly by tax payer’s soverign dollars as when in Texas the biggest public school pension fund was made private and poured its billions into the coffers of companies like Carlyle Group it was even clearer.   That maneuver was done by GWB.   “Even Michele Obama worked in the Springfield, Illinois law firm of Sidley Austin which merged with Brown and Wood law firm of New York .  That's the law firm of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln on the one hand and of the Alexander Brown galaxy which General Smedley Butler called in his book War Is A Racket the National City Bank Boys, on the other,” said St. John.

     “No they shouldn’t apologize for those boys being paid to fight and die for a war that could have and should have been settled with the simple stroke of a pen.  They should have thrown the 1833 Order out onto the street and admitted that Washington, Franklin and Jefferson’s vision of American had been stolen,” said St. John.

 

    “Hitchens was not simply contrarian in his views.  Those views oscillated between ideological poles on purpose.  That purpose was the destabilization of the masses which long to hold to that anchoring moral core.  There are no war profits to be made by the peace loving center of humanity who coming from differing cultures and a wide range of religious beliefs each embrace a form of the Golden Rule.  The Order understands this and fuels the fires of conflict worldwide,” said St. John who noted that a very large ship can be easily directed by a small rudder.  “In this case Captain Ahab is at the helm and he is hell-bent, as was Christopher Hitchens in his desire to pull humanity from its common mooring, in creating and chasing the great white leviathan myth,” said St. John who cautioned that "it is too late for this Ahab, but the mutiny should not take on the character of a bloody Peasant's Revolt."

     "As for Hitchins' complaints that Christians like Christopher Hedges are not the real McCoy, but an apologist who cloaks the escatological nature of all of Jesus' followers rush toward Armageddon, I have an opinion," said St. John.  "Hitchins was flat wrong.  As a man whose name is St. John,  I have read the Book of Revelation and concluded that it's not good to take it as Christopher Hitchens and Asa Hutchinson's friends at Bob Jones University do.  The story is simple.  In the end love wins and those with a moral core who, convinced that having that core was a good idea, were correct all along.  Those are generally the ones who have nibbled at the bait, liked how it tasted and swallowed hook, line, sinker, rod, reel, boat and boat anchor the notion that "In Christ there is neither East nor West, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" and that "Greater things shall you do than I have done," said St. John.  "When he said 'I came not to bring peace, but a sword,' he didn't mean it as George W. Bush or Erik Prince of Blackwater took it....as regurgitated Knight Templars with more powerful weapons.  How can the 'Prince of Peace' be anything but a peace maker?  And Hitchins' friend George Carlin was right about this when he said "fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity."