Dear Mr Hitchens,
I know you are not in good health, and in that concern I wish you all the best, for I am forever indebted to you for your works on Orwell. But I must make exception when it comes to your essay “Simply Evil”
For that I must say “Fuck You Sideways”, “Fuck You with a red-hot poker”, “Fuck You and the horse you rode in on”, and/or simply, “Fuck You”.
To characterize Al Quaeda and it’s actions on 11Sept2001 as “simply evil”, is accurate only in it’s most limited context and has the effect of dismissing the destruction of cultures, subjugation of peoples, and outright murder and theft in the many centuries that preceded that day (often accompanied by the most coarse and extreme prejudice cloaked in false notions of racial and ideological superiority) perpetrated by your mother empire, Great Britain, and it’s bastard child, your adopted home, the United States of America.
To do such is the diametric opposite of the proper function of a ‘public intellectual’, especially one of your caliber. Yet I suppose that we all have the right to be, and math requires sooner or later, completely wrong sometime. Dammit Son, I wish you hadn’t chosen now, on this subject, to diminish your ratios.
After centuries of murder and pillage by global empires versus a few decades of kicks in the shins and a bloody punch in the nose back, the events of that day did not provoke as much as they revealed, as the subsequent decade has shown.
Of all people, you, should know better.
stephenhsmith 5Sept2011
