...What a brilliant point he’s making in the course of preening his anti-Americanism before his audience of U.K. intellectuals. What does Sept. 11 remind him of? The way Americans are killers. Sept. 11 becomes, in his lovely leap of logic, really about Americans being pure-hearted killers capable of "no end of mayhem," infinite evil deeds. Doesn’t everybody think that way? (Everybody in his little circle, I imagine). Sept. 11 reminds them that Americans are first and foremost murderers, so let’s not spend a moment acknowledging that little matter of Sept. 11 being a day on which 3,000 Americans were murdered by the "pure-hearted killers" of Al Qaeda. Who, when not committing mass murder, stone women as punishment, torture gays, crush free thought by executing dissidents. No, they get a pass (and the 3,000 become non-persons). Because they hate America, they must be for liberation, and so we can’t blame them; we must accuse ourselves of being killers. In fact, we should thank them for providing our witty writer with an occasion for reminding the world that the "American everyman" is a killer...

...Heidegger’s peculiar neutrality-slash-denial about Nazism and the Holocaust after the facts had come out, and the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides—in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered. Not all of the Left; many were honorable opponents. But for many others, it just hasn’t registered, it just hasn’t been incorporated into their "analysis" of history and human nature; it just hasn’t been factored in. America is still the one and only evil empire. The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America’s alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America’s deplorable "Cold War mentality"—none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler’s, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. An ideology that doesn’t need to be reassessed. As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn’t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states...

A small bit of Ron Rosenbaum's much longer explanation of why he can no longer associate himself with the left.

Confusion abounds...

I think the way you posted that excerpt makes it rather confusing what the original essay is about. You need a better header introducing it.

I'm also confused as to when this article actually ran. The header at the top of the page reads today, but something at the bottom of the page says that the article originally ran in October 2002.

On the general subject of the article, it might be worthwhile to take a look at the new book "In Denial," which deals with the same subject. I have it on order and it got a good review in Reason magazine.

Now that I look at it again, it does seem to be a rerun of a golden oldie. Nothing wrong with that, of course...

Christopher Hitchens separated himself from his erstwhile vanguard-mates much more elegantly. And yes, that is an old column.

_In Denial_, about the psychic indigestion revisionist historians are getting from the VENONA decrypts, is indeed good reading. I've got a copy from the library. It makes you want to tell all those Sixties flotsam: Squirm baby, squirm.