“To be able,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, “to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them,’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.” That was in 1985. In 2002, he took a different view of the matter. As long as the bombs were hitting the bad guys, then “it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else … They’ll be dead, in other words.” Predictable as hell or not, this transfiguration placed Hitchens (pictured in 1978) in a recognisable category: the left-wing defector with a soft-spot for empire.
more from Richard Seymour at The Guardian here.