This Morning: Halderman Radio Interview on the War on Drugs and Foreign Policy

by Liberty and Power

Barring any last-minute schedule changes, Liberty and Power's own Keith Halderman will be on Scott Horton's radio show at 11:15 a.m. central time. This promises to be a great show. Keith will discuss the historical, and curent, nexus between the war on drugs and American foreign policy. Few, if any, scholars know more about this topic.

Make sure to not only tune in but to also to call the show and ask Keith some questions. Click here to hear it online.

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Gus diZerega - 10/12/2007

Hitchens is a clever writer, but not a wise one, nor is he a particularly honest one. Consequently, he fits in as well with his new right wing and Neocon friends as he did with his old marxist ones.

I speak from personal experience. Hitchens was a guest of the Politics Department at Whitman College on 9-11, where I was teaching at the time. He had to stay extra days in Walla Walla until air travel was restored to normal. Hitchens later said our department was openly opposed to American military responses and exemplified a prime example of ultra-leftists blaming America for every ill.

Perhaps because he was drunk most of the time, Hitchens could not distinguish between one ultra-left couple who between themselves split a single position, and everyone else. His charge was true for them, and for no one else to my knowledge. It was certainly not true for me.

Hitchens' concept of Islamofascism is as dishonest and incoherent as what he said about our department.

There is no "Islamic Threat" in part because there is no united Islam nor is there a strong Islamic military power.

Most victims of terrorism by Muslims are other Muslims.

Further, all Islamic states are third world powers, with no significant industrial or scientific base, no air force of note, no navy, armies of only regional significance, etc., etc.

Nor have they mobilized their populations the way Hitler and Mussolini did.

Fascist powers are threats because they can mobilize the resources created by relatively free societies they have parasitized.

For example, Germany was powerful because the Nazis made use of German scientists who grew to greatness in relatively free conditions. Their reaction to Einstein says what would have happened to German science had the Nazis survived.

Much as I like Orwell, however, I think there is something to the term "fascist." That it is over used is no more evidence the term is meaningless than the right wing's claim that Eisenhower and Earl Warren was evidence the term 'communist' was meaningless.

I recommend looking at Robert O. Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (Vintage, 2004). I found it very insightful. He has the following comment on "Islamic fascism": (p.204)

"The principle objection to succumbing to the temptation to call Islamic fundamentalist movements like al-Qaeda and the Taliban fascist is that they are not reactions against a malfunctioning democracy. Arising in traditional hierarchical societies, their unity is, in terms of Emile Durkheim's famous distinction, more organic than mechanical. Above all, they have not 'given up free institutions,' since they never had any."