The New Statesman This Week
Salil Tripathi reports on the Indian art scene where the “art nets record prices even as its makers suffer threats to their freedom of expression.” Tripathi also provides notice of a sale at Bonhams and Asia House in London this month that will include 85 works by major Indian artists, including M.F. Husain. (”The profits from ‘Art for Freedom’ will go towards another champion of freedom of expression, the Indian weekly newspaper Tehelka, which is backed by such luminaries as V S Naipaul and Arundhati …”) In the same issue, Chris Hedges sticks it into Hitchens:
And as an apologist for the war in Iraq, Hitchens not only has the blood of American and British soldiers on his hands, but the blood of a few hundred thousand Iraqis, too. He is no better than the apologists for radical Islam he so ardently seeks to discredit. His moral certitude is no different and the consequences are as dangerous.
Hitchens’s arguments are the mirror image of those used by the fundamentalists he despises. He embraces a self-serving and simplistic view of the world. This allows him to create the illusion of a dualistic world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality. And once this vision has been adopted, as the events of the past six years prove, it is possible to view military intervention, occupation and even torture - anything that will subdue the “irrational” or “dangerous” - as necessary. “Necessity,” William Pitt wrote, “is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.” This is done in the name of his substitute for God, “reason” - which looks, like all personal idols, an awful lot like Christopher Hitchens.
