From: nonesuch@here.com   
      
   "Pete Bayle"  wrote in message   
   news:8d9486cd.0410110913.40f5482d@posting.google.com...   
   > "Buffalo"  wrote in message   
   > news:...   
   >   
   >> This is rather a long way from a lament for the lack of a Nuremberg for   
   >> the   
   >> Left. He's asking for acknowledgement, not retribution. But since you're   
   >> keen on the subject, you could read Martin Amis's "Koba the Dread", a   
   >> recent   
   >> book about Stalin and his crimes, and about the refusal of Western   
   >> liberals   
   >> to take the Stalinist holocaust as seriously as they took the German one.   
   >> It   
   >> was a book that Christopher Hitchens, for one, took exception to, even   
   >> though he and Amis are close friends. But even Amis, angry as he is, is   
   >> not   
   >> asking for retribution. He's just saying that it's about time the Left   
   >> admitted that these horrors happened and that those who committed them   
   >> were   
   >> just as evil as the Nazis. And so they were.   
   >>   
   >> Buffalo   
   >   
   > Hitchens took exception to it, IIRC, not because of anything about   
   > Nurmenburg, but because of the way Amis characterized Hitchens own   
   > actions and repsonses. I found Amis persuasive, or at least highly   
   > plausible, on the old Hitchens.   
      
   As I might have inadvertantly revealed elsewhere, Hitchens is not my   
   favourite ageing radical, but I think you're traducing him a bit here. His   
   reaction to Amis's book was rather more than tetchiness that Amis had picked   
   on him as a representative of the selectively blind left-radical of the   
   '60s. He did answer Amis quite fully on historical grounds, pointing out the   
   large gaps in Amis's knowledge of the subject.   
      
   >   
   > It would be interesting to know whether the new Hitchens, still feels   
   > the same way, or at least sees the same things in others regarding   
   > Iraq, as Amis saw on him.   
      
   Well, in all fairness, Hitchens was ranting about Islamic fundamentalists   
   before 9/ll. Whether he would read Koba the Dread in a more generous frame   
   of mind now, I couldn't say. But probably not. A lot of his criticisms of   
   the book were quite valid ones. Robert Conquest's The Great Terror (1961, I   
   think) is a more serious and more scholarly (and more terrifying) account of   
   the Stalinist bloodbath.   
      
   Buffalo   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)