Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Hitch against Amis, kind of:

"Most interesting of all, in my memory, was the direct confrontation this involved with Stalin's heirs. Our faction at any rate was in close touch with student and worker groups in Poland and Czechoslovakia, where open rebellion against the sclerotic Warsaw pact regimes was breaking out. The regimes themselves seemed to get the point. Moscow directly ordered the French Communist party to help put down the rebellion against De Gaulle, and Brezhnev both sought and received Lyndon Johnson's advance assurance that a Red Army invasion of Prague would be considered an "internal affair".

For a short, exhilarating while, it seemed that the permafrost could be melted from below. And this idea did not experience any "death throes". It became subterranean, and re-emerged in 1989. Of the dissident heroes of that later revolution, I can think of several who I first met on or around the barricades of 1968. And many of them also did tremendous work in helping to save the people of Bosnia a few years further on."

and:

"This whole exchange between us comes at an unsettling time for me, because I think that a huge section of the "left" has fatally condemned itself by flirting with, or actually succumbing to, a creepy concept of "moral equivalence" between the United States and its (actually our) enemies - whether Christian Orthodox thugs in the Balkans or Islamic fascists in Afghanistan or national socialists in Mesopotamia. Talk about wincing - I can scarcely bear to read the drivel and bad faith that is now emitted by some of my former comrades. However, and though I am now without allegiances, I still choose to regard the term "comrade" as a title of honour, and one which betrays itself rather than fulfils itself in such negations. It was always a sorrow to me - I can tell you this now - that my dearest friend showed no real interest in such apparent metaphysics, and I'm sorry all over again that you have written on the subject in such a way as to give pleasure to those who don't love you, as I do."