Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

(Book Review)

In 340 pages Christopher Hitchens attempts to once and for all definitively disprove the metaphysical claims of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, and any other form of religion great or small.

It is of course an attempt doomed to failure (and I’ll get around to nit-picking this book to death in just a minute), but let me start with the most important point:

This book is fun to read.

Whether you agree or disagree with Christopher Hitchens, there is a large amount of pleasure to be had by following a talented writer as he takes on the greatest philosophical issue of all time.
Particularly a writer like Christopher Hitchens, who doesn’t pull any punches. Take for example his thoughts on the Christian doctrine of hell:

Nothing proves the man-made character of religion as obviously as the sick mind that designed hell…Pre-Christian hells were highly unpleasant too, and called upon the same sadistic ingenuity for their invention. However, some of the early ones we know of—most notably the Hindu—were limited in time….It was left to Christians to find a hell from which there was no possible appeal. (And the idea is easily plagiarized: I once heard Louis Farrakhan, leader of the heretical black-only “Nation of Islam,” as he drew a hideous roar from a mob in Madison Square Garden. Hurling spittle at the Jews, he yelled, “And don’t you forget—when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s FOREVER!”)
(From the chapter “Is Religion Child Abuse?” Pages 261-262).

Although this writing is polemical, and strongly based on emotional appeals, notice the value of it. Another writer might have more calmly debated the contradiction between an all-loving God and eternal damnation, and not have had the impact of Hitchens who pushes the issue to the emotional extreme, and forces you to really feel what the doctrine of hell means.

The whole book is written in this style. Reading the book is a small adrenaline rush on every page, and it’s not the kind of book that would ever put you to sleep.

I raced through the whole book in a few days. It’s the perfect book to pick up for 20 minutes at lunch during a dreary day stuck at work.

I’m not much of a philosopher by nature, and so, fortunately for me, the philosophy contained in this book is all of the “bite sized” kind. As Hitchens races form one point to another, he seldom gets stuck in any one argument that takes him more than a couple paragraphs to develop. There’s no long build up or getting weighed down in the complexities of any argument.
Obviously this style has some advantages and disadvantages. There are several arguments Hitchens over-simplifies, or doesn’t develop as well as he could have (and again, I’ll get around to nit-picking some of these further down below.) Serious philosophers will no doubt raise their eyebrows at all the over-simplification Hitchens is doing, but if you want a more serious philosophical book you can look elsewhere. The beauty of this book is in its simple prose and simple arguments.

Because of this, I think that this book would be enjoyed whether you agreed with Hitchens or not. For myself, I’m largely sympathetic to most of Hitchens’ arguments, but I still think there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be had by reading a polemic you disagree with, and mentally debating the author. I’d be interested to hear the opinion of a more religious person on how readable the book was.
(If the Amazon page (A) is any indication, most of the Christians reviewing this book haven’t actually read it, and are just outraged over the idea of the book.)

Hitchens in print versus Hitchens on video

After he published this book, Hitchens went on a debating tour across the United States, where he debated a different religious leader in every town he went to. Almost all of these debates are available on youtube, and I became addicted to watching them back when I was in Japan.
(Hitchens himself is now dead, but the video archive will live on after him. These videos are still alive and well on youtube, and are well worth checking out.)

I got to the point where I had just about memorized Hitchens standard replies to every point religious leaders could possibly make. Since I had his arguments down pat, I wondered if there was any point in actually reading his book, and that was one of the reasons I waited so many years before buying it.

Reading the book, I found that some of the arguments were familiar, but the good news is that there’s enough new material in here to justify reading the book even if you think you already know everything Hitchens has to say on the subject.
The format of the book allows him to go into more detail on several subjects, such as short polemical histories on the formation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. (Not knowing much about the history of Islam, I found Hitchens’ recounting of its origins fascinating.)

All that being said, I think I almost prefer the debates. Partly because I’m a victim of the TV generation, and I find it much easier to watch videos than to read a book.
But also because this is a subject that needs to be debated. When Hitchens makes a point, you need to hear what the religious response to it is going to be.

When you read Hitchens’ book, there is no counter point of view being offered, and so the reader himself needs to be constantly debating Hitchens. The best way to read this book is to fill up the margins with scribbled comments of your own.

There is an infinite amount of things that can be said on Hitchens’ subject, and it would be pointless endeavor for me to try and give my complete thoughts on all the subjects he broaches. But I’m going to indulge myself nevertheless and give my thoughts on several of them.

[Advanced warning—I go on a bit here. I’ve put in bold-faced headings to make it a bit easier to navigate from topic to topic or jump around, but if you don’t want to read all of this, we’re still friends.]

The Beginning of the Book and Other Stylistic Concerns

Over-all a very well written book, but a terrible beginning. Hitchens starts off his book by first insulting the religious, then going into a self-serving story about how smart he was at a young age, and how even as a child he was able to see through the logical fallacies of religion that his elders did not.
The purpose of opinion writing should be to convert someone from a different point of view. The purpose of the introduction to an opinion piece, therefore, should be to give them a reason to read it. In his first few pages, however, Hitchens does everything he can to drive away anyone who doesn’t agree with him.
(This may actually explain why on Amazon very few of Hitchens’ Christian critics have actually read his book.)
If your picking this book up for the first time, you’ll just have to forgive the first couple pages. The book does improve if you stick with it.

There’s also a bit of repetition in this book which may indicate a lack of thorough proof-reading. (Or more likely in Hitchens’ case, a lack of sober proof-reading.) Some points Hitchens makes in one chapter he will occasionally pop up again in another chapter.

The Iraq War

One would like to disassociate the good Hitchens who bravely stands up against religious tyranny from the bad Hitchens, who stupidly championed quagmire wars in the Middle East.

Unfortunately Hitchens himself does not make this possible, by insisting on linking his support of the Iraq War with his stand against religious fundamentalism, and condemning anyone who didn’t see the war the way he did. This leads to some of the more embarrassing sections of the book.

As the debate over intervention in Iraq became more heated, positive torrents of nonsense poured from the pulpits. Most churches opposed the effort to remove Saddam Hussein, and the pope disgraced himself utterly by issuing a personal invitation to the wanted war criminal Tariz Aziz, a man responsible for the state murder of children….On the other side of the confessional span, some but not all American evangelicals thundered joyously about the prospect of winning the Muslim world for Jesus….
(page 40).

In one paragraph, Hitchens condemns Christians both for opposing the Iraq War and for supporting it. There’s nothing they can do to make this guy happy.

If you watch a lot of Hitchens videos, you’ll know this is a blunder he often makes in his debates as well, one minute condemning Christians for all the wars they started, the next minute condemning them for not going along with his war. He will also often whine about how the religious right hijacked what was supposed to be a secular war against fundamentalism.

This overlooks two things:
1) It was entirely predictable that the religious right would try and turn this into a religious war (something Hitchens should really have thought about before he supported such an incredibly stupid war.)
2) When a predominately Christian nation attacks Islamic regimes, it is entirely predictable that the war will be perceived as a religious conflict.
(I remember I was in Japan when the bombing of Afghanistan started. I walked into the office that morning, and my Japanese colleagues showed me the newspaper and said, “The Christians are fighting the Muslims again.” There was a smug tone in his voice which seemed to add, “Aren’t we Japanese so much smarter for staying out of these religious conflicts you Christians and Muslims are always getting into.”)

But there’s a larger point which Hitchens is completely missing. The fact that the Pope condemned the Iraq War was one of the best moments in Church history. If this was representative of how the Church had usually acted throughout history, I would have much less of a problem with religion.
The problem wasn’t that the Catholic Church opposed this war, the problem was that the Catholic Church historically hasn’t opposed wars nearly enough. Imagine what a different world we would live in today if the Church had spent as much time and energy condemning war as they spend condemning sex.

And this should have been Hitchens line of attack. Instead he acts like a petulant child because the church didn’t fall in line and support the one war he supported. (In fairness Hitchens didn’t reserve his criticism for the Church alone. He dished out the same kind of bile to all his former comrades on the Left who also refused to go along with his support of the war.)

On Noah’s flood

The folk memory, now confirmed by archaeology, makes it seem highly probable that huge inundations occurred when the Black Sea and the Mediterranean were formed, and that these forbidding and terrifying events continued to impress the storytellers of Mesopotamia and elsewhere. Every year, Christian fundamentalists renew their expedition to Mount Ararat in modern Turkey, convinced that one day they will discover the wreckage of Noah’s Ark. This effort is futile, and it would prove nothing even if it were successful, but if these people should chance to read the reconstructions of what really did happen, they would find themselves confronted with something far more memorable than the banal account of Noah’s flood: a sudden massive wall of dark water roaring across a thickly populated plain. This “Atlantis” event would have adhered to the prehistoric memory, all right, as indeed it does to ours.
(page 103-104).

A fascinating theory, and a well written passage that really grips the imagination.
A trip over to wikpedia, however, shows that this theory is by no means accepted as the authoritative version (W).

On the Authorship of the Gospels

Hitchens hints at the problem of the authorship of the 4 Gospels, particularly when criticizing The Passion of the Christ.

Mr. Gibson defended his filmic farrago—which is also an exercise in sadomasochistic homoeroticism starring a talentless lead actor who was apparently born in Iceland or Minnesota—as being based on the reports of “eyewitnesses.” At the time, I thought it was extraordinary that a multimillion-dollar hit could be openly based on such a patently fraudulent claim, but nobody seemed to turn a hair.
(page 131)

And later…

He [Maimonides] fell into the same error as do the Christians, in assuming that the four Gospels were in any sense a historical record. Their multiple authors—none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion—cannot agree on anything of importance.
(page 132).

It is typical of Hitchens’ writing style that he just asserts something and then moves on: The Gospels were not actually written by the apostles—never mind how I know this, just trust me on this and let’s move on. This is both the strength and weakness of his book. On the plus side, it keeps him from getting bogged down in details as he goes quickly from one point to another. On the minus side, any reader wishing to know more will be frustrated.
For the sections on the Bible especially, it’s best to treat the book almost as a survey introduction to all the various arguments one could make against the historical accuracy of the Bible. Anyone who wants the full argument can find them argued better and in more detail by other writers.

For what it’s worth though, he’s right about this. The Gospels were not written by the Apostles we attribute them to.
I learned this in religion 101 at Calvin College (a conservative Christian college.)

The professor was talking about how most of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were all word for word identical, so somebody was obviously copying from somebody else. Since Mark is the shortest book, it is much more likely that Matthew and Luke copied from Mark and added supplementary material than it is that Mark edited material out.

At this point I raised my hand and said, “But wasn’t Matthew actually an eye witness? Why would he be copying from John-Mark, who wasn’t even there?”

The professor then explained that none of the Gospels were actually written by their traditional authors. For one thing, our earliest copies of these Gospels (and the earliest references to them in other historical documents) don’t show up until all of the Apostles would have been long dead.
For another thing, the earliest copies of the Gospels don’t have any names attached to them. It was only later that Church tradition attached the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
[The other religion courses I took at Calvin—such as Anti-Semitism in the New Testament, also all operated off the assumption that the Gospels were not written by the Apostles.]

In and of itself, this doesn't disprove Christian faith, especially for Protestants (who don’t believe in the authority of Church tradition). The Gospels were written anonymously, so the texts themselves aren't claiming to be somebody they weren't. Rather it is Church tradition that was wrong to attribute the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. (The Gospel of John does claim to be written by a disciple of Jesus, but that part was probably added later)

[…Although there is some deliberate deception going on elsewhere in the New Testament. Some of the letters claiming to be from Paul were not actually written by Paul. But that’s another subject. ]

However, I think it should trouble Christians that all our sources for Jesus are written by authors removed from the actual events.

It also made me wonder why, in 18 years of weekly church, Sunday School, and Christian schools, I was only just hearing about this now. What else haven’t they been telling me?

There’s an excellent documentary, “Who Wrote the Bible” (IMBD) in which at one point the narrator says, “In the past 100 years there’s been an explosion of scholarship as to who wrote the Bible. It’s well known in the seminaries, but none of this knowledge is making its way down to the people who actually attended churches.” (I’m quoting from memory, but it’s something like that.)

Think about this for a second: every first year seminary student knows that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John weren’t actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but somehow the pastors never bother to tell anyone in their congregation. In fact, I remember as a child sitting through sermons in which the pastor talked about things like how the apostle Matthew was writing his Gospel to the Jews, or how the Gospel of Mark was based off of Peter’s recollections, because John Mark later became Peter’s scribe.

Q Source

The book on which all four [Gospels] may have been based, known speculatively to scholars as “Q,” has been lost forever, which seems distinctly careless on the part of the god who is claimed to have “inspired” it.
(page 133)

Hitchens has got half a good point here, but he seems to be a little fuzzy on his facts. All 4 Gospels were not based off of the Q source, just sections of Matthew and Luke. (The Q source is a theory by Bible scholars to explain the parts of Matthew and Luke which are word for word identical, but do not appear in the Gospel of Mark.)

That being said, it does seem careless of God to have lost the original source on which parts of Matthew and Luke were based.

The Resurrection

Most astonishingly, they [the 4 Gospels] cannot converge on a common account of the Crucifixion or the Resurrection. Thus, the one interpretation that we simply have to discard is the one that claims divine warrant for all four of them.
(Page 133).

Again, no supporting details are given, but for what it’s worth he’s right about this.
My 8th grade Bible teacher once took a whole hour taking us through the 4 different resurrection accounts, and pointing out the various contradictions in them, and explaining to us that they contradicted each other so much on so many important points that there was no way they could all be synchronized into one common narrative.
(He was an interesting guy and a bit of amateur scholar. When I tried to bring up this same point the following week with my Sunday School teachers, I just got blank looks from them. Evidently this is another one of those facts that is well known in seminaries, but somehow never quite makes its way down to the flock.)

My teacher’s purpose was not to disprove the Gospels. Rather his conclusion was that this proved the Gospels couldn't have been fabricated. Any time a dramatic event happens, he said, eye-witnesses always have conflicting accounts of what happens. The fact that the disciples all came away with conflicting accounts of the resurrection is only human. If they had been making the whole thing up to fool everyone, they would have met first and been sure to carefully coordinate their stories. Because they did not bother to coordinate their stories, it proves the Gospels couldn’t have been fabricated.

I latched onto this explanation at the time because it was the only one given to me. (I was still a Christian at this stage, and always latched onto whatever explanation would protect my faith.) But even then it was a very uneasy truth that I felt conflicted with the Christian doctrine in the inerrancy of scripture.

As an adult, I’m even more skeptical of it. The obvious problem is, as mentioned above, that the Gospels were not written by the Apostles. Although to give his argument the benefit of the doubt, one could still posit different oral traditions that emerged as a result of differing memories during the resurrection, and that these different oral traditions account for the discrepancy in the Gospels.

It is true that in all historical events, eye-witnesses always have conflicting accounts. But then we read history by different standards than we read scripture.
Christians do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus because there is historical evidence for it. On the contrary, they believe in the resurrection of Jesus in spite of the fact that there is no historical evidence for it.

We have no collaboration for Jesus’ resurrection from any non-Christian source, or for that matter from any contemporary source. (Nobody thought it worth while to write down anything about Jesus’ resurrection at the time—a fact which is suspicious in itself, especially since Matthew claims that after the death of Christ several people broke out of their graves and wandered around the city.)

Granted the ancient world was more of an oral culture than a written culture. But even here, ancient historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, when they set down to write a history based off of oral accounts, carefully outlined who they talked to and what their criteria for evaluating evidence was. When there were differing oral traditions, they would often write down both traditions, and then commented on which one they thought was more reliable and why.

The Gospels can not be thought of as histories in this respect. We don’t know who wrote them. We don’t know what their criteria for gathering or evaluating evidence was. We don’t know who they talked to or where they got their evidence.

Almost no part of the Gospels is collaborated by other historical sources, and in fact on the few occasions when the Gospels do intersect with established history, they often contradict what we know from other sources. (There was no census of the Roman world, Quirinius was not governor of Syria at the same time as Herod the great, and from what we know of Pontius Pilate he was a harsh and brutal governor, not the charming gentleman he appears as in the Gospels.)

The Gospels themselves do not even pretend to be histories—they are religious tracts. They ask you to believe in extraordinary things not because the authors have outlined their historical procedures for meticulously sifting through the evidence. Rather they ask you to believe because you have faith in the authority of the document as something coming from God.

The minute you question your faith in the authenticity of any part of the Gospels, the whole house of cards collapses. You can not pick and chose which parts of the Gospels you want to believe in or not.

The only reason to put any faith in the resurrection account is because you believe the Gospels were inspired by God. And if God is the common author of all 4 Gospels, than it is disturbing that God couldn’t get his story straight.

Furthermore, some contradictions can perhaps be explained away by conflicting memories (such as who got to the tomb first, or whether or not the women were present when the Angels rolled away the stone).
Other contradictions are a little harder to explain away. Did the disciples really forget whether Jesus appeared to them first in Jerusalem, or whether they had to trek all the way to Galilee to see him resurrected for the first time?

Also, what model of divine inspiration are we operating from here? Why did God "inspire" the synaptic Gospels to be word for word the same for so much of Jesus' ministry, and then to differ so wildly on the resurrection? And if the differing resurrection accounts come from different eye witness accounts, why aren't their conflicting eye witness accounts on everything in the synaptic Gospels?

(Leaving God out of the equation, the obvious human answer is that Matthew and Luke were based off of Mark. Because the original ending to Mark appears to have been lost, this is probably why Matthew and Luke follow Mark closely for much of Jesus’ ministry, but then differ wildly on the resurrection.)

This brings me to another subject:

The Resurrection and Nativity in the Gospel of Mark

The New Testament is itself a highly dubious source. (One of Professor Bart Ehrman’s more astonishing findings is that the account of Jesus’ resurrection in the Gospel of Mark was only added many years later.)
(page 169).

I’ve not actually read any of Bart Ehrman’s books (although I’ve listened to his interviews on NPR), so I don’t know exactly what Hitchens’ is talking about here. I’ve done several Google searches, and can’t find Ehrman’s writings on the Gospel of Mark online either.

So, I’m going to assume that this is a reference to Mark 16: 9-20, (which should be footnoted in your Bible as being a later addition to the Gospel of Mark.) And if I’m wrong on this, I blame Hitchens for not explaining clearly.

Again, Hitchens has half a point here. It’s problematic for Christians that God allowed the original ending to the book of Mark to be lost. And, as mentioned above, the fact that this ending was lost probably accounts for the differing accounts of the resurrection in Matthew and Luke (who were basing their Gospels off of Mark).

But Hitches still exaggerates the implications. There are several reasons to doubt the resurrection (as mentioned above) but the idea that it is a later addition to Christianity is not one of them.

I’m told that in the original Greek, Mark appears to end in a sentence fragment. Which means it’s more likely that the original ending to Mark was lost than that Mark simply forgot to write about the resurrection.
As it is, even though the original Mark doesn’t show the resurrected Jesus, Jesus resurrection is heavily implied at the end. And in the body of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus predicts his resurrection. Plus the Pauline epistles (which predate the Gospels, even though they are placed afterwards in the Bible) make references to the resurrection.

So the resurrection was not a later addition to Christianity.

The myths surrounding the birth of Christ, however, were a later addition, and Hitchens would have had a much better case if he were to argue this about the beginning of Jesus’ life instead of the end of it.
When Mark was writing his Gospel, Christians were not very concerned about where or how Jesus was born, and so Mark didn’t even bother with it.
Later it became very important to Christians that Jesus had a miraculous birth, and that Jesus’ birth was connected with the Old Testament prophecies, so Matthew and Luke both have conflicting accounts of how to get Jesus (well known to have been from Nazareth) born in Bethlehem.
Luke invents a census to get Mary and Joseph temporarily into Bethlehem for the birth, while Matthew has Mary and Joseph start out in Bethlehem, and then flee from King Herod and later resettle in Nazareth.
To be fair to Hitchens, he mentions these contradictions, but doesn’t make the connection that the accounts differ because they were both later additions after Mark. (This may be because Hitchens’ doesn’t fully understand the relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. See his mistake with the Q source above.)

Also the fact that the nativity myths were a later addition to Christianity probably goes a long way to explaining this next problem:

Jesus makes large claims for his heavenly father but never mentions that his mother is or was a virgin, and is repeatedly very rude and coarse to her when she makes an appearance, as Jewish mothers will, to ask or to see how he is getting on. She herself appears to have no memory of Archangel Gabriel’s visitation, or of the swarm of angels, both telling her that she is the mother of god. In all accounts, everything that her son does comes to her as a complete surprise, if not shock. What can he be doing talking to rabbis in the temple? What’s he saying when he curtly reminds her that he’s on her father’s business? One might have expected a stronger maternal memory, especially from someone who had undergone the experience, alone among all women, of discovering herself pregnant without having undergone the notorious preconditions for that happy state.
(pages 137-138).

Although they have sometimes been incorporated into the same Gospel, the stories in which Mary is perpetually surprised by Jesus probably come from an earlier tradition than the nativity stories in which Mary is informed of her miraculous progeny by angels.

The Birth of Jesus

The Gospel according to Luke states that the miraculous birth occurred in a year when the Emperor Caesar Augustus ordered a census for the purposes of taxation, and that this happened at a time when Herod reigned in Judaea and Quirinius was governor of Syria. That is the closest to a triangulation of historical dating that any biblical writer even attempts. But Herod died four years “BC” and during his rulership the governor of Syria was not Quirinius. There is no mention of any Augustan census by any Roman historian, but the Jewish chronicler Josephus mentions that one did occur—without the onerous requirement for people to return to their places of birth, and six years after the birth of Jesus is supposed to have taken place.
(p. 132-133)

In fact there’s an even stronger case to be made here. Not only is there no mention of the Augustan census by any other historian or letter writer during the “Golden Age of Augustan Letters” (nor is there any paper trail left over from an empire wide census). But more importantly, Roman censuses only occurred in provinces that the Romans had direct rule over. During the time of Herod the great, Judaea was a client kingdom to Rome. Herod would have been responsible for sorting out the taxes himself. Even during the governorship of Quirinius (from 10 AD) the Roman Empire still did not directly govern Galilee, where (according to Luke) Joseph was living.
Also, all Roman censuses were conducted for taxes. The purpose was to discover land and other taxable assets in the area where the people were currently living. We have no record of any census that required everyone to go back to their ancestral lands, and it would have been pointless to do so.

A minor point—Hitchens messes up his dates a bit here. Jesus was supposedly born somewhere between 6 and 4 BC. Quirinius was appointed governor in 6 AD. There should have been 12 or 10 years difference, not 6. It's a nitpick, I know, but this kind of sloppiness irks me a little. Don't major publishing houses employ fact checkers whose job it is to double check all the facts before publication?

Did Jesus want to start a new religion?

His [Jesus’] illiterate living disciples left us no record and in any event could not have been “Christians” since they were never to read those later books in which Christians must affirm belief, and in any case had no idea that anyone would ever found a church on their master’s announcements. (There is scarcely a word in any of the later-assembled Gospels to suggest that Jesus wanted to be the founder of a church, either.)
(page 135).

The historical Jesus probably didn’t want to start a new religion.
The Jesus that appears in the Gospels however is a different story.
I’m not exactly sure how Hitchens’ is interpreting the Gospels (another area where some more elaboration on his part would have been nice.) In my reading of the Gospels, however, there seems to be several references to “building my church” and making disciples of all nations, et cetera.

Again, I think there was a stronger point here to be made if Hitchens would have argued it the other way around, and pointed out the anachronisms of the Gospels.

The 7 undisputed letters of Paul indicate that Paul did not think Christianity was a separate religion. The Gospels (which were written after Paul) thus show an anachronism when they reference establishing a church. In Matthew 18, Jesus talks a lot about the church, and the Gospel of John (which was written in the second century) depicts an antagonism between the followers of Jesus and the Jews which did not yet exist, and also depicts a hardening of ideological purity among Judaism which did not yet exist in the first century. (The Gospel of John claims that Jews could be expelled from the synagogues for expressing faith in Jesus.)

On the Canon of the New Testament

For a long time, there was incandescent debate over which of the “Gospels” should be regarded as divinely inspired. Some argued for these and some for others, and many a life was horribly lost on the proposition. Nobody dared say that they were all man-inscribed long after the supposed drama was over.
(Page 134).

Here again, Hitchens gets his history confused. Many heretics were horribly killed for questioning church doctrine—after the canon was established. The debate over which books should be regarded as canonical was fairly non-violent.

But more importantly, he’s arguing this the wrong way around again. The problem with the establishment of the canon wasn’t how violent it was. The problem was what a terribly human process it was.

Once again, I remember back to my religion 101 class at Calvin College. The professor explained to us the process by which books of the Bible were voted canonical or non-canonical.

“Now this ought to make your Protestant skins crawl,” he said. “But the way to think of this is not that the Church was giving these books their authority. Rather these books were given their authority by God, and the church was simply recognizing their authority.”

His first sentence very accurately described my agitation. I was less re-assured by his second sentence, which seemed even at the time like it was just a word game to explain away the problem. I was still a Christian at the time, so I tried to accept the explanation, but it never sat easily with me.

It is often stated that the various canonical councils only ratified the books that were in common use by Christian communities. But the books used varied widely from one Christian community to another. (To this day there is no agreement among Christians.)

Christians say that the Holy Spirit inspired the Church fathers to pick the correct books in the Bible, but this isn’t so much a logical argument as it is declaring something by fiat.

Or if there is a logic here, it’s of a circular nature. “The books in the Bible must be inspired by the Holy Spirit, because if they weren’t it would mean our religion would be all wrong.”
Or, “The Books in the Bible were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and we know that the Holy Spirit exists because the books in the Bible tell us so.”

In fact, to this day different groups of Christians have never agreed on a common canon. The Syrian Orthodox Church doesn’t recognize all the books we have in our Bible. The Ethiopian Church has more books. Catholic Bibles include the books of the deuterocanon, and Protestants Bibles do not. If the Holy Spirit does exist, he has not been very consistent when guiding different groups of Christians to select their scripture. When and where and under what conditions the Holy Spirit shows up has always been a bit of a mystery. (When the Jews were deciding their canon, why didn’t the Holy Spirit inspire them to include the Gospels?)

If all these different groups could be inspired to agree on a common canon, that would be miraculous, and perhaps could be used as some evidence towards the existence of a Holy Spirit.
The fact that they can not all agree is some evidence the other way.

On the Old Testament

I’ve commented a lot on his writings on the New Testament, but barely commented on his chapter on the Old Testament. But I strongly agree with Hitchens when he condemns all the horrible massacres and the tyrannical blood thirsty God of the Old Testament.

Of the many massacres and genocidal events in the Old Testament, Hitchens highlights in particular Numbers 31, in which Moses chastises his generals for sparing so many civilians. From the Bible:

He [Moses] asked them, “Why have you kept all the women alive? Remember that it was the women who followed Balaam’s instructions and at Peor led the people to be unfaithful to the Lord. That was what brought about the epidemic on the Lord’s people. So now kill every boy and kill every woman who has had sexual intercourse, but keep alive for yourselves all the girls and all the women who are virgins.”
(Numbers 31: 15—18)

To which Hitchens responds:

This is not the worst of the genocidal incitements that occur in the Old Testament (Israeli rabbis solemnly debate to this day whether the demand to exterminate the Amalekites is a coded commandment to do away with the Palestinians) but it has an element of lasciviousness that makes it slightly too obvious what the rewards of a freebooting soldier could be. At least so I think and so thought Thomas Paine, who wrote not to disprove religion but rather to vindicate deism against what he considered to be foul accretions in the holy books. He said that this was “an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters,” which drew him a hurt reply from one of the celebrated divines of the day, the bishop of Llandaff. The stout Welsh bishop indignantly claimed that it was not at all clear from the context that the young females were being preserved for immoral purposes rather than for unpaid labor. Against dumb innocence like this it might be heartless to object, if it were not for the venerable clergyman’s sublime indifference to the fate of the boy-children and indeed their mothers.
(P. 126-127)

Having read the Old Testament, I think Hitchens is right when he says this is far from the worst part.

In fact it's almost interesting he doesn't spend more time examining the Old Testament massacres and genocide. There's plenty of awful stuff in there which would more than support his thesis. Perhaps he's all to aware that all of this material has been done over by other writers.

For example Hitchens mentions the Amalekites only in passing, but the Amalekites are a particular poignant example of the genocide in the Old Testament. It's true God orders plenty of other races are exterminated in books like Numbers and Joshua, but these appear to have been done in the hot blood of conquest. The extermination of the Amalekites is done in cold blood over the centuries. Even during the time of Saul, even during the time of Hezekiah, God still can not stand the fact that there are some people of Amalekite blood living, and he still orders the Israelites to systematically wipe them out.

The whole book is just dripping with blood and commands to exterminate. Looking back on it, it boggles the mind that as children we were taught that we were supposed to take our morality from this book.
Really, it’s a ridiculous idea that anyone can claim to get their morality from the Bible. Have these people actually read the Bible? What a terrible blood thirsty book.

Also in his chapter on the Old Testament, Hitchens thoroughly demolishes the idea that anyone would get their morality from the 10 commandments.

As terrible as the Old Testament is, we can take some comfort in the fact that most of it is fictitious. Hitchens also makes the point that recent archeological findings have not supported the historical claims of the Old Testament, and often (in the case of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan) contradicted them.

On Religion and Sex

A common theme Hitchens also returns to is the unhealthy obsession religion has with sex, and here I strongly agree with him.

The relationship between physical health and mental health is now well understood to have a strong connection to the sexual function, or dysfunction. Can it be a coincidence, then, that all religious claim the right to legislate in matters of sex? The principal way in which believers inflict on themselves, on each other, and on nonbelievers has always been their claim to monopoly in this sphere. Most religions (with the exception of the few cults that actually permit or encourage it) do not have to bother much with enforcing the taboo on incest. Like murder and theft, this is usually found to be abhorrent to humans without any further explanation. But merely to survey the history of sexual dread and proscription, as codified by religion, is to be met with a very disturbing connection between extreme prurience and extreme repression. Almost every sexual impulse has been made the occasion for prohibition, guilt, and shame. Manual sex, oral sex, anal sex, non-missionary position sex: to name it is to discover a fearsome ban upon it.
(pages 61-62).

“One could write an entire book,” Hitchens writes elsewhere “that was devoted only to the grotesque history of religion and sex, and to the holy dread of the procreative act,” (p. 257).

Having grown up in a religious environment, I can personally attest to this obsession. They are obsessed with prohibiting the sex act to the point of myopia on all other issues. (And when religious people attempt to make their presence felt in politics, their obsession with prohibiting sex spills over into the political sphere as well. It’s a pity Hitchens isn’t alive to comment on the religious right this election cycle.)

Much More to Say

There’s much much more to say, but I’m going to have to leave off here, not because I’ve exhausted everything I have to say on the subject, but because it is a futile endeavor to try and go through Hitchens’ whole book and comment line by line.

Needless to say, there were several more passages where I agreed with him, and some where I disagreed with him, and some where I thought he had half a point but was arguing it the wrong way around.

But my opinion is of no value. Read the book yourself and see what you think.

There’s an infinite amount of things one could say on this subject, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.

I enjoyed Hitchens critiques of Islam, but do not know enough about Islam to comment intelligently.

I’ve made a big deal about the history in this book (because that’s my area of interest) but most of the book is actually more philosophical in nature, with chapters devoted to refuting the idea of argument from design, or questioning the metaphysical claims of religion

In Malaysia

I spent a fair amount of my time in Malaysia browsing book stores. (It’s a weakness of mine no matter what country I’m in.) Since Malaysia is a predominately Muslim country, the religion section usually contained rows and rows of books about Islam.
This book, however, and “The God Delusion” By Richard Dawkins, always seemed to be absent from any Malaysian bookstore, despite the fact that they’re both international best sellers.

I’ve gotten someone conflicting reports from Malaysian friends. Some of them tell me the government is actively banning this book, some tell me the Malaysian government doesn’t officially ban books, but that booksellers are just afraid to stock it.

Either way, for my money the fact that someone is trying to prohibit you from reading a book is always one more reason to read it. I picked up this book shortly after returning from Malaysia.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky speaks at UTSC on Academic Freedom and the Corporatization of Universities.

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens: Book Review (Scripted)

Part 2: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

Part 3: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

links I was reading this in the paper the other day and thought I would highlight it on the blog. It's from: US drone strikes in Yemen crucial to prevent terrorist threat, Panetta says by Even MacAskill in The Guardian

But Mary Ellen O'Connell, an international law specialist at Notre Dame university, challenged the legality of the strikes. She expressed unease with what she described as a return to the ugly strategy used by the US in the Vietnam war and in Central America.

O'Connell, who is also vice-president of the American Society of International Law and who has testified to Congress on legal issues, said of the proposed expansion in Yemen: "In other words, the CIA is seeking to escalate an already unlawful campaign of targeted killing at the very time Yemen needs support building the rule of law and ending violence and military conflict. The last time the CIA had this much freedom to kill was in Vietnam. It killed 25,000 people, and the US lost the war."

 She said that the Obama administration had decided that detaining people was causing political difficulties so they are just killing them instead, and governments round the world are quiescent. She noted that Obama is a law professor and expressed surprise that this should be happening on his watch.

 And this article I thought was also worth reading:
 No real justice in Guantanamo: Trying accused terrorists before military commissions won't meet international standards by Reed Brody from the Los Angeles Times

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

(Book Review)

Before my trip to Malaysia, a co-worker asked me what my interest in the country was.

“It just sounds like it has a fascinating mix of cultures,” I said. “The native Malays, the Indians, the Chinese, and then the British colonial influence all together in one country.”

The next day he handed me this book. “I think you’ll enjoy this,” he said. “This novel does a good job of describing all the multi-culturalism of Malaysia that you mentioned, plus it throws in the Japanese occupation during World War II.”

And so that’s how this novel was sold to me.

And there are passages of the novel that do hint at Malaysia’s cultural complexity.

On page 66, the narrator reflects, “It was only just starting to occur to me what a strange place I had grown up in—a Malayan country ruled by the British with strong Chinese, Indian, and Siamese influences. Within the Island [of Penang] I could move from world to world merely by crossing a street.”

Several pages later, on the eve of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the narrator reflects:

“Looking back, it was strange that everyone, every Chinese, every Malay and Indian, knew with complete certainty that the Japanese would eventually invade Malaya. The Chinese feared that the Japanese would extend their massacre of the people of Nanjing into Malaya, while the Malay and Indian communities hoped that the Japanese would free them from colonial rule. The majority of the English scoffed at the notion that Malaya would be attacked, feeling secure behind the naval batteries of Singapore.” (p. 133)

However these passages aside, for most of the book the Indian and native Malay elements of Malaya are removed to the background, and the story concentrates almost exclusively on the conflict between the British, the Chinese, and the Japanese.

(The story takes place in the island of Penang which, along with Singapore, was one of the centers of the Chinese population in British Malaya.)

The book is written by a Chinese-Malaysian author, Tan Twan Eng, who himself was born in Penang. It is the fictional story of a half-Chinese, half British teenage boy in Penang who befriends a Japanese diplomat on the eve of the Japanese invasion.

This book was (apparently) highly praised by critics upon its release, and even nominated for the Booker Prize.

You can take the opinion of the experts, or you can take mine, but I didn’t care for it all that much. I thought the writing style of this book was over the top, as if the author were trying too hard to impress the reader with his literary talents.

I’ll quote below a typical example, and you can make up your own mind:

She told me her name, with an expectation that seemed to suggest I had been waiting for her. Yet it still took me a few seconds to find a mention of her in the vastness of my memory.
I had heard her spoken of only once before, by a wistful voice in a distant time. I tried to think of a reason to turn her away but could find none that was acceptable, for I felt that this woman had, ever since that moment, been set upon a path that would lead her to the door of my home. I took the gloved hand she offered. With its scarce flesh and thin prominent bones it felt like a bird, a sparrow with its wings wrapped around itself.
I nodded, smiled sadly, and led her through the house, pausing to put the lights on as we passed each room. The clouds had brought the night in early and the servants had gone home. The marble floors were cold, absorbing the chill of the air but not the echo of our footsteps.
We went out to the terrace and into the garden. We passed a collection of marble statues, a few with broken limbs lying on the grass, mold eating away their luminosity like an incurable skin disease. She followed me silently, and we stopped under the casuarina tree that grew on the edge of the small cliff overlooking the sea. The tree, as old as I, gnarled and tired, gave us a small measure of shelter as the wind shook flecks of water from the leaves into our faces.
“He lies across there,” I said, pointing to the island. Though less than a mile from the shore, it appeared like a gray smudge on the sea, almost invisible through the light veil of rain. The obligation to a guest, however unsettling her presence, compelled me to ask, “You’ll stay for dinner?”
She nodded. Then, in a swift movement that belied her age, she knelt on the wet earth and brought her head to rest on the grass. I left her there, bowing to the grave of her friend. For the moment we both knew silence was sufficient. The things to be said would come later. (pages 2-3)

If you enjoyed that passage, you’ll probably enjoy this book.

If, like me, you found it slightly bordering on pretentiousness, than this is how the rest of the book is written.
Also if you thought you maybe noticed an over-use of similes in that short passage, this is also typical of the author’s style.

When I first started reading the book, I found this incredibly distracting. The good news was that as I kept reading, I became used to the author’s style, and once I was a couple hundred pages into the book it didn’t bother me so much. So if the first couple pages put you off, it might be worth persevering, form a stylistic point of view anyway.

The plot, though, is another story.
The narrative of the book is unfortunately like the prose: overdone and completely lacking in subtlety.
It’s a war story about the Japanese occupation of Malaya. During the Japanese occupation, the Chinese population of Malaya in particular suffered horribly and this book tries to convey that enormous suffering.

But after a while everything seemed so overdone I couldn’t take it seriously anymore. In order to show us the war-time suffering of the people of Malaya, it wasn’t enough that some of the main character’s friends and family had to die. All of them, without exception, had to die. And so by the end of the book the narrator’s entire family is wiped out, as well as any friends he ever had.

In real life, surely there must have been some people left alive in Penang after the Japanese left? Doesn’t it seem a bit over the top that everyone he knows has to die?

By the way, I spoil nothing by revealing this information. The story is told in flashbacks, and so the from the beginning of the book the reader already knows that the War is responsible for wiping out the narrator’s whole family.
This is a questionable narrative technique. Granted it does increase the reader’s curiosity at the beginning, but then later on in the flashback scenes, when each successive member of the narrator’s family is killed, the reaction of the reader is not shock or horror but simply a bored: “Yep, knew that was going to happen eventually.”
The reader must simply stick around until everyone is finally dead, and then the story is allowed to conclude itself.

Furthermore, I had a difficult time becoming invested in any of these characters, because none of them ever managed to seem like real people to me. They all just seemed like characters in a book. They do have some individual characteristics, but the author is not good at letting these characteristics come through naturally in the narrative, and so there are a lot of exposition passages describing what the personalities of different characters are like.

**************************************************************************

Despite this book’s many flaws, I’m glad I read it. It served as an excellent introduction to the Island of Penang.

The book is filled with references to actual places in Penang, and, despite the slightly pretentious prose, the author generally does a good job of describing colonial Penang with all its sights, sounds, and smells.

I read this book while travelling through Malaysia, and by the time I got to Penang I was excited to see everything the author had described.

Present day Penang appears to be thoroughly modern city, with traffic jams, large shopping centers, Starbucks and McDonalds, and outwardly bears little resemblance to the old British colonial island described in this book.
But then that is this is one of the themes of this book as well. Since the story is told in flashbacks, the narrator in the present day continually laments how the Penang of his boyhood has been swallowed up by the modern world. And you can see this very clearly if you visit Penang.

Not all the remnants of the colonial days have entirely disappeared though, and many of these surviving remnants the author has done a good job of integrating into his story.
For example, the author makes a big deal of describing Penang Hill, and the colonial-era British summer homes at the top of the hill.
When I went to Penang, I made a special point of checking out the hill, and was delighted to see all the old colonial-era houses much as author Tan Twan Eng had described it.
The colonial era railway car up to the top of the hill is also described in this book, and so I was interested in riding up that as well. (It’s been rebuilt and modernized several times over the years, but still takes the same path as the original 1923 funicular railway car.)

On page 18, the book mentions, “A constant flow of vehicles went around the clock tower donated by a local millionaire to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.”
This clock tower was something else I made a point of checking out while in Penang, and was further surprised/delighted when one of my Malaysian friends revealed to me she was the great-granddaughter of that Victorian era local-millionaire.

The British Fort Cornwallis, which plays a big part in the second half of the book, was another thing I checked out.

When my friends took me to see the Batu Ferringhi coast, I was pleased to remember it as one of the places described in the book.
The Penang Swimming Club (visible from my hotel room) is mentioned in this book.
The legendary haunted house (mentioned on page 19 of this book) my friends also made a point of showing me as we drove past.

Also because of this book, when one of my Malaysian friends asked me, with a mischievous look in her eyes, if I knew what the word ang-moh meant, I was able to show off my linguistic knowledge and reply that it meant red hair. (It’s mentioned in this book as a way the Chinese-Malaysians refer to the white people.)

In short, if you’re planning a trip to Penang, this is the perfect book to read while you’re there.

***********************************************************************

Historical Accuracy:

In the author’s note at the end, the author acknowledges that the book is not entirely historically accurate.

Historians however will quickly recognize that I have taken certain liberties with events. There was, for example, no ceremony on the surrender of the island of Penang to the Imperial Japanese Army and the occasion depicted herein is based on the actual surrender in Singapore.
Also, while the Emperor Kuang Hsu and the Dowager Empress Tzu Xsi were actual historical figures, the “Forgotten Emperor” Wen Zu, is entirely my own invention. The reform movement under the Ching Dynasty occurred only once, in 1898, and my description of its recurrence in a weakened form eight years later is merely dramatic license. (p. 433)

Perhaps I’m a purist, but I’m less inclined to forgive these liberties. My general view is that if I want history to be re-written to serve the cheap dramatic points of the story, then that’s what I have Hollywood movies for. If I’m going to take the time and energy to read through an historical novel, I prefer it to be as historical accurate as possible.

In addition to what the author admits to in his afterwards, there were some other historical inaccuracies I found:

* On page 150, it is said that the Perak Civil Wars of Malaya, during which opposing Chinese triads fought each other, occurred in the 1880s.
--A conflict like this is described in “A History of Malaysia” but dating from 1867 to the early 1870s. (Although I suppose it’s possible there was another one in the 1880s maybe, I’m no expert.)

* On page 326, it is claimed that the Malayan Communist Party was active in the late 1920s.
--According to “A History of Malaysia” the Malayan Communist Party was not founded until 1930.

* In this book, the Malayan Communist Party is initially portrayed as being the dupes of the Japanese army. In this fictional story, prior to the Japanese invasion, the Malayan Communist Party, lured by promises of freedom from British colonialism, attempt to carry out an anti-British terrorist bombing on behalf of the Japanese army.

In reality, the Chinese dominated Malayan Communist Party was fervently anti-Japanese long before the Japanese invasion of Malaya ever took place (because of what the Japanese were doing in China.)
The author Tan Twan Eng tries to get around this by making the terrorist bomber be an Indian-Malayan Communist. And it is true that some Indians did welcome the Japanese invasion under the hopes that the Japanese would free them from the British. But the Malayan Communist Party certainly did not take this line.
This is somewhat a matter of interpretation, but I’m going to say it is misleading for Tan Twan Eng to imply that the communists were collaborating with the Japanese at any period.

After the Japanese invasion happens, Tan Twan Eng does show that the Malayan Communist Party fiercely fought against the Japanese, but he continues to portray the communists as mindless thugs.

This is typical of his one-note characterizations for many of the characters in this novel. The Japanese characters are portrayed in the same way.
The book is not anti-Japanese. There are many good Japanese portrayed in the novel as well as many bad Japanese. But, like the communists, the bad Japanese are all one note characterizations— brutal thugs with no further complexity or motivation.

Final verdict: It’s not the worst book I’ve ever read. I might give this a cautious recommendation to anyone interested. And if you’re travelling through Penang, it’s definitely worth reading.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Occupy's potential now, moving forward after their initial tactic -- 2/21/12

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng: Book Review (Scripted)

This Means War

(Movie Review)

The other day, I was in the shopping mall with a friend, and on a whim we decided to take in a movie. Neither of us had any idea what was playing, but we were in the mood to sit down in an air-conditioned theater for a couple hours and try to escape the sun, so we weren’t feeling picky.

This was the only movie showing at the local theater at that time. I had never heard of it, but I decided to take a chance. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “Well, it can’t be that bad, right? Competition for movie theater screens these days is so fierce that really bad movies don’t get a theatrical release anymore.”

Oh, was I ever wrong about that.

Within the first 5 minutes of this movie, I knew I had wasted my money.

Right from the beginning of this movie it’s painfully obvious that nobody involved in it really cared at all about the quality.

I guess this is one of those movies whose sole purpose is just to make a quick buck. Very little money is spent on screen writing or directing. If the movie is lucky, it manages to suck in a few poor saps who didn’t read the reviews, and it manages to easily recoup its low production costs.
And then it disappears into oblivion with all the other utterly forgettable movies. (5 years from now, no one will even remember this movie ever existed.)

The movie starts out immediately with incredibly cheesy dialogue that makes you think, “Did people actually get paid to write this?”

Then, without bothering to do any sort of build up or suspense at all, the entire film just breaks into this huge gun fight within the first 5 minutes.
The fighting isn’t very well choreographed, and so they try to distract from this by just doing a lot of quick edits. Which makes the whole thing very distracting and hard to follow. And (at least in my theater) the volume was cranked up way too loudly, so whenever someone got hit with a movie punch, there was this ridiculously over the top fake slap noise.

That’s just the first 5 minutes. But once you see how little thought and care is put into it, you can pretty much predict the quality of the rest of the movie. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

The genre is supposed to be a combination of action plus romantic comedy, but the comedy parts aren’t very funny. (It’s obvious no one spent a lot of time on this script.)
The action scenes are poorly choreographed and poorly edited.
And the romantic parts are pretty bad as well.

Granted I’m not generally a big fan of romance movies, so I’ll leave it to the fans of the genre to critique these parts better than I can. But since all of the characters were more plot devices than actual people, I found myself unable to care who ended up with which girl.

On the plus side:
The best thing I can say about this film is that it managed to cater very well to my short attention span. I’ve seen movies that were a lot more boring, but at least the pace of this movie kept things moving right along. Sure, each individual scene might be terrible, but thankfully none of the scenes last all that long.

Also the soundtrack is decent.

Link of the Day
Selective Memory and a Dishonest Doctrine

This Means War: Movie Review (Scripted)

A History of Malaysia by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya [Second Edition]

(Book Review)

I wanted to learn about the history of Malaysia while I was travelling through the country.

Malaysian history interested me. You have so many different cultures mixing together: the indigenous culture, mixed with Islam imported by overseas traders, mixed with large groups of Chinese and Indian immigrants, mixed with the British colonial legacy.
You also have the communist insurgency and jungle warfare in the 1950s which served as a rehearsal for the Vietnam War.
[The Malayan Emergency period is completely forgotten these days, at least from American history books. The first time I even became aware of it is was when looking at the War Memorial in Melbourne, and seeing the monuments to the Australian soldiers who had died fighting communists in the jungles of Malaya in the 1950s.]

Ideally, I wanted a nice armchair history—something that was easy to read, interesting, and engaging.

Alas, you can’t always get what you want. If that book exists out there somewhere, let me know. I couldn’t find it. Of all the bookstores I went to (both inside Malaysia and outside) this was the best I could find.

This book is a textbook, designed to be used in an undergraduate survey course on Malaysian history. (They don’t ever say so in so many words, but it’s obvious.)

I wish I could say it was fun to read but unfortunately the thing reads like, well…. a textbook. It’s filled with dry prose that seems almost designed to put you to sleep. The authors seem more concerned about avoiding controversy than advancing any interesting arguments. It contains very few interesting stories, but is packed with statistics, figures, and analysis. The reader is overwhelmed with strange names, most of which appear briefly on the page, and then never re-appear again.  Or worse yet, sometimes a name does reappear again several pages later, leaving the reader to try to remember which of the many characters this was.  (The authors usually assume the readers have just memorized all these strange names they have been throwing at them, and  offer the reader no help in remembering when one of the many names randomly reappears several pages later.)

Books like this are the reason that some people think they hate history. And yet survey history books are a necessary evil.

Obviously history is most interesting when you can look at people’s individual stories in detail. But not everyone has the time to do this, and sometimes survey history books are the most efficient ways to learn a country’s history.

And, I must admit that I did learn a lot of Malaysian history from reading this book.
I did not, however, enjoy the journey. And so depending on what you’re looking for, you should be forewarned ahead of time. If you want a book that makes history interesting, or if you’re looking for arm-chair pleasure reading, stay away from this book.
If want a textbook with lots of facts and figures to get you ready for a university exam, then this might well be the book for you.

Anyone familiar with survey history books will know that the first few chapters always start out before historical records are kept, and are mostly conjecture based on archaeological evidence, and modern anthropology. For example, based on modern anthropological studies, we learn how the ancient jungle people of Malaysia most probably lived.
Because there are no individual stories to tell, this part of the book was pretty boring. But I persevered, hoping that the book would get more interesting once the authors arrived at the time when historical records are kept.

It doesn’t.

Partly this is because of the author’s fondness for an analytical approach to history rather than a narrative approach.

All the interesting events in Malaysia’s history are covered briefly with just a few sentences, while the author’s spend pages analyzing statistics and demographic trends.
For example, here is how they relate the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore in 3 brief sentences:


“Japanese forces landed in southern Thailand and northern Malaya on 8 December 1941 and by the end of the month had established their control of both the Peninsula and the Borneo states. Within a few weeks, on 15 February 1942, the ‘impregnable’ fortress of Singapore capitulated, followed in March by the Netherlands East Indies. With remarkable speed British rule in Malay was replaced by that of the Japanese military” (p. 257).

This can be contrasted with an overly long and boring analytical section on the demographics of education under British colonialism, which lasts for 17 pages (from pages 226 to 243). To quote from part of it:

“A striking feature of government and mission efforts was the low enrollment of Iban and Dayak pupils. By 1936 the 2086 students in the 25 government schools for Malays and Muslim Melanus included only six Ibans and one Land Dayak; the mission schools had a somewhat better record, with 339 Ibans and 296 Land Dayaks. By contrast, three–quarters of Sarawak’s total school population of about 14,000 were Chinese attending independent Chinese and mission schools. In 1935, under the direction of C.D. Le Gros Clark a report was compiled that proposed wide-ranging changes in the educational system. These included the appointment of a director and an Education Board composed of representatives from the missions and the people….”

….And it goes on like that for 17 pages.

And it was like this all through the book. Everything I wanted to hear more about was covered only in a few sentences, and everything I didn’t want to hear about went on at length.

I suspect this is partly because the authors wanted to avoid giving simply a history of the colonialist powers in Malaysia. In the modern period, Malaysia’s history is one colonial power after another. It was first colonized by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, then the British, than the Japanese, and then the British again. Not until 1957 did the nation finally reach independence.
Ideologically, I’m broadly sympathetic to the idea of “history from below”, but there’s got to be a better way to do it than death by statistics.
(The early chapters contain very little statistics, probably because this survey data wasn’t available back then. But once the authors reach the period of British colonialism, they can’t seem to help themselves from over-using all the statistics and data that the British collected.)

After World War II, the book becomes a little bit more interesting with the story of Malaysia’s struggle for independence and the Communist Emergency. But then once independence has been achieved, the authors fall back on statistics, analyzing the New Economic Policy in terms of percentages of ethnic groups, and then their last few pages on modern Malaysia is spent mainly analyzing the voting patterns of different demographics.

***********************************************************************
* The mainly negative reviews this book has gathered on Amazon seems to indicate other readers shared my frustration with it. [LINK HERE].

That being said, I am perhaps being a little bit unfair. I’m trying to analyze this book in terms of pleasure reading. It’s designed as a textbook.

*******************************************************************

Connections with Other Books I’ve Been Reading

A few other characters from Malaysian history have popped up in the Flashman books I’ve been reading.

* James Brooke, the eccentric British adventurer who colonized Northern Borneo (now part of Malaysia) was featured prominently in “Flashman’s Lady” by George MacDonald Fraser.
(In fact, biographies of James Brooke seem to be hitting on the Flashman connection as a marketing point. When I was in a bookstore in Malaysia, I saw a biography of James Brooke that on the back cover mentioned James Brooke had such an adventurous life he could well have been a fictional creation of George MacDonald Fraser.)

* The Chinese millionaire in Singapore, Whampoa, (mentioned briefly in this history) is also a minor character in “Flashman’s Lady."

* Captain T.C.S. Speedy, another eccentric British adventurer, pops up a couple times in this book as one of the British administrators in Malaysia.
Speedy was also part of the British Abyssinian expedition, and as such appears as a character in “Flashman on the March”.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - What Was Leninism?, March 15th, 1989

A History of Malaysia by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya [Second Edition]: Book Review

No One Loves Armed Missionaries

The continuing disasters in Afghanistan have again made me remember Robespierre’s quote:

During the French Revolution, Brissot and the Girondists wanted to export the republicanism to France’s neighboring countries by force. They were convinced that if the French army were to overthrow the monarchies of its neighbors, and set up republican governments, then they would be welcomed as liberators by the local people.

During the euphoria of revolutionary France, Robespierre was one of the few politicians clear-headed enough to see through this. And over 200 years ago, he spelled out exactly what the dangers of this way of thinking were.

The most extravagant idea that can arise in a politician's head is to believe that it is enough for a people to invade a foreign country to make it adopt their laws and their constitutions. No one loves armed missionaries.

Robespierre’s faction lost the vote, and France did invade its neighbors. But the war was a disaster, and Robespierre was vindicated by the actual events.

Actually I’ve already mentioned this quote twice on this blog already, so you might think I’m over-using by bringing it up a 3rd time

However I say this quote doesn’t get used enough.

It so perfectly applies to our present day situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, you would think this quote would get used more. But how many times have you heard it? Do a Google search and see how few times it pops up.

[Admittedly Robespierre’s historical legacy is a bit mixed, and that could be part of the embarrassment of repeating a quote associated with his name. This quote comes from the time of his life when he was just a charming liberal, before the stress of the revolution caused him to lose his mind and become an insane dictator. But either way, it doesn’t make him any less right.]

Conservatives, by and large, have done a very good job of cherry picking their favorite quotes from history and repeating them ad naseum until they get forced into mainstream culture. We liberals need to do more of this.

So repeat this quote. Repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Post it on your blog or on your facebook page. This quote needs to be repeated ad nauseam until it gets forced into the mainstream.

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Actually on the topic of under-used historical quotes, I can’t help but remember Herman Goring's quote.

Goring, one of the Nazi leaders, when on trial for war crimes gave his thoughts about how the Nazi's had manipulated the German people into supporting the war:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Now I know what you’re thinking: this was already widely quoted in the years running up to the invasion of Iraq.

Well, it was widely quoted on liberal blogs. (I've used it on this blog in the past myself.)
However I saw very little reference to it in any mainstream publications. It also deserves to be repeated ad nauseam. Ideally it would get repeated so much that there wouldn’t be a school child in America who was unfamiliar with it.

Link of the Day
What is the US Deficit?

Santorum on Pornography

It's funny--there are people out there who will try and convince me that (contrary to my own experience) the Christian Church is not obsessed with sex.

You'd never know it from this election cycle.

First, there was the uproar over the contraception issue.

Which resulted in Limbaugh's infamous comments over a female law school student who had the nerve to ask to be insured for contraception.

Now Santorum is crusading against pornography.

(Santorum himself, before becoming a long shot presidential candidate, was most famous for his opposition to gay marriage that first made him a darling of the religious right.)

Okay, so Limbaugh isn't the appointed spokesperson of any organized religion. But you can't tell me it's the secularists who are supporting this type of view.

And maybe the religious right doesn't represent the values of all Christians everywhere. But the inescapable conclusion of this election cycle is that they represent a significant number of Christians. And they vote. And they have no qualms about forcing their narrow view of morality onto the public at large.

And yet, when I try and explain to Christians how the Church is obsessed with sex to the point of myopia on all other issues, they look at me with a hurt expression and say, "Where did you ever get that impression?"

And so now we have Santorum (and presumably his supporters) concerned about the one thing that causes the most harm to American families:

Not guns, which incidentally kill 30,000 people per year. (In fact Santorum and his party are well-known supporters of gun rights. The idea that guns should be regulated is as abhorrent to them as the idea that pornography should be unregulated. They don't seem to see the contradiction.)

Nor does he identify the as one of the greatest threats to families (which also is responsible for 30,000 deaths per year) or tobacco (100,000 per year), or alcohol (50,000 per year).

No, he wants to ban pornography.

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Part of the problem with the Republican party is that it has since the 1980s been made up of an awkward alliance between the religious right and the libertarians.

Thus Obama's Health Care plan was denounced in the shrillest terms as too much government intereference in your life.

This by the same party who wants to regulate who you can and can't get married to. And now wants to regulate what you can and can't masturbate to in the privacy of your own home.

It's built on a party that either overlooks this contradiction, or believes that God has given them the duty to interfere in everyone else's sex life.

Because the religious right finds pornography offensive, they must ban it for everyone.

I realize that we are in the midst of primary craziness, and that most of these issues will die away during the general election in November. But it's interesting to see what motivates the religious right.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky speaks to Dutch activists on various topics

Sex Industry and Cambodia

Some interesting articles have been appearing lately regarding the sex industry and Cambodia.

To start out, there's a blog post from Ms Greenwood:
Sex Work and Dignity in Cambodia – Not Everyone’s a Victim at That Girly Bar

(I recently disagreed with Ms Greenwood over her article on Chomsky. But that doesn't necessarily mean she's all wrong all the time and I think she's asking the right questions in this blog post.)

The links from her blogpost are interesting to follow as well:
Group struggles for legal distinction between human trafficking and sex work
and from the Phnom Penh Post:
Professional girlfriends: Moving beyond sex work by Heidi Hoefinger.

Which reminded me of another article I had read recently by the same author in South East Asia Globe:
Professional girlfriends and bar girls are creating new meanings of Khmer womanhood by Heidi Hoefinger.

I have my own thoughts on the issue, but they're largely irrelevant since they usually consist of me trying to imagine how a woman views sex, and that's always a dangerous profession for a man to engage in. (You'll notice that all of the above linked to articles are written by women.)

So I'll confine my observations to the obvious:
Human trafficking is a problem in this region. Some of my Khmer friends tell me that even upper middle class women dare not walk the streets alone at night in this country for fear of being abducted into a car and sold across the boarder to a brothel somewhere.

And yet, as Ms Greenwood says, a simple consideration of the economics of the situation should make the appeal of the voluntary sex trade obvious. A Cambodian woman can work in a sweat shop factory from morning to night in appalling conditions for $30 a month. Or she can get that same amount of money for a few hours work in Phnom Penh.

It's no wonder then that, as these articles indicate, a number of these woman don't appreciate being "saved" by religious groups and NGOs and retrained to work in the sweatshop industry.

Putting aside the morality of sex for a minute, from a purely cold classical liberal economic view, one would hope that the high wages available for sexual activity would force other business to push up their wages in an effort to compete for labor.
One would not hope that the it results in woman being taken off the streets and forced into the sweatshops by anti-human trafficking laws, which is apparently what's happening.

Perhaps the fact that sex workers in Cambodia are attempting to unionize and take their future into their own hands can be seen as a positive development.

Link of the Day
The Soviet Union Versus Socialism

Thoughts on the Continuing Disaster That is the US Occupation of Afghanistan

The idea of a “War on Terrorism” has always had internal contradictions. How do you fight an enemy without a traditional army?

It was feared from the very beginning that each US military victory would, rather than reduce terrorism, only fuel the anger of the opposition more, and recruit more terrorists. The fear was that we would get stuck in an endless cycle of violence and reprisals that have characterized every other terrorist conflict in the world, such as Northern Ireland, Israel, Chechnya, et cetera.

Way back in 2001, the supporters of the Afghanistan War assured us this wouldn’t happen. They said that while it may be true that every other occupying army in history has been resented by the local population, this time would be different. Our troops would target only the terrorists, and would win the support and trust of the local people.

Over 10 years later, I think it’s time to admit this little experiment has run its course .

If it were active US Government in Afghanistan policy to inflame Muslim hatred as much as possible, it would be hard to imagine how things would be any worse.

First there were the US soldiers urinating on dead Muslim soldiers. Then there was the burning of the Koran. And now the news that 16 Afghanistan civilians, 9 of them children, were murdered by a US soldier.

By themselves, any one of these could be excused as an aberration.

Taken together, I think it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that:
1) The US government has lost control over its soldiers, and
2) US soldiers no longer want to be in Afghanistan.

If anyone can think of any good that can be reached by continuing this occupation, please let me know. Because I can’t see any.

Instead, what I see is a continuing occupation that is just daily making things worse and worse.

It’s time to end this war now. No more US soldiers need to die in Afghanistan, and the US government is hugely in debt and can no longer afford to fund this occupation.

Link of the Day
ENLIGHTENMENT MINUTES - with Noam Chomsky