Iraq's 1979 Fascist Coup, Narrated by Christopher Hitchens
“I suppose I'll start with Iraq —which was best described by….
has best been captured under its old regime form by a
brilliant author Iraqi-English… Half-Iraqi, Half-English
author called uh Kanan Makia
who had to write for a long time
under a protective pseudonym of
Samir al-Khalil and wrote a tremendous
book called The Republic of Fear —
which is the best four-word description that
one could have of The Regime of Saddam Hussein.
If you can get hold of it, and You CAN,
if you go back to look at the program that
Kanan Makia and Hoding Carter once did for
public broadcasting, you can actually get
to see one of the most chilling, annihilatingly
chilling actually, videos ever made
in The 20th Century.
It shows The Moment at which Saddam Hussein,
The ACTUAL moment at which Saddam Hussein
seized Power in Iraq for himself.
We don't have that moment in Germany.
We don't have that moment in Russia.
We don't know What Happened after
The Kirov Assassination in Leningrad
and The Opportunity it gave to Stalin
to seize Supreme Power.
We know roughly What Happened
in The Night of The Long Knives
when Adolf Hitler realised that
he could massacre every rival of his
not just in German politics but within
His OWN PARTY, which
is always the crucial thing
But with Iraq we do have the actual moment
and you see it — there's The Central Committee
of The Ba’ath Party, perhaps 100 people are sitting
in a very formal array in a conference room and
Saddam Hussein is chairing them from a podium,
smoking a large cigar --
And suddenly without warning to anyone,
in is dragged between two guards and in
chains, a broken man -- A man who is obviously
physically and mentally been utterly destroyed.
His personality has been evacuated and
prodded a bit, he stumbles through A Confession
that implicates himself and others in A Plot to destroy
The Iraqi Republic, to remove The Regime of
The Ba’ath Party and to ruin
The Iraqi Revolution --
The Counter-Revolution in other words; he says
The Regime behind it is The Syrian regime,
it could have been anybody --
It could have been International Zionism --
It could have been anything you like. But he actually
implicates in this case The Syrian Ba'ath Party rivals.
Having confessed for himself, and having begged to be executed
for His Crimes, having been reduced to a state of complete abjection,
the man then says, "The following members of this Central Committee
were with me in This Plot." And he begins to read out their names slowly.
And as this happens, you can see it.
The Guards move, every time
a name is mentioned and
they grab the member of
The Central Committee and
lead him out of the door —
And after about a dozen of these,
the panic, sheer animal panic starts to spread
among those who haven't yet been named.
And in the hope that they're not going to be,
they start screaming and jumping up and saying,
"Glory to Saddam Hussein, Our Leader. All praise
to him. The Sun, The Moon, The Stars of Iraq --”
PRAYING that it won't be
them who are called next.
Nothing makes any difference.
The Harvest just goes on randomly.
They're taken off The Chessboard and
taken out until half of them are GONE
and the rest are just limp and done for, and --
almost dying with relief that it wasn't them.
It's the most extraordinary live show of a real
for-keeps political purge that you'll ever see.
And then there's the second half, which
has been seen by much fewer people and was
NOT shown on PBS - where the surviving half are
told to go out in the yard and are given guns and
are told to shoot the convicted half --
Now They're in The Plot;
Now they're now -- They are
cemented to The Leadership.
Now Canand in his book says correctly, he says,
"Hitler wouldn't have thought of THAT --"
STALIN didn't even Think of that, and
HE thought about these things a LOT...
About how to get one member of The Central Committee
to betray another member and keep them all guessing
so that you're the ultimate beneficiary.
But This is that added little touch
of Sado-Masochistic genius —
This is The Adding of The Godfather
and The Soprano to the mixture
of Nazism and Stalinism.
That was in fact the birth of Ba’athist ideology to begin with.
In case you don't know or haven't studied it,
The Iraqi Ba’ath Socialist Party was modeled in large part
on admiration for European National Socialist and
Fascist movements, hoped to emulate them, especially
in their nationalism against The West.
But mutated by Saddam Hussein, it became also one that
very very much admired — He had a great admiration for,
and grew a special mustache and admiration of the work
of Joseph Visaranovich Dugashilli, the great
Georgian known to us historically as Stalin.
So you had, in modern Iraq, a regime in in our own time
that was there was openly and directly modelled upon
the two most extreme examples of
European Totalitarianism.
And when I used to go there in those days… it's often very difficult
when you come out of a country like this, to explain to people
quite what it's LIKE when you're THERE.
The atmosphere of terror, the look that comes
into people's eyes when you mention
the name of The Leader, the absolute
look of flash of panic — ‘anything
could happen to me now —’
The person who spills their cup of coffee
on a copy of The Party paper that has
The Leader's picture on it and everyone
in the cafe goes completely quiet —
‘You just desecrated a picture of The Leader;
The Police are on their way now; You've just
made the biggest mistake of your life.’
And it's very likely that your family
will go to prison with you.
And maybe they'll have to
watch you being tortured.
And if they do, they'll have to applaud.
And if they have to watch you being executed,
they'll be later sent a bill for the bullets
that were used to be fired into the back
of your head and your neck
because no one's exempt.
It's often, I think, very very very hard for people who
live in civilised countries, democratic countries,
to understand what it would be like to live
even a day under a regime that was like this —
I used to - I used to find in arguments about Iraq
that I knew right away um when someone
didn't know what they were talking about.
And the dead giveaway would always be
when they would say, "All right, I agree.
Saddam Hussein is a bad guy." I said,
"That means you don't know.
You don't know anything about it.”
If that's what you think, you don't know
what it would be like to be sitting at home
wondering where your daughter was and
finding out because The Police came around and
banging on the door, handed you a video while
they stood there of her being raped by their
colleagues just to show you who was boss.
The word Evil, which I began with,
I think does need a bit of justification.
Many people think that to use even use the word ‘evil’ is
sort of naive or morally too judgmental or you know —
what I'm driving at — too simplistic and yet it's
somehow a word without which we cannot do.
Hannah Arendt in her study of Totalitarianism borrowed
from Emanuel Kant the concept of radical evil,
of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself.
It's so committed to evil. It's so committed to hatred
and cruelty that it becomes suicidal.
My definition of it is the surplus value
that's generated by Totalitarianism.
It means you do more violence, more cruelty
than you absolutely have to to stay in Power.
You've already made your point.
You've done everything
you need to do to make people
realise that You're in Power.
But you somehow can't stop.
There has to be a special appetite.
There must be special prisons for rape.
There must be special graves,
mass graves just for children.
There must be the desire to
see how far you can go.
And even if you know this will
in the end bring retribution,
it's worth it in some sense
for its own sake —
Maybe that's the only redeeming thing about it.
Maybe the irrationality is the one saving grace of it.
But at any rate, it's not A Word, it seems
that we can abolish from our vocabulary.
