Christopher Hitchens and Kim Jong Il both died this week and I've just been pondering the difference in their contributions. Between them, they represent the extremes in our ability to face 'the truth' and illustrate how those differing abilities can have serious consequences.
First to The Hitch. Atheism has found a natural home on the net. It suites us in so many ways from the most trivial to the most serious. Organising a group of people who are naturally suspicious of formalised organisations is best done by a shapeless, organic entity that is hard to pin down. That's the net. There's no gathering under big arches and spires to abase yourself in front of a pitiless god. It allows broad ranging interests to be pursued from any location and it allows it to be done anonymously. Anonymity is very important to atheists in some parts of the world. I don't need to explain why – but again, that's the net.
Remembering Hitchens in A Grey Area will only represent the tiniest percent of the tiniest percent of what has and will be written about him and by much more serious thinkers. But, the fact there is so much activity on the net surrounding his death is interesting. The medium has enabled a growth in a particular philosophy of life that is hard to imagine without the enabling technology. I only get a keyhole view (I am only one person) but my feeling is that non-belief, reason, and the humanist movement has got an enormous lift from the net. The truth will out and it outs much more easily when it's democratic.
Christopher Hitchens faced the most unpleasant truths unflinchingly and with open eyes. He was not a foxhole atheist who converted in the face of his demise. He had worked too hard at uncovering and exposing the hypocrisy of religion and I have nothing but contempt for the religious who either a) prayed for him to get better so that they could shanghai him into the ranks of belief, or b) those that relished his painful death and gloatingly make statements about hell and damnation. A pox on both your idiotic and immature houses.
Hitchens made the world a better place. He might have changed a few minds, he certainly put a few plonkers back in their place and he entertained. Be anything, but don't be boring. He was never that. I'm going to miss him.
Similarly, I don't relish the thought of the demise of Kim Jong Il. Not because he was a blessing to his people, not because he was a blessing to comedy, but because he was the devil we knew. This next fat little porker is entirely unknown and I can only hope that he follows the rule of the third generation in a dynasty that inevitably fails its father and grandfather.
I have been reading for years the horrors that come out of North Korea. The profligate spending on the military while the locals are forced to eat the bark off trees and finally resort to eating each other before burying what remains of an emaciated corpse. I've been astonished at the level of brainwashing that has been maintained in the peninsular. Dear Leader really had most of them fooled and it's to his credit that he did this in the face of the growing news content on the web.
Some years ago, I saw a doco on an ophthalmic surgeon who went over the DMZ and did a few hundred simple eye operations that restored sight to all of the recipients. It was an operation that the North Koreans were unable to perform. The reaction of the patients was chilling.
As the American surgeon pulled the padding from the eyes of the afflicted, they'd look up at the beatific picture of KJI that can be found everywhere and thanked Dear Leader for returning their sight.
To be so literally and figuratively blinded is the work of a religion and I don't think that KJI is being given enough dues when his leadership is simply described as a cult of personality. It sounds a little paltry.
Kim Jong Il closed eyes, Christopher Hitchens opened them. It's about light. It's funny how that word means both not being a burden and illuminating.
