Larry Flynt: Freedom fighter, pornographer, monster? A recent interview with the founder of Hustler Magazine

Who belongs on the margin? Larry Flynt. What does it say about the United States that he's not?

The Larry Flynt we're more or less aware of:

"I don't know how many different ways I can say this – the First Amendment gives me the right to be offensive. If you're not going to offend somebody you don't need the First Amendment."

You could make the case, as Flynt has, that Hustler has done the united states a service by forcing the Supreme Court to relax the limits of the first amendment. I mean, free speech is absolutely good.

Or that Flynt has as much sway as the next guy in our increasingly "direct" democracy may make you doubt any faith you ever had in a dispassionate judiciary:

"I try to explain that I absolutely support his right to free speech – but find the way he has chosen to use his free speech in Hustler despicable. I describe some of Hustler's most notorious photoshoots to him. "Dirty Pool" depicted a woman being gang-raped on a pool table. A few months after it was published, a woman was gang-raped on a pool table in a town called New Bedford – and Hustler responded to the criticism suggesting they may have inspired the assault by publishing postcards of another woman being gang-raped on a pool table with the greeting: "Greetings from New Bedford, Gang Rape Capital of America." 

Then I describe "The Naked and the Dead", a Hustler spread in which a woman is forcibly shaved, raped, and apparently killed in a concentration camp. Who, I ask, finds that sexy? "That is satire. That's what I went to the United States supreme court for. It was a landmark judgment. It was a unanimous decision. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, one of the most conservative justices, said sometimes things are done under the name of the First Amendment that are less than admirable but that doesn't give the government the right to suppress it." 

I'm not arguing it should be suppressed, I explain. I support your right to say it – just as I have a right to respond by saying it's vile and asking you why you did it. "It's satire," he says, testily. But what's it satirising? "What?" he says. What's it satirising? "It's satirising the whole idea of a pretty girl being executed." But how is that a concept that needs satirising? How is that even a concept at all? "It wasn't done as any kind of statement," he says. But you just said it was a statement – a satirical one. "There wasn't any malice in it," he says. Really? It's a non-malicious concentration camp?"

That's the least of it. Here's the full-article.

Christopher Hitchens, "Chomsky's Follies," and American Polemics

Interesting article on Bin Laden's life and death, which Christopher Hitchens slammed this week in Slate. Although Hitchens definitely represents the mainstream here, I can't help but think Chomsky raises important questions about the way abuses of power are rationalized, and how most political "rationale" is guided by self-interest instead of a utilitarian logic Hitchens and other polemics make it out to be.

A few highlights:

Chomsky, among other things, equates Bush to Bin Laden:

"It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”


"Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement."

"We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."

"Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

From Hitchens' response:

"As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.) In his recent article for Guernica magazine, however, professor Noam Chomsky decides to leave that central question open. We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon."

"Chomsky still enjoys some reputation both as a scholar and a public intellectual. And in the face of bombardments of official propaganda, he prides himself in a signature phrase on his stern insistence on "turning to the facts." So is one to assume that he has pored through the completed findings of the 9/11 Commission? Viewed any of the videos in which the 9/11 hijackers are seen in the company of Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri? Read the transcripts of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker"? Followed the journalistic investigations of Lawrence Wright, Peter Bergen, or John Burns, to name only some of the more salient? Acquainted himself with the proceedings of associated and ancillary investigations into the bombing of the USS Cole or indeed the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers in the 1990s?"

"In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade."

And the last word, from George Scialabba also in Guerneca:

"Over the last decade, Hitchens has reenacted the drama of Dorian Gray: his prose style has waxed ever more elegant, while his political judgment and his polemical morality have decayed. Of course, Hitchens’s inability to discuss Chomsky fairly and intelligently is a mere bagatelle, significant only as a symptom of a more widespread and troubling failure. Public understanding of the nature and consequences of American foreign policy, past and present, was even more urgently necessary—morally as well as prudentially necessary—after 9/11 than before. No such understanding has dawned. American intellectuals, whose responsibility it was to lead the national conversation beyond uncritical acceptance of the premises of state policy, failed entirely. If the American citizenry ever learn, in relation to their country’s international behavior, Auden’s simple yet difficult lesson that “Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return” (or their benighted sympathizers do), it will be despite rather than because of the efforts of Hitchens and the large majority of American intellectuals who, about these matters at least, agree with him."

Article | First Things

The Moral Economy of Guilt: The curious process by which notions of sin and guilt have become both illusory and omnipresent.

Wilfred M. McClay

On the ways people feel about and deal with guilt. Great discussion on forgiveness.

Especially interesting: why the interconnectedness and freedom new technologies offer open us to ever more reasons to feel guilty:

"In a world in which the web of relationships between causes and effects becomes ever better understood, in which the means of communication and transportation become ever more efficient and effective, and in which individuals become ever more powerful and effective agents, the range of our potential moral responsibility, and therefore of our potential guilt, expands to literally infinite proportions. In an ever shrinking and ever more interconnected world, it is theoretically possible for every living person to go anywhere that he or she wants to go, and to be made literally, or at least virtually, present to any other person, in ways that promise to become ever more vivid and high-definition in the future..." 

Later attributes a recent glut of counterfeit trauma accounts to people trying to absolve their mounting guilts, just without traditional methods or assumptions. Good stuff.