Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Back at the beginning of 2001, Christopher Hitchens was tiring of politics so he decided to do some serious reading. With the vague idea of writing a reply to Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, he opted to tackle Marcel Proust properly. Just as he finished the project in early September his wife woke him up one morning — he was on the West Coast and she was in Washington — and told him to turn on the TV. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City were burning.

Since that day, Christopher Hitchens has become the most prominent journalistic supporter of American military action against Islamic terrorism. Adored by the left until his "apostasy", he is now hated by those who once admired his elegant and incisive writing. In the current issue of The Atlantic, Hitchens talks to Daniel Smith in The Contrarian in Combat (subscription required). Here's an excerpt:

Staying with Iraq and your support of the war there, what about other regimes that clearly pose a risk to the United States? North Korea, for one. How do you apply the logic of regime change in Iraq to the rest of the world?

North Korea has threatened the invasion of South Korea; it's starving its own people to death; it's repeatedly caught sponsoring international terrorism; and it's obviously violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But North Korea has us in a stranglehold that Saddam didn't. We've let things get to the point where North Korea can —and might, given what we know of the nature of its regime — destroy the capital city of South Korea if we make a move against it. If we were an imperialist state we wouldn't give a shit about that. We'd just say, It's in our interest if the North Korean regime ceases to exist — too bad if South Korea ends up getting blown up. But we can't do that.

So essentially it's a military calculation?

Yes. The calculation made by the Administration — in my opinion, quite rightly —was that we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get to the point where he could say, like Kim Jong Il, "Come and get me if you'd like, but look what I've got." Of course, Saddam was continually trying to get into that position.

Christopher Hitchens there in The Atlantic in fighting form. His latest book is titled Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.

AUSCHWITZ In this week in which we are remembering here the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with diary entries from those dark days, we present an account from 1945 that captures the full horror of the "Final Solution". The diarist is Abel Herzberg:

22 March 1945 [Bergen-Belsen] "The weather affects the mood of the camp most profoundly. Had it not been such a gloriously fine spring day today, we would all be feeling as dejected as on our worst days.

Last night a transport of two thousand people arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp. The shouting, abusing, crying, taunting, groaning, cracking of the whips and thuds of the beatings could be heard throughout the night.

This morning behind Hut 16 we saw hundreds of corpses being dragged onto a heap and stripped of their clothing. They also removed the gold teeth from their mouths. Never has it been as bad as this. All day, the heap of emaciated, naked bodies was left lying in the sun. Their facial expressions are frightening. They seem to know what is being done to them."

Abel Herzberg (1893-1989) was the son of a broker of uncut diamonds and grew up in Amsterdam. During the First World War, he enrolled as a volunteer in the Dutch Army though he did not have Dutch citizenship. He qualified as a lawyer and played a prominent role in the Dutch Jewish community. After the German occupation of Holland in 1940, Herzberg, his wife and three children went into hiding, but were later arrested and deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Amazingly, the whole family survived. His concentration camp diary was published in English as Between Two Streams.