Cultural literacy, part 94

I rarely comment on blogs, for reasons implied by this column last week. I particularly don't bother with this blog, for reasons unintentionally intimated 18 months ago by an academic in international relations who might do well to spend a bit less time blogging. But what can you say about this?

1. “Since he is of no use anymore, there is no gain if he lives and no loss if he dies.”

2. “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer.”

Easy, right? The less bloodthirsty one is Pol Pot. (As Brother Number One famously mused “Look at me now. Am I a savage person?”) It’s only fair to note here that Christopher Hitchens is not, in fact, a genocidal maniac. Well, not someone who has actually killed anyone, that we know of. It’s also nice to know that Pol Pot has a myspace profile. (His interests include taking control of Kampuchea and social experimentation. Music? DK, obvs.)

That's the entire post, by someone who clearly has no idea that Hitchens is alluding to the sentiment usually (though inaccurately) attributed to Diderot that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Agree with Hitchens's views on the Iraq war and the struggle against Jihadism or not (and I am militantly on his side), you should be aware that he has always been an accomplished literary critic with an impressive stock of cultural knowledge. As a secularist, he knows whom he's invoking, and clearly assumed his readers would know as well.

I repeat: most blogs have nothing to say.