"European explorers and missionaries.... compared the organisation of the kingdom of Burundi with that of the old Greek empire."

"It was not until 1899 that Burundi became a part of German East Africa."

Unlike the Rwandan monarchy, which decided to accept the German advances, the Burundian king Mwezi IV Gisabo opposed all European influence, refusing to wear European clothing and resisting the advance of European missionaries or administrators. The Germans used armed force and succeeded in doing great damage, but did not destroy the king’s power. Eventually they backed one of the king's sons-in-law Maconco in a revolt against Gisabo. Gisabo was eventually forced to concede and agreed to German suzerainty.....

With WWI, Belgium took over, running things "through indirect rule, building on the Tutsi-dominated aristocratic hierarchy." Independence came in 1962, and "Tutsi King Mwambutsa IV Bangiriceng established a constitutional monarchy comprising equal numbers of Hutus and Tutsis." Horrific events follow.

In Burundi, today's "History of" country.

"On the fourth Armenian Remembrance Day of his presidency, President Obama has for the fourth time in a row broken his promise..."

"... to the Armenian community to use the word 'genocide' in describing what happened at the hands of the Turks roughly a century ago."

“America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides,” he said. “I intend to be that president.” In a January 2008 letter to the Armenian Reporter, Mr. Obama said he shared “with Armenian Americans — so many of whom are descended from genocide survivors — a principled commitment to commemorating and ending genocide. That starts with acknowledging the tragic instances of genocide in world history.”

Whatever happened to Darfur?

Have you noticed that we don't notice it anymore?

IN THE COMMENTS: mesquito says:

Darfur has contracted herpes and is hiding from the ozone layer in the Amazon rain forest.

Algirdas Brazauskas — "He was an honest man, a charismatic leader and outstanding politician."

"The memory of the first president of independent Lithuania will remain in the hearts of the people."



IN THE COMMENTS: bagoh20 begins with some decent-enough generic snark:

No matter who the subject, I find it hard to consider "outstanding politician" to be anything but an insult. I'm a bigot about politicians.

But it is not right for this occasion. Irene brings the gravitas:

Brazauskas was no ordinary, career politician. He became a politician as a result of extraordinary times. He was a courageous man who inspired the citizens to stand up to an awesome power.

Lithuania was under the Soviet yoke between 1944 and 1991. A documentary, Red Terror on the Amber Coast exposes these times. There now is a museum in the capital, Vilnius, dedicated to preserving the history of the Soviet genocide.

Many members of my family fled Lithuania in June 1944. Those who did not get out were deported to reeducation camps in the Gulag.

"The American lawyer jailed by the authorities in Rwanda last week on accusations of denying the nation’s genocide..."

"... tried to kill himself with a pill overdose in his cell, officials there said Wednesday, and he now may face a new charge under Rwandan law: attempted suicide...."

Rwanda, a close American ally that has received hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid, is tightening restrictions on political opponents and critics of the government in the months leading up to elections in August, several human rights groups have said. No subject seems to be touchier than the genocide in 1994, in which hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred by government-backed death squads. In recent years, thousands of Rwandans have been charged with genocide ideology, an Orwellian-sounding and vaguely defined crime often leveled against anyone who challenges the government’s version of events in 1994.

But Mr. Erlinder’s case is the first time Rwanda has leveled such charges against a Westerner. And the charges against [American law professor Peter Erlinder], 62, seem to have nothing to do with what he may have said or done in Rwanda, but more with his earlier work as a defense lawyer at a United Nations-backed tribunal in Tanzania.

At that tribunal, Mr. Erlinder, who represented a top genocide suspect, disputed the standard characterization of the bloodshed in Rwanda as Hutu victimizers slaughtering innocent Tutsis. Instead, he said that the violence was more spontaneous and possibly the result of Tutsi rebels killing Hutu civilians. He even went as far as to say that the Tutsi rebels, who now rule Rwanda, assassinated Rwanda’s president in 1994, the event that set off the widespread murder.

"Obama's use of Meds Yeghern 'is an elegant dodge to avoid using the 'g-word'..."

"... but the substance of what he states about what happened gives no comfort to those who cling to the Turkish official version... '1.5 million Armenians were rounded up and massacred or marched to their death.' Despite the passive construction, that assumes intentionality."

How Radovan Karadzic hid himself.

With a new look, he "lived a strikingly public life practicing alternative medicine and writing for a health magazine" in Belgrade, WaPo reports.

Does the U.N. have a duty to undertake a military intervention in Burma?

Matthew Lee explains the "responsibility to protect." Military intervention is the most extreme option, but there is a policy, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly that extends from the obligation to stop genocide.

ADDED: The Australian has an editorial "Tear Down Burma's Bamboo Curtain."

Obama is letting Wright overpower him.

Dana Milbank says that Wright's speech today may have doomed the Obama candidacy. He summarizes the Q&A session pithily:

His claim that the September 11 attacks mean "America's chickens are coming home to roost"?

Wright defended it: "Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles."

His views on Farrakhan and Israel? "Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him.... Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."

He denounced those who "can worship God on Sunday morning, wearing a black clergy robe, and kill others on Sunday evening, wearing a white Klan robe." He praised the communist Sandinista regime of Nicaragua. He renewed his belief that the government created AIDS as a means of genocide against people of color ("I believe our government is capable of doing anything").

Obama needs to take control of the situation. But what is he saying today?

Some of the comments that Reverend Wright has made offended me and I understand why they offend the American people. He does not speak for me. He does not speak for the campaign.

So bland. So uninspiring. Obama is letting Wright overpower him.

"Wright has now removed any guilt or conflict Obama might feel about denouncing him and his approach to race and politics," says Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan had been giving Wright a pass, but now he says:

[What Wright] said today extemporaneously, the way in which he said it, the unrepentant manner in which he reiterated some of his most absurd and offensive views, his attempt to equate everything he believes with the black church as a whole, and his open public embrace of Farrakhan and hostility to the existence of Israel Zionism, make any further defense of him impossible. This was a calculated, ugly, repulsive, vile display of arrogance, egotism, and self-regard.

ADDED: Video of the Q&A:

"There is no repentance on the part of The New York Times. There is no integrity when it comes to The Times."

Writes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to Jodi Kantor of the NYT in a letter published at Time.com:

Out of a two-hour conversation with you about Barack’s spiritual journey and my protesting to you that I had not shaped him nor formed him, that I had not mentored him or made him the man he was, even though I would love to take that credit, you did not print any of that...

... I spent approximately five to seven minutes on Barack’s taking advice from one of his trusted campaign people and deeming it unwise to make me the media spotlight on the day of his announcing his candidacy for the Presidency and what do you print? You and your editor proceeded to present to the general public a snippet, a printed “sound byte” and a titillating and tantalizing article about his disinviting me to the Invocation on the day of his announcing his candidacy.

The letter is dated March 11, 2007. Since then, no doubt, Jeremiah Wright has learned a whole lot more about how people extract sound bites (or "sound byte"). (But it's hard to believe he was so innocent even back then.)

The NYT responds to Times's printing of the old letter:

Ms. Kantor conducted herself professionally and honestly throughout her dealings with Mr. Wright. She did what any journalist would do: She brought the news he conveyed during the interview to the attention of her editors, including me. We decided to do what a newspaper does: to present that news to our readers, accurately, fairly and as quickly as possible. Ms. Kantor in no way misrepresented the nature or purpose of the interview; as soon as it was ready for publication, we published exactly the longer story we told Mr. Wright we were working on and that he referred to in his letter.

Putting aside the question of why a letter that is more than a year old is suddenly getting new circulation, it is worth noting that at no time has Mr. Wright challenged the accuracy of either story written by Ms. Kantor – both of which, given the events of the last several weeks, seem remarkably prescient about the potential political peril in the Obama-Wright relationship.”

Good answer!

ADDED: Instapundit links here and also points to this post by Ed Morrissey, speculating that Wright's letter caused the Times to go easy on Wright when it ultimately published the long piece Kantor was working on. He notes that her article has a very tame presentation of Wright's sermons. She wrote:

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

Ed says:

That’s about as close as Kantor ever got to the incendiary rhetoric offered by Wright. She apparently didn’t bother to research the videos and copies of sermons easily available, and so missed the exhortations that 9/11 was America’s “chickens coming home to roost”, that black people should sing “God Damn America”, and that the US had created HIV-AIDS as a tool for genocide against people of color. One wonders why Wright bothered to complain about the minor issue at hand while all of these political land mines remained just below the surface — and why Kantor and the Times never bothered to research Wright in more depth.

... [D]id the Times pull its punches because Wright complained about their early coverage?

Good question!

Why did Obama let Clinton jerk him around over Samantha Power?

Here's the revolting and ridiculous conference call, in which Clinton campaign hacks pretend it's a giant outrage that the brilliant Samantha Power applied the word "monster" to Hillary Clinton. Power withdrew herself from the campaign, but where was Barack Obama? Why didn't he support her?

Here's Matthew K. Johnson:

For those of us who follow foreign policy and human rights policy in particular, Samantha Power is a fascinating and inspiring figure - a brilliant woman who has lectured and written equally from her heart and her head. Her Pulitzer-prize winning book A Problem From Hell is a passionately argued and beautifully written description of America's at times shameful and always complicated history during the genocides of the 20th century - it remains my favorite non-fiction book; the first one I will recommend to friends and colleagues and has inspired more than one of my own written works.... Her profession, and her approach to it, makes her a somewhat undiplomatic politcian, but I was still absolutely thrilled that she joined Obama's campaign, and was one of the first reasons that I became an Obama supporter - clearly he was attracting the top minds, many of whom were critical of the practices of the past (Power, like myself, is very critical of the Clinton years - the inaction on Rwanda, the ignorance of the power of strong leadership in the Balkans).

What do we learn from this incident? I don't need to learn that Clinton will do whatever it takes to win, and perhaps that does earn the label "monster," but let's not ignore the deficiencies in Barack Obama. How does he intend to win by shrinking away when her people pull their tricks? Where is his vigor? And, more importantly, where is his courage? It was cowardly to allow the Clinton campaign to savage Power and rip her away from him.

And now I'm wondering whether there is anything courageous about Barack Obama. Obama supporters, please: Make the case to me that the man has courage. And don't say that he opposed the war in Iraq, because I don't think, in the position he was in at the time, that it took courage to oppose the war. That served his political ambitions. Tell me something he did that was difficult to do, that took some risk to do what was right.

IN THE COMMENTS: Balfegor said:

I've read speculation that he may have used the "monster" kerfluffle as cover for tossing her overboard because in that same interview, she claimed he wasn't actually serious about getting out of Iraq in 16 months or whatever his plan was -- once he was president he'd discard his campaign plan and take a new look at the situation.

If this is the reason he let her go, it's a defense against the charge that he let Hillary push him around, but it only makes me worry more that he lacks courage. And ironically, Power's statement about how he would handle Iraq reinforced what I've been assuming, and this assumption was central to my decision to vote for him in the Wisconsin primary.

So what am I to think now that he let Power go? That what she said about Iraq was wrong or that it was right? If it's wrong, I like him less on policy. If it's right, then I'm more upset about the estrangement of Power and concerned that Obama is dishonest, saying things to get elected that he's never going to do in office. And yet — this is so troublesome for me! — I'm hoping that, if elected, he'll listen and reassess and exercise the good judgment that he now applies to the task of getting elected and the results of his presidential decisionmaking will be much more to my liking.

"She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything."

Obama's foreign policy advisor Samantha Power says something hot and then hopes the reporters will cut her a break by saying "off the record" afterward. Come on, that's like saying "Mother, may I?" after you've taken 2 giant steps forward or "No takes" after the cootie girl has touched you. Are my cultural references old enough? They're so old that only Hillary voters understand them.

AND: David Corn gets it almost right:

The Clinton people do deserve chutzpah points for trying to turn this nothing-burger into a full-course feast. During a conference call with reporters yesterday, Clinton's top spinner, Howard Wolfson, compared Obama and his aides to Kenneth Starr because they dared to question Clinton's refusal to release her income taxes.... The comparison was ridiculous. But in Democratic circles, there's not much of a bigger slur than, Hey, you're Ken Starr! For Democrats, Starr is the functional equivalent of a monster.

So the Clinton crowd does not have the moral high ground in this round. Yet what was the net result? Power, a talented journalist and thinker who gives a damn about genocides (certainly more so than Bill Clinton did during the Rwanda nightmare), was forced off Obama's campaign.

What's missing? Obama deserves criticism for letting Clinton make something out of nothing and not standing up for Power.

Let's watch the Democratic debate in New Hampshire.

Okay, we're off. Wolf Blitzer invites the candidates to introduce themselves with a quick one liner. John Edwards wins this round by saying "I'm John Edwards." The others are all tagging on the fact that they are "running for President." Yeah, it would be weird if you weren't. Bill Richardson is "the proud governor of the state of New Mexico."

1. 14 minutes into this, I think John Edwards is making the strongest showing. Obama seems nervous and rushed, and Hillary Clinton seems flat. Obviously, this is a subjective opinion, but Edwards seems to have put the others on the defensive.

2. Bill Richardson bumbles the question about genocide in Iraq. [ADDED: That is, he evades the question with one desperate move after another. Anyone paying attention must conclude: He is prepared to accept genocide in Iraq. I wish all the candidates were pinned down with this question.]

3. Kucinich is asked whether the entire war was a complete waste, and instead of harshly saying yes, he uses the occasion to say -- quite rousingly -- that this war is the Democrats' war too, and he's not buying Hillary Clinton's repeated (already!) refrain that this is George Bush's war. The Democrats have the majority: cut off funding!

4. Biden keeps yelling. Hillary Clinton tries to deflect the question about her failure to read the National Intelligence Estimate before the original Iraq war vote. Edwards compliments Obama: "He was right. I was wrong." Obama is settling down now, and he magnanimously says that voting for the war shouldn't be seen as "a disqualifier." We see Hillary in the background as he's speaking and she looks intense, determined, and scared. When she gets a chance to speak, it's back to her refrain: It's all Bush's fault.

5. Immigration. I have to admit that I have no patience for the posturing on this issue. Blitzer does a show-of-hands for the question whether English should be the official language of the U.S. Only Gravel raises his hand. There's a lot of blather about the importance of English and of other languages.

6. Health care. They all seem to have plans to cover everyone with quality health care.

7. Hillary Clinton is asked whether Bill Clinton's "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy was a mistake. It was a transition, she says. And she asserts that it's been applied in a discriminatory way -- which is odd, since the whole idea is discriminatory. But she opposes the policy in the end, even as she won't say Bill made a mistake. It was a "first step."

8. Blitzer is going through the list of issues. They are on energy now. I don't think this is an effective way to do a debate, because each candidate just lays out his or her official policy, which we could see by looking at their websites and which is always a bit unreal, given that a President will have to work with Congress. But just as I'm sick of it, Wolf says we're going into "Part 2" of the debate. Questions from citizens. Okay. Good. Anything for a change. There's 3 minute break. I fast-forward. Looks like hands are being shaken. And those weird lecterns are carted off and replaced by modernistic swivel chairs of that seem to have time traveled in from a 1970s talk show.

9. The first 2 audience questions are from women with family members involved in the military. The responses here are nondescript, and I'm sorry to say, my attention wanes.

10. At about 1:20, Hillary Clinton heats up, talking about diplomacy and Iran. It's still the same theme that it's all Bush's fault: "We've had an administration that doesn't believe in diplomacy." But there's some style here as she talks about how "every so often" Condi Rice shows up somewhere and "occasionally they even send Dick Cheney, which is hardly diplomatic, in my view." She sounds very strong at this point. I just wish she'd shown this spirit in the first half hour. Is anyone watching as she catches fire?

11. Confession: I'm in a bit of a TiVo lag, and "The Sopranos" is about to start. So... I'm bailing! Keep talking. I'll get back to this. But I don't TiVo "The Sopranos." I'm on HDTV here. Sorry!

12. Blah! I'm trying to get back to this after watching "The Sopranos." Is anyone watching now? Does this matter? They all look like they want to leave. Edwards is shaking his foot impatiently. Various issues come up in the end, but nothing impresses me to the point where I feel like writing. Sorry.

"We have acquired this responsibility..."

Christopher Hitchens on Iraq:

[T]he many disappointments and crimes and blunders... do not relieve us of a responsibility that is either insufficiently stressed or else passed over entirely: What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country? We have acquired this responsibility not since 2003, or in the sideshow debate over prewar propaganda, but over decades of intervention in Iraq's affairs, starting with the 1968 Baathist coup endorsed by the CIA, stretching through Jimmy Carter's unforgivable permission for Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, continuing through the decades of genocide in Kurdistan and the uneasy compromise that ended the Kuwait war, and extending through 12 years of sanctions and half-measures, including the "no-fly" zones and the Iraq Liberation Act, which passed the Senate without a dissenting vote. It is not a responsibility from which we can walk away when, or if, it seems to suit us.

"If I am a conservative, and I detest many of the things this conservative administration is doing..."

"... then what kind of conservative am I and what kind of conservatives are they?"

That -- according to David Brooks -- is the question Andrew Sullivan is asking in his book "The Conservative Soul." Brooks writes a strangely good/bad review, in which he agrees with the aspects of Sullivan's thinking that have to do with the "conservatism of doubt" and "epistemological modesty" but takes him to task for failing to understand what religious conservatives are really like and for missing the "complexity" of fundamentalism. Then he praises Sullivan for being at his "wonderful best" when he is "a fervent, passionate crusader" for the things he's fundamentalist about -- like gay marriage and torture.

That doesn't seem too complimentary to Sullivan, but in the end I get the impression that Brooks is criticizing himself, saying that all that doubt and modesty that he himself finds so alluring really doesn't cut it in American politics:

... Oakeshottian conservatism can never prevail in America because the United States was not founded on the basis of custom, but by the assertion of a universal truth — that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain rights. The United States is a creedal nation, and almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed. In many cases, the people making those calls were religious leaders. From Jonathan Edwards to the abolitionists to the civil rights leaders to the people fighting AIDS and genocide in Africa today, religiously motivated people have been active in public life. They have been, in their certainty and their willingness to apply divine truths, fundamentalists — if we want to use Sullivan’s categories. You take those people out of American politics and you don’t have a country left....

Conservatives need to relearn the lessons of Burke and Hayek — that the world is complex, and efforts to transform it will have unintended consequences, most of them bad. But if American conservatives give up their optimism and their universal creed, they will once again be a small sect at the fringes of political life.

Orhan Pamuk!

Orhan Pamuk wins the Nobel Prize for literature. Pamuk was charged with the crime of "insulting Turkishness," charges that were dropped after outcry from Westerners.

Pamuk, 54, who gained international acclaim for books including ''Snow,'' ''Istanbul,'' and ''My Name is Red,'' went on trial last year for telling a Swiss newspaper in February 2005 that Turkey was unwilling to deal with the massacre of Armenians during World War I, which Turkey insists was not a planned genocide, and recent guerrilla fighting in Turkey's overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast.

''Thirty-thousand Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it,'' he said in the interview.

Hoarse Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy that awards the prize, said the controversy had nothing to do with the decision to award him the prize.

''It could of course lead to some political turbulence but we are not interested in that,'' Engdahl said. ''He is a controversial person in his own country, but on the other hand so are almost all of our prizewinners.''

Which is why we don't believe you when you say it has no effect on the decision... But, anyway, I like the support for Pamuk.

If you want to read something of his, read his New Yorker piece about his trial:

My detractors were not motivated just by personal animosity, nor were they expressing hostility to me alone; I already knew that my case was a matter worthy of discussion in both Turkey and the outside world. This was partly because I believed that what stained a country’s “honor” was not the discussion of the black spots in its history but the impossibility of any discussion at all. But it was also because I believed that in today’s Turkey the prohibition against discussing the Ottoman Armenians was a prohibition against freedom of expression, and that the two matters were inextricably linked. Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world....

As tomorrow’s novelists prepare to narrate the private lives of the new élites, they are no doubt expecting the West to criticize the limits that their states place on freedom of expression. But these days the lies about the war in Iraq and the reports of secret C.I.A. prisons have so damaged the West’s credibility in Turkey and in other nations that it is more and more difficult for people like me to make the case for true Western democracy in my part of the world.

ADDED: Jeff Weintraub observes that the prize "seems like a happy ending for [Pamuk], at least for the moment. But the larger issues remain, both for Turkey and for the rest of us."

At the genocide museum in Suleimaniya, Kurdistan.

Michael Totten reports:

When you enter the museum you will walk through a long and winding hallway. The walls are covered with mirror shards. Each represents one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds murdered in the genocidal Anfal campaign. A river of twinkling lights lines the ceiling. Each represents one of the five thousand villages destroyed by Saddam Hussein....

The hardest thing to see was the cell used to hold children before they were murdered. My translator Alan read some of the messages carved into the wall.

“I was ten years old. But they changed my age to 18 for execution.”

“Dear Mom and Dad. I am going to be executed by the Baath. I will not see you again.”

Turkish ironies: the Orhan Pamuk trial.

Yesterday, I wrote about the trial of Orhan Pamuk, and today, I see the trial has been put on hold. Perhaps the irony impressed the court: putting a writer on trial for damaging the image of the country damages the image of the country. Yet Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems irony deaf when he complains:

"The EU at the moment is trying to put our judiciary under pressure ... Rightly or wrongly, the issue is in the courts.

"My views concerning freedom of expression are well known," he said. "I am a person who was a victim of a freedom of expression case."

Erdogan served four months in jail in 1999 for reciting what the courts deemed to be an inflammatory poem interpreted as being anti-secular. Turkey is a staunchly secular state.

Here's a collection of different opinons about the Pamuk trial in the Turkish newspapers.

The current New Yorker has a piece about the trial, written by Pamuk himself (and translated by Maureen Freely, who, I take it translated freely):

Comforted as I was by the interest in my predicament and by the generous gestures of support, there were also times when I felt uneasy about finding myself caught between my country and the rest of the world.

The hardest thing was to explain why a country officially committed to entry in the European Union would wish to imprison an author whose books were well known in Europe, and why it felt compelled to play out this drama (as Conrad might have said) “under Western eyes.” This paradox cannot be explained away as simple ignorance, jealousy, or intolerance, and it is not the only paradox. What am I to make of a country that insists that the Turks, unlike their Western neighbors, are a compassionate people, incapable of genocide, while nationalist political groups are pelting me with death threats? What is the logic behind a state that complains that its enemies spread false reports about the Ottoman legacy all over the globe while it prosecutes and imprisons one writer after another, thus propagating the image of the Terrible Turk worldwide?

Did European witch-hunting kill 9 million?

I've been under the impression that was the real number, ever since I read Gyn/Ecology about 15 years ago. But I see here, that number is entirely wrong:

"For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties," writes Wolfgang Behringer in "Witches and Witch-Hunts" (Polity, 2004). He estimates that perhaps twice as many received other penalties, "like banishment, fines or church penance."

Other recent estimates range from 40,000 to 100,000 executions over those early modern centuries. These remain appalling numbers, even when put in the context of the far greater numbers killed in religious wars and the fact that resort to capital punishment was at one of its high points in European history.

No one should underestimate the cruelty these numbers represent. "Witchfinders," Malcolm Gaskill's full-blooded account, just published by Harvard University Press, of the most notorious witch hunt in English history, makes that clear in engrossing detail.

But contemporary historians bridle at the huge numbers that have become part of the witch hunt mythology-and the implicit or explicit comparisons to the Nazi campaign of genocide. Professor Behringer traced the estimate of nine million victims back to wild projections made by an 18th-century anticlerical from 20 files of witch trials. The figure worked its way into 19th-century texts, was taken up by Protestant polemicists during the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf in Germany, then adopted by the early 20th-century German neopagan movement and, eventually, by anti-Christian Nazi propagandists.

In the United States, the nine million figure appeared in the 1978 book "Gyn/Ecology" by the influential feminist theoretician Mary Daly, who picked it up from a 19th-century American feminist, Matilda Gage.

Do such unfounded myths do anyone any good? Certainly many feminists, including some identifying themselves as neopagans, agree with contemporary historians about the answer: No.

Have any of you folks read "Gyn/Ecology"? Oh, that is a rousing book!

UPDATE: Cathy Young (who also participates in the comments) expresses shock at my "rousing book" compliment to "Gyn/Ecology." (She and I also had some debate about the writings of Andrea Dworkin.) I wrote this in the comments:

I just said it was rousing, not that it was good or right. I went through a period when I read a lot of Dworkin and Daly's books. They were very stimulating, but also ultimately stimulated me into wanting to distance myself from them. There are plenty of things in the treatment of women to be outraged about, but polemical works that demand that you reach and maintain a permanent state of anger just seem sad after a while (or dangerous, if they are actually effective).

Hitchens on "The Daily Show" and in The Weekly Standard.

Did you see Christopher Hitchens on "The Daily Show" show this week? It was a rather strange little interview in which Jon Stewart did most of the talking, asking really long questions that ostensibly begged Hitchens to explain things about the war in Iraq but left Hitchens with little time to attempt to do it.

Hitchens did manage to say he was going to have an article in The Weekly Standard on the subject. Now, the article is available.

An excerpt:

I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago. Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time....

The subsequent liberation of Pakistan's theocratic colony in Afghanistan, and the so-far decisive eviction and defeat of its bin Ladenist guests, was only a reprisal. It took care of the last attack. But what about the next one? For anyone with eyes to see, there was only one other state that combined the latent and the blatant definitions of both "rogue" and "failed." This state--Saddam's ruined and tortured and collapsing Iraq--had also met all the conditions under which a country may be deemed to have sacrificed its own legal sovereignty. To recapitulate: It had invaded its neighbors, committed genocide on its own soil, harbored and nurtured international thugs and killers, and flouted every provision of the Non-Proliferation Treaty....

I have a ready answer to those who accuse me of being an agent and tool of the Bush-Cheney administration (which is the nicest thing that my enemies can find to say). Attempting a little levity, I respond that I could stay at home if the authorities could bother to make their own case, but that I meanwhile am a prisoner of what I actually do know about the permanent hell, and the permanent threat, of the Saddam regime. However, having debated almost all of the spokespeople for the antiwar faction, both the sane and the deranged, I was recently asked a question that I was temporarily unable to answer. "If what you claim is true," the honest citizen at this meeting politely asked me, "how come the White House hasn't told us?"

Read the article.

I would love to have heard what Hitchens said about Jon Stewart after that interview. I wonder if it would have been something like this passage from the article:

There are an astounding number of plain frauds and charlatans (to phrase it at its highest) in charge of the propaganda of the other side. Just to tell off the names is to frighten children more than Saki ever could: Michael Moore, George Galloway, Jacques Chirac, Tim Robbins, Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson . . . a roster of gargoyles that would send Ripley himself into early retirement. Some of these characters are flippant, and make heavy jokes about Halliburton, and some disdain to conceal their sympathy for the opposite side.

Too harsh for Stewart? Perhaps, but if he were interviewing any of Hitchens's gargoyles, I think he'd treat them far differently from the way he treated Hitchens.

UPDATE: Here's the video of the Hitchens interview, available at Crooks & Liars, which opines:

Jon was very focused tonight and made Hitchins lose his place a few times. (How did he ever do that?) When intelligence is met against blind ideology, intelligence usually wins. (I just made that up)

Gargoyles, indeed.