I was staring out the window and thinking about the conceptual strain of setting complex issues in their most basic terms. There happened to be a clutch of children handy, and I nearly absent-mindedly asked aloud: "Have you ever liked something that you know is bad?"

Eleven year-old Emily sharply stabbed the air with the pencil at work on her sketch-pad, and said, "Heights".

"What?"

Nodding solemnly, she explained, "I know high places are dangerous, and they scare me, but I like high places."

I had been at the point of seizing on cigarettes as an example, with resort to paraphrase of Brick Pollit's immutable ethical stand taken in the screen adaptation of "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof": "I like to smoke." When it comes to Christopher Hitchens, however, I have to admit that Emily made a much finer point, if only instinctively. I have every confidence that she will grow into serious analysis of the "heights: bad, but good" paradox, but, for the moment, it's enough to let her be a kid, something at which she is most delightfully adept. In the meantime, many years of familiarity with the demands of heights brought the facility of her example to superb clarity in an adult. The essential thing about dealing with high places is surety of foot and grasp. They really can be enjoyed, but only in the safety of practiced knowledge.

Never once in a quarter-century did I entertain the hope that Hunter S. Thompson would arrive at a sensible politics. To my mind, the closest he ever got was in the fact of his relative quiet through the term of The Ozark Long March. It was a time when, arguably, he could have been of good use at articulating the manifest implications of his left-handed endorsement of Maximum Bill in 1992. However, I could not blame the guy for lying low, and I did idly wonder now and then whether he dawdled in his own Second Thoughts over his youthful infatuation with the likes of Rick Stearns, or perhaps the example of Pat Caddell's rational skepticism. It was an idle wonder, though, without excitement. Justice is a fugitive, a recurring travesty evident in the exemplary fact that some of the most incisive political scripture in the back half of the twentieth century ("Fear & Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72") found no reprise when it was needed most. Don't hand me "Better Than Sex", because that was a hand-job, and we are all given widely-cited authority to understand that the Senate would never subscribe the definition.

When I do not blame Thompson, it's because I do not hold him principally responsible for the confusements into which he was born as an incident of history. Call me a bleeding-heart: the thing simply makes me sad. And when I say he was the H. L. Mencken of his era, I refer to matters of attitude, a bit less to style, and not at all to integrity of judgment. With Vince Foster's body a-mouldering in the grave, just barely, Thompson came up for air in 1994 and gave us -- his obituary of Richard Nixon. I say the work was better done pre-mortem, and there were fatter swine to slice, on the living hoof. It's a crying shame that his blade had gone dull, but I remember the heights of yore, from which the "coke bottle" dropped on that smashing August afternoon when the jig was up, and Thompson tracked the flying shards.

It is a necessary attribute of heights that they go where the lows are not. This is why it's possible to admire them in the work of people who could have been genuine contenders in the conceptual fight for freedom, but who, when not all is said and done, settled for spelling the word. I was never deluded by Thompson's spelling any more than by The Lying Bastard's lips moving for eight rotten years. This is because the concept of "freedom" always rested flat on the floor of his brain like a plugged nickel with one side showing. If he did not originally strike the word "greedhead," then he certainly made the most of it at securing his own fortified compound. Whether confused or deliberate, it is a low thing to indict the idea of private property behind private fortifications, and I'm here to say that plumbing depths can require all the surety of foot and grasp necessary to scaling heights.

And that brings me to another significant conceptual failure: Christopher Hitchens. To begin at the top, a prominent peak of selection would include his "Letters To A Young Contrarian", in which he points out the probity of that corner of Dante's Inferno where the morally neutral are consigned. Hitchens specifies a "moral crisis", and I won't quibble -- in this paragraph -- between "The Cold Battle", to which myopic apprehensions point as ended, and "The Cold War", which has never stopped since twelve hundred horses were drawn up as the Estates-General at Versailles in May of 1789. I will place my bet here that Bastiat would understand me, and agree, which is not to dispute the qualification of a half-century of potential global annihilation as a "moral crisis". It certainly was that. However, there was, and is, much more to the matter, namely, the reasons behind it all.

The questions here are these: how could it be such a short step from a peak of ethical concept to those pits outlined in the statement that "Lenin was a great man"? And, most important: what is the act of identifying two individual men as mass-murderers if not "moral equivalency"? The two men at hand are Hitler and Stalin, with Lenin thrown in where, if the exchange between Martin Amis and Hitchens is fact as reported, the dog did not bark with real cause for alarm. Unless, that is, there was real cause for alarm.

In a passage of crucial lucidity in these times of stark nonsense, Hitchens, in his "Letters", extols the ability to discriminate as "a precious faculty". Every two-bit senator of the day is, and whole gangs of those gone by were, eager to follow the fashion of disclaiming this universal human practice of judgment in the name of "compassion" or its latest meme. It is a most painfully tedious chore to point out the rare value of a statement of the fact of things -- the actual reality -- in opposition, because joy in the truth of it is aborted at the sight of this hollow revolt before the obvious similarity of two monstrous killers.

"Discrimination" is, first and foremost, an epistemic process. It begins with abstraction of essentials by comparison of all an entity's attributes and selection of that (or those) attributes that serve a distinctive concept. One might discriminate human beings among all living things for political purposes (e.g.; the recognition of rights), but attribute selection is different when judging the very same basic entity ("human") for other purposes, such as speed for the purpose of a track meet, honesty and mental acuity for the purpose of accounting, or specialized dexterity and soulful expression for the purpose of recording blues guitar solos. Note that these purposeful discriminations generally rely on demonstrated record: this is the basis of the old admonition that "What you are speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say." That thing is a warning to be, in order to be known.

Is there a sensible person alive who would have trusted their life to either Hitler or Stalin? That question is absurd among people who know anything more than either name and whose faculties are intact with factory equipment. That's because we know them by their works. So; what "moral equivalency" have I "fall[en] for" in asking it? Here is the discrimination that I draw: innocent human lives are sacrosanct from destruction at the hands of dictators of every stripe. Dictators who violate that sanctity are morally equivalent monsters. When they do it on the scale of millions, they have descended into something very special: the domain where quantity takes on a discernable quality, which is the reason why Jeffery Dahmer will completely disappear before history is even half finished with Hitler and Stalin.

This is all elementary, important as it is to say it, yet again, and again, if necessary.

What's slightly more interesting is the matter of cause for alarm, and the stand for Lenin behind Stalin. This is the part where I might laugh, except that my sense of humor has had the decency to leave the room. Call it "reaction".

At a crucial moment of The Cold Battle, Dean Rusk met Charles De Gaulle's native impudence with the question whether to rid France of Americans including the dead ones in the military cemeteries. It was a point of clarity given to The Hero of Madagascar for reflection, and, for once, he had nothing to say. It would not do to dismiss the moment's lapse of impudence to an ally on account of his once watching Stalin toast the shooting of Kaganovich and the hanging of Air Marshal Novikov as jokes during a diplomatic reception at Moscow. Doubtless Kaganovich and Novikov were compelled to laugh by something beyond professional courtesy. They knew who they were dealing with, and so did De Gaulle. ("And these are the people we shall be facing for the next hundred years!") If De Gaulle prevailed to the point where NATO moved its various commands out of France, it was only because he could afford it as long as NATO existed to begin with. And here is the point:

Those who split "Stalinism" as a loose communist hair in their coif of history, also implicitly ignore Hungary and Czechoslovakia (to say nothing of Afghanistan) when they do it. And that necessarily means that they ignore Lenin and Trotsky, too. Hitchens, himself, has "refus[ed] to indict the course of events", preferring "historical as well as moral reasons for the fate of revolution". This is sophistry failing to redeem itself. If Lenin calls for blood, it could be arguable that he is not responsible if Stalin delivers on a scale that Lenin did not live to attain, except for the fact that Lenin is credited with principal impetus for the coup of October 1917. If Stalin ground "kulaks" through the machine in wholesale lots, it is impossible to rationally disconnect the fact that it was Lenin who, when asked what a "kulak" was, said, "They will know them when they see them." Why don't we take a moment to discuss "moral reasons" for "fate"? While we're at it, we might spare a word for untold numbers of individual people -- with names and dreams and families and work -- who were deliberately squeezed out of existence like so many watermelon seeds. There was something a bit more than "fate" involved, and if my pointing this out is "moral equivalence" of Soviets with Nazis, then I have no problem at meeting the indictment with a plea of reality and accepting conviction. I don't care a whit for any so-called reasons for any of it: none of them are valid. This, I judge, and "self-appointed suits me just fine." I take the conviction as it is recommended.

Hitchens has written of words "with which to puncture an argument". ("Vyshinsky" is a good one, although it's not as good at puncturing a human head as the bullets that also perforated his dialectics.) It will likely be an enduring curiosity whether Viktor Serge "punctur[ed]" the coif of "Stalinism" with the word "Kronstadt". Trotsky briefly entertained the curiosity -- with lies -- as late as 1938. Tukhachevsky was assigned military command of the siege, but it was Trotsky who ordered the execution of every fifth Red Army soldier who disobeyed orders to charge across the ice. It was Trotsky who told the rebels that they would be "shot like partridges" if they continued to resist. It is understandable that he did not care to dwell on Kronstadt -- or even mention it -- in his memoirs, but that also does not address the very serious, probative, argument by Serge that the tap-root of "Stalinism" reaches to "the beauty and pride of the Revolution" in the Gulf of Finland. When Zborowski delivered Trotsky's dismissal, "The Fuss About Kronstadt", to Stalin, it's unknown how it was received, but there is no question but that the two were in perfect Bolshevik accord on the matter.

Is that "moral equivalence"? Yes. With prejudice and no apology.

The central question here is this: by what possible standard available in human history can these men -- any of them -- be called "great"? Hitchens was entirely correct when he wrote, "On some grave questions, there is no difference to be split; one does not look for a synthesis between verity and falsehood; the sun does not rise in the east one day and in the west the next." This is language ("always look to the language") from the sure-footed heights: the sort of thing that first drove human beings to the endurance of the written word. I take no vengeance here in quoting it back to him in the wake of the passage by Amis.

The largest matter of this is in reminding those with eyes to see that "The Cold War" is not over, and that's because it was never about ICBM's and submarines so much as ideas.