Johann Hari

The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in the Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness.” It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our twenty-first century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.

Every day I think about the people I met in the warzones of Eastern Congo when I reported from there. The wards filled with women who had been gang-raped by the militias and shot in the vagina. The battalions of child soldiers – drugged, dazed thirteen year olds who had been made to kill members of their own families so they couldn’t try to escape and go home. But oddly, as I watch the war starting again on CNN, I find myself thinking about a woman I met who had, by Congolese standards, not suffered in extremis.

I was driving back to Goma from a diamond mine one day when my car got a puncture. As I waited for it to be fixed, I stood by the roadside and watched the great trails of women who stagger along every road in Eastern Congo, carrying all their belongings on their backs in mighty crippling heaps. I stopped a 27 year-old woman called Marie-Jean Bisimwa who had four little children toddling along beside her. She told me she was lucky. Yes, her village had been burned out. Yes, she had lost her husband somewhere in the chaos. Yes, her sister had been raped and gone insane. But she and her kids were alive.

I gave her a lift, and it was only after a few hours of chat along on cratered roads that I noticed there was something strange about Marie-Jean’s children. They were slumped forward, their gazes fixed in front of them. They didn’t look around, or speak, or smile. “I haven’t ever been able to feed them,” she said. “Because of the war.” Their brains hadn’t developed; they never would now. “Will they get better?” she asked. I left her in a village on the outskirts of Goma, and her kids stumbled after her, expressionless.

There are two stories about how this war began – the official story, and the true story. The official story is that after the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu mass murderers fled across the border into Congo. The Rwandan government chased after them. But it’s a lie. How do we know? The Rwandan government didn’t go to where the Hutu genocidaires were; not at first. They went to where Congo’s natural resources were – and began to pillage them. They even told their troops to work with any Hutus they came across. Congo is the richest country in the world for gold, diamonds, coltan, cassiterite, and more. Everybody wanted a slice – so six other countries invaded.

These resources were not being stolen to be used in Africa. They were being seized so they could be sold on to us. The more we bought, the more the invaders stole – and slaughtered. The rise of mobile phones caused a surge in deaths, because the coltan they contain is found primarily in Congo. The UN named the international corporations it believed were involved: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and more than 100 others. (They all deny the charges). But instead of stopping these corporations, our governments demanded the UN stop criticising them.

There were times when the fighting flagged. In 2003, a peace deal was finally brokered by the UN, and the international armies withdrew. Many continued to work via proxy militias – but the carnage waned somewhat. Until now. As with the first war, there is a cover-story, and the truth. A Congolese militia leader called Laurent Nkunda – backed by Rwanda – claims he needs to protect the local Tutsi population from the same Hutu genocidaires who have been hiding out in the jungles of Eastern Congo since 1994. That’s why he is seizing Congolese military bases and is poised to march on Goma.

It is a lie. Francois Grignon, Africa Director of the International Crisis Group, tells me the truth: “Nkunda is being funded by Rwandan businessmen so they can retain control of the mines in North Kivu. This is the absolute core of the conflict. What we are seeing now is the beneficiaries of the illegal war economy fighting to maintain their right to exploit.” At the moment, Rwandan business interests make a fortune from the mines they illegally seized during the war. The global coltan price has collapsed, so now they focus hungrily on cassiterite, which is used to make tin cans and other consumer disposables. As the war began to wane, they faced slowly losing their control to the elected Congolese government – so they have given it another bloody kick-start.

Yet the debate about Congo in the West – when it exists at all – focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are causing the wound. It’s true the 17,000 UN forces in the country are abysmally failing to protect the civilian population, and urgently need to be super-charged. But it is even more important to stop fuelling the war in the first place by buying blood-soaked natural resources. Nkunda only has enough guns and grenades to take on the Congolese army and the UN because we buy his loot. We need to prosecute the corporations buying them for abetting Crimes Against Humanity, and introduce of a global coltan-tax to pay for a substantial peace-keeping force. To get there, we need to build an international system that values the lives of black people more than it values profit.

Somewhere out there – lost in the great global heist of Congo’s resources – are Marie-Jean and her children, limping along the road once more, carrying everything they own on their backs. They will probably never use a coltan-filled mobile phone, a cassiterite-smelted can of beans, or a gold necklace – but they may yet die for one.

To save the lives of the victims of Congo's sexual violence, you can donate money at http://www.panzihospitalbukavu.org

La guerre la plus meurtrière, depuis la marche d’Adolf Hitler sur l’Europe, redémarre – et vous transportez très probablement dans votre poche un morceau de ce carnage gorgé de sang. Lorsque l’on jète un coup d’œil sur l’holocauste qui se déroule au Congo, avec 5,4 millions de morts, les clichés des reportages sur l’Afrique n’y résistent pas. Ils prétendent qu’il s’agit d’un "conflit tribal" au "cœur des ténèbres", mais c’est faux. L’enquête des Nations-Unies a découvert que cette guerre est menée par les "armées des entreprises", afin de mettre la main sur les métaux qui font de notre société du 21ème siècle un monde "bling-bling". La guerre au Congo est une guerre qui vous concerne directement.

Tous les jours, je pense aux gens que j’ai rencontrés dans les zones de guerre de l’Est du Congo lorsque j’y faisait des reportages. Les salles des hôpitaux étaient remplies de femmes qui avaient été violées en série par des milices et auxquelles ont avait tiré une balle dans le vagin. Des bataillons d’enfants soldats – des jeunes de 13 ans abrutis par la drogue, conduits à tuer les membres de leurs propres familles en vue de tenter de s’échapper et de rentrer à la maison. Tandis que je regarde la guerre reprendre sur CNN, je me retrouve, de façon étrange, à penser à une femme que j’avais rencontrée, laquelle, selon les normes congolaises, n’avait pas souffert à l’extrême.

Un jour, alors que je retournais à Goma, après avoir enquêté sur une mine de diamants, un pneu de mon véhicule a crevé. Tandis que j’attendais qu’il soit réparé, je restais debout au bord de la route en observant les longues files de femmes qui marchaient péniblement le long des routes, partout dans l’Est du Congo. Elles transportaient péniblement sur leurs dos tout ce qu’elles possédaient. J’ai arrêté une jeune femme de 27 ans, Marie-Jeanne Bisimwa, qui avait quatre petits enfants qui trottinaient à ses côtés. Elle m’a dit qu’elle avait de la chance. Oui, son village avait été incendié. Oui, elle avait perdu son mari quelque part dans ce chaos. Oui, sa sœur avait été violée et était devenue folle. Mais elle et ses enfants étaient en vie.

Je l’ai fait monter dans mon véhicule, et ce ne fut qu’après quelques heures de conversation sur les routes crevassées que j’ai remarqué quelque chose d’étrange avec les enfants de Marie-Jeanne. Ils étaient affalés en avant, leurs regards fixés en avant. Ils ne regardaient pas autour d’eux, ne parlaient pas et ne souriaient pas. "Je n’ai jamais été capable de les nourrir", dit-elle. "A cause de la guerre".

Leurs cerveaux ne se sont pas développés ; c’est trop tard maintenant. "Iront-ils mieux ?" a-t-elle demandé. Je l’ai laissée dans un village dans les environs de Goma, et ses enfants ont trottiné derrière elle, sans expression.

Il y a deux histoires pour expliquer comment cette guerre a commencé – l’histoire officielle et la véritable histoire. L’histoire officielle est qu’après le génocide rwandais, les meurtriers de masse Hutus se sont enfuis de l’autre côté de la frontière au Congo et le gouvernement rwandais est parti à leur poursuite. Mais c’est un mensonge. Comment le savons-nous ? Le gouvernement rwandais ne s’est pas rendu où se trouvaient les Hutus génocides, du moins, pas au début. Ils se sont rendus là où se trouvaient les ressources naturelles – et ils commencèrent à les piller. Ils ont même dit à leurs soldats de travailler avec tous les Hutus qu’ils rencontraient. Le Congo est le pays le plus riche du monde pour l’or, les diamants, le colombo-tantale, la cassitérite et bien d’autres minerais. Tout le monde voulait sa part du gâteau – c’est pourquoi six autres pays l’ont envahi.[1]

Ces ressources n’ont pas été dérobées pour être utilisées en Afrique. Elles ont été saisies dans le but de nous être vendues. Plus nous en achetions, plus les envahisseurs volaient – et massacraient. L’essor des téléphones portables a provoqué une brusque montée du nombre de morts, parce que le colombo-tantale qu’ils contiennent se trouve essentiellement au Congo. L’ONU a désigné les sociétés internationales qui seraient impliquées : Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers et plus de 100 autres. (Toutes réfutent ces accusations.) Mais au lieu de faire cesser les agissements de ces sociétés, nos gouvernements ont exigé que l’ONU cesse de les critiquer.

Il y a eu des moments où les combats se sont calmés. En 2003, un accord de paix a été finalement négocié par l’ONU et les armées internationales se sont retirées. Nombre d’entre elles ont continué de travailler comme milices par procuration – mais le carnage s’est quelque peu estompé. Jusqu’à maintenant. Comme pour la première guerre, il y a un prétexte et il y a la vérité. Un dirigeant d’une milice congolaise, Laurent Nkunda – soutenu par le Rwanda – prétend qu’il a besoin de protéger la population Tutsi locale des mêmes Hutus génocides qui se sont cachés dans la jungle de l’Est du Congo depuis 1994. Voilà pourquoi il met la main sur les bases militaires congolaises et qu’il tient à marcher sur Goma.

C’est un mensonge, François Grignon, le directeur pour l’Afrique de l’International Crisis Group [ISI], me dit la vérité : "Nkunda est financé par les hommes d’affaires rwandais afin qu’ils puissent prendre le contrôle des mines au Nord-Kivu. C’est le cœur absolu de ce conflit. Ce que nous voyons maintenant sont les bénéficiaires de la guerre économique illégale en cours pour maintenir leurs droits d’exploitation."

En ce moment, les intérêts des entreprises rwandaises font des fortunes avec les mines qu’ils ont illégalement saisies durant la guerre. Comme le cours mondial du colombo-tantale s’est effondré, ils se concentrent désormais goulûment sur la cassitérite, qui est utilisée pour fabriquer des boites de conserve et d’autres articles de consommation jetables. Alors que la guerre commençait à faiblir, ils se sont retrouvés en train de perdre leur contrôle du gouvernement congolais élu – alors ils ont donné un nouveau coup d’envoi sanglant.

Pourtant, le débat sur Congo, qui se déroule à l’Ouest – lorsqu’il existe –, se concentre sur notre incapacité à apporter un soulagement décent, sans mentionner que nous occasionnons les blessures. Il est vrai que les forces de l’ONU qui comptent 17.000 hommes dans le pays échouent abominablement à protéger la population civile et a un besoin urgent de monter en puissance. Mais, pour commencer, il est encore plus important de cesser d’alimenter cette guerre en achetant des ressources naturelles trempées de sang. Nkunda a tout juste assez de fusils et de grenades pour se battre contre l’armée congolaise et l’ONU, parce que nous achetons ce qu’il pille. Nous devons poursuivre en justice les entreprises qui les achètent, pour complicité de crimes contre l’humanité, et introduire une taxe mondiale sur le colombo-tantale afin de financer une force de paix conséquente. Pour en arriver là, nous devons construire un système international qui valorise les vies des Noirs plus qu’il ne valorise les profits.

Quelque part là-bas – perdus dans le gigantesque hold-up mondial des ressources du Congo – se trouvent Marie-Jeanne et ses enfants, claudiquant à nouveau le long des routes, transportant tout ce qu’ils possèdent sur leurs dos. Ils n’utiliseront probablement jamais un téléphone portable bourré de colombo-tantale, ni une boîte de conserve de haricots, fabriquée avec de la cassitérite fondue, ni un collier en or – mais ils pourraient pourtant mourir pour le vôtre.

Traduit de l'anglais par [JFG-QuestionsCritiques]

La guerra más mortífera desde que Adolf Hitler marchase a través de Europa comienza de nuevo; y casi con toda certeza tu llevas un pedazo de la matanza - manchado de sangre - en tu bolsillo. Cuando observamos el holocausto del Congo, con 5.4 millones de muertos, los clichés de África aparecen atropelladamente: este es un “conflicto tribal” en “el corazón de la oscuridad”, te dirán, pero no lo es. La investigación realizada por las Naciones Unidas descubrió que lo que sucede en el Congo es una guerra dirigida por los “ejércitos de las empresas” para hacerse con los metales que hacen que nuestra sociedad del siglo XXI prospere y refulja. La guerra del Congo tiene lugar por ti. [..]

Existen dos versiones sobre el inicio de la guerra: la oficial y la verdadera. La oficial sostiene que tras el genocidio en Ruanda, los asesinos en masa hutus cruzaron la frontera entrando en el Congo, y que el gobierno de Ruanda fue tras ellos, pero esto es mentira. ¿Qué como lo sabemos? Porque el gobierno de Ruanda no fue al lugar donde se refugiaban los genocidas Hutus, al menos no en un principio. En vez de eso se dirigieron a las zonas ricas en recursos naturales, y comenzaron a saquearlas. Llegaron incluso a pedirle a sus soldados que colaborasen (en el pillaje) con cualquier Hutu con el que se cruzasen. El Congo es el país más rico del mundo en oro, diamantes, coltán, casiterita y otros recursos más. Todo el mundo quiere una tajada, y por eso ha sido invadido por otros seis países. [..]

Estos recursos no son robados para su utilización en África. El saqueo se da con la intención de vendernos esos recursos a nosotros. Cuanto más compramos, más roban los invasores, y mayor es la carnicería. El aumento en el número de teléfonos móviles ha provocado un aumento en el número de muertos, ya que el coltán que contienen se extrae principalmente en el Congo. Hace bien poco desde las Naciones Unidas se publicó una lista de las corporaciones internacionales que se cree están involucradas en el conflicto: Anglo-America, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers y ciento y pico empresas más. (Todas ellas negaron los cargos) Pero en lugar de detener las actividades de estas corporaciones, nuestros gobiernos solicitaron a la ONU que dejase de criticarlas. [..]

When John McCain loses next week, what will be left of the Republican Party? The answer lies in the sands of Florida, where the sunshine-state Republicans have nominated an unrepentant torturer as their candidate for Congress. They view his readiness to torture an innocent Iraqi not as a source of shame, but as his prime qualification for office. This is American conservatism in the dying days of Bush – and it points out the direction Sarah Palin would like to take it in 2012.

In August 2003, Colonel Allen West – commanding a US unit in Baghdad – heard a rumour that one of the Iraqi policeman he was working with was a secret insurgent. He ordered his officers to go and seize Yehiya Hamoodi, a thin, bespectacled 31 year-old, from his home. They dragged him into a Humvee, beat him, and then handcuffed, shackled and blindfolded him. In a dank interrogation room, they told him he had better start talking. Perplexed and terrified, Yehiya explained he didn’t know what they were talking about: why was he here? So West was called in. He told Yehiya he was going to be killed. While his men beat him again, he explained he had one last chance to save his life – by talking.

Yehiya protested: I am innocent! What are you talking about? So West took him outside, had him pinned down, and began to shoot. First he fired into the air. Then he ordered his men to ram Yehiya’s head into a barrel used for cleaning weapons – and fired right next to his head. Then he began to count down from five. Finally Yehiya began to scream out names – any name he could think of, just to make it stop.

The men he named were seized and roughed up in turn. No evidence was found of any plot, and after another 45 days of terror, Yehiya was released. Today, he is severely traumatised, and collapses when he sees a Humvee approaching. The story only came to light after one of West’s soldiers began to protest against these practices. West was fined $5000, and now concedes grudgingly: “It’s possible I was wrong about Mr Hamoodi.” But he says he would do it again, and again, and again.

West has even taken to joking about it, gaining applause for telling Republican audiences: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.” But the 1994 Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, is explicit: “threat of imminent death” is the third form of torture it outlaws. There are reams of studies showing it can traumatise a person for life.

Yet the Republican Party has rallied to the defence of this torturer, and of torture in general. The Bush administration has oredered the simulated drowning of “high value” suspects, and set up secret black ops sites across the world where it is practiced. After Afghan detainees were hanged from the ceiling and beaten to death, the officers responsible were merely given a “letter of reprimand.” West’s “toughness” is fawned over; one leading conservative magazine has even named him its Man of the Year. And Sarah Palin, the Party’s darling, mocks Barack Obama’s opposition to torture. She complains: “Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America [and] he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.” Palin is fond of saying she “won’t blink when it comes to terror”, but if you don’t blink, your corneas dry out, and you go blind.

At first, the rise of John McCain looked like a repudiation of torture. McCain was tortured by the Viet Cong for three years, and the beatings were so vicious that even today he can’t raise his arms to brush his own hair. For a time, he was a loud, proud opponent of torture – but then he caved. In February 2008, he voted to allow the CIA to be excluded from the ban on torture – when he knows the CIA who are the prime American torturers today. Then, when the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanomo detainees have basic habeas corpus rights, McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of the country.” If McCain will compromise on this, he will compromise on anything. He has tried to flip-flop back, saying he would ban torture after all, but if he tried now, he would face mass rebellion from his own party and Vice-President.

The advocates of torture love to wheel out the ticking bomb scenario served up every week on ‘24’. But there’s one problem – it’s a fiction. Think about what it requires. You have to (a) be certain you have captured a bomber in the very brief window between him planting a bomb and it blowing up, yet (b) have no idea where the bomb is. This has never happened, anywhere in the world, ever.

No: what happens in reality is Yehiya Hamoodi. You get a man you kinda-sorta suspect; you torture him; and you get junk intelligence leading you up wrong paths. What would you confess to if I put a gun to your head and started counting down from five? Once you start to torture it doesn’t just stay in the neat mind-experiments favoured by philosophers. After the Israeli supreme court approved torture in very limited circumstances, soldiers were soon torturing two thirds of the Palestinians they held captive. Professor David Luban explains: “Escalation is the rule, not the aberration. Abu Ghraib is the fully predictable image of what a torture culture looks like.”

There are no recorded instances of getting useable intelligence from torture – but even if in some freak instance after you have tortured a thousand Yahiyas you finally did, would it outweigh the damage of handing al Qaeda a thousand new recruits, vindicating Bin Laden’s hate-talk, and breaching the most basic moral prohibition?

The gap between the Republican and Democratic Parties is too narrow, but on this issue it is hefty. The Republicans have now curdled into the Party of Torture, bullying their torture-victim nominee into backing their barbarism, and proudly picking a torturer as their candidate for Congress. That sound of screaming from inside the Palin-drome isn’t just from fawning Republicans – it’s from men like Yehiya, begging for it to stop.

An Orwell Prize Winner in his twenties, Johann Hari is a model of what aspiring young writers can become. He startedb writing for the New Statesman soon after leaving university and by the age of 23 had a twice-weekly column in The Independent.

Despite his rise, he is cautious in his understanding of what someone in his position can achieve. He speaks, in our quiet Aldgate café, of two types of political columnists: those "who think they're talking to politicians and ones who think they're talking to the readers."

He recounts a story of former Times columnist Antony Jay: "A reader wrote to him and said, ‘I didn't understand what you were saying,' and Jay wrote back to him - ‘Since you're not the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer or the Governor of the Bank of England it doesn't matter whether you understood what I was saying. It wasn't written for you.'"

So Hari understands that to effect change, he must persuade readers and put them in touch with pressure gorups. "Some of the things that I say aren't things you'd normally read in a newspaper. A lot of times people write to me and say ‘Oh I'm so glad, I thought I was mad for thinking like that but actually now I realise it's quite a rational thing to say'."

But in the era of podcasts and blogs, is his role as a traditional newspaper columnist under threat? Not only are newspapers seeing their circulation and profits drop, but their authority as the nation's news-breakers is being cut away by every internet exclusive.

He claims not to be worried by the financial future of the press: "I cannot make newspapers more economically viable than they are. So, I don't spend a huge amount of time sweating about it".

Hari is combative regarding the relative quality of new and print media: "When blogs first began I thought they would be like columns: with a fairly rational argument. I thought the medium they would most resemble would be column writing. Actually I think the medium they have ended up most resembling is talk radio. It's consumed in small bursts and there's a premium on aggression, shouting and being more extreme than the last person. There are some excellent intelligent bloggers but they are a minority."

He bemoans the declining standard of Nick Cohen and Melanie Phillips' writing: "People who actually write blogs are quite atypical of your readership, but someone like Nick Cohen gets congratulated for his most right wing views by bloggers, so he will air them more and more and get more and more positive comments, and slip further and further away from reality. You imagine they are your readers, when in fact they are a tiny, tiny proportion of your readers, and the maddest wing of them. But it's like a sort of electronic circle jerk, where you get trapped in it."

True newspapers boast not only quality control but also the willingness to pay to send writers across the world to report, something Johann recently did in Bangladesh. His experience of the impact of climate change left a deep impression. He talks of seeing trees emerging from the sea where just two years ago there were houses. "The biggest island in Bangladesh has lost half its mass in the last decade".

A creative analogy demonstrates the nature of the threat and the imperative to deal with it: "Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that Osama bin Laden had a machine that could flood some of the most important global cities, make the oceans more acidic, cause the ice caps to collapse and drown Bangladesh.

"Then we'd do everything we possibly could to stop Osama bin Laden from using this machine. We are that machine. We are doing that. But somehow it's not personified in the form of an enemy. If it's all of us doing incrementally it's much harder to deal with."

He mentions Bill McKibbin, an American environmentalist author who explains human inability to deal with climate change as a function of evolution: we are not evolved to think that "we do the weather to ourselves".

Our conversation moves on to another man-made disaster, according to Hari, the ‘War on Drugs'. Opposition to drug prohibition crosses traditional ideological lines, including libertarians and conservatives. Hari, a self-proclaimed social democrat, is another joining the calls for legalisation.

"There was a great line of Milton Friedman, not someone I'd normally quote approvingly: ‘Drug addiction is always a tragedy for the individual addict but drug prohibition makes it a tragedy for the whole society'. Drug prohibition causes more problems than drug addiction. It doesn't actually stop very much drug addiction.

"We know that in the US when, in the 1970s, they decriminalised cannabis in three states, cannabis use did not go up, it stayed the same. We also know that countries that are the most prohibitionist, like the US and Britain, have more drug addicts than liberal countries like the Netherlands."

But this is an issue in which the actual words used by those advocating reform are working against them. "If you look at the opinion polls, in the Daily Mirror for example, the word ‘legalisation' gets very little support. If you ask people if they support legalisation about 10-20% of them do.

"If you ask them ‘Do you think drugs should be taken away from criminal gangs and handed to off-licenses and pharmacists?' about 80% of people say yes. So I think the word ‘legalisation' has a certain contamination around it. Which is unfortunate."

Consistent in his other views, Hari has radically changed his mind on the Iraq War. In the months leading up to the invasion, he was one of a number of left-leaning writers who supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. But almost six years later, he regrets his initial position.

"What I got horrifically wrong and should have known in advance, as some people did, was that because the American invasion was motivated primarily by a desire to monopolise the oil resources it would be an occupation that was run in the interests of the oil resources, not in the interests of the Iraqi people.

"If you look at what happened in Venezuela, another country I've reported on, a year before the invasion they [the US] supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected President, because he was trying to control the oil supply himself, and use the profits not for American multinationals but to enrich people in the barrios [slums]. So I should have looked at evidence like that."

In abandoning and apologising for his pro-war position, Hari has parted company with Christopher Hitchens, the man whom he credits with inspiring him to become a journalist after his denunciatory ‘The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice' was published in 1995. "I remember being absolutely exhilarated by it and thinking ‘well I want to do this.'"

Hari's secularism is as strident and assertive as that of Hitchens. "70% of the British people never attend religious ceremonies. But the people who are religious are very concentrated. 70% of British people think faith schools should be abolished, but the 30% who support them really really fucking support them and if the faith school is shut down will go crazy and lobby and hold protests.

"Whereas the 70% who are against them are just mildly against them because they've got better things to do with their lives because they're not superstitious lunatics."

With his witty writing and combative agenda, Johann Hari shows us that real, traditional column writing is alive and well.

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