Why Hitchens Matters
By Ian Williams
Nov. 22 2002
Terry Laban
|
Christopher Hitchens explains
Why Orwell Matters, and does so
with feeling. One can see that he identifies strongly with his
countryman, the socialist daring to stand up against doublethink and
prepared to think and speak thoughtcrime against the orthodox. The
identification is not totally misplaced. The would-be Big Brothers on
the left have indeed vilified Hitchens for several years now for daring
to question the lines they laid down on. The interesting question, made
even more topical by his recent defection from
The Nation, is
whether Hitchens himself has broken under this intellectual torture and
deserted the cause of a humane and democratic socialism.
An earlier generation on the left used Israel as their excuse to defect
and become neoconservative: There are some disturbing indications that
Hitchens’ disillusion with some of the left has him veering toward
Israel, from his recent comments that one of the reasons for supporting
the Bush
drang nach Baghdad is that it would cut off support for
some of the more thuggish elements around Arafat. This may be true, but
the most thuggish elements around Arafat at the moment are Sharon and
his ilk.
In
1984, Goldstein’s heretical text read: “In the general
hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had
been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment
without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions,
torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and deportation of
whole populations—not only became common again, but tolerated and even
defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and
progressive.”
Orwell wrote this in the aftermath of Spain, Manchuria and World War II,
and while Stalin continued to use the techniques he had perfected at
home to seize Eastern Europe. The horrifying thing about the turn of the
millennium is that there are still apologists for all these practices
and more.
They span the whole traditional political spectrum. On the establishment
side, there has been toleration for death squads in Central and Latin
America; on the left, apologetics for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans
and users of poison gas in Iraq. The Khmer Rouge found support from both
the left and the right as a stick to beat the Soviets and Vietnamese;
while recently both right isolationists and alleged left
anti-imperialists found common cause in defending Slobodan Milosevic.
Orwell would have berated them all— just as Hitchens has honorably done,
too, although with an increasing intemperance that hints at a shared
polemical heritage with his detractors.
--------------
On reading Hitchens’ defense, my first reaction was almost “why bother,”
since the direction and motivation of Orwell’s detractors is so clear.
In any event, Hitchens correctly shows that Orwell matters because he
was so accurate in his depiction of so many of the people who are now
his detractors and, one regrets to say, even some who would see
themselves as his supporters.
After the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party confirmed what
Orwell and others had said about Stalin, leading British Communist
theoretician R. Palme Dutt was asked why he had not mentioned these
details in his constant praise of the alleged socialism of the USSR. “I
never said there were no spots on the sun,” he replied.
You can see why such people hate Orwell for depicting just how in
reality the sun was eclipsed with mass terror. He was never forgiven for
being so accurate about the nature of totalitarianism even when it
donned a red fig leaf. Hitchens robustly defends the “List,” a catalogue
of people who Orwell thought were not suitable writers to be employed
by a British Social Democratic government agency, which brought some of
the Big Fraternity to apoplexy.
If anything, Hitchens understates the defense here. Orwell escaped from
Spain with the KGB on his tail; other independent socialists were not so
lucky. Stalin was an ally of Hitler for two years of war, during which
German Communists and socialists met their end. Victory in Eastern
Europe led to a purge of socialists across the region—and people are
angry that Orwell compiled a list of fellow travelers, most of whom
would, on the evidence of their previous work, have found excuses for
his liquidation if he had been late leaving Spain!
Indeed, there are portions of the book where one feels the need to
spring to the defense of Orwell against Hitchens, such as the persistent
insinuation that Orwell was a Trotskyist, whether he knew it or not,
and that his ire was reserved for “Stalinism.” In fact, Orwell called it
“Communism” and, as Hitchens himself admits, saw the line of
succession from Lenin and Trotsky to Stalin. In
Animal Farm,
Lenin and Trotsky are rolled into one exiled pig for just that reason.
Hitchens quotes Orwell as feeling that “something like” the purges was
“implicit in Bolshevist rule.”
There is a conflict here between Hitchens’ intellectual honesty and his
nostalgia for Trotsky, whose record while in power in the Soviet Union
showed no signs of overly deep attachment to democracy or human rights.
Hitchens’ introduction claims that the three great subjects of the 20th
century were fascism, imperialism and “Stalinism.” In fact, looking at
Orwell’s work, the one subject is totalitarianism, which encompasses
clogged rivers in Rwanda, death squads in Central America—and Leninism
in all its forms.
--------------
But why go on about Trotskyism in 57 varieties? Well, there are two
reasons. One is that I suspect Hitchens’ residual adherence to it has
distorted some of his analysis of where Orwell stands in the socialist
tradition. While he establishes firmly that Orwell is in that tradition,
and remained so until he died, Hitchens underestimates the homegrown
influences on Orwell. Throughout the ’30s, the large cooperative
movement, and even some of the unions in Britain, considered the dangers
of state control and centralization before Hayek ever put pen to paper
on the subject.
Hitchens mentions the Independent Labour Party, which was a
Marxist-leaning but non-Leninist body with its own traditions of
activism and militancy. It was Orwell’s political home until it and he
rejoined the Labour Party, which he supported even in government. It is
fashionable among many on the American left to mock the achievements of
British Labour. But when the American left builds large unions committed
to socialism, has legislated universal health care, pretty much free
education at all levels, and the type of social benefits that remain in
Britain even after Thatcher, maybe their mockery will have more
substance.
The other reason for dwelling on Hitchens’ roots has nothing to do with
Orwell. In the Troskyist/Leninist milieu where Hitchens has spent so
many years, the polemical approach takes no prisoners. Luckily,
Trotsky’s followers have not had the power of life and death for some
time. The reason for that is the same reason we should rejoice that it
is so. The concept of “thoughtcrime” in active use has meant that
expulsions or splits afflict any section of the Fourth International
whose membership looms much above the high three figures. Every week is
“Hate Week” in the sects.
In his enjoyable and generally accurate literary eviscerations of the
likes of Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, Hitchens shows
few signs of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian. We almost like
O’Brien in
1984, and we feel for the apparatchiks who do Big
Brother’s work. Hitchens himself shows that Orwell went out of his way
to defend and maintain friendly relations with people he disagreed with,
sometimes profoundly.
My worry is that Hitchens’ time in the Fourth International dimension
has affected his sense of relativity so that the constant ad-hominem
attacks on him, which are indeed often of the specious sort leveled at
Orwell, may have driven him into a political form of
“synecdochism”—taking the part for the whole. The would-be Big
Brotherhood who have reviled him may manufacture more vitriol than the
real left, but they do not represent it. I suspect that a majority of
Nation readers might actually agree with him most of the time.
Hitchens is right about the nature of the Iraqi regime, but I’d like to
see a little more ambivalence from him about signing up for the
obsessive crusade against it. Quite what motivates the Bush hawks’
quasi-theological obsession with Iraq is a mystery to most observers—but
looking at the personnel, from Sharon to Rumsfeld, surely no one
believes that concern for the Iraqi people or the spread of democracy is
one of their motives.
I invite Hitchens to read his own book, where he praises Orwell for his
realization that there was no facile analogy with appeasement when he
resisted suggestions for a quick war against Stalin’s Russia. With
Animal Farm already out, and
1984
in preparation, he points out that Orwell opposed what could have been a
successful—if bloody—attempt to overthrow a tyrannical evil regime
guilty of monstrous crimes against its own people and its neighbors.
The left needs contrarians: It doesn’t need neo-neocons while the
original breed have so much power in the White House. So I hope Hitchens
sticks around. Orwell did.
