As a “public intellectual,” Christopher Hitchens’ eminently readable
writings helped cast people and events from a different perspective –
mostly, it must be said, one based on reality rather than received
“wisdom” and prejudice. While his work was certainly refreshing in this
age of competing groupthink and duckspeak across the political spectrum,
unlike his hero George Orwell, one has to doubt whether his currently
impressive work will still be read in seventy years time.
It is useful to compare the two. While Orwell sought to write a
prose that is like a pane of glass and gave his famous list of does and
don’ts, Hitchens played with words and often broke many of his mentor’s
rules. The uncharitable might conclude that he was often trying to draw
attention to the writer rather than the message, and they would often be
right.
While Orwell tends to state his theses magisterially, if occasionally
cantankerously, Hitchens’ preferred style always came as the polemic.
He functioned best when he was arguing with an opponent, to the extent
that by the time of the Iraq war he made his own windmill to tilt at – a
collective left that did not actually exist.
Even so, re-reading
Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory
and reflective person than Hitchen’s often intemperate outbursts would
suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability for which he was
overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as his own “most marked
characteristic,” “insecurity,” which I suspect derives from his British
upbringing. Like Orwell, from the Lower Upper Middle Classes, his public
(that is private)-school and Oxford background had given him a sense of
entitlement without the income, and so he had become an inveterate
freelancer – who I suspect turned down a commission as rarely as a
cocktail invite.
As well being a rung or two down the caste ladder from Orwell,
Hitchens came of age when the charm of an upper class accent was wilting
in the face of working class heroes like the Beatles. And unlike in
Orwell’s day when even working class socialists might defer to a “toff”
who was on their side, by the 1960s even the universities were filled
with students of working class origin who were more likely to see a posh
accent as the mark of Cain, while the residual deference of the proles
themselves had long gone. To his credit Hitchens did not attempt the
nasalized pastiche plebeian accent to which his Merseyside origins might
have given him some claim.
In contrast, as he and others noted, educated British arrivals in the
US, particularly English ones, escape the social insecurities of home
and land as honorary WASPs with almost instant deference guaranteed. An
accent that in Britain would have fathers locking up their daughters and
wallets is considered high class in the US! It is no accident that
Hollywood chooses that Oxbridge accent for Roman colonialists and
Gestapo officers. But the combined effect of his accent and his
over-reaction to insecurity enhanced the appearance of almost reflexive
arrogance – certainly compared with Orwell, who let the ideas speak for
themselves. Better sounding cantankerous than supercilious.
To be fair, the Socialist Workers Party, originally the International
Socialist Group, to which he adhered, was more open minded and
attractive intellectually than the other quantum particles splitting
from the various Fourth Internationals, and its guru, Tony Cliff,
although revered and influential, was not as rabbinically omnipotent as
his rivals in other sects. Amusingly he anticipated Hitchens’
omniscience in his works by citing other great thinkers, such as A. N.
Israel and Ygael Gluckstein, without mentioning that these were some of
his pen names.
While Orwell excelled at weighing courses of action in the balance
and factoring desirability against feasibility, sects such as the one to
which Hitchens subscribed tended to take the full prerogatives of the
harlot and assume power without responsibility. That tendency was
accentuated even more when he arrived in the US and drifted away from
his native home where there is a spectrum of the left from ultra through
to centrist with channels of communication and sometimes shared
political purpose and action. In Britain even the ultra-left can talk to
socialists in Parliament. In the US, many of them regard Bernie Sanders
as a reformist sell-out!
Hitchens’ decades in the US accustomed him to the self-denying
ordinances of some of the sectarian American left, who can condemn
shrilly while never having to offer practical alternatives.
Particularly in relation to Iraq he should have remembered his own book
on Orwell, in which he praises his hero for his realization that there
was no facile analogy with appeasement when he opposed calls for a quick
war against Stalin’s Russia. With
Animal Farm already out, and
1984
in preparation, 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. Orwell thought about
the consequences: Hitchens sixty years later did not, until afterwards.
All people, and all writers change over time. Some can admit to
previous follies, but Hitchens found that difficult, hence the temporal
consistency in his outlook since he never admitted he had been wrong
before. Whatever new apercu he presented fitted over his previous views
like a badly erased palimpsest, which was not always conducive to
clarity and impeded a consistent and coherent worldview from his
contemporary essays.
The World according to Hitchens is all too often a pointillist
picture where the dots are the holes from the darts he had flung and
rarely retracted. He shared with his disgruntled former comrades the
same
ad-hominem approach that they later used to bell book and
candle him out of the “movement,” for the perceived instances where he
broke “the line.” Sounding almost wounded, he writes in
Hitch 22,
“I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if
your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he
was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.”
What he says is quite true and perspicacious. But it describes
exactly his own style and that of the old left from Lenin and possibly
before. He shared with his detractors on the American Left the
Manichaean tendency to divide the world into black and white, cowboys
and Indians, goodies and bad and a consequent proclivity to hate more
well than wisely. Along with Saul Alinsky’s organizational schemata it
has certainly been adopted enthusiastically by the new right, with far
more devastating effect. More people see this type of bile on Fox News
in one program than have read Socialist Worker from its inception!
However, one reason Hitchens wrote with a renewed animosity, even at a
time when his politics were aligning to reality – he began to support
the Labour Party in the UK – was the bile on the left that had begun
after NATO’s belated intervention in Balkans – events which eventually
led both Hitchens and myself to terminal breaks with
the Nation, for example.
Even
if there was a certain sense of taking ones own medicine, one needs a
refined sense of irony when assaulted by groups whose cardinal
principles simultaneously encompassed the absolute innocence of Mumia
and the wrongness of the death penalty with the infallibility of
Milosevic and an apologia for the mass murder of Bosnian and Kosovar
civilians.
However, after he supported the war on Iraq, the steady drip of bile
became a tsunami. Above all it was the Comintern view that once someone
had been outlawed, their past and future were equally excoriated. Sadly,
that was a pattern he followed himself. One manifestation perhaps of
his atheism is that he rarely shows signs of believing in redemption and
indeed shows few signs of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian.
Orwell made O’Brien in
1984, almost likable, and we almost feel for the apparatchiks who do Big Brother’s work.
In his biography of Orwell he shows that his subject went out of his
way to defend and maintain friendly relations with people he disagreed
with, sometimes profoundly. However, Hitchens range of enemies was
wide, and his atheism took a Calvinist tilt, in which those not of the
elect, his personal friends, had no chance of redemption for a perceived
deviation. He did antipathy and rarely empathy or sympathy. He
retained the Leninist binary politics that eschewed any in-betweens and
fuzzy logic. In fact, he never really got social democracy even when he
joined the British Labour Party in the USA!
If he could write hagiographies of Thomas Jefferson, the slave-owner
and raper, why did he preserve a life long animus against his overtly
Trotskyite student-era foe Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister who
kept Britain out the Vietnam War in the face of relentless political
and economic pressure from LBJ? Or indeed Michael Foot, a cultured and
principled radical who led the Labour Party – and incidentally
eloquently supported the same principles as Hitchens in the Kosovo and
Falklands War?
Above all, I shared his revulsion for Bill Clinton and remember
fondly when Murray Kempton shouted across a crowded UN cafeteria that he
had enrolled Hitchens and myself as charter members of “Revolutionary
Socialists for Bob Dole.” But Hitchens churlishly refrains from giving
the rubber-spined President any credit at all, even though, belatedly he
was dragged into supporting intervention on behalf of the Kosovars.
Indeed, later at the time of Iraq, he even achieved the rare feat of
making Clinton seem hard done to. His newly adopted friends around the
White House, the “tougher thinkers in defense department “ and the
“Pentagon Intellectuals,” as he called them, had harried Clinton into
military ineffectiveness in Kosovo and Rwanda because he had opposed the
war in Vietnam but was not called up. In contrast, many of the most
sedulous detractors of Clinton actually agreed with the Vietnam war –
but dodged the draft and then went on to wage war in Iraq. Hitchens’
response was to attack those who used the well-deserved epithet “Chicken
Hawk” against the Bush coterie since the “Pentagon intellectuals” were
not of age or health to qualify in the new volunteer army. Heredity
triumphs. Few if any of their offspring ran to the colors.
Once can only put down these jejune excuses to a relapse into the
polemical mode of the sects, in which once the enemy has been
identified, you throw everything you can at him while fiercely defending
your own side. The problem is, of course, that someone of his genuine
intellectual acuity should have been able to weigh the relatives masses
of beams and motes in the eyes on either side.
Even so, re-reading
Hitch 22 reveals a more self-deprecatory
and reflective person than the author’s occasionally intemperate
outbursts would suggest, and at times hints at a vulnerability and
insecurity for which he was overcompensating. Indeed the book lists as
his own “most marked characteristic,” “insecurity,” which as I said
earlier reflects his British upbringing.
He compensated for this with strong relationships with friends –
sometimes enough to evoke scabrous rumors from observers. His account of
his disagreements with, for example Edward Said, has more than a hint
of a feeling of personal betrayal. In this, I too argued with Said
about the Balkan Wars and his Chomskyite view of the US as the only
permitted target, but certainly agreed with him about most of the
targets he did pick!
Hitchens made the Iraq War his own equivalent of the Leftist loyalty
oath, and preemptively put the mark of Cain on all who disagreed. In
the shrill and un-nuanced “A Long Short War,” about the war he tried to
maintain all the old positions he held on the Left, while uncritically
embracing his new friends “the Pentagon Intellectuals” or the “tougher
thinkers in the Defense Department.” For a time he had become a free
floating antithesis with not much thesis, unless you accepted as such
his claims of wisdom and morality for the Bush administration.
It is also true that many Leftists, whoring after strange gods as is
their wont, were putting Saddam Hussein along with Slobodan Milosevic
and later Gaddafi and Assad in the Pantheon of progressive heroes.
However, contrary to the customized windmill he had built to tilt at,
many others were not, but were disturbed by a militarist lynch mob that
disregarded international law, manufactured evidence and carried out the
intervention so clumsily that more Iraqis died than at the hands of the
tyrant’s forces.
“First do no harm,” was the old Hippocratic advice to surgeons, and
the coterie around Bush might indeed have removed a malignant tumor when
they excised the Ba’athist regime, but they also eviscerated and
lobotomized Iraqi society in the process. On a national scale, “it was
destroying the village to save it,” which was an entirely predictable
consequence of a war fought by the ignorant, malignant and ideologically
driven, who before the first shot had cast aside the lamentably few
people in the State Department who knew anything about the country and
the region.
It was pleasant to see that before he died, even if he had no doubts
about godlessness, he did have those second thoughts about the conduct
of the war. Uncharacteristically he had, if not withdrawn from his
positions, at least, shall we say, ceased to state them so emphatically.
He admits “I probably now know more about the impeachable incompetence
of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left
Iraq in the hands of Saddam,” and adds in possibly the nearest thing to
admission that “even though they don’t alter the case against Ba’athism,
(they) have permanently disfigured the record of those of us who made
that case.”
It is typical Hitchens to claim that he is better informed about the
arguments against cheering the White House to war than many on the Left
he reviled had pointed out at the time that he was cheering on a
mad-axeman to carry out brain surgery. I drank with him shortly after
his meetings with Paul Wolfowitz, which clearly flattered and intrigued
him. Without succumbing to Hitchens’ unfettered admiration, it is indeed
possible that if Wolfowitz had had more influence on the conduct of the
war many of its more disastrous outcomes would have been avoided. It is
true, for example, that Wolfowitz had the chutzpah and foresight to
tell AIPAC that the Palestinians had genuine issues that needed
resolution. But once it was clear that the tenuous rational element in
the administration had been sidelines, why did he not at least scale
down to merely two cheers for the war effort? Why act as a champion of
Bush while casting Clinton into outer darkness? Was it because as
Kissinger said of the latter “he does not have the strength of character
to be a war criminal?” Or was he just as “loyal,” in his own way, to
his enemies as he was to his friends? On the loyalty front, while
Britishers are rarely “loyal” to their native land in the American sense
of tub thumping, one wonders what the quietly patriotic Orwell would
have made of Hitchen’s un-British enthusiastic professions of loyalty to
his new American home when he took his oath?
Hitchens left the left by means of redefining it, to exclude a
humanitarian and democratic socialist view to which he was hewing by the
end. However, he was right (and Left) far more than he was wrong,
because he derived his positions from opposition to all forms of tyranny
and barbaric governments without making expedient tribal or
geopolitical exceptions.
Now that he is dead, proving if it needed it that there are indeed
atheists in hospices, it seems almost churlish to consider tone and
attitude so important. After all, most of his targets deserved some, at
least, of the winged arrows of outraged morality. However, one cannot
help feeling that such unbalanced denunciation can lead philosophically
to the totalitarianism that he otherwise fought against strenuously and
sincerely.
In the end, that is why, much as I enjoyed talking and drinking with
him, like a bar chat, his works are stimulating and enjoyable, but on a
longer scale ephemeral. Like the plaster casts from Pompeii, future
readers would have to fill in the centre to determine what he was
for
by reference to those whom he was so clearly against. And they are
hardly great turning reference points. Hitchens is cursed with an age
where even bad guys are eminently forgettable. In future years Mother
Theresa will be one of those minor saints in the RC calendar and Bill
Clinton will be down there with Millard Filmore as an historical
footnote, the blow-job forgotten as the DNA sample on Monica’s frock
breaks down. There are probably more people know Dr Strangelove from TV
re-runs than know Henry Kissinger.
But aberrations of intemperance aside, the sins of totalitarianism,
hypocrisy and complaisance in the face of evil against which he railed
are still rampant. It is sad to see his voice silenced, now.
Ian Williams was born in Liverpool
about the same time as Christopher Hitchens to an upper lower working
class family, was expelled from Liverpool University, worked on the
railroad and in the union before becoming a writer and journalist in the
USA. He was always surprised at how often a teenage Maoist like him and
a teenage Trotskyist like Hitchens agreed on things. He drinks but does
not smoke. His collected works tend to appear in deadlinepundit.blogspot.com.
