Photo of Bojana by Kyle Tryhorn
The Curious Case of Christopher Hitchens
By Bojana Stancic
It is a very personal issue, the one regarding political engagement. It can take the form of the constant monitoring of Administrative events and inherent political intrigue, or be personally embodied, an unquestionable sense of self-preservation or persecution. Obviously there are those analysts that transcend the moment-to-moment simulacra of ideology and create something akin to a grand narrative of issues, obstacles and patterns most true to systematic change and long-term gains, but are too often relegated to the intelligentsia stratosphere. Christopher Hitchens inhibits this stratosphere, but has actively embodied, and sometimes bridged the gap between the first two models, although simultaneously exposing the pitfalls inherent in both.
Mr. Hitchens is a former Oxford Socialist, erudite literary critic and an outspoken social critic. All this changed, albeit gradually, over the course of the 90s, finally culminating in his ‘Islamofascist’ state. Now all the guns, tanks and verbal cannons are turned the other way, towards the oppressed: the way of the ‘jihadist gangsters,’ the way of ‘fascism with an Islamic face’ and so forth. This, I can only assume, he believes to be only ‘accidentally’ falling in line with the current American rhetoric and mainstream spin, since he never embraces all the political stances of the Right, but inevitably defends them on account of a humanist and democratic liberation. His visit to Kurdistan, his friendship with Salman Rushdie, death of his colleague on a trip to Iraq1, frequent threats he has received since his critiques caught the public’s attention, all account for this new found ferventness. However this seems to reflect more the resuscitated vacuum of political feelings in daily discourse than partisanship or criticism, even though the latter with him is imbued with the special touch of moralism that defies politics in its very nature.
Christopher Hitchens is the author of such works as ‘No one left to lie to’ about the Clinton presidency (which I didn’t read as an indictment only of his sexual conduct but as Hitchens himself says ‘if the rust-free zipper were enough on its own to cripple a politician, then quite clearly Bill Clinton would be remembered if at all, as a mediocre Governor of the great state of Arkansas’), ‘The Trials of Henry Kissinger’ (elaborating who knew what when, and what Machiavellian promises were made to further pit one poor nation against another) and “Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.” His attention to these subjects merited an affidavit to the Senate, and a lawsuit by Kissinger himself. So how is it that he became a mouthpiece of the current Bush administration’s venture in the Middle East? After all, in ‘Love, Poverty and War’ he says ‘I had begun to resolve, after the cold war and some other wars, to try to withdraw from politics and such and spend more time with the sort of words that hold their value, Proust, Borges, Joyce and Bellow.’ He named his disgust with politics as ‘sordid auction between banal populists.’
But all this changed on September 11, 2001, and he realized that there is no refuge form political engagement. His reawakened political spirit had taken on a new form this time, and analytical and objective it was not.
The drastic extent of his great conversion was clearly illustrated in his debate with George Galloway, a British Member of Parliament (available at democracynow.org) who had employed a Hitchensenian tactic, an inspired first person narrative of his opponent’s previous life.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: … I want to begin by praising Mr. Hitchens. In Dundee, my home city, at the annual delegate meeting of the National Union of Journalists, 25 years ago the same Mr. Hitchens made a speech in which he praised me and the city council for what he described as its brave act of twinning the City of Dundee with the Palestinian city of Nablus. He said --
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: No, no. Must have been someone else.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: He said that it was -- I didn't interrupt you. So perhaps you'll not slobber over my remarks.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Someone else.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: You see, it was very important, Mr. Hitchens' support for the Palestinian people. And it was not easy in 1980. Only a few years before, the Palestinian resistance had seized the Israeli Olympic games team in Munich and had committed what most people in the world described as an act of mass terrorism. Mr. Hitchens's courageous stand with groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the hijackers of many an aircraft, the carrying out of many a military operation, was very significant because it was very rare.
Equally, I want to thank Mr. Hitchens for the brave stand that he made against the war on Iraq in 1991. I want to -- I want to say, and I never had the chance to thank him for this, one of the magic moments of that great era was Christopher Hitchens on television with the gun nut Charlton Heston. When Heston was fulminating, desperate to get in there, desperate to attack, Hitchens told him to keep his wig on. And then he asked him, magically, to name four countries with a border with the country he was so keen to invade. And Heston, of course, could name none.
That was important, because it was very difficult to oppose the war against Iraq in 1991. After all, it was ruled by somebody called Saddam Hussein. It was governed by the Ba'ath Party, who continued to govern thereafter. It was only three years since those chemical weapons that Mr. Hitchens could still smell when he was last there had been launched against the Kurdish people whom he will never leave alone, only three years before Halabja had taken place and, of course, perhaps most significantly of all, it was difficult to oppose that attack on Iraq in 1991 because Iraq had invaded and abolished, to quote him a few minutes ago, a member state of the Arab League of the United Nations, a Muslim Arab country.
Notwithstanding all of these things, Mr. Hitchens bravely, fanatically you may say, stood against the idea of President George Bush invading Iraq in 1991. What you are -- what you have witnessed since is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug. And I mention slug purposefully, because the one thing a slug does leave behind it is a trail of slime.
A hint of personal insults is an ignoble type of criticism (even though Hitchens' love of drink has been well documented), but is a tactic of which Hitchens himself isn’t innocent. He has indeed called people worse things, and has purposefully created himself into an iconic poster boy for his opinions (on the cover of his ‘Letters to a Young Contrarian’2 he is wearing a beige raincoat with the collar up, the typical rebellious sleuth with a half-smoked cigarette, the epitome of a modernist outcast intellectual). The reader’s attraction to Hitchens’ work has always been in part due to his passions, albeit draped in words, perfectly constructed, that follow all rules of grammar and composition, and humorous anecdotes from literary sources. So when Galloway called him a "drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay,” it was less a comment on the size of his genitals and more on the oeuvre they had written. As usual Hitchens had already anticipated the criticism (perhaps this contributes to his prolificness) in an article for Vanity Fair in July 2004, when he called himself a ‘part-Jewish recovered ex-Trotskyist,” (something pre-9/11 Hitchens never would have stated). The article, entitled ‘Rumble on the Right,’ was about dissent in the Republican Party. It discussed the newly minted theories of the current neo-conservative movement, pitting them against Pat Buchanan, of all people, who hardly any intellectual on left or right would bother taking as a point of reference. But this is the extent to which Hitchens' approach had changed.
Supporter as he is of the current war in Iraq, there are still Hamletian reflections that defy the line of his political support and show signs of his humanism, despite being contrary to the war’s purported aims. The death of Saddam Hussein is an example in his writings where the opposing philosophies came to a head. As someone who was opposed to the crudeness of Saddam’s hanging and also an opponent of capital punishment, both morally righteous and straightforward positions, he still maintained that part of the reason for the uproar lied in a relatively naïve question he posed in his Slate article3: “did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions?...To have made the butcher Saddam into a martyr, to have gratified one sect, and to have cheated millions of Iraqis and Kurds of the chance for a full accounting—what a fine day's work!” But the same man who invoked the Geneva Convention in one article, and criticized those who upheld international law as ‘UN fetishists’ in another, could surely not believe that the Saddam’s trial was an honest examination of accountability. After all he thought Clinton’s was a show trial, one that was organized by Clinton’s own country, by the people’s representatives and under the laws he knew and understood and had promised to obey. There is an unbridgeable schism here, that of the divorce between Hitchens' generally held beliefs and the situations where they are selectively applicable. If it wasn’t for this selective naiveté how else could he say to George Galloway (quoted above) the following regarding American military aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “The 82nd airborne and first air cavalry so far from being distracted by Iraq, have learned in Iraq matters of civil reconstruction, water distribution, purification, that have been extremely useful to them in New Orleans.”4
This is an inverse mockery of the highest order because it doesn’t come from George Bush Sr. or the current President, nor from Charlton Heston or anyone else of that ilk, but rather from an educated British scholar who has admitted that “The United States appears to have played a part in Saddam's original accession to power: it certainly sided with him in his catastrophic war on Iran and provided him with the sinews of war that he was later to employ against his "own" people. After his eviction from Kuwait, it was successive administrations which decided to leave (i.e. confirm) him in power, subject his people to demoralizing and impoverishing sanctions and protect the Shiites and Kurds (who together constitute a majority) from a renewal of genocide. This is a weight of responsibility that makes it quite premature to talk about any ‘exit strategy.’ We did help break Iraq, and we do partly own it.”5
But an obvious lack here of cohesion between causes, effects and historical context is cured by Hitchens' first-hand experience with the Kurds in Iraq, and their flower welcoming parade at the arrival of the American soldiers. His newfound moral gravity, as reflected in his interventionist outlook, has eclipsed all of his earlier writings. This has allowed his critics to label him a bombastic contrarian, refuting almost all his previous contributions to social and political thought over the past few decades (the most famous of which is Chomsky’s put-down article, for lack of a better term, to one of Hitchens’ articles post 9/11). Hitchens' response to all this is that his views haven’t changed drastically, and he maintains that radicalism has to have a human face or else it’s nothing. Fair enough.
But before the curtain parted and left Hitchens alone on the world stage of political opinion, unable to find allies or rather unwilling to find allies in any of his colleagues, his observations were a refreshing memento of an iconoclastic wit and poetic aggression towards the establishmentarian mindset. Reading his prose was illuminating, and surprising, and always an attempt at historical contextualization. For example, his book ‘Blood, Class and Nostalgia’6 examined Anglo-American heritage, at once integrated and rejected from the American folklore, eventually taking on a science of its own. Interestingly, in this work he claims that the British were the ones to imbue America with the ‘imperial’ burden, a word that no longer has a presence in his writings. ‘Its real roots and character,’ he said in 1990, ‘are to be sought in the grand triad of race, class and empire - the trivium upon which the relations rests. These are the three words which, still, evoke the most nervousness and denial and equivocation in everyday American discourse. If you dig for the roots of this ambiguity, you will come repeatedly across the traces of a small archipelago that was once a great maritime empire. No I do not mean Greece although the comparison has been attempted.’ He argues in the same book that it was due to this tenuous relationship in the 19th century that saw the birth of the United States as a superpower, exceeding its own mentor, ceasing to exist as a ‘British spirit in a new and invigorating body’. It was then, as Hitchens’ extrapolates, that the U.S. found itself ‘committed in far-off places which it had no common history, it found itself a nuclear power, it found itself involved as an arbitrator in the politics of old Europe, and found itself engaged along the widest front in history against the Soviet Union’, and inheriting Israel. Perhaps this is the secret of his ability to divorce the great motivator of American agenda in current affairs as less imperialist or expansionists but rather as a new giant to whom policing and righting wrongs belongs to. This in a way commends England’s overt crimes, and glosses over America’s covert ones.
And therein lies the confusion, from a confessed implication of guilt to the destabilization, occupation and all out ruination of Iraq, obviously arises a responsibility, a culpability that in its wake outweighs the initial thrust, to use the semi-erotic military terminology. But how can one disentangle the orthodoxy of power from the moral culpability inherent with a preemptive action such as Iraq, is not answered through personal apologia or the bleeding heart syndrome that also preempts any intelligent critique. This is the pitfall of heroic personal testimony. If we agree with President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union Address, a scary thought if there ever was one, that ‘to whom much is given much is required,’ then someone who identifies with the ‘fortunate one percent of all those now living’7 (E.U. passport, earnings above daily needs, audience for his opinions), should know that the moral float that he is on cannot be tipped by himself alone, in whichever direction he wants to take. That he too, perhaps most of all, has the responsibility of using his status to examine the very nature of this privilege.
It’s an interesting proposal that explains Hitchens' moral and political dilemmas as stemming from the death valley that lies between the partisan politics of the American landscape. In his book on President Clinton, Hitchens is indignant of the partisan voting process saying: “it is the hope of these pages, that some of the honor of the Left can be rescued from the moral and intellectual shambles of the past seven years, in which the locusts have dined so long and so well.”8 But as archaic and useless as the left-right divisions are, there is even less excuse for ornamental incantations of a humanism that has been long lost in the political spectrum, particularly one whose might can trump any number of voices, privileged or not.
Footnotes:
1. Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, Avalon Publishing, 2004.
2. Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books, 2001.
3. Christopher Hitchens, Lynching the Dictator: On Saturday morning, the United States helped to officiate at a human sacrifice, Slate, January 2, 2007, http://www.slate.com/id/2156776/fr/rss/.
4. George Galloway vs. Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration Response to Hurricane Katrina, September 16, 2005, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/16/1223201.
5. What to Do in Iraq: A Roundtable, Foreign Affairs, July 11, 2006, www.foreignaffairs.org/special/roundtable_hitchens
6. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Blood, Class and Nostalgia’ Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
7. Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays.
8. Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: The triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, Verso 1999.