For the Sake of Argument

Essays and Minority Reports

Christopher Hitchens

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782394976
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

The global turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s severely tested every analyst and commentator. Few wrote with such insight as Christopher Hitchens about the large events - or with such discernment and wit about the small tell-tale signs of a disordered culture. First published in 1993, the writings in For the Sake of Argument range from the political squalor of Washington to the twilight of Stalinizm in Prague, from the Jewish quarter of Damascus in the aftermath of the Gulf War to the embattled barrios of Central America. Hitchens provides re-assessments of Graham Greene, P. G. Woodhouse and C. L. R. James, and his rogues' gallery gives us portraits of Henry Kissinger, Mother Theresa and P. J. O'Rouke. The addition of pieces on political assassination in America, as well as a devastating indictment of the evisceration of politics by pollsters and spin doctors, and an entertaining celebration of booze and fags, complete this outstanding collection from a writer of unequalled talent.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Studies in Demoralization

Where Were You Standing?

On the Imagination of Conspiracy

Contempt for the Little Colony

The State Within the State

Voting in the Passive Voice

The Hate that Dare Not Speak Its Name

A Pundit Who Need Never Dine Alone

Hard on the Houseboy

New Orleans in a Brown Shirt

Rioting in Mount Pleasant

Billionaire Populism

The Clemency of Clinton

Clinton as Rhodesian

Bill’s Bills in Miami

2. The Power and the Glory

Realpolitik in the Gulf: A Game Gone Tilt

Churchillian Delusions

No End of a Lesson

Befriending the Kurds

Arise, Sir Norman

Jewish in Damascus

Songs Fit For Heroes

Hating Sweden

Squeezing Costa Rica

The Saviour

Tio Sam

The Autumn of Patriarch

Third Thoughts

3. The Cunning History

Cretinismo Eroico

The Twilight of Panzerkommunismus

Police Mentality

On the Road to Timşoara

Bricks in the Wall

The Free Market Cargo Cult

Now Neo-conservatives Perish

Appointment in Sarajevo

4. No Class: Toryism Today

‘Society’ and Its Enemies

Credibility Politics: Sado-Monetarist Economics

Union Jackshirt: Ingham’s Conservative Chic

Neil Kinnock: Defeat Without Honour

Bribing and Twisting

5. Coach Into Pumpkin: The Fairy Tale Reviewed

How’s the Vampire?

Charlie’s Angel

Unhappy Families

Princess of Dysfunction

6. Ideas and Interests

New York Intellectuals and the Prophet Outcast

Clubland Intellectuals

The ‘We’ Fallacy

Shouting Anarchy

Politically Correct

Friend of Promise

Booze and Fags

7. Rogues’ Gallery

Nixon: Maestro of Resentment

Kissinger: A Touch of Evil

Berlin’s Mandate for Palestine

Ghoul of Calcutta

The Life of Johnson

A Grave Disappointment All Round

Too Big For His Boot

P.J. O’Rourke: Not Funny Enough

Not Funny Enough (2)

Warhol in One Dimension

8. Critical Resources

Siding with Rushdie

Goya’s Radical Pessimism

Degenerate Art

James Baldwin: Humanity First

Updike on the Make

P.G. Wodehouse in Love, Poverty and War

Greene: Where the Shadow Falls

Kazuo Ishiguro

Victor Serge

C.L.R James

In Defence of Daniel Deronda

Index

INTRODUCTION

A feeble logic, whose finger beckons us to the dark spectacle of the Stalinist Soviet Union, affirms the bankruptcy of Bolshevism, followed by that of Marxism, followed by that of Socialism. . . . Have you forgotten the other bankruptcies? What was Christianity doing in the various catastrophes of society? What became of Liberalism? What has Conservatism produced, in either its enlightened or its reactionary form? If we are indeed honestly to weigh out the bankruptcies of ideology, we shall have a long task ahead of us. . . . And nothing is finished yet.

Victor Serge, 1947

WHEN I WAS but a callow and quarrelsome undergraduate, my moral and political tutors used to think that, by invoking the gentle admonition of there being nothing much new under the sun, they had found an indulgent but quenching reply to all distressful questions. That the words cited above should have been written two years before I was born, and forty years before Fukuyama gave tongue, strikes me therefore as – in that most overworked of the language’s most potent terms – an irony. And a pleasing irony at that, since it operates at the old foes’ expense. A turn or two of history’s wheel, a tug or so on Ariadne’s thread, and suddenly it is not the revolutionaries and idealists but the forces of reaction and tradition (to say nothing of the spokesmen for meliorism and compromise) who find themselves with much explanation due.

Not that Serge and his comrades ever sought to excuse or evade the crimes and illusions of the left, or to set these in any simplistic contrast to the horrors of the counter-revolution. On the contrary, they thought of social and cultural change, individual and collective emancipation, self-determination and internationalism, as subtly but surely indissoluble; for this reason they were the earliest and bravest opponents of Zhdanov, Stalin and all versions of the uniform and the correct. In dedicating these ensuing ephemera to the memory of the old brother-and-sisterhood of the left opposition, I’m conscious of a ridiculous disproportion which critics will easily be able to enlarge. But everyone has to descend or degenerate from some species of tradition, and this is mine.

If I may say it for myself, my last collection, Prepared for the Worst, ended on a slight premonition of the 1989 European and Russian revolutions: the axis, pivot and subtext of all commentary since. Even while I was writing about other matters (a ruling-class crime-wave in Washington here; a fresh calamity in the House of Windsor there; a fraudulent memoir; a power-hungry local intellectual) I was fighting to keep in mind that aspect of ‘history’ which, bewilderingly, both takes sides and fails to take sides. I swore off all metaphors that even hinted at the presence of owls, or the existence of Minerva. Still, I could see that it was wonderfully funny, as well as distinctly embittering, that our predominant culture, faced with one of the greatest episodes of liberation in the human record, chose to take it as no more than its due. Thus ‘we’ won the Cold War by the same exercise of natural right that ‘we’ enlisted in the Gulf War. Odd, this, when you consider that even the most Establishment teaching of history contains an inscription; the warning against hubris . . .

Even if I had not spent much of that bogus triumphal period in the wastes of Kurdistan and Bosnia, I like to think that I would have seen the hook protruding from this drugged bait. In Kurdistan, an improvised socialism and communitas held tenuously against tribalism within, as well as against Saddam Hussein, Nato à la Turque and Western opportunism without. In Sarajevo, the onrush of Christian fundamentalism, military arrogance and racialist toxin was kept at bay by men and women honouring the remnant of the Partisan tradition. In both cases, the role of ‘fascist’ and aggressor was played by a ruling socialist party – the Serbian Socialist and the Arab Ba’ath Socialist, to be exact – but this did no more than lend point to the dysfunction between nomenklatura and nomenclature that had been apparent to any thinking person since approximately 1927. So I couldn’t bring myself to see, in this or a score of other instances, the licence for Western liberal self-congratulation. And there has been something more than naïveté in those who affect surprise or shock at the release of impulses long-nurtured rather than (as the consoling sapience would have it) long buried.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan– Bush–Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty – or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’.

Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the nonjudgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ – tribe and faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modem Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read:

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [Italics mine]

The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of ideology. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC, 4 January 1993

1

STUDIES IN DEMORALIZATION

WHERE WERE YOU STANDING?*

WHEN PEOPLE CEASE to believe in God, remarked G.K. Chesterton slyly, they come to believe not in nothing but in anything. When people cease to trust the word of the authorities, it might be added, they often become not more sceptical but more credulous. A truly hard-headed person could object that those who believe in Go...