Christopher Hitchens and His Critics

Terror, Iraq, and the Left

Thomas Cushman, Simon Cottee, Christopher Hitchens

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780814772751
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Saggi su politica e relazioni internazionali

Christopher Hitchens—political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described contrarian—is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. His most recent book, God Is Not Great, was on the New York Times bestseller list in 2007 for months. Like his hero, George Orwell, Hitchens is a tireless opponent of all forms of cruelty, ideological dogma, religious superstition and intellectual obfuscation. Once a socialist, he now refers to himself as an unaffiliated radical. As a thinker, Hitchens is perhaps best viewed as post-ideological, in that his intellectual sources and solidarities are strikingly various (he is an admirer of both Leon Trotsky and Kingsley Amis) and cannot be located easily at any one point on the ideological spectrum. Since leaving Britain for the United States in 1981, Hitchens's thinking has moved in what some see as contradictory directions, but he remains an unapologetic and passionate defender of the Enlightenment values of secularism, democracy, free expression, and scientific inquiry.

The global turmoil of the recent past has provoked intense dispute and division among intellectuals, academics, and other commentators. Hitchens's writing during this time, particularly after 9/11, is an essential reference point for understanding the genesis and meaning of that turmoil—and the challenges that accompany it. This volume brings together Hitchens's most incisive reflections on the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the state of the contemporary Left. It also includes a selection of critical commentaries on his work from his former leftist comrades, a set of exchanges between Hitchens and various left-leaning interlocutors (such as Studs Terkel, Norman Finkelstein, and Michael Kazin), and an introductory essay by the editors on the nature and significance of Hitchens's contribution to the world of ideas and public debate. In response, Hitchens provides an original afterword, written for this collection.

Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.

PART I

Hitchens on Terror

1

American Society Can Outlast or Absorb Practically Anything

Any attempt at a forward look is still compromised by the dreadful, fascinated glance over the shoulder. A week when the United States itself was a “no-fly zone” from coast to coast. The wolfish parting of the lips as the second of the evil twins hastened towards New York, and saw that its sibling had already smashed and burnt the first of the harmless twins. (Truly, God must be great.) Then the scything of the second innocent twin. The weird void. The faint echoes of heroism from the fuselage of a United Airlines jet over Pennsylvania, as its condemned passengers decided they had nothing to lose, but would not be “collateral damage” in the blaspheming of another national landmark. America is the greatest of all subjects for a writer, in the first place because of its infinite space and depth and variety, and also because it is ultimately founded upon an idea. The idea, originally phrased in some noble document drawn up by a few rather conservative English gentleman-farmers, is that on this continent there might arise the world’s first successful multinational and secular democracy. Profiting by the stupidity of European monarchs, its early leaders were able to buy the Midwest from the French and then Alaska from the Russians, both at knockdown prices. Profiting from the stupidity of later European statesmen, the United States did very well indeed out of two world wars and emerged as the only serious global and imperial power in human history. Even the least superstitious American often has a smidgen of belief in the idea of providence; the notion that this is a lucky country, if not a divinely favored one. The trauma of last Tuesday morning is quite unlike all previous tests of the American proposition, because it is humiliating and in some ways meaningless. Pearl Harbor—the most readily available comparison—was also subject to analysis and criticism as an outcome of American foreign policy in the Pacific. But the conversion of civilian airliners into missiles gives no such work for the heart or the mind to do. It is simultaneously sordid and scary: more as if all the gold in Fort Knox had turned to lead, or all the blood-banks in the country had been found to be infected with some filthy virus. This is why the very pathos of the public ceremonies—flag displays, floral tributes, candle-lightings—seems so tawdry and inadequate. It is also why the grounds for vengeance sound so hollow and unconvincing. President Bush has been criticized, quite rightly, for contriving to combine the utterly tame with the emptily bombastic. But it is difficult to imagine what even a Roosevelt could have usefully pronounced. What do you do when there’s nothing to do? What do you say when there’s nothing to say? (The answer of Congress to this pressing question: let’s all assemble on the Capitol steps and sing “God Bless America” out of tune, was universally agreed to be the wince-making superfluous gesture of the week.) I am writing this in the temporary mental atmosphere of a one-party state. For the moment, every article and bulletin emphasizes the need for unity behind our leader and for close attention to national security. This culture of conformism and fear is the precise opposite of American optimism. Somewhere, there must be cackles of wicked mirth at the ease with which an American herd can be cowed or stampeded. But then the attack on American optimism is the whole point. The perpetrators have calmly rehearsed their own deaths, and the deaths of strangers, for years. They are not even “terrorists” so much as nihilists: at war with the very idea of modernity and the related practices of pluralism and toleration. In order to comprehend them we need the images not of Beirut in the 1980s or of Palestine today but of the crusades or the Thirty Years War. These are people who are seen by the Taliban as extreme. No settlement for the Palestinians or the Chechens or the Kashmiris or the Bosnians would have appeased such barbarous piety. As a result, we are all hostages for now to the security-mad, the anonymous “expert,” the unsmiling professional. The very people who have served us so badly for so long. But these are the praetorians who inevitably inherit such situations. There is a uniquely American expression that usually surfaces at moments such as this. It is called “the loss of innocence.” I was rather interested to see that it didn’t come up last week. But then there was probably a surplus of innocence in the form of the families who had happily boarded those flights on a bright Tuesday morning, heading for the West Coast and a bigger sky. In any case, the proper term would be “loss of American confidence.” The whole idea that tomorrow will be better than today, and that each successive generation will be happier and more prosperous and more hopeful, has taken an enormous body-slam. It is absurd and upsetting to see schools closed in cities as far away as California. The TV and the web can spread panic as rapidly as any rumor of witchcraft. Yet, even as people were partially retreating into a bunker mentality, they were nonetheless managing to act as if they had learnt from previous panics. The single most impressive fact about the past few days has been the general refusal to adopt an ugly or chauvinistic attitude towards America’s most recent and most conspicuous immigrants: the Middle Eastern ones. The response of public opinion has been uniformly grownup and considerate. As if by unspoken agreement, everyone seems to know that any outrage to multiculturalism and community would be an act of complicity with the assassins. And in rather the same way, no one chooses to be very raucously in favor of hitting just anyone in “retaliation” overseas. This is an undemonstrative strength of the sort that will be decisive from now on. After all, a sober look at the odds discloses an obvious truth. American society cannot be destroyed even by the most horrifying nihilist attacks. It can outlast or absorb practically anything (of course, it could not entirely survive an attack by WMDs, but then neither can any society, and the greatest single political casualty of the week is undoubtedly the fantasy of the “missile defense” option as the front-line posture against “rogue” elements). A few months ago, a friend of mine was introduced to George Bush at a reception for aid workers in the Third World: “Tell me,” said Bush. “What’s the worst country in the world?” “Congo, Mr President.” “OK, what’s the second worst?” “Afghanistan, Mr President.” “Oh yeah—that’s where them loonies blew up those statues.” Bush did better than perhaps he realized in this trivial exchange. Recall the Taliban’s desecration of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, and you will see that the nihilists are at war with culture as a whole. They are capable of impressive vandalism and callousness, but that’s the limit of their attainment. Last week, an entire population withstood an attempted rape and murder of its core and identity. It did so while the President was off the radar screen. But everyone, in an important sense, knew what to do, as well as what not to do. The whole point of a multinational democracy is that it should be able to run on its own power. In other words, if short-term foolishness can be minimized at home and abroad, then people will surely appreciate that, in the words of an old slogan worn out by repetition, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Independent, September 16, 2001

2

The Pursuit of Happiness Is at an End

This is what a missing limb must feel like. I don’t just mean the amputated feeling one gets when contemplating the New York skyline, which is what I’m doing at the moment. Nor the bizarre and weird emotions that occur at the realization that while I still live in Washington DC—the capital of the free world—it is now the only capital on the planet whose airport is indefinitely closed.

I spent some of last week stranded in a time and space-warp, caught in the first-ever American no-fly zone. And much of the time I couldn’t get a phone call on the first or second or third dial, even to my home in Washington.

The light, space, air and freedom of the United States depend on two things working well all the time—the airline network and the phone system. To be deprived of both, as well as of the US Mail and all the wonderful overnight delivery services, was to experience a hellish feeling of powerlessness.

But these are merely the material symptoms of the dismemberment. I searched my cortex all week for the right phrase, which I knew was in there somewhere. I didn’t locate it, prod and tug and probe as I might, until late in the weekend. Here’s what’s gone: the pursuit of happiness. Four words, which are to be found in only one audacious document of human ambition and aspiration—the American Declaration of Independence.

Nobody knows quite who inserted the phrase, or what was precisely intended by it. There’s a learned dispute about whether “pursuit” means the search for happiness, or happiness itself as a pursuit. No matter: one knows the concept to be somehow indispensable. After the first Kennedy assassination, Senator Patrick Moynihan was talking to the columnist Mary McGrory. She said to him: “Pat, we’ll never laugh again.” “No, Mary,” was his reply, “we’ll laugh again. We’ll just never be young again.” How banal that sad exchange now seems. For the first time ever, I can feel grief at a public event and its dire and limitless consequences, and reflect that at my age I might never again feel entirely carefree. The absent limb may stop hurting, but it will not grow back.

Past US Crimes Are No Excuse

Ex-Ministers and ex-diplomats are the bane of the screen at times like this, clogging the airwaves with conventional unwisdom. Dust flies from the Rolodex as networks search out the has-beens with which to fight the last war. Still, I could not repress a twinge of sympathy for the former United States ambassador to Britain, Philip Lader, when I read about BBC’s Question Time and the way he cracked under pressure.

One needs to be unambivalent here. I have written more criticisms of American foreign policy than most people. I have no time for the way in which the Sharons and Pinochets of the world profit from their Washington connection. (It was only four months ago that the Bush administration handed the Taliban a $43 million subsidy for its kind and fundamentalist help in the war on drugs.)

When Clinton rocketed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, to give himself a bounce in the opinion polls, I wrote in this newspaper that it was a war crime, and I found the applause as sickening as last week’s footage of destitute refugees making a fiesta out of the news from New York.

But the mass murder of last Tuesday is in no sense a reprisal or a revenge for past crimes such as that. The people who destroyed the World Trade Center, and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to free Gaza. They are fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi. They didn’t just destroy the temple of modernity, they used heavy artillery to shatter ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan earlier this year, and in Egypt have plotted to demolish the Pyramids and the Sphinx because they are un-Islamic and profane.

Look at what they do to their own societies, from Algeria to Afghanistan, and then wonder what they might have in mind for ours.

Liberal masochism is of no use to us at a time like this, and Muslim self-pity even less so. Self-preservation and self-respect make it necessary to recognize and name a lethal enemy when one sees one.

London Evening Standard, September 19, 2001

3

Against Rationalization

It was in Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, as the Red Army was falling apart and falling back. I badly needed a guide to get me to the Khyber Pass, and I decided that what I required was the most farouche-looking guy with the best command of English and the toughest modern automobile. Such a combination was obtainable, for a price. My new friend rather wolfishly offered me a tour of the nearby British military cemetery (a well-filled site from the Victorian era) before we began. Then he slammed a cassette into the dashboard. I braced myself for the ululations of some mullah but received instead a dose of “So Far Away.” From under the turban and behind the beard came the gruff observation, “I thought you might like Dire Straits.”

This was my induction into the now-familiar symbiosis of tribal piety and high-tech; a symbiosis consummated on September 11 with the conversion of the southern tip of the capital of the modern world into a charred and suppurating mass grave. Not that it necessarily has to be a symbol of modernism and innovation that is targeted for immolation. As recently as this year, the same ideology employed heavy artillery to destroy the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, and the co-thinkers of bin Laden in Egypt have been heard to express the view that the Pyramids and the Sphinx should be turned into shards as punishment for their profanely un-Islamic character.

Since my moment in Peshawar I have met this faction again. In one form or another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques. Just a few months ago Bosnia surrendered to the international court at The Hague the only accused war criminals detained on Muslim-Croat federation territory. The butchers had almost all been unwanted “volunteers” from the Chechen, Afghan and Kashmiri fronts; it is as an unapologetic defender of the Muslims of Bosnia (whose cause was generally unstained by the sort of atrocity committed by Catholic and Orthodox Christians) that one can and must say that bin Ladenism poisons everything that it touches.

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton’s rocketing of Khartoum—supported by most liberals—was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the “bounce in the polls” achieved by their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers Street.) But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers. The people of Gaza live under curfew and humiliation and expropriation. This is notorious. Very well: Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist a...