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The Passion of Christopher Hitchens

Michael Kazin

Dissent, Volume 52, Number 3, Summer 2005 (whole No. 220), pp.

107-110 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/dss.2005.0086

For additional information about this article

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The Passion ofChristopher HitchensM ichael Kazin

L O V E , P O V E R T Y , A N D W A R :J O U R N E Y S A N D E S S A Y Sby Christopher Hitchens

Nation Books, 2004 475 pp $16.95

S I N C E T H E A T T A C K S Of September 11,2001, an unsettling matter has roiledcertain precincts of the left: Christo-pher Hitchens's zealous suppo rt of the Bu shadm inistration's foreign policy, in particular itswar in Iraq. How could the once fearless radi-cal polemicist have becom e a cheerleader forthe neoconservative project to remake theworld? Why must he revi le former comradesas either traitors or slackers in the struggleagainst terrorists? Wh y, this June, did he joinDavid Horow itz to conduct a ten-day tour ofLondo n, featuring private visits to the Houseof Lords an d the estate of W inston Churchill?Some believe Hitchens's apostasy began in1989 when an Iranian fatwawhich stillstandsdemanded the murder of his closefriend the novelist Salman R ushdie. A few con-nect his militant patriotism to his applying forAmerican citizenship or even the discovery thathe had Jew ish ancestors. Others prefer to faulthis personality instead o f his politics. Hasn'tHitchens always been an arrogant individual-ist, eager to bash the illusions o f the left? Per-haps all that good w hiskey and cham pagne fi-nally curdled his synapses?Turnco ats can fascinate, particularly wh enthey are su ch brilliant and prolific writers. Fordecades after the 1947 hearings of the HouseUn-American Activities Committee, left-wingcommentators tried to psychoanalyzeWhittaker Chambers; they alleged thatspurned affection, perhaps even lust for A lgerHiss drove the squ at, anxious journalist to tar-

get the suave, handsom e diplomat. Hitchensis certainly Chambers's intellectual equal, al-though the sum of his opinions will nevermatch the historical significance of the form erspy's testimony to R ichard Nixon and his fel-low red-hunters.W hat tempers the furor over Hitchens isthe recognition that he has not really becom ea soldier for the right. Brow sing through hisample w ritings during the first quarter of 2005,one finds, alongside support for the war in Iraq,a variety of opinions that many A merican left-ists would applaud: a slap at the late Pope JohnPaul II for "saying that condoms are worse thanA IDS," pra ise for John Brown as a prophet"who anticipated the Emancipation Proclama-tion and all that has ensued from it," and a trib-ute to Tom Paine as "our unacknowledgedfound ing father . . . the mo ral and intellectualauthor of the Declaration of Independenc e." 'Hitchens a lso con tinues to o ppose the deathpenalty and to advocate putting HenryK issinger on trial as a w ar criminal.He does seem perverse a t t imes; wh y in-deed wo uld any non-disciple of David Horowitzchoose to do business with that screechingbully? But Hitchens, who put in man y yearsas an editor of New L ef t Rev iew and a colum-nist for the Nation, has clearly stuck by m anyof the convictions that made him a radical backin the 1960s. And nearly everything he writesis full of sly observa tions and delicious proseeven w hen one f inds something to disagreewith on every page.There is one co nstant in his torrent of pub-lications since the end of the cold warwh ether the topic is literature, politics, or his-tory. Strange as i t may sound, Hitchens is aromanticand a particularly ardent one atthat . His rom anticism harks back to the be-ginnings of the A nglo-A me rican lef t and ofmodern literatureto Paine's and MaryW ollstonecraft's passionate engagem ent w ith

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the French Revolution but revulsion at the orgyof the guillotine, to the early socialists whoimagined they could build a cooperative orderthat would do away with class distinctions, andto the writers and artists inspired byWordsworth's maxim "that poetry is the spon-taneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . "F OR HITCHENS, TOO, it is unforgivable tocompromise one's principles, to flirt withlies, to heed the sirens of realpolitik overthe call of the heart. His anger at such corrup-tions shouts, elegantly, from the brief introduc-tion to this collection of his pieces written fromthe early 1990s to 2004: religion is "the mostbase and contemptible of the forms assumedby human egotism and stupidity"; Kissinger,Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa are all "despi-cable" figures; American schools are "designedto bore" students "to death with second-rateand pseudo-uplifting tripe." "I wake up everyday," Hitchens confesses with a certain glee,"to a sensation of pervading disgust and annoy-ance."

This style of moral outrage at wicked, men-dacious authorities was stoked by the Enlight-enment and burned on through countlessmanifestos, anthems, and the oratory of social-ists and anarchists over the next two hundredyears. Formidably well-read, perpetually self-confident men like Bakunin, Trotsky, and MaxShachtman were masters of the idiom. Thecounterpoint of such invective is a strong sym-pathy for those whom priests, presidents, andprincipals are fooling and pushing around. Itis not surprising that, in his title, Hitchenschose to give "love" top billing. Although cel-ebrated for his sardonic hauteur, he has alwayschampioned intellectuals he believes foughtthe good fight for ordinary people.

Elsewhere, Hitchens has revealed, in adoleful tone, that he no longer calls himself asocialist. But here, in a review published in2004, he fairly gushes about Trotsky, fromwhom "a faint, saintly penumbra still ema-nates." Hitchens salutes the "Old Man" for pre-dicting that Stalin would sign a pact with Hitlerand for sternly admonishing leftists in the1930s who saw little distinction between theNazis and the older, aristocratic right theytoppled from power. Trotsky, he writes, set

108 n DISSENT / Summer 2005

down "a moral warning against the crass men-tality of moral equivalence."

Alas, a taste for romantic heroes often leadsone to neglect their flaws. Hitchens says not aword about Trotsky's infamous crushing of the1921 revolt at the Kronstadt naval base, whichalienated many independent radicals from theSoviet cause. Nor does he mention that the OldMan remained, until the end, an Old Bolshe-vik, insisting he could pick up where Lenin leftoff, if only Stalin, the Oriental despot with apoor education, could somehow be whiskedinto the dustbin of history. But when Hitchensloves you, it's no good unless he loves you allthe way .

That spirit also animates his essays on lit-erary giants. Byron's poem "The Isles ofGreece" "can still start a patriotic tear on amanly cheek" even though it "was originallycomposed and offered as a self-parody."Hitchens lauds Kingsley Amis for demonstrat-ing in Lucky Jim , his satire of British academia,the "crucial human difference between thelittle guy and the small man." The novel's pro-tagonist, "like his creator, was no clown but aman of feeling after all." Bellow, Borges, andProust all get the same smart, adoring treat-ment. Hitchens makes no apology for writingsolely about "the gold standard" in modern lit-erature, with "the sort of words that hold theirvalue." Romantic critics from Thomas Carlyleto Harold Bloom would warmly agree.The longest essay in the collection de-scribes a different sort of love, that between atourist and the great, mostly late AmericanWest. One recent summer, Hitchensoutfit-ted, presumably, with a large expense accountfrom Vanity Faircruised the length of Route66 in a bright red Corvette convertible, thesame model driven by two buddies in a not-quite-forgotten television show named after thehighway. "It winds from Chicago to LA, morethan two thousand miles," and Hitchens gotas many kicks as he could on the journey. Hepraises the hamburgers and "terrific jukebox"at a St. Louis bar; marvels at the skills of theauto mechanics in Elk City, Oklahoma, whopatch his tires; gapes at a huge meteor craterin the Arizona desert; and orders too much foodfrom "a hauntingly beautiful Spanish waitress"before he heads into California.

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But Hitchens is appalled to see how thecrude and greedy are trashing what remains ofthis quaint and seductive cultural landscape.Drug dealers and prostitutes hassle him out-side his motel, and Indians peddle "bogusbeads and belts and boots" by the side of amountain. "Surely," he laments, "a decent si-lence could be observed somewhere, insteadof this incessant, raucous, but sentimental bat-tering of the cash register." One can share hisopinion yet be amused by his naivet. Learnedfolks have been deploring the commerce inculture since the Renaissance, if not before.Hitchens is nostalgic for an America he neverknew and that never existed.

That passion for an idealized homelandmay help explain his unqualified fury at theantiwar left. Hitchens has no patience with apolitics of difficult choices. In the waning yearsof the 1990s, he and I held two debates aboutthe merits of Bill Clinton and the Dem ocratsone at a Dissent meeting, the other in print.Hitchens, in high moral dudgeon, thought it"con temptible" to defend the president on stra-tegic grounds, as a figure who had blocked theadvance of the Gingrichite right, even if hehadn't done enough to advance a progressiveagenda. To him, Clinton was the vilest mem-ber of the political species, a man whose"mock-compassionate and pseudohumanitari-an bilge" concealed the raw ugliness of his ego-mania. Realists like me were cowards who didnot want the knave to be humbled and drivenfrom office.

THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 roused Hitchens toa greater, and m ore justifiable, fury. Trueto character, it was mingled with righ-teous joy. "I felt a kind of exh ilaration," he w rotea few days after the Twin Towers came down,

4 `. . . at last, a w ar of every thing I loved againsteverything I hated."' Hitchens had not sup-ported the first Gulf War. During one appear-ance on CNN, he dared Charlton Heston toname all the nations that bordered Iraq. Whenthe aging conservative fum bled the attempt, hisantagonist remarked that such ignorance wastypical of Americans who believed their mightgave them the ability to forge a new world or-der. Yet a year la ter, Hitchens was reporting onthe valiant Kurds who, protected by U.S. war-

planes, had carved out a liberated enclave forthemselves in northern Iraq. "They have pow-erful, impatient enem ies," he wrote, "and a fewrather easily bored friends." In Hitchens, theKurds now had an ally as steadfast and articu-late as they could desire.

The shock of 9/11 finally persuaded himto abandon his troubled romance with the leftand begin another. In war, he embraced thecause of a country he had always held at arm'slength when it was at peace. Enraged by thecoldly reflexive anti-imperialism of suc h figuresas Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, heabandoned his previous ambivalence about theperils of dep loying the A merican m ili tary in theIslamic world. He hailed the United States for"bombing" Afghanistan "back out of the StoneA ge" and repo rted happily that children in post-Saddam Iraq chanted "Boosh, Boosh!," whileweeping m en declared, "You're la te . What tookyou so long?" To a right-wing interviewer,Hitchens complained, "Most of the leftists Iknow are hoping openly or secret ly to leveragedifficulty in Iraq in order to d efeat George Bu sh. . . this is a tactic and a mentality utterlydamned by any s tandard of history or moral i ty .What I mainly do is try to rub that in."

I T'S THE STANCE of a man wh ose passion out-runs his reason. Hitchens knows there aremany liberals and some radicals whocheered the fall of Saddam Hussein yet alsocursed Bush and British prime minister TonyBlair for lying their way into Iraq and then do-ing more to cover their tracks than to rebuildthat devastated nation. Such ambivalence isthe main reason no mass antiwar movementexists today, despite widespread aversion to theadministration's conduct before and after theinvasion. But the arrogance and brutality ofempire are not repealed when they temporarilyget deployed in a just cause.

What defines Hitchens's great talent alsolimits his political understanding. It is thrill-ing to read and argue with a gifted writer whoevinces no doubt about which side is right andwhich wrong and who can bring a wealth oflearning and experience to the fray. We judgepublic intellectuals partly on their perfor-mance, and few can hold an audience as wellas he.

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Still, the most romantic position is notoften the most intelligent one. It is unheroicbut necessary to explain how the Bush ad-ministration threw Americans into a bloodymorass and might now get them out. A loverof absolutes would label this task an act ofbad faith; I would call it common sense. Ina luminous recent essay about successivetranslations of Swann's Way, Hitchens ob-served, "To be so perceptive and yet so in-nocentthat, in a phrase, is the achieve-ment of Proust."

The author might also have been speakingabout himself, a self-made patriot who has

added to his love of fearless rebels a fierce apol-ogy for the neoconservative crusade.

Since Bush's reelection, some of Hitchens'sold left-wing friends have urged him to comeback home, to confine himself to the elegantslashing of powerful hypocrites on which hebuilt his writerly reputation. But their wish isunlikely to be granted. Christopher Hitchens,you see, is already home. M ICHAEL KAZIN is the author of W illiam JenningsB ryan: A God ly Hero, forthcoming in January. He isa mem ber of the Dissent editorial board and teacheshistory at Georgetown University.

1. See quotes at http://www.hitchensweb.com .2. Quoted in George Scialabba, "Farewell, Hitch," N + 1 ,V o l . 1, No. 2, 2005.

3. http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:jiRSOAuE2RMJ:www.frontpagemag.com/Artic les /

Fascism and CounterrevolutionC o r e y R o b i n

THE ANATOMY OF FASCISMby R obert 0. PaxtonKnopf , 2004 321 pp $26 clothVintage, 2005 336 pp $15 paper

THE NAZI CONSCIENCEby Claudia K oonzHarvard University Press, 2003

362 pp $29.95 cloth

E VER SINCE William Wordsworth cel-ebrated revolution as a gift of youth andEdmund Burke condemned it as thescourge of age, we've looked upon rebellion andreaction as a clash of generations. The biogra-phies of movement and counter-movementseem to tell the whole story. Both the St. Pe-tersburg uprising of 1905 and the Montgom-ery Bus Boycott of 1955 were led by twenty-six-year-olds against regimes donning themantle of eternity. Malcolm X was killed at

forty, Che Guevara at thirty-nine, whileKlemens von Metternichanother interna-tionalist with continental visiondidn't getgoing until his late thirties. Thomas Jeffersonwas thirty-three when he wrote the Declara-tion of Independence, Frantz Fanon thirty-sixwhen he wrote The Wretched of the Earth.Burke, by contrast, was sixty-one when hewrote Reflections on the Revolution in France.And when tennis champ Billie Jean King beatBobby Riggs in three straight sets at Houston,she was twenty-nine, while he was, well, oldenough to be her father.

But what are we to make of fascism's de-claring war on anything and everything thatstank of age? During the 1932 election cam-paign in Germany, Adolf Hitler's handlers de-picted their man as a dreamy adventurer withenough cojones (notwithstanding that rumor)to tour the country by plane. "In an era whenair travel was considered dangerous," writesClaudia Koonz, "Hitler literally descended fromthe clouds to address audiences of between120,000 and 300,000 at major cities." Widelydistributing a booklet of photos from his air

I I 0 n D ISSE N T / Summer 2005