Frontpage Interview: Christopher Hitchens

Frontpage Interview had the privilege of conducting the following discussion with Christopher Hitchens, author of the new book A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, in an email correspondence.

Frontpage Magazine: Thank you for joining Frontpage Interview Mr. Hitchens. I’d like to begin with your intellectual journey. You were, at one time, a man of the Left and, if I am correct, a Trotskyist. What led you to this political disposition? It is often said that a lot of our personal psychology and character lead us to our political outlooks. When you look back, does this apply to you in any way? Tell us a bit about your attraction to the Left, Trotskyism, Isaac Deutscher, etc.

Hitchens: A the time and place when I came to political awareness, which was in the early mid-1960s in England, the governing Establishment was that of the Labour Party in its most corrupt and opportunist form (and in Washington, which we all understood as the real capital) it was that of the Democratic machine of LBJ. The charm and appeal of the “social democratic” project was thus very slight. And, coming from a generation which had read Darkness and Noon and Nineteen Eighty Four before being exposed to any Marxist influence, the option of illusions in orthodox Communism did not seriously exist. I think it is this formative background that meant that, in Western Europe at least, the radical and insurgent spirit was attracted to one form or another of “Trotskyism”.

In 1968 - I of course like to think of myself as having been a “Sixty Eighter” or even soixante-huitard rather than merely a “Sixties person” - there seemed the chance not only of contesting the atrocious imperial war in Vietnam but of ending the dictatorial regimes of De Gaulle, Franco, Salazar and Papadopoulos, and of extending this movement across the Berlin Wall. And we have some successes to boast of: the battering that the old order received in that year was to prove terminal in the short run, both East and West.

One is in danger of sounding like an old-fart veteran if one goes on too long about this, but to have been involved in street-arguments in Havana while Chicago was erupting and Prague being subjugated was to feel oneself part of a revolutionary moment. What I didn’t understand then was that this was the very end of something - the revolutionary Marxist tradition - rather than a new beginning of it. But it had its aspect of honor and of glory. Its greatest culmination turned out to be in 1989, when the delayed or postponed effects of 1968 helped bring down the Berlin Wall altogether. It’s not very well understood by the mainstream, but many Czechs and Poles and East Germans of my acquaintance, with more or less “Trotskyist” politics, played a seminal part in those events. And I did my best to stay on their side through those years.

The figure of Trotsky himself, as leader of the “Left Opposition” to Stalin, has many deformities. But I still think he comes out of the twentieth century as a great figure of courageous and engaged dissent, and of the fusion of intellect and action. In my writing, I try to pay respect to the literary and intellectual figures associated with this tradition, from CLR James to Victor Serge. The best-known of this group is of course George Orwell, though he is often not celebrated for that reason.

I am anticipating your next question, but there is in fact a “red thread” that still connects my past to my present views. In discussing things with my Iraqi and Kurdish comrades over the past decade or so, for example, I was quite struck by how many of them came to the struggle against Saddam Hussein by means of some of the same memories, books and traditions that I did. The best of the Iraqi dissident authors, Kanan Makiya, whose books everyone simply has to read if they want to be part of the argument, is the foremost example.

FP: After 9/11, you publicly broke with the Left. You resigned from the Nation magazine and came out forcefully supporting Bush’s efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tell us a bit about this turning point in your life. What was the final straw? Was it an excruciating decision? Surely it took a lot of courage to make it. After all, it entailed facing the fact that you yourself may have been wrong on some things and that, well, perhaps that you were also in the company of people that maybe it was a mistake to be in the company of. Tell us a little bit about the intellectual journey here, the decisions you had to make, and perhaps some of the pain – and bravery – that came along with making them.

Hitchens: Well, there’s no bravery involved (as there has been, for example, in Kanan’s case). And my “turning points” are not quite the ones you suppose. The realisation that we were in a cultural and political war with Islamic theocracy came to me with force and certainty not on 11 September 2001 but on 14 February 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini offered money in his own name to suborn the murder of my friend Salman Rushdie. On that occasion, as you may forget, the conservative and neo-conservative movement was often rather stupid and neutral, in the case of the Bush establishment because of its then-recent exposure as a sordid client of Khomeini’s in the Iran-contra scandal, and in the case of many neo-cons because they thought Salman was an ally of Third World rebellions, especially the Palestinian one.

The realisation that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later. Here, the coalition of forces that eventually saved former Yugoslavia from aggression and ethnocide was made up of some leftists, many Jews and Muslims in America and Europe, many if not most of the neo-conservatives, and Tony Blair’s Labour Government. The mass of mainstream conservatives in America and Britain were indifferent if not openly hostile, and of course many peaceniks kept to their usual line that intervention only leads to quagmires. That was an early quarrel between me and many of my Nation colleagues, and it was also the first time I found myself in the same trench as people like Paul Wolfowitz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick: a shock I had to learn to get over.

On 11 September I was actually in Whitman College, in Washington State, giving the “Scoop” Jackson memorial lecture at his alma mater. Slightly to my surprise, the college and the Jackson family had invited me to speak about my indictment of Henry Kissinger. But on reflection I understood that I needn’t have been so startled: Henry Jackson had always disliked Kissinger for his willingness to sell out the Soviet Jews to Brezhnev, for example, and I point out in my book that it was Kissinger who told Gerald Ford to refuse Solzhenitsyn an invitation to the White House, and who later groveled to the Chinese Stalinists right after Tiananmen Square. He was soft on Communism, as well as on fascism and military dictatorship. (He also opposed any move to stop, let alone to depose, Slobodan Milosevic.)

Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn’t fully grasp (partly because I was far from my family in Washington, who had a very grueling day) until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose. A pity that we let them pick the time and place of the challenge, but we can and we will make up for that.

As to the “Left” I’ll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our “national security” calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of “Left” intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush’s legitimacy. So I don’t even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.

FP: When a leftist leaves the ranks, he often loses many, if not all, of his friends. In my own experience with leftists, I have learned that when they “like” people, they do not like them for who the people are as actual human beings, but for how their structure of political ideals conforms to their own. If you are a leftist in a leftist crowd and you all of a sudden like George W. Bush and love capitalism, chances are you will soon be made into a non-person.

You were once close friends with individuals such as Alexander Cockburn, Sidney Blumenthal, etc. But it appears not any more. Did your leftist friends abandon you? Or the other way around? Was this dislocation hurtful to you? Did it surprise you?

Hitchens: In fairness to Mr Blumenthal, it must be said that it was I who attacked him first. As for Mr Cockburn, if I admire him as a somewhat ad-hominem polemicist (which I still do, though I think he long ago reached the point of diminishing returns) then I can’t very well complain when his fire is turned in my direction. Some lurid things have been said about me - that I am a racist, a hopeless alcoholic, a closet homosexual and so forth - that I leave to others to decide the truth of. I’d only point out, though, that if true these accusations must also have been true when I was still on the correct side, and that such shocking deformities didn’t seem to count for so much then. Arguing with the Stalinist mentality for more than three decades now, and doing a bit of soapboxing and street-corner speaking on and off, has meant that it takes quite a lot to hurt my tender feelings, or bruise my milk-white skin.

There are also a number of my old comrades, I must say, who have been very solid and eloquent in defending civil society against totalitarianism and theocracy, in America and Europe and the Middle East, and I recognise the esprit of 1968 in many of them, even as this has come to mean less to me personally.

FP: What do you consider yourself to be now? Are you still a leftist? Are you a conservative? Do you want to be embraced by neo-conservatives? Or are these labels -- and questions – meaningless/inaccurate to you?

Hitchens: The last time that I consciously wrote anything to “save the honor of the Left”, as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal’s champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of “sexual McCarthyism”, an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it. Which I now see I was beginning to do anyway.