Click here to read Alexander Linklater’s portrait of Christopher Hitchens
The sectarian left and the "Kronstadt" moment
This June, New York University Press is publishing a book of Hitchens's quarrels with some of his former fellow travellers. Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley University, and one of the editors of Christopher Hitchens and his Critics, argues that it is possible to discern in this confrontation "one of the most powerful self-critiques of the Western left today." In their introduction, Cushman and Simon Cottee write: "Hitchens is a vivid example of what the great German sociologist Georg Simmel described as the 'antagonist,' a social type who thrives on conflict and disputation." The contest they have orchestrated is, they say, "bruising and lacerating. Yet to witness the entanglements that ensue is to gain a fascinating insight into the world-view of the contemporary western left."
Now often viewed as a "defector," Hitchens argues that, on the contrary, it is others who have retreated into reaction and conservatism. "What I'm spending a lot of time on is the emergence of the reactionary left," he says. His are the manoeuvres of a factional mindset, in which he has split the partisan crystal into ever-narrower shards. This derives from a type of thinking learned from an ideological tradition. "Trotskyism is, in a way, a Talmudic training. It teaches you certain forms of argument and method that you never lose, and that I wouldn't be without." More precisely, however, he came to political consciousness less as a Trotskyist than a "Luxemburgist," meaning that he was not only foundationally anti-Stalinist, but also had no original faith in Trotsky as a hypothetical alternative.
Pretty well everyone on the left has experienced a turning point, a tragic peripeteia when they realised ideals were not going to be borne out in reality. For old leftists, the traditional mode of inquiry into a comrade's disillusion was to ask, "When was your Kronstadt?" Trotsky's brutal suppression of the sailors' anti-Soviet uprising of 1921 is code for any moment of realisation that reveals it's not just a question of replacing a Lenin or Stalin with better alternatives, but that the project itself is flawed.
Hitchens likes to cite the sociologist Daniel Bell, who was enough of a veteran to claim: "Some people had their Kronstadt during the mass purges in the 1930s, others during the Hungarian uprising, and still others during the Prague spring. My Kronstadt was Kronstadt." But deriving his position from Rosa Luxemburg's, it's possible for Hitchens to claim sceptical authority from an even earlier moment, in 1918, when Luxemburg warned Lenin that Bolshevik methods would lead first to a dictatorship of one party, then to a dictatorship of that party's central committee, and finally to absolute rule by one member of that central committee. This gets very close to annihilating the 20th-century revolutionary project at its foundations. Indeed, the idea that revolutions inexorably eat their own children is one that lies behind Hitchens's close identification with his two most important journalistic heroes: Thomas Paine, whose rejection of the French model came as he tasted the first purges of the terror; and George Orwell, with his intuition "that the two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies." These are the anti-authoritarian authorities Hitchens draws on to negotiate the flaws in the socialist project. "I find it easy to say I'm not a socialist now," he says. "Painful though I found that, it didn't cost me as much as to say I'm no longer a Marxist, which wouldn't really be true. Because it's the way I think. I think like someone who uses the historical materialist method of analysis."
These days, what remains for Hitchens, and what he continues to draw from his Trotskyist youth, is not an argument for a particular politics, so much as a particular way of arguing. To take him at his own account, the only way his arguments make sense is to see them as a development of ideologically formulated positions. And the only way to grapple with his habit of partisan certainty is to view it as belonging to the tendency to factional splitting and absolutism inherent in the traditions of the left.
So it makes some sort of left-sectarian sense, as Thomas Cushman says, that "at the hands of his former comrades, Hitchens has been subjected not just to criticism, but to actual disparagement. He has been denounced and excommunicated, purged from the orbit of the left, and subjected to a plethora of what the sociologist Harold Garfinkel referred to as "degradation ceremonies." The main accusation is that he has become a rank ideologist of imperialism and a fanatical "cheerleader" for the Bush administration and American expansionism. Thus he is a "turncoat," a defector, a traitor. And since being a turncoat seems to be indicative of a far wider moral decline, Hitchens is accused, variously, of being a racist; an alcoholic; a snob; dishonest; venal; overweight; unkempt; psychopathic; and a closeted homosexual. Hitchens has thus been, to paraphrase Garfinkel, "ritually separated" from the left; his former identity defamed as a sham. Marc Cooper is perhaps right: "Leaving the left can be a bit like trying to quit the mafia. You can't get out without getting assassinated."
Marxists in the White House
Hitchens tells a story about the time that the newly appointed Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, first came to Washington, and stayed in a wing of the White House, along with other members of his administration and various figures—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—who had participated in the movement to topple Saddam. Hitchens was invited to a reception there. "And at one point," he says, "we were all babbling, and Talabani said that whenever he'd quarrelled with Paul Bremer, which he often did, Bremer would says 'that's just your Marxist training coming out again.' There was a pause. And then Talabani remarked, 'I wonder if President Bush knows how many Marxists he has under his roof this evening?'"
Hitchens replied that Bush probably didn't have the faintest idea, but that if he did, he probably wouldn't mind. Because at least it was an assurance of a group defined by something other than religious sectarianism. (Hitchens does not see any aspect of Bush's foreign policy as being forged out of his own Christianity.)
"Their Marxism was very different from mine," Hitchens clarifies. "There was much more Maoist stuff—third-worldism, Castroism—in the background. Still, that was a great moment, and everybody saw the joke."
Hitchens on the "Protestant revolution"
Hitchens doesn't have a historical imagination in the sense of being absorbed by the details of events for their own sake; rather, those events he invests with significance are marshalled—in his basically Marxist telling—as if history might obey a grand, overarching argument. Identifying the traditions from which he has drawn to become a leading agitator of the new atheism, the Cromwellian revolt represents not merely the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right. His understanding of the origin of human rights comes down to a mechanism of conflict: rights emerged not a priori, but because "the other side" claimed theirs were divine. One might assume that he'd therefore find it awkward to celebrate a period in which all parties fought with God on their side, and when factional politics were inseparable from the sectarian psychologies of faith. But not a bit of it. Relishing its triumphal Protestant music, Hitchens recites the "Battle of Naseby," Thomas Babington Macaulay's 19th-century eulogy to the decisive encounter, in 1645, of the English civil war. Macaulay's 15-verse ballad begins:
Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press that ye tread?
Oh! evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God.
Hitchens loves the English poetic tradition as ferociously as he rejoices in political argument. For him, the twinning of these two obsessions is best represented in the fact that Marvell, Milton and Dryden all marched in Oliver Cromwell's funeral procession. "No monarch," he points out, "has ever had that kind of retinue; but they turned up for Cromwell. This is what the Protestant revolution means to me."
What's less easy to understand is how Hitchens avoids emotional contradiction. Listening to him recite Macaulay on the English civil war is to be confronted by a riotous admixture of the revolutionary, the puritanical, the bacchanalian and the theological. Yet from this Hitchens derives unequivocal conclusions: progress, rights, atheism. The argumentative tactic is essentially that of splitting off the things he advocates from those he rejects, even if they have shared sources. Hence what he calls his "Protestant atheism" and his claim that the liturgies of the King James Bible and Cranmer prayer book provided, at once, a poetics to embrace and a system of belief to reject. He plucks a secular vocabulary from the literary canon and rips away the roots of religious mythology from which much of it flowered. His is a mentality of opposition, not internal contradiction. If history throws up competing claims, he splits the difference and argues for the one he considers to be correct.
Reciting poetry, rejecting faith
In a raw, almost confessional article he wrote for Vanity Fair last November, Hitchens described how a US army officer, Mark Daily, had died in Iraq having signed up because of his belief in the American mission; a belief for which he had found justification in Hitchens's advocacy of the invasion. By this stage Hitchens was conceding his "deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war." Shaken by Lieutenant Daily's funeral service, which he attended, and by the moving reception he received from the young man's family, he signed off his article with the words: "May death be not proud to have taken Mark Daily." The allusion to one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets is affecting but also perplexing. Donne, after all, was quite explicit about what it was that allowed him to disdain death: the conviction that, after a short sleep, "wee wake eternally."
Religious feeling emerges, Hitchens declares in God Is Not Great, from the fear of darkness and death which has been with us ever since "the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species." To be at war with that, he comes close to acknowledging, is to be engaged in an unwinnable battle with ordinary human nature.
His love of English poetry and hatred of religion inevitably clash, though he palms off the difficulty. Hitchens has a favourite question he likes to put to believers who propose the argument that, without religion, there can be no motivation for morality. In response, he asks: is there any moral action that a believer has ever performed that could not have been performed by a non-believer? To this unarguable rhetorical challenge, he has received only one response that has unsettled him. Could John Donne have written the Holy Sonnets had he not experienced religious faith? One could ask the same question of many of the authors in the literary canon whom Hitchens loves.
In God is not Great, he rather peculiarly alludes to his own death, citing the passage from Paul to the Philippians that he read at his father's funeral. The spirit of these words, Hitchens declares, is the one he hopes to embrace at his own last hour: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." Naturally, he considers this to be an "essentially secular injunction." But one doesn't need to be a believer to detect a sleight of hand in the unnecessary insistence. No religion comprises merely belief. The appeal of observance is aesthetic, ritual, communal. If theological thought can produce poetry or wisdom, just as rational and executive functions of the brain may be a product of its "lower" functions, why the furious urge to exterminate the associative link?
"It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human," the political philosopher John Gray has said. "Evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms—rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them."
Gray—who finds Hitchens the most intellectually interesting of the new atheists—argues that his kind of atheism also derives from a faith. Not Marxism or socialism as such, though these also rely on redemptive beliefs. Rather it's the notion of history as an argument and a narrative. "The belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism," Gray writes. "It is a myth created by the need for meaning."
For Hitchens, 9/11 was the "flash that illuminates the whole scene." He says he was quite conscious that it would mean the breaking of old friends and alliances. "I knew that this would be going on for the rest of my life, and probably my children's lives," he explains. "It reminded me of something I used to be fond of telling other people, but had temporarily forgotten myself—you can't escape politics. If you try, it will come after you, like the Hound of Heaven: 'I fled him down the nights and down the days, I fled him down the arches of the years, I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind.'" Quoting from Francis Thompson's poem, Hitchens pauses for the joke to sink in: that he is putting politics in the place of God.
Hitchens on Hitchens
Publishers in both Britain and America have recently been urging Hitchens to produce a memoir, so he uses our interviews to exercise an autobiographical muscle. He concedes that, if such a book is to work, he'll have to formulate some kind of developmental principle. I ask whether he favours "psychobabble" or "biobabble." Does he believe, in other words, that he is a dynamically shaped product of early events, or a result of innate personality traits? It's a false dichotomy, of course, but the way people answer that question usually provides some indication of how they imagine themselves. Hitchens opts for the innate. He remains suspicious of "Damascene" or transforming moments—preferring to think in terms of catalysing ones. In the God book, he describes how his earliest rejection of religion was, if anything, an anti-epiphany. "It was a way of discovering what, and indeed how, I already thought," he says.
His notion of the origins of morality similarly belongs to the realm of the innate. "There's a species feeling," he says. "If you see a woman being pushed to the ground and kicked in the stomach you should feel a natural revulsion, an innate protective instinct. Would that revulsion be increased if you knew if she was with child? The answer is yes. Why would that make it worse? It shouldn't be a question. It shouldn't need an answer. People who need that explained to them are socio- or psychopathic; morally defective."
Short of going into the evolutionary, adaptive arguments for altruism, this is probably what morality must consist of for a materialist. In Hitchens's case, it's also a justification for one of the views he has long held, against the general tendency of left-wing attitudes: his anti-abortion position. "I think there's something innate in that too," he says. "I had disagreements with the so-called women's 'right to choose' lot because it seemed to me that the concept of an unborn child was a real one, materially, embryologically. What else can it be? It's a life, it's not un-alive, and if it's alive what kind of life is it except human? I disliked the kind of argument that it's just a growth or projection on the female form, an appendix or tumour."
In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens considers those dissidents who can trace their careers to an incident in early life "where they felt obliged to make or take a stand." But clearly he also feels that the urge to dissent must spring from some inherent trait of personality. When he writes the following, one assumes he is thinking of himself: "Quite often, the 'baptism' of a future dissenter occurs in something unplanned, such as a spontaneous resistance to an episode of bullying or bigotry, or a challenge to some piece of pedagogical stupidity… It would be encouraging to believe that such reactions are innate, because then we can be certain that they will continue to occur, and will not depend for their occurrence upon the transmission of good examples or morality tales."
Though he is no slouch when it comes to advertising his own participation in events or arguments, Hitchens rarely chooses to write directly about his own life. The only near-intimate account he has laid down in print was a piece published in 1988 by the New York magazine Grand Street, described in my Hitchens portrait. On another more recent occasion, when the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy commissioned him to write about his political journey, he entitled the essay "Can One Be A Neo-Conservative?" and was irritated to find this translated into French as "How I Became A Neo-Conservative." It wasn't just the misrepresentation that grated, but the way it implied a narrative of personal development. In fact, his 12,000-word article contains no interior interpretation at all, being an account solely of political positions he has held since 1968. Hitchens is not much taken by the idea of an inner self that can be shaped or transformed. Rather it's the principle of ideas and character transforming a malleable world that animates him. He has no patience with the project of explaining one's actions through detailed self-scrutiny and trying to become "a better person." It is man as a public beast that concerns him.
After what he calls the "high tide of the rogue left" had been reached in 1968, he says, "you started to hear the slogan: the personal is political. That was the worst legacy of the 1960s. And I just felt the most awful premonition when I heard it. What that proved to be was the midwife of feckless, narcissistic postmodernism; a pseudo-radical concentration on the self and that sort of thing. It's now a curse from one end of every campus to the next: stultifying, boring, horrible—and, I think, part of the reactionary left. Suddenly the measure became how much you could talk about your own specific sense of grievance. People would begin sentences with 'As a…' Then it would be 'woman, homosexual, Pakistani' or something. It's no longer what you think, or what you know, but how you feel and who you happen to be. As if these were achievements, that you'd done something to earn it. No, no, no. I hate that."
Hitchens is not, as it were, autobiographically inquisitive. The scattered vignettes Hitchens recalls of his upbringing are largely those that fit the adult profile, such as the story that opens God Is Not Great, of his spinsterly natural history teacher spouting religious absurdities at him when he was nine. The English landscape he loves is less the Dartmoor he experienced himself than the one he experienced in John Clare's poetry. He cites Philip Larkin in describing the rest of childhood as "a forgotten boredom." When he describes his first memory, of crossing the grand harbour of Valletta with his mother when he was two or three, the memory may be authentic or retrospectively constructed. But it doesn't matter. More significant is the fact that he considers it to be a "major one."
He describes the impact of his mother's suicide on his father as follows: "Picture if you will, a guy who lives in north Oxford in a respectable street who is the bursar of a boys' prep school, whose social circle consists of masters and wives and so on. He has gone to all the lengths of deceiving them, with my mother showing up at cricket matches, playing the hostess. Then they open the newspaper and find out that she's run off with another guy, and either been killed by him or died for love of him, and my father has to realise that everyone he knows in the world—and it's a very small world—knows everything.
Hitchens is quite frank in the way he tells this story. There are some aspects that he wants to keep off the record, to avoid reopening a wound between him and his brother. Otherwise, he spares none of the details, nor the derangement of what his mother's lover did, disembowelling himself in an Athens hotel in 1973 while she took sleeping pills. Yet Hitchens declines to countenance the notion that his mother's death, any more than her Jewishness, had a shaping or determining influence on him. To describe this as repression or self-preservation would probably be meaningless. It does, however, fit with the strategy by which his interpretation of history repeatedly performs its acts of separation: the Protestant revolution from Puritanism, literature from faith, adult reason from infantile fear. At the end of God is Not Great, he summarises what's required to maintain momentum towards a humane civilisation. "We first have to transcend our prehistory," he writes, "and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection."
Hitchens on brotherhood
Ten years ago, Prospect initiated what has become an occasional spectator sport, by pitting Christopher and Peter Hitchens against one another on a debating platform. The spectacle of two brothers with strikingly similar looks and manners but with strikingly divergent political views has been a crowd-puller ever since, most recently in Michigan, before an audience of 1,200 people, where the brothers debated religion and Iraq. To describe one as being of the left and the other as being from the right seems increasingly redundant. Peter, opposing the invasion of Iraq, once described it as a "left-wing war" (presumably thinking of Christopher's advocacy of it). Both seem to enrage their own "sides." Nevertheless, one has conservative social and religious views that the other despises; and they pull no punches in an argument. Christopher dismisses the significance of the sibling relationship. "He and I have never lived in the same town or the same context for more than a few months since we were quite small, and I don't know him very well," he says." If it wasn't for the political dimension, no one would be interested in this. Lots of people have brothers they don't get on with, siblings they don't see. Because of the politics, my relationship with Peter fascinates people much more than it does me, or him."
Nevertheless, in the Mail on Sunday, Peter recently described how their relationship developed as a result of this encounter: "On this we agree: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if it gets us disliked. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions. We sometimes also arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier to do than you might think. This will not make us close friends at this stage in two very separate lives. Let's not get sentimental or soppy here. But I was astonished, on this spring evening by the Grand River, to find that the longest quarrel of my life seemed to be over, just when it appeared to be at its most intense."
Friendship and betrayal
The big British friendships of Hitchens's life—with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie—remain intact. He is capable of intense personal loyalty and selfless gestures. (He once threatened to resign from the Nation if his former friend—now enemy—Alexander Cockburn was sacked from the magazine. As he says, "When it comes to the pinch, I'm a good person to have in your corner.") But, for him, friendship can be made or broken over an argument. Most notoriously, in 1999, he signed an affidavit to the effect that his close friend Sidney Blumenthal, then a Clinton aide, had described Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker." Blumenthal had testified on oath that he had made no such claim. It was an act Hitchens performed out of his hatred of Clinton, but it was widely seen as a vicious personal betrayal, and lost him many more friendships than merely Blumenthal's.
Hitchens describes the Blumenthal incident as unusual even by his own standards of fighting with friends. "To be accused of disloyalty to a friend in a crisis is a very severe thing. It was pure accident really. He told me something that he shouldn't have at a time when it wasn't a legal matter. It only became significant later. I found that I was in possession of something that had serious implications. And I did think it would be withholding evidence if I didn't come forward with it, and it would be something like perjury if I was asked if I knew about it, and said no, by the house committee—who did call. I thought I really didn't have much alternative. I think it's a case that's fantastically unlikely to re-occur. We were pretty tight, but he had become a different person working for that thug [Clinton]. He sounded different, walked differently. Like he'd gone to work for John Gotti or something. It was awful. And they were conspiring to pervert the course of justice. And they tried to intimidate and slander a truthful witness.
"I got a very nice letter from Monica Lewinsky, saying thanks for sticking up for me and thanks for opening my eyes to what my boyfriend was like. I've had letters of thanks from two or three of Clinton's female victims. Which means quite a lot to me—more than Sidney does, put it like that. And these are women he was defaming and in one sense almost blackmailing. I hope I wouldn't have as a friend anyone who would do that."
Befriending Wolfowitz
There's a story that, with his articles advocating invasion in 2002, Hitchens had been attempting to "send a message" to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence and one of the war's key intellectual architects, and that he was rewarded with a personal meeting—an invitation Wolfowitz's special adviser, Kevin Kellems, has described as "like contacting someone on the other side you think might want to defect." The message wasn't intentional, Hitchens says, but the story is "effectively true." They met, and Wolfowitz showed him a photograph of the Reagan cabinet in the White House situation room on the night of the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Standing to one side was the younger Wolfowitz, who had persuaded his superiors not to step in to save Marcos. This was Wolfowitz essentially telling Hitchens that he had been a long advocate of reversing the old tendencies of American foreign policy, and the "principle of proxy rule."
Hitchens thought it "an attractive pitch." They discussed their mutual dislike of Henry Kissinger, and what Wolfowitz saw as the betrayal of the Shia rebellion after the first Iraq war. "I could see where he was going with this," Hitchens says. "He said there's only one area in the world where we still rule by proxy, second hand through local regimes. The middle east. He said, 'Are you interested in more conversation?' and I said, 'Sure.'" Hitchens thereafter joined a Washington group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which he describes as a mixture of human rights activists, eastern Europe veterans, Bosnia hands, Kanan Makiya and a few other Iraqis. These were the people who the chat shows would start to call for comment, and Hitchens became a regular.
On not regretting the Iraq invasion
You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong. Kanan Makiya, interview in the New York Times, October 2007
Hitchens explains his ongoing belief in the Iraq project with a classically leftist summation of historic betrayals: "Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the US at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion." That, and later US abandonment of the Shia uprising after the first Gulf war, are the historical betrayals that Hitchens views the 2003 invasion as rectifying—with key administration architects of the war, such as Paul Wolfowitz, attempting to reverse the cynical, Kissingerian realpolitik of earlier American foreign policy.
As to the idea that Iraq became a recruiting ground for al Qaeda, he says: "That's turned out to be very untrue. I think we can say one thing for certain; whoever takes over Iraq it's not going to be them. And the signs are it's drying up. We've learned how to fight and beat these people. Everything I hear from Anbar province and Ramadi is that the al Qaeda guys were rejected completely by the locals, turned in by them, killed like rats. This is going to be the great success of the thing, whatever happened in the short run. And we're having to train people of our own, our best blood, to fight and discredit and kill them. This gets me called genocidal, because I want to kill the people who'd put a car bomb outside a girls' school, or a Shia mosque, or a funeral procession. But we're going to need these skills again, the skills of isolating and killing al Qaeda. And we're training a generation of young officers for whom that's the baptism of fire. It's horrible, but the casualties we're taking are not war-level of casualties, and Baghdad is stabilising."
Click here to read Alexander Linklater's portrait of Christopher Hitchens
The sectarian left and the "Kronstadt" moment
This June, New York University Press is publishing a book of Hitchens's quarrels with some of his former fellow travellers. Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley University, and one of the editors of Christopher Hitchens and his Critics, argues that it is possible to discern in this confrontation "one of the most powerful self-critiques of the Western left today." In their introduction, Cushman and Simon Cottee write: "Hitchens is a vivid example of what the great German sociologist Georg Simmel described as the 'antagonist,' a social type who thrives on conflict and disputation." The contest they have orchestrated is, they say, "bruising and lacerating. Yet to witness the entanglements that ensue is to gain a fascinating insight into the world-view of the contemporary western left."
Now often viewed as a "defector," Hitchens argues that, on the contrary, it is others who have retreated into reaction and conservatism. "What I'm spending a lot of time on is the emergence of the reactionary left," he says. His are the manoeuvres of a factional mindset, in which he has split the partisan crystal into ever-narrower shards. This derives from a type of thinking learned from an ideological tradition. "Trotskyism is, in a way, a Talmudic training. It teaches you certain forms of argument and method that you never lose, and that I wouldn't be without." More precisely, however, he came to political consciousness less as a Trotskyist than a "Luxemburgist," meaning that he was not only foundationally anti-Stalinist, but also had no original faith in Trotsky as a hypothetical alternative.
Pretty well everyone on the left has experienced a turning point, a tragic peripeteia when they realised ideals were not going to be borne out in reality. For old leftists, the traditional mode of inquiry into a comrade's disillusion was to ask, "When was your Kronstadt?" Trotsky's brutal suppression of the sailors' anti-Soviet uprising of 1921 is code for any moment of realisation that reveals it's not just a question of replacing a Lenin or Stalin with better alternatives, but that the project itself is flawed.
Hitchens likes to cite the sociologist Daniel Bell, who was enough of a veteran to claim: "Some people had their Kronstadt during the mass purges in the 1930s, others during the Hungarian uprising, and still others during the Prague spring. My Kronstadt was Kronstadt." But deriving his position from Rosa Luxemburg's, it's possible for Hitchens to claim sceptical authority from an even earlier moment, in 1918, when Luxemburg warned Lenin that Bolshevik methods would lead first to a dictatorship of one party, then to a dictatorship of that party's central committee, and finally to absolute rule by one member of that central committee. This gets very close to annihilating the 20th-century revolutionary project at its foundations. Indeed, the idea that revolutions inexorably eat their own children is one that lies behind Hitchens's close identification with his two most important journalistic heroes: Thomas Paine, whose rejection of the French model came as he tasted the first purges of the terror; and George Orwell, with his intuition "that the two things he most valued, which is to say liberty and equality, were not natural allies." These are the anti-authoritarian authorities Hitchens draws on to negotiate the flaws in the socialist project. "I find it easy to say I'm not a socialist now," he says. "Painful though I found that, it didn't cost me as much as to say I'm no longer a Marxist, which wouldn't really be true. Because it's the way I think. I think like someone who uses the historical materialist method of analysis."
These days, what remains for Hitchens, and what he continues to draw from his Trotskyist youth, is not an argument for a particular politics, so much as a particular way of arguing. To take him at his own account, the only way his arguments make sense is to see them as a development of ideologically formulated positions. And the only way to grapple with his habit of partisan certainty is to view it as belonging to the tendency to factional splitting and absolutism inherent in the traditions of the left.
So it makes some sort of left-sectarian sense, as Thomas Cushman says, that "at the hands of his former comrades, Hitchens has been subjected not just to criticism, but to actual disparagement. He has been denounced and excommunicated, purged from the orbit of the left, and subjected to a plethora of what the sociologist Harold Garfinkel referred to as "degradation ceremonies." The main accusation is that he has become a rank ideologist of imperialism and a fanatical "cheerleader" for the Bush administration and American expansionism. Thus he is a "turncoat," a defector, a traitor. And since being a turncoat seems to be indicative of a far wider moral decline, Hitchens is accused, variously, of being a racist; an alcoholic; a snob; dishonest; venal; overweight; unkempt; psychopathic; and a closeted homosexual. Hitchens has thus been, to paraphrase Garfinkel, "ritually separated" from the left; his former identity defamed as a sham. Marc Cooper is perhaps right: "Leaving the left can be a bit like trying to quit the mafia. You can't get out without getting assassinated."
Marxists in the White House
Hitchens tells a story about the time that the newly appointed Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, first came to Washington, and stayed in a wing of the White House, along with other members of his administration and various figures—Kurdish, Shia and Sunni—who had participated in the movement to topple Saddam. Hitchens was invited to a reception there. "And at one point," he says, "we were all babbling, and Talabani said that whenever he'd quarrelled with Paul Bremer, which he often did, Bremer would says 'that's just your Marxist training coming out again.' There was a pause. And then Talabani remarked, 'I wonder if President Bush knows how many Marxists he has under his roof this evening?'"
Hitchens replied that Bush probably didn't have the faintest idea, but that if he did, he probably wouldn't mind. Because at least it was an assurance of a group defined by something other than religious sectarianism. (Hitchens does not see any aspect of Bush's foreign policy as being forged out of his own Christianity.)
"Their Marxism was very different from mine," Hitchens clarifies. "There was much more Maoist stuff—third-worldism, Castroism—in the background. Still, that was a great moment, and everybody saw the joke."
Hitchens on the "Protestant revolution"
Hitchens doesn't have a historical imagination in the sense of being absorbed by the details of events for their own sake; rather, those events he invests with significance are marshalled—in his basically Marxist telling—as if history might obey a grand, overarching argument. Identifying the traditions from which he has drawn to become a leading agitator of the new atheism, the Cromwellian revolt represents not merely the foundational struggle for parliamentary rule, but the great rejection of divine right. His understanding of the origin of human rights comes down to a mechanism of conflict: rights emerged not a priori, but because "the other side" claimed theirs were divine. One might assume that he'd therefore find it awkward to celebrate a period in which all parties fought with God on their side, and when factional politics were inseparable from the sectarian psychologies of faith. But not a bit of it. Relishing its triumphal Protestant music, Hitchens recites the "Battle of Naseby," Thomas Babington Macaulay's 19th-century eulogy to the decisive encounter, in 1645, of the English civil war. Macaulay's 15-verse ballad begins:
Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press that ye tread?
Oh! evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God.
Hitchens loves the English poetic tradition as ferociously as he rejoices in political argument. For him, the twinning of these two obsessions is best represented in the fact that Marvell, Milton and Dryden all marched in Oliver Cromwell's funeral procession. "No monarch," he points out, "has ever had that kind of retinue; but they turned up for Cromwell. This is what the Protestant revolution means to me."
What's less easy to understand is how Hitchens avoids emotional contradiction. Listening to him recite Macaulay on the English civil war is to be confronted by a riotous admixture of the revolutionary, the puritanical, the bacchanalian and the theological. Yet from this Hitchens derives unequivocal conclusions: progress, rights, atheism. The argumentative tactic is essentially that of splitting off the things he advocates from those he rejects, even if they have shared sources. Hence what he calls his "Protestant atheism" and his claim that the liturgies of the King James Bible and Cranmer prayer book provided, at once, a poetics to embrace and a system of belief to reject. He plucks a secular vocabulary from the literary canon and rips away the roots of religious mythology from which much of it flowered. His is a mentality of opposition, not internal contradiction. If history throws up competing claims, he splits the difference and argues for the one he considers to be correct.
Reciting poetry, rejecting faith
In a raw, almost confessional article he wrote for Vanity Fair last November, Hitchens described how a US army officer, Mark Daily, had died in Iraq having signed up because of his belief in the American mission; a belief for which he had found justification in Hitchens's advocacy of the invasion. By this stage Hitchens was conceding his "deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war." Shaken by Lieutenant Daily's funeral service, which he attended, and by the moving reception he received from the young man's family, he signed off his article with the words: "May death be not proud to have taken Mark Daily." The allusion to one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets is affecting but also perplexing. Donne, after all, was quite explicit about what it was that allowed him to disdain death: the conviction that, after a short sleep, "wee wake eternally."
Religious feeling emerges, Hitchens declares in God Is Not Great, from the fear of darkness and death which has been with us ever since "the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species." To be at war with that, he comes close to acknowledging, is to be engaged in an unwinnable battle with ordinary human nature.
His love of English poetry and hatred of religion inevitably clash, though he palms off the difficulty. Hitchens has a favourite question he likes to put to believers who propose the argument that, without religion, there can be no motivation for morality. In response, he asks: is there any moral action that a believer has ever performed that could not have been performed by a non-believer? To this unarguable rhetorical challenge, he has received only one response that has unsettled him. Could John Donne have written the Holy Sonnets had he not experienced religious faith? One could ask the same question of many of the authors in the literary canon whom Hitchens loves.
In God is not Great, he rather peculiarly alludes to his own death, citing the passage from Paul to the Philippians that he read at his father's funeral. The spirit of these words, Hitchens declares, is the one he hopes to embrace at his own last hour: "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." Naturally, he considers this to be an "essentially secular injunction." But one doesn't need to be a believer to detect a sleight of hand in the unnecessary insistence. No religion comprises merely belief. The appeal of observance is aesthetic, ritual, communal. If theological thought can produce poetry or wisdom, just as rational and executive functions of the brain may be a product of its "lower" functions, why the furious urge to exterminate the associative link?
"It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human," the political philosopher John Gray has said. "Evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms—rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them."
Gray—who finds Hitchens the most intellectually interesting of the new atheists—argues that his kind of atheism also derives from a faith. Not Marxism or socialism as such, though these also rely on redemptive beliefs. Rather it's the notion of history as an argument and a narrative. "The belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism," Gray writes. "It is a myth created by the need for meaning."
For Hitchens, 9/11 was the "flash that illuminates the whole scene." He says he was quite conscious that it would mean the breaking of old friends and alliances. "I knew that this would be going on for the rest of my life, and probably my children's lives," he explains. "It reminded me of something I used to be fond of telling other people, but had temporarily forgotten myself—you can't escape politics. If you try, it will come after you, like the Hound of Heaven: 'I fled him down the nights and down the days, I fled him down the arches of the years, I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind.'" Quoting from Francis Thompson's poem, Hitchens pauses for the joke to sink in: that he is putting politics in the place of God.
Hitchens on Hitchens
Publishers in both Britain and America have recently been urging Hitchens to produce a memoir, so he uses our interviews to exercise an autobiographical muscle. He concedes that, if such a book is to work, he'll have to formulate some kind of developmental principle. I ask whether he favours "psychobabble" or "biobabble." Does he believe, in other words, that he is a dynamically shaped product of early events, or a result of innate personality traits? It's a false dichotomy, of course, but the way people answer that question usually provides some indication of how they imagine themselves. Hitchens opts for the innate. He remains suspicious of "Damascene" or transforming moments—preferring to think in terms of catalysing ones. In the God book, he describes how his earliest rejection of religion was, if anything, an anti-epiphany. "It was a way of discovering what, and indeed how, I already thought," he says.
His notion of the origins of morality similarly belongs to the realm of the innate. "There's a species feeling," he says. "If you see a woman being pushed to the ground and kicked in the stomach you should feel a natural revulsion, an innate protective instinct. Would that revulsion be increased if you knew if she was with child? The answer is yes. Why would that make it worse? It shouldn't be a question. It shouldn't need an answer. People who need that explained to them are socio- or psychopathic; morally defective."
Short of going into the evolutionary, adaptive arguments for altruism, this is probably what morality must consist of for a materialist. In Hitchens's case, it's also a justification for one of the views he has long held, against the general tendency of left-wing attitudes: his anti-abortion position. "I think there's something innate in that too," he says. "I had disagreements with the so-called women's 'right to choose' lot because it seemed to me that the concept of an unborn child was a real one, materially, embryologically. What else can it be? It's a life, it's not un-alive, and if it's alive what kind of life is it except human? I disliked the kind of argument that it's just a growth or projection on the female form, an appendix or tumour."
In Letters to a Young Contrarian, Hitchens considers those dissidents who can trace their careers to an incident in early life "where they felt obliged to make or take a stand." But clearly he also feels that the urge to dissent must spring from some inherent trait of personality. When he writes the following, one assumes he is thinking of himself: "Quite often, the 'baptism' of a future dissenter occurs in something unplanned, such as a spontaneous resistance to an episode of bullying or bigotry, or a challenge to some piece of pedagogical stupidity… It would be encouraging to believe that such reactions are innate, because then we can be certain that they will continue to occur, and will not depend for their occurrence upon the transmission of good examples or morality tales."
Though he is no slouch when it comes to advertising his own participation in events or arguments, Hitchens rarely chooses to write directly about his own life. The only near-intimate account he has laid down in print was a piece published in 1988 by the New York magazine Grand Street, described in my Hitchens portrait. On another more recent occasion, when the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy commissioned him to write about his political journey, he entitled the essay "Can One Be A Neo-Conservative?" and was irritated to find this translated into French as "How I Became A Neo-Conservative." It wasn't just the misrepresentation that grated, but the way it implied a narrative of personal development. In fact, his 12,000-word article contains no interior interpretation at all, being an account solely of political positions he has held since 1968. Hitchens is not much taken by the idea of an inner self that can be shaped or transformed. Rather it's the principle of ideas and character transforming a malleable world that animates him. He has no patience with the project of explaining one's actions through detailed self-scrutiny and trying to become "a better person." It is man as a public beast that concerns him.
After what he calls the "high tide of the rogue left" had been reached in 1968, he says, "you started to hear the slogan: the personal is political. That was the worst legacy of the 1960s. And I just felt the most awful premonition when I heard it. What that proved to be was the midwife of feckless, narcissistic postmodernism; a pseudo-radical concentration on the self and that sort of thing. It's now a curse from one end of every campus to the next: stultifying, boring, horrible—and, I think, part of the reactionary left. Suddenly the measure became how much you could talk about your own specific sense of grievance. People would begin sentences with 'As a…' Then it would be 'woman, homosexual, Pakistani' or something. It's no longer what you think, or what you know, but how you feel and who you happen to be. As if these were achievements, that you'd done something to earn it. No, no, no. I hate that."
Hitchens is not, as it were, autobiographically inquisitive. The scattered vignettes Hitchens recalls of his upbringing are largely those that fit the adult profile, such as the story that opens God Is Not Great, of his spinsterly natural history teacher spouting religious absurdities at him when he was nine. The English landscape he loves is less the Dartmoor he experienced himself than the one he experienced in John Clare's poetry. He cites Philip Larkin in describing the rest of childhood as "a forgotten boredom." When he describes his first memory, of crossing the grand harbour of Valletta with his mother when he was two or three, the memory may be authentic or retrospectively constructed. But it doesn't matter. More significant is the fact that he considers it to be a "major one."
He describes the impact of his mother's suicide on his father as follows: "Picture if you will, a guy who lives in north Oxford in a respectable street who is the bursar of a boys' prep school, whose social circle consists of masters and wives and so on. He has gone to all the lengths of deceiving them, with my mother showing up at cricket matches, playing the hostess. Then they open the newspaper and find out that she's run off with another guy, and either been killed by him or died for love of him, and my father has to realise that everyone he knows in the world—and it's a very small world—knows everything.
Hitchens is quite frank in the way he tells this story. There are some aspects that he wants to keep off the record, to avoid reopening a wound between him and his brother. Otherwise, he spares none of the details, nor the derangement of what his mother's lover did, disembowelling himself in an Athens hotel in 1973 while she took sleeping pills. Yet Hitchens declines to countenance the notion that his mother's death, any more than her Jewishness, had a shaping or determining influence on him. To describe this as repression or self-preservation would probably be meaningless. It does, however, fit with the strategy by which his interpretation of history repeatedly performs its acts of separation: the Protestant revolution from Puritanism, literature from faith, adult reason from infantile fear. At the end of God is Not Great, he summarises what's required to maintain momentum towards a humane civilisation. "We first have to transcend our prehistory," he writes, "and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection."
Hitchens on brotherhood
Ten years ago, Prospect initiated what has become an occasional spectator sport, by pitting Christopher and Peter Hitchens against one another on a debating platform. The spectacle of two brothers with strikingly similar looks and manners but with strikingly divergent political views has been a crowd-puller ever since, most recently in Michigan, before an audience of 1,200 people, where the brothers debated religion and Iraq. To describe one as being of the left and the other as being from the right seems increasingly redundant. Peter, opposing the invasion of Iraq, once described it as a "left-wing war" (presumably thinking of Christopher's advocacy of it). Both seem to enrage their own "sides." Nevertheless, one has conservative social and religious views that the other despises; and they pull no punches in an argument. Christopher dismisses the significance of the sibling relationship. "He and I have never lived in the same town or the same context for more than a few months since we were quite small, and I don't know him very well," he says." If it wasn't for the political dimension, no one would be interested in this. Lots of people have brothers they don't get on with, siblings they don't see. Because of the politics, my relationship with Peter fascinates people much more than it does me, or him."
Nevertheless, in the Mail on Sunday, Peter recently described how their relationship developed as a result of this encounter: "On this we agree: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if it gets us disliked. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions. We sometimes also arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier to do than you might think. This will not make us close friends at this stage in two very separate lives. Let's not get sentimental or soppy here. But I was astonished, on this spring evening by the Grand River, to find that the longest quarrel of my life seemed to be over, just when it appeared to be at its most intense."
Friendship and betrayal
The big British friendships of Hitchens's life—with Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie—remain intact. He is capable of intense personal loyalty and selfless gestures. (He once threatened to resign from the Nation if his former friend—now enemy—Alexander Cockburn was sacked from the magazine. As he says, "When it comes to the pinch, I'm a good person to have in your corner.") But, for him, friendship can be made or broken over an argument. Most notoriously, in 1999, he signed an affidavit to the effect that his close friend Sidney Blumenthal, then a Clinton aide, had described Monica Lewinsky as a "stalker." Blumenthal had testified on oath that he had made no such claim. It was an act Hitchens performed out of his hatred of Clinton, but it was widely seen as a vicious personal betrayal, and lost him many more friendships than merely Blumenthal's.
Hitchens describes the Blumenthal incident as unusual even by his own standards of fighting with friends. "To be accused of disloyalty to a friend in a crisis is a very severe thing. It was pure accident really. He told me something that he shouldn't have at a time when it wasn't a legal matter. It only became significant later. I found that I was in possession of something that had serious implications. And I did think it would be withholding evidence if I didn't come forward with it, and it would be something like perjury if I was asked if I knew about it, and said no, by the house committee—who did call. I thought I really didn't have much alternative. I think it's a case that's fantastically unlikely to re-occur. We were pretty tight, but he had become a different person working for that thug [Clinton]. He sounded different, walked differently. Like he'd gone to work for John Gotti or something. It was awful. And they were conspiring to pervert the course of justice. And they tried to intimidate and slander a truthful witness.
"I got a very nice letter from Monica Lewinsky, saying thanks for sticking up for me and thanks for opening my eyes to what my boyfriend was like. I've had letters of thanks from two or three of Clinton's female victims. Which means quite a lot to me—more than Sidney does, put it like that. And these are women he was defaming and in one sense almost blackmailing. I hope I wouldn't have as a friend anyone who would do that."
Befriending Wolfowitz
There's a story that, with his articles advocating invasion in 2002, Hitchens had been attempting to "send a message" to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defence and one of the war's key intellectual architects, and that he was rewarded with a personal meeting—an invitation Wolfowitz's special adviser, Kevin Kellems, has described as "like contacting someone on the other side you think might want to defect." The message wasn't intentional, Hitchens says, but the story is "effectively true." They met, and Wolfowitz showed him a photograph of the Reagan cabinet in the White House situation room on the night of the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Standing to one side was the younger Wolfowitz, who had persuaded his superiors not to step in to save Marcos. This was Wolfowitz essentially telling Hitchens that he had been a long advocate of reversing the old tendencies of American foreign policy, and the "principle of proxy rule."
Hitchens thought it "an attractive pitch." They discussed their mutual dislike of Henry Kissinger, and what Wolfowitz saw as the betrayal of the Shia rebellion after the first Iraq war. "I could see where he was going with this," Hitchens says. "He said there's only one area in the world where we still rule by proxy, second hand through local regimes. The middle east. He said, 'Are you interested in more conversation?' and I said, 'Sure.'" Hitchens thereafter joined a Washington group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which he describes as a mixture of human rights activists, eastern Europe veterans, Bosnia hands, Kanan Makiya and a few other Iraqis. These were the people who the chat shows would start to call for comment, and Hitchens became a regular.
On not regretting the Iraq invasion
You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong. Kanan Makiya, interview in the New York Times, October 2007
Hitchens explains his ongoing belief in the Iraq project with a classically leftist summation of historic betrayals: "Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy US involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the US at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion." That, and later US abandonment of the Shia uprising after the first Gulf war, are the historical betrayals that Hitchens views the 2003 invasion as rectifying—with key administration architects of the war, such as Paul Wolfowitz, attempting to reverse the cynical, Kissingerian realpolitik of earlier American foreign policy.
As to the idea that Iraq became a recruiting ground for al Qaeda, he says: "That's turned out to be very untrue. I think we can say one thing for certain; whoever takes over Iraq it's not going to be them. And the signs are it's drying up. We've learned how to fight and beat these people. Everything I hear from Anbar province and Ramadi is that the al Qaeda guys were rejected completely by the locals, turned in by them, killed like rats. This is going to be the great success of the thing, whatever happened in the short run. And we're having to train people of our own, our best blood, to fight and discredit and kill them. This gets me called genocidal, because I want to kill the people who'd put a car bomb outside a girls' school, or a Shia mosque, or a funeral procession. But we're going to need these skills again, the skills of isolating and killing al Qaeda. And we're training a generation of young officers for whom that's the baptism of fire. It's horrible, but the casualties we're taking are not war-level of casualties, and Baghdad is stabilising."
Click here to read Alexander Linklater's portrait of Christopher Hitchens
