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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Christopher Hitchens talks about his beef with the Nation, the "filthy menace" of Saddam Hussein, and how the left ceded its moral credibility by opposing the war against Islamic fascism.
Oct 29, 2002 | In the weeks leading up to the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, editors at America's premier left-wing magazine, the Nation, asked their readers to submit letters describing how that day had changed their lives. Hundreds replied and more than 40 letters were published from a diverse group of people who came from different generations, different regions of the U.S., different countries.
Christopher Hitchens, author of the magazine's "Minority Report" column, read the letters with dismay. Many of the writers offered only a glancing lament for the lives lost that day, or the acts of heroism that saved other lives; few criticized the intolerance and cruelty of al-Qaida and the Taliban. Instead, one letter writer after another attacked the United States. It was "fascist," said one. The war on terrorism was "flawed and self-serving," said another. A third seemed to find a grim silver lining: The attacks had weakened the "loony" system over which George Bush now presides.
In 20 years as the Nation's in-house contrarian, Hitchens had seen the left in all its idiosyncrasy and excess. His frustration was evident in the 1990s during his relentless criticism of -- some would say unhealthy obsession with -- President Bill Clinton, a charismatic icon for many liberals. But the left's reaction to Sept. 11 did what Clinton's misdeeds and his supporters' defense of them never could: It drove Hitchens away from the Nation. In an interview last week, Hitchens recalled that his reaction to the Sept. 11 letters was decisive: "Well, that's goodbye. I don't want to have anything to do with reinforcing that kind of public opinion."
Earlier this month, he wrote a column that was in some ways an answer to those letters, and to all the reflexively antiwar readers of the Nation. It called Saddam Hussein "a filthy menace," and reiterated Hitchens' support for Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of Saddam's regime. It doubted Bush's competence to prosecute the Iraq liberation effort. And it questioned whether Western antiwar groups would ever be persuaded by the voluminous evidence that shows Saddam to be a ruthless, murderous tyrant. "I have come to realize that the magazine ... is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden," he wrote. Then, abruptly, he ended the column with the announcement that it would be his last.
History may see the column as a small but telling moment for the modern American left. Hitchens' sentiments were no doubt heartfelt, but it is difficult to imagine that he is anything but delighted with the controversy he has provoked. An ex-Trotskyist, expat Brit living in Washington, a loquacious but unpredictable rebel in the pundit class, Hitchens today finds himself at a singular position: He is friend to neither left nor right, but reserves the right to eviscerate them equally and in due proportion with whatever blade is at hand.
Hitchens was in San Francisco last week promoting his latest book, "Why Orwell Matters" (Basic Books). And in a 90-minute interview on the storied terrace at Enrico's in North Beach, he nursed a glass of red wine and chain-smoked Rothmans, pausing only to relish a small chocolate souffli with crhme anglais. In the interview -- which appears below, condensed in deference to the limits of the reader's time -- Hitchens did not so much answer questions as use them as a springboard for long, impassioned ruminations and fulminations on Orwell, Iraq, terrorism and the state of the left in America.
During the discussion, he acknowledged the inherent "contradiction" at finding himself allied with Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and other Iraq hawks close to President Bush, although he said nothing to embrace them. But he reserved most of his animus for the left. Many will argue it was unnecessary for Hitchens to leave the left, that the left had already left him thanks to his unrelenting attacks on Clinton and his support for impeachment. During impeachment hearings, he provided Senate investigators with an affidavit swearing that White House aide Sidney Blumenthal (formerly a close friend) told him Monica Lewinsky was a "stalker," contradicting Blumenthal's sworn testimony. In July 1999, many Hitchens fans were aghast when the Nation columnist teamed up with right-wing Rep. Bob Barr to headline an anti-Clinton Free Republic rally.
Since leaving the Nation, Hitchens says he's felt "emancipated," though the relief does not seem to have dimmed his antipathy for the politics espoused by Noam Chomsky, Ramsey Clark and the legions now carrying placards urging "No War on Iraq." Why, he asks, did they not organize demonstrations against Saddam when he gassed his people, against the Taliban when they imposed harsh religious rule on Afghanistan, or against the al-Qaida attacks at the World Trade Center or elsewhere around the world?
"The term 'the American left' is as near to being meaningless or nonsensical as any term could really be in politics," he says. "It isn't really a force in politics anymore. And it would do well to ask itself why that is."
Though it is a risk to summarize Hitchens' carefully nuanced opinions, it is fair to say that he sees in the left's reaction to Sept. 11 a failure to understand a profound change in world relations -- a failure that makes the left irrelevant. The old political conflicts -- and the old paradigm of opposition -- are largely fading, and they've been replaced by a global conflict of theocratic states or movements against secular states. A conflict between God and reason, perhaps, with Hitchens very much allied with the latter. And that is a natural position for a leftist, he says, but the left has become so mesmerized by multiculturalism that it will not criticize even those cultures that oppose freedom.
"I love it when Muslims go to war with each other, as I do when the Christians do," he says, "because it shows there's no such thing as the Christian world and the Islamic world. That's all crap."
For Hitchens, clearly, life without a grudge would be no life at all -- and he accumulates enemies and nurtures his fights as an oenophile collects fine wines. He won notoriety for a 1997 book that savaged Mother Teresa as a fraud. He is among those pushing to have former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger tried as a war criminal. And in the interview last week, he had pointed criticism for figures arrayed from left to right: Not just Chomsky, Kissinger, Clinton and Ramsey Clark, but Pat Buchanan, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, George Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan, Vladimir Putin, Alexander Cockburn, Karl Rove, Jerry Falwell and even former President Jimmy Carter, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner.
And these days, more than any other, Saddam Hussein.
How do you think Orwell is applicable to our times? Or, as I think the Washington Post phrased it in the past couple of days: What would Orwell be saying if he were alive today?
Well, I've no claim to be his ventriloquist in any way, or rather, to be able to ventriloquize him, but I'm sure no one would think I was an opportunist or just trying to sell my book if I pointed out that in the course of the last week, we saw the Iraqi people forced to humiliate themselves by a supposed 100 percent turnout and a supposed 100 percent vote and forced to degrade themselves by a big brother figure who might've modeled his regime on Orwell. And the same could be said of the other news that troubled our sleep last week, which is the news from North Korea, which -- I've been to both of these countries, by the way, so I'm nearly up to speed with the axis of evil -- and however much you want to avoid the clichi, there's no way of spending even a day in a North Korea without thinking about Orwell. It's as if they took their playbook from him -- a completely hermetic state, endless adulation of the leader, literally hate meetings at workplaces about foreign powers and foreigners. The abolition of the private life. The abolition of the sexual life. So what would he be if he were still alive? He'd be a fairly sardonic 99-year-old. I think he might say: "Well look, you, it was easy to see the totalitarian system is a threat not to its own people alone, but to others. And that method of thinking, that method of rule is deadly and has to be opposed." Then there are things about the language. The great lesson Orwell taught me was the connection between the struggle over language and the struggle for freedom -- for free thinking -- and that you have to realize that so many traps lurk in the language so that a term like "collateral damage" I think would obviously be easy meat for him as a way of describing dead civilians. I'm impressed that when people hear phrases like that, they think of Orwell. But I think he would also object to people who say: "No war on or with Iraq." That's using language for propaganda also, in a very base and I think a very crude and obvious way.
