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May 28, 2002
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France,
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A Hero
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May 24, 2002
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Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
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Mark Weisbrot
Bush
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Former
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May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
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Travails
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May 22, 2002
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Dick Cheney's Obscenity
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May 21, 2002
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Riddle
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Displaced Reality:
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Confusing the Face
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"War
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May 20, 2002
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Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
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In Defense
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Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
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May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
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Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
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May
28, 2002
No
Longer an Authentic Voice of Dissent
Christopher Hitchens:
the Dishonorable Policeman of the Left
by Scott Lucas
The
New Statesman
It was a sudden, devastating attack. The perpetrator
struck mercilessly, leaving no time for a considered response.
When he had finished, the 'left' was in ruins.
'I have no hesitation in describing this
mentality, carefully and without heat,' the author wrote heatedly,
'as soft on crime and soft on fascism. No political coalition
is possible with such people and, I'm thankful to say, no political
coalition with them is now necessary. It no longer matters what
they think.'
And, with that strike, we could rest
assured that no dissent--no quibbling about military action against
Afghanistan; no worries about the bypassing of the United Nations
or the International Court of Justice; no concerns that the Israel-Palestine
issue, the tensions in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia or the
Philippines would remain even after Osama Bin Laden and Mullah
Omar had been hunted down; no mention of the long-term expansion
of American power for motives perhaps less noble than the 'war
on terrorism'--would rise from the smouldering target of this
invective. For the attacker was not Donald Rumsfeld but the self-proclaimed
'contrarian', the 'singularly insightful . . . critic of American
policy and culture' (Reason magazine), the 'honorable man of
the left' (Atlantic magazine), that 'authentic voice of dissent'
(Observer), Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens's assault was masterful.
He gave it non-partisan respectability by launching it across
the Anglo-American political spectrum: the London Evening Standard
on 19 September 2001; the Nation, almost the only semblance of
a mainstream 'left' journal in the US, on 24 September; the Guardian
and Spectator in the following three days. His past record--as
vilifier of Pinochet's Chile and scourge of Bill Clinton's 'Monicagate',
of air strikes against Iraq and the Sudan, and, above all, for
tracking the 'war criminal' Henry Kissinger--established his
claim to being the honourable policeman of the left, attacking
it in order to save it.
Since then, Hitchens has worked his beat
masterfully. In addition to his periodic walkabouts in the Guardian,
the Mirror and the Evening Standard, there has been the unveiling
of his tome Letters to a Young Contrarian, an appearance on Start
the Week, the references to his latest book-length mission, Orwell's
Victory (in which he binds history to the present by exalting
the 'decent Englishman' George and smiting evildoers such as
Raymond Williams). There has even been time to inspire, with
wit and wine, Lynn Barber's tribute in the Observer. Hitch has
toned down the polemic and moved to other concerns--he's travelled
through India and revisited his persistent target Kissinger--but
still he lurks behind the forelock, ready to pounce if the bad
lefties reassemble to suck up to Islam: 'I'm not surprised at
criticism from the 'Ramadanistas' . . . I don't care what they
think . . . It's one long bleat from these guys and gals.'
But it ain't the final reel for our hero
yet. Sheriff Hitchens rode into London on 15 May, saddling up
for a debate on 'the war on terrorism', and found that all his
carpet-bombing, daisy-cutting rhetoric hadn't wiped out the 'left'.
On the podium, there was top schoolmarm
Onora O'Neill, with her pragmatic approach to nation states and
human rights, politely asking about the evidence to prove Hitchens's
'Islamic fascist' conspiracy (in which he characterises Islam
as one homogenised entity, committed to imposing sharia law across
the globe). There was Jacqueline Rose, the Freudian with the
heart of gold, linking Hitchens's rhetoric to that of Tony Blair,
Ariel Sharon and Osama Bin Laden: 'At best, two boys in a playground
fighting, at worst two dead men talking . . . very exciting,
very ineffectual, and very dangerous.' There was Anatole Lieven,
too thoughtful by half. He reminded the Sheriff that he, Lieven,
had supported a retaliatory strike against al-Qaeda, but then
he became a pest with his depression because the US had not developed
'a new commitment to humanitarian principles and a new sense
of international law and international institutions', and warned
that a 'war on Islam' would never succeed.
And there, at the other end of the table,
was Tariq Ali. He tried to hide his menace behind his smile,
he checked his black hat at the door, but we still knew that
he was a quick-draw barb-slinger. He quipped about the 'thinker
president' and labelled Hamid Karzai an 'old US agent'. And he
warned that 'the effects of this business are by no means over',
inconveniently noting the tenuous situation in Pakistan and the
collective blind eye to Saudi support for al-Qaeda.
The Sheriff was soon agitated, scribbling
notes and scanning the audience, cheek in hand. He tested his
learned one-liners against the villainous Ali--'I'll try to avoid
casuistry as well as prolixity'; he tried his chastising one-liners--'I
hope we've heard the last of the sneering at President Bush .
We've certainly heard the first of it'; he fell back on his best
9/11 phrases--'civilian airliners turned into cruise missiles'.
But, while it may have worked in Peoria,
it wasn't going down well in London. Hitchens's opening shots
met largely with a 'been there, heard that' response. Defensive,
then desperate, he moved from target to target: how about fatwas
from Iran? Sharia law in Nigeria? Synagogues burned in Tunisia?
Synagogues burned and trashed in London? Immigrants bringing
the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen in France? Everywhere the 'destruction
of society where only one book is allowed'? No joy. Only when
the Sheriff mentioned the rightness of action in Kosovo were
some of the citizenry moved.
By contrast, Jacqueline Rose's comments
on the dangers of warrior language were warmly received, and
she was loudly commended when she took on Hitchens's free association
that 'theocratic fascism' was even responsible for the Dreyfus
affair: 'It was the French, not Islamic theocracy, that put Dreyfus
on trial.' Hitchens snapped at the audience: 'You'll clap anything?'
For the Sheriff, the evening had already
turned into High Noon: he was taking on all of us. He lashed
out: 'I won't bore you with that moral mushy stuff about airliners/
cruise missiles/terrified passengers , even if many of you have
already forgotten it'--and encountered booing and heckling. (To
its credit, the audience, as well as the moderator, immediately
silenced the hecklers.) When he was booed for turning aside a
question derisively, he redoubled the challenge to the audience:
'If you knew how you sound when you hissed, you wouldn't do it.
You sound like such berks.' And, always, there was his sneer
and mocking handclap when those listening responded to a point
that was not his: 'Anyone can get more applause than me.'
It had come to this. An elderly gentleman
challenged the Sheriff over the dangers of US foreign policy.
The Sheriff shot back wildly, 'I assume you are from the subcontinent,'
and tried to finish off his assailant: 'I wouldn't expect you
to think otherwise with your ideology.' The gentleman replied
in agitation: 'I am not from the subcontinent.' Hitchens blustered,
'We can all make mistakes.' Off mike, he said: 'Well, he certainly
looks like he's from the subcontinent.'
It didn't have to be this way. In the
first few days after 11 September, Hitchens was not attacking
(except for George W Bush, 'a shadow framed by powerful advisers
and handlers, a glove puppet with little volition of his own
and a celebrated indifference to foreign affairs'): he was cautioning
that 'the question Americans are asking is how--not why'.
But then something happened. Maybe it
was the horror and agony of losing a friend, the CNN commentator
Barbara Olson, in the attacks. Maybe it was the surge of anger
and mourning for the loss of a 'big, free, happy, carefree society'.
Maybe it was just the pressure of writing quickly for newspapers
clamouring for answers. Probably it was all of these.
Hitchens had a little think for Americans,
for all of us, and came up with an easy 'why' in the Evening
Standard:
The people who destroyed the World Trade
Center, and used civilians as accessories, are not fighting to
free Gaza.
They are fighting for the right to throw
acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi.
The petty-minded might have quibbled
at the easy slippage from 'the people who destroyed the World
Trade Center' to the unnamed 'they' who may have had nothing
to do with the attack, who may even have condemned it, but who
were undoubtedly scarring women and blowing up the Buddha. (He
was not the only person to make this manoeuvre: Bush also pulled
it off the following day in his speech to Congress, the one that
put the Taliban, rather than Osama Bin Laden, in the US cross-hairs.)
But Hitchens was already beyond such
objections, beyond the need for any understanding of the complexities
of the region, of Islam, of 'America'. The enemy was not just
over there, he was here. Suitably buoyed by this discovery, he
crushed his foes with a bombardment of invective: 'Liberal masochism
is of no use to us at a time like this, and Muslim self-pity
even less so. Self-preservation and self-respect make it necessary
to recognise and name a lethal enemy when one sees one.'
No link was too tenuous, no tone too
shrill for our intrepid protector. Hitchens assured us that if
'brave American civilians' had not been allowed 'to mount a desperate
resistance' on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in the
Pennsylvania countryside, 'I would be looking out at a gutted
Capitol or charred White House, and reading Pinter or Pilger
on how my neighbourhood had been asking for it'. The assertion
of Sam Husseini, the director of the US-based Institute for Public
Accuracy, that al-Qaeda 'could not get volunteers to stuff envelopes
if Israel had withdrawn from Jerusalem like it was supposed to--and
the US stopped the sanctions and the bombing on Iraq', was not
the 'why' that Hitchens wanted. So it became 'a simple refusal
to admit that a painful event has occurred . . . a cheery rationalisation
of something ghastly . . . a crude shifting of blame'.
This was 'with us or against us' intellectual
warfare, a 'ha ha ha to the pacifists', a warning to the moaning
'peaceniks' and any other Bin Ladens: 'There are more of us and
we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent
that our culture demands respect, too.'
This victory won, Hitchens's macho swagger
has taken a knock recently. He was unsettled by his new bedfellows'
'axis of evil', 'the symbolic phrase for everything that has
become risky and dubious and opportunistic about the new Bush
foreign policy', even as he fell into confused hand-wringing
about Iraq, where he could not wish away the problems of realpolitik
with his moral wand--'in many ways, the United States quite likes
the Saddam regime'. (C'mon, Christopher, no liberal whining!)
And the silence on the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio of the 'authentic
voice of dissent', a prominent supporter of a Palestinian state
and critic of Ariel Sharon, was finally broken on 15 April with
a column for the new-look Mirror.
But, after seeing Hitchens at the debate,
organised by the London Review of Books, I fear these thoughtful
moments will be rare. 'The Hitch' is no longer an activist, no
longer a participant in the real debates about power and who
wields it, no more a source for thought. No, he is an industry,
posing in trench coat with a cigarette dangling from his top
lip, hailed as 'one of the few remaining practitioners of the
five-hour, two-bottle lunch'. And, naturally, the most profitable
industry is a monopoly. So he packages himself, surreally, not
just as a policeman but the only policeman of 'a radical left
that no longer exists'.
Just as Orwell eventually saw himself
as Charles Dickens, 'a type hated with equal hatred by all the
smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls',
Hitchens now sees himself as Orwell (who, as the cover of Orwell's
Victory reminds us, also dangled a cigarette from his top lip),
the lone voice of decency among the ranks of a naive and/or nasty
left.
It's an effective tactic. Like Orwell,
Hitchens has made himself the poster boy of 'principled opposition',
even as he sides with the dominant powers in the US, by wielding
a scatter-gun, 'common-sense' rhetoric that does not have to
deal with troubling political or economic considerations. He
need not worry about such details. Only he, in his words, has
'elementary morals'. All others, with their 'oppositional stance'
(like Orwell's pacifists who were the accomplices of fascism,
like his 'pansy' leftist writers), can cower with their al-Qaeda
allies or whimper in the op-ed columns of the Guardian.
I don't care when the hapless Andrew
Sullivan of the Sunday Times, through columns repetitively void,
or his preening website, thrashes against the 'left'. I read
Mark Steyn's 'loud bloke in a pub' opinions in Conrad Black's
newspaper from the same safe distance that I would keep from
any loud bloke in a pub. But Hitchens, because of his past affiliations,
the quality and persistence of much of his writing, and especially
his cause celebre against Kissinger, has street cred.
This is more than a semantic scrap, more
than a sideshow to keep the intelligentsia gossiping. It is more
than another contest between Christopher and Tariq for the soul
of '68. We are well beyond 9/11, with the bodies piling up and
human rights suspended in the West Bank; with detainees languishing
uncharged not only in Camp X-Ray, but in American and British
jails; with the United States desperate to unleash its bombers
over Baghdad, to stare down Tehran, to crush insurgencies everywhere
from Colombia to the Philippines, to topple governments that
do not meet the 'with us or against us' criterion. In a 'war
on terrorism' that is highly elastic, Hitchens's rhetoric of
'Islamic fascism' stretches conveniently.
So, Sheriff, before you ride into the
sunset, into Washington's sanctuary, I'm calling you out. Before
you have another pop at the dissent of the 'left', do it fairly,
where someone can respond with the political, economic, military
and, yes, moral considerations that you might be shoving aside.
If you are going to reduce your opposition to stick men and women,
'voluntary apologists for abuse of power' standing in the way
of 'the model revolution of the American experiment', hang around
for an answer before your five-hour lunch.
Name the time, the place and the medium.
This time, bring some evidence along with your one-liners. I'll
be there.
Scott Lucas
is professor of American Studies at Birmingham University. He
is working on a book about 11 September and the betrayal of dissent.
This article originally appeared in The New Statesman.
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