I posted this yesterday on FADG and GWB.
It's an interesting piece written by a friend. He sure is an elegant writer. I'm going to paste it here, then post a reaction (not the talking-points response it got on FADG). I hope others find this interesting, and entertaining, too.
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A piece on Christopher Hitchens by George Scialabba (a piece you won['t see any place on the net but SI).* (Apologies for the formatting errors.)
Farewell, Hitch
If a hall of fame were established for contemporary
book reviewers—well, why
not? There’s one for ad executives, poker
players, and probably porn stars—Christopher
Hitchens would very likely be its
second inductee. (James Wood, of course,
would be the first.) About an amazing
range of literary and political figures—
Proust, Joyce, Borges, Byron, Bellow, Orhan
Pamuk, Tom Paine, Trotsky, Churchill,
Conor Cruise O’Brien, Israel Shahak, and
a hundred others—he has supplied the basic
information, limned the relevant controversies,
hazarded an original perception
or two, and thrown out half a dozen fine
phrases, causing between fifteen and forty-
five minutes of reading time to pass entirely
unnoticed. His very, very frequent political
columns have occasionally seemed tossed
off, it’s true; but his books about Cyprus,
the Palestinians, the British monarchy, and
the Elgin Marbles are seriously argued.
Though he lives in Washington, DC, and is
said to be very fond of fancy parties, he has
famously insulted and called for the incarceration
of a sitting President and a ubiquitously
befriended diplomat and Nobel
laureate. And he appears on all those selfimportant
TV talk shows without wearing
a tie. How can you not admire someone
like that?
Actually, it’s not so difficult, I’ve discovered.
All the someone in question has to
do is begin thinking differently from me
about a few important matters, and in no
time I find that his qualities have subtly
metamorphosed. His abundance of colorful
anecdotes now looks like incessant and
ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous
copiousness and fluency strike me as mere
mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity.
A prose style I thought deliciously
suave and sinuous I now find preening
and overelaborate. His fearless cheekiness
has become truculent bravado; his namedropping
has gone from endearing foible
to excruciating tic; his extraordinary dialectical
agility seems like resourceful and
unscrupulous sophistry; his entertaining
literary asides like garrulousness and vulgar
display; his bracing contrariness, tiresome
perversity. Strange, this alteration
of perspective; and even stranger, it sometimes
occurs to me that if he changed his
opinions again and agreed with me, all his
qualities would once more reverse polarity
and appear in their original splendor. A
very instructive experience, epistemologically
speaking.
Then again, it’s not just his changing his
mind that’s got my goat. His and my hero
Dwight Macdonald did that often enough.
But one may do it gracefully or gracelessly.
Even when all the provocations Hitchens
has endured are acknowledged (especially
the not-infrequent hint that booze has befogged
his brain), they don’t excuse his zeal
not merely to correct his former comrades
but to bait, ridicule, and occasionally slander
them, caricaturing their arguments and
questioning their good faith. Not having
recognized a truth formerly ought to make
you more patient, not less, with people who
do not recognize it now; and less certain,
not more, that whomever you currently
disagree with is contemptibly benighted.
Besides, if you must discharge such large
quantities of remonstrance and sarcasm,
shouldn’t you consider saving a bit more
of them for your disagreements—he must
still have some, though they’re less and less
frequently voiced, these days—with those
who control the three branches of government
and own the media and other means
of production?
Hitchens might want to insist, contrarily,
that although he has changed his allies, he
has not changed his opinions. Unlike, say,
David Horowitz, he still believes that the
Cold War was an interimperial rivalry, the
Vietnam War was immoral, the overthrow
of Allende was infamous, and American
support for Mobutu, Suharto, the Greek
colonels, the Guatemalan and Salvadoran
generals, the Shah of Iran, and the Israeli
dispossession of Palestinians was and is indefensible.
He still believes in progressive
taxation; the New Deal; vigilant environmental,
occupational safety, and consumer
protection regulation; unions (or some
form of worker self-organization); and, in
general, firm and constant opposition to
the very frequent efforts of the rich and
their agents to grind the faces of the poor.
It’s just that he now cordially despises most
of the people who proclaim or advocate
these things. Why?
It began with the Balkan wars. Hitchens
supported NATO intervention, in
particular the bombing of Serbia in March
of 1999. Some of his opponents on the left
argued that NATO gave up too easily on (or
indeed sabotaged) diplomacy, was wrong
not to seek UN authorization to use force,
and may have precipitated a humanitarian
catastrophe (the flight and deportation of
hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians
after the bombing began) that might
not otherwise have occurred. Hitchens replied
furiously—though not, by and large,
to these arguments; rather, to other ones,
either nonexistent or easier to refute: for
example, opposition “in principle in any
case to any intervention,” and insistence
that in view of its imperialist past the United
States could never in any circumstances
be a force for good. His most reflective
comments did seem to take his opponents’
point: “Skeptical though one ought to be
about things like the reliance of NATO on
air power and the domination of the UN
by the nuclear states, the ‘double standard’
may still be made to operate against itself.”
But such moments were few.
Since 9/11, reflectiveness and skepticism
have gone on holiday from his political
writing. Logic and good manners have also
frequently called in sick. “Embattled” is
too mild a description of his state of mind;
it’s been inflamed. Those who returned different
answers than he did to the questions
“Why did 9/11 happen?” and “What should
we do about it?” were not to be taken seriously.
They were Osama’s useful idiots,
“soft on crime and soft on fascism,” their
thinking “utterly rotten to its very core.”
What provoked that last epithet was a
suggestion, by a pro-Arab-American commentator,
that “Bin Laden could not get
volunteers to stuff envelopes if Israel had
withdrawn from Jerusalem . . . and the
US stopped the sanctions and bombing of
Iraq.” Hitchens went ballistic. The hapless
fool who wrote this, he thundered, either
“knows what was in the minds of the murderers,”
in which case “it is his solemn responsibility
to inform us of the source of
his information, and also to share it with
the authorities,” or else he doesn’t know,
in which case it is “rash” and “indecent”
to speculate.
Hitchens proceeded to speculate. Al Qaeda,
like its allies the Taliban, aims first “to
bring their own societies under the reign of
the most pitiless and inflexible declension
of shari’a law,” and then, since it regards
all unbelievers as “fit only for slaughter
and contempt,” it will seek to “spread the
contagion and visit hell upon the unrighteous.”
Talk of “Muslim grievances” is rubbish;
al Qaeda’s only grievance is that it
has not yet enslaved the whole world. Jihad
means, simply, the obligatory conquest or
destruction of everything outside Islam.
Hitchens has asserted this insistently: for
him, to talk about “grievances expressed
by the people of the Middle East” in connection
with 9/11 is obscene. Bin Laden
and al Qaeda are “medieval fanatics”; they
“wish us ill”; no more need be said. To presume
to “lend an ear to the suppressed
and distorted cry for help that comes, not
from the victims, but from the perpetrators”
just amounts to “rationalizing” terror.
Denouncing one’s opponents as soft on terror
has been the first or last resort of many
scoundrels in the political debates of the
past few decades in America. (Actually, it’s
such a dubious tactic that even the scoundrels
don’t usually get further than broad
hints.) One is surprised to see Hitchens doing
it. But even more important: Is he right
about al Qaeda? Does he know “what was
in the minds of the murderers”?
In Imperial Hubris and its predecessor,
Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, veteran CIA
analyst Michael Scheuer, former head of
the Agency’s al Qaeda task force, writes:
Bin Laden and most militant Islamists
[are] motivated by . . . their hatred for
a few, specific US policies and actions
they believe are damaging—and threatening
to destroy—the things they love.
Theirs is a war against a specific target
and for specific, limited purposes.
While they will use whatever weapon
comes to hand—including weapons of
mass destruction—their goal is not to
wipe out our secular democracy, but
to deter us by military means from attacking
the things they love. Bin Laden
et al are not eternal warriors; there is
no evidence that they are fighting for
fighting’s sake, or that they would be
lost for things to do without a war to
wage. . . . To understand the perspective
of the [tens or hundreds of millions of]
supporters of Bin Laden, we must accept
that there are many Muslims in the
world who believe that US foreign policy
is irretrievably biased in favor of Israel,
trigger happy in attacking the poor
and ill-defended Muslim countries, Sudan,
Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and
so forth; rapacious in controlling and
consuming the Islamic world’s energy
resources; blasphemous in allowing Israel
to occupy Jerusalem and US troops
to be based in Saudi Arabia; and hypocritical
and cruel in its denial of Palestinian
rights, use of economic sanctions
against the Muslim people of Iraq, and
support for the Muslim world’s absolutist
kings and dictators.
For holding essentially these views about
al Qaeda’s motives, Hitchens’s leftist opponents
were labeled apologists, rationalizers,
and eager excusers of terror. A few moments’
reflection or a few grains of knowledge
would have saved Hitchens from indulging
in these slurs, so damaging to his reputation
for fairness and decency (insofar, that is, as
anyone cares about slanders against leftists).
But although his prose has retained its poise
since 9/11, his thinking has not.
On and on Hitchens’s polemics against
the left have raged, a tempest of inaccuracy,
illogic, and malice. Naomi Klein
opines that since most Iraqis agree with the
insurgents at least in wanting an end to the
occupation, the US should end it. Without
disputing her premise, Hitchens condemns
her “nasty, stupid” conclusion as an “endorsement
of jihad,” “applause for the holy
warriors,” “swooning support for theocratic
fascism.” He jeers repeatedly at the
antiwar left for having predicted that Saddam
would use WMD against a US invasion,
conveniently forgetting that what the
left actually said was: If, as the Administration
insists without evidence, Saddam has
WMD, then the most likely scenario for
their use is against a US invasion. And that
was true. Hitchens fiercely ridicules the antiwar
argument that there was no contact
and no sympathy between Saddam and al
Qaeda—only that wasn’t the argument. The
argument was that it was so unlikely Saddam
would entrust weapons of mass destruction
to al Qaeda or any other uncontrollable
agent that the United States was
not justified in invading Iraq in order to
prevent it. And that was true, too. Hitchens
continually deplores left-wing “isolationism,”
even though his opponents are, on
the contrary, trying to remind Americans
that the UN Charter is the most solemn international
agreement ever made (“the first
universal social contract,” Hitchens’s friend
Erskine Childers once observed to him),
embodying the deep, desperate hope of the
weaker nations that the stronger ones will
someday submit themselves consistently
to the rule of law; while the Bush Administration
is—not reluctantly but purposefully—
undermining it. “The antiwar left,”
Hitchens scoffs, “used to demand the lift-
ing of sanctions without conditions, which
would only have gratified Saddam Hussein
and his sons and allowed them to rearm.”
Not quite true—all leftists agreed that import
restrictions on military materials were
justified. But more important, a gratified
Saddam would not have been the “only”
result of ending sanctions. Besides killing
hundreds of thousands, the sanctions left
Iraqi society helpless, disorganized, and
dependent on the state, thus blocking the
most likely and legitimate path to regime
change—the path followed in Romania,
Haiti, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines,
and other dictatorships, all of them
more broadly based, and all (except South
Korea) ruling poorer and less-educated societies,
than pre-sanctions Iraq. Really, one
could almost get the idea that Hitchens
thinks the antiwar left doesn’t care every
goddamned bit as much as he and the neocons
about the sufferings of Iraqis.
About any sufferings that cannot serve
as a pretext for American military intervention,
moreover, Hitchens appears to
have stopped caring. (Given how much he
writes, and in how many places, if he hasn’t
mentioned something for several years it
doesn’t seem unfair to assume he’s stopped
caring about it.) He is “a single-issue person
at present,” he wrote in endorsing President
Bush for reelection. This issue, compared
with which everything else is “not
even in second or third place,” is “the tenacious
and unapologetic defense of civilized
societies against the intensifying menace
of clerical barbarism.” The invasion of Iraq
was a justified act of self-defense against
clerical barbarism, and the Bush Administration
is to be praised and supported for
undertaking it.
A lot of suffering people would disagree,
I think—and not just the perennial ones,
betrayed by every US administration: the
tens of millions who die annually for lack
of clean water, cheap vaccines, mosquito
nets, basic health care, or a thousand additional
daily calories while the US devotes
0.2 percent of its GDP (one-thirtieth of its
military budget and less than one-tenth
the cost so far of invading Iraq) to international
aid. These unfortunates are mostly
not part of a “civilized society under attack
from clerical barbarism,” so they’re out of
luck. No, I mean a new class of suffering
people, specifically attributable to the new
tenacious and unapologetic compassionate
conservatism. From its first days in office,
the Bush Administration has made clear its
determination to reverse as much as possible
of the modest progress made in the
20th century toward public provision for
the unfortunate; public encouragement of
worker, consumer, and neighborhood selforganization;
public influence on the daily
operation of government and access to the
record of its activities; public protection of
the commons; and public restraint of concentrated
financial and corporate power—
not only at home but also, to the (considerable,
given American influence) extent
feasible, abroad. And from the first weeks
after 9/11, as Paul Krugman and many others
have documented, the Administration
has found ways to take advantage of that
atrocity to achieve its fundamental goals.
The results, now and in the future, of this
return to unfettered, predatory capitalism
have been and will be a vast amount of
suffering. Enough, one would think, to be
worth mentioning in the second or third
place, after the dangers of clerical barbarism.
Not a word from Hitchens, however,
at least in print. Perhaps he is whispering a
few words about these matters in the ear of
the “bleeding heart” (Hitchens’s description)
Paul Wolfowitz and his other newly
adopted neoconservative allies.
From Hitchens, this silence is peculiar.
Another one is equally so. The South
African critic and historian R. W. Johnson
once alluded to George Orwell’s “simple
detestation of untruth.” Hitchens—who
has written very well about Orwell—was
once thought (and not only by me) to feel
the same way. No One Left to Lie To, his
finely indignant critique of Bill Clinton’s
“contemptible evasions” about his sexual
predations and even more contemptible efforts
to intimidate potential accusers, convinced
many of us that Clinton should have
resigned and faced criminal prosecution or
at least been served with a sealed indictment
at the end of his second term. (Hitchens
rightly didn’t try to make a case that
impeachment, properly limited to official
malfeasance, was warranted.) It’s a short
book, though, pocket-size and with only
103 pages of text. You would need more
than that just for a preface to an adequate
critique of the lies of the Bush Administration.
As the journalist Paul Waldman has
remarked, “Bush tells more lies about policy
in a week than Bill Clinton did in eight
years.” He has lied about taxes, budgets,
and deficits; about employment statistics;
about veterans’ benefits; about the Social
Security trust fund and the costs of privatization;
about climate change; about environmental
policy; about oil drilling in the
Arctic; about the California electricity crisis;
about stem-cell research; about Enron
and Harken; about the Florida recount in
November 2000; about his National Guard
service and his record as governor of Texas;
and about most of his political opponents.
And then there are his lies about
Iraq. The Bush Administration is the most
ambitiously and skillfully dishonest pack
of liars in American history, probably by a
large margin. And since 9/11, Hitchens has
never said a mumbling word about it.
Why? What accounts for Hitchens’s astonishing
loss of moral and intellectual
balance? I think he had a plausible and
even creditable reason. Anyone intelligent
enough to understand that there are institutional
and structural, not merely contingent,
constraints on the behavior of states
will also understand how difficult it is to
budge those constraints and produce a
fundamental change in policy. To make the
United States an effective democracy—to
shift control over the state from the centers
of financial and industrial power, now
global in reach, to broadly based, self-fi-
nanced and self-governing groups of active
citizens with only average resources—will
take several generations, at least. This is a
daunting prospect for just about anyone.
For someone of Hitchens’s generous and
romantic temperament, it is potentially demoralizing.
The temptation to believe that
this long, slow process could be speeded up
if only he could find and ally himself with
a faction of sympathetic souls close to the
seat of executive power who really understood—
i.e., the neoconservatives, the only
ones, Hitchens has written, willing to take
“the radical risk of regime change”—must
have been overpowering.
And why not? It is hardly dishonorable
to try to influence even arbitrary, undemocratic
power in a more humane direction.
Hitchens has rebuked the American left
for its supposedly intransigent refusal to
consider supporting the American government
in any military undertaking “unless
it had done everything right, and done it
for everybody.” He is mistaken. I was not,
I am sure, the only leftist who at least tried
to distinguish between intentions and consequences.
It was as plain as day to me (and
no matter what Hitchens may say, I can’t
help suspecting it was equally plain to him)
that the Bush Administration’s chief purposes
in invading Iraq were: to establish
a commanding military presence in the
region where the most important natural
resource in the world is located; to turn a
large and potentially rich country into a
virtually unregulated investors’ paradise;
to impress the rest of the world once again
with America’s insuperable lead in military
technology; to exploit the near-universal
hatred of Saddam to legitimize (by
establishing a precedent for) the doctrine
of unilateral American military intervention
expounded in the National Security
Strategy document of September 2002;
and to unify the electorate behind an administration
that was making a hash of the
economy and the environment in order
to reward its campaign contributors. Still,
this is not why I opposed the war. If I had
not also believed that the invasion would
strike a sledgehammer blow to most of the
world’s fragile hopes for international order
and the rule of law, I might have calculated
that, whatever the government’s motives,
the potentially huge expenditure of lives
and money it contemplated would be better
employed in removing Saddam than in, say,
providing clean water, cheap vaccines, mosquito
nets, et cetera to the wretched invisibles,
and so saving tens of millions of lives.
Not likely, but it would have been a decision
based on calculation rather than principle.
Even at their easiest, such calculations
are excruciating. Weighing immediate
costs and benefits is hard enough; figuring
in the effects of setting a good or bad precedent,
though often just as important, is
devilishly hard. The conscientious have always
struggled with these difficulties, and
sometimes lost patience with them. Randolph
Bourne, criticizing the New Republic
liberals of his era for supporting America’s
entry into World War I, wondered whether
realism is always a stern and intelligent
grappling with realities. May it
not sometimes be a mere surrender to
the actual, an abdication of the ideal
through a sheer fatigue from intellectual
suspense? . . . With how many of the acceptors
of war has it been mostly a dread
of intellectual suspense? It is a mistake
to suppose that intellectuality makes
for suspended judgments. The intellect
craves certitude. It takes effort to keep
it supple and pliable. In a time of danger
and disaster we jump desperately for
some dogma to cling to. The time comes,
if we try to hold out, when our nerves
are sick with fatigue, and we seize in a
great healing wave of release some doctrine
that can be immediately translated
into action.
Compare Hitchens’s widely quoted response
to 9/11: “I felt a kind of exhilaration
. . . at last, a war of everything I loved
against everything I hated.” More recently,
explaining to Nation readers last November
“Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush,” he testified
again to the therapeutic value of his
new commitment: “Myself, I have made my
own escape from your self-imposed quandary.
Believe me when I say . . . the relief is
unbelievable.” I believe him.
Will Hitchens ever regain his balance?
Near the end of his Bush endorsement,
Hitchens defiantly assures us that “once
you have done it”—abandoned cowardly
and equivocating left-wing “isolationism”
and made common cause with Republicans
in their “willingness to risk a dangerous
confrontation with an untenable and
indefensible status quo”—there is “no going
back.” Well, it wouldn’t be easy. After
heavy-handedly insulting so many political
opponents, misrepresenting their positions
and motives, and generally making an
egregious ass of himself, it would require
immense, almost inconceivable courage
for Hitchens to acknowledge that he went
too far; that his appreciation of the sources
and dangers of Islamic terrorism was neither
wholly accurate nor, to the extent it
was accurate, exceptional; that he was mistaken
about the purposes and likely effects
of the strategy he associated himself with
and preached so sulfurously; and that there
is no honorable alternative to—no “relief”
to be had from—the frustrations of always
keeping the conventional wisdom at arm’s
length and speaking up instead for principles
that have as yet no powerful constituencies.
But it would be right.
—George Scialabba
*Edit: You won't see it elsewhere, I mean, unless I or you post it elsewhere, which it's fine to do... |
