Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left

 by Nathan Alexander  

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For Christopher Hitchens, the Left has degenerated into a self-interested faction, no longer interested in the poor of all color (and sexual persuasion), and absorbed by spokespersons of diversity who seek to advance middle class constituencies of color (or sexual preference). A review of Christopher Hitchens and His Critics.

Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq and the Left
Edited by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman
Published by New York University Press (2008)
Ppbk., 392 pgs.
ISBN-10: 0814716873
ISBN-13: 978-0814716878

Christopher Hitchens’ attacks on Islamic extremism, the “contemporary” Left, and his defense of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq are the natural outgrowth of his old Trotskyite “pragmatism.” Hitchens’ intellectual orientation is that of the “Old Left,” which was committed broadly to secularism, the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and faith in the function of criticism to bring about social progress. These values (which have much in common with contemporary non-religious conservatism) have brought Hitchens into conflict with many on the contemporary American Left, whose commitment to the cause of “oppressed minorities” has loosened their commitment to the rational tradition of the Enlightenment. Whatever America’s evils, the medieval theocracies of the Middle East should represent a regressive form of political life to any modern critic on the Left or Right.  Islamic extremists, Hitchens writes, are “fighting for the right to throw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi.” The efforts of the contemporary Left to reduce the events of 9/11 to a “reaction” against American policies conceals a reactionary agenda that fails to distinguish between modern democracy and political barbarism. The bombers of Manhattan “represent fascism with an Islamic face.”

In the essays collected in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, editors Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman have gathered many of Hitchens’ writings on Iraq, terrorism and the contemporary Left, along with several responses from his critics. While the editors identify Hitchens with dense and highly intellectual (and generally tedious) left-wing critics of the “Frankfurt School,” Hitchens makes his points with the subtlety of a meat cleaver:  “There’s no time to waste on the stupid argument that such a deadly movement [as the Islamicist] represents a sort of 'cry for help' or is a thwarted expression of poverty and powerlessness . . . Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth. We are fighting . . . against the scum of the earth.”  Clearly, “there can be no compromise between [modern society] and the raving of those who study dream and are deluded by wild prophecies and who regard women as chattel and unbelievers as sacrificial animals.”

To self-styled leftists who are quick to characterize Islamacists as “the oppressed other,” Hitchens has little patience: “It is . . . impossible to compromise with the stone-faced propagandists for Bronze Age morality: morons and philistines who hate Darwin and Einstein and who managed, during their brief rule in Afghanistan, to ban and to erase music and art while cultivating the skills of germ warfare . . . In confronting such people the crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill them without pity before they can get started.”

Hitchens' distaste for the medieval regimes of the Islamic world makes him open to a variety of allies: “George Bush may subjectively be a Christian, but he — and the US armed forces — have objectively done more for secularism than the whole of the American agnostic community combined and doubled. The demolition of the Taliban, the huge damage inflicted on the al Qaeda network and the confrontation with theocratic saboteurs in Iraq represent huge advances for the non-fundamentalist forces in many countries.” Finally, in what is no doubt the most outrageous comment on the current US policy towards Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens declares that Afghanistan may very well be the first country to be bombed “out of the stone age.”

Hitchens sees the American war in Iraq (and the war on terror in general) as an extension of the broader political and cultural struggle against irrationalism. The Old Left’s belief in internationalism, he argues, should have motivated it to rally behind the Kurdish people long before the 101st Airborne executed the job themselves.  The fascist nature of Saddam’s Baathist party made regime change (even if brought about by George Bush) a “lesser evil.”¹  To leftist objections that the Bush administration should have waited for further weapons inspections, Hitchens argues that the nature of Saddam’s rule made accurate weapons inspections an impossibility. Moreover, Hitchens adds combatively, America’s historical involvement supporting Saddam’s Baathist regime is hardly an excuse for not invading it at present. America might well morally absolve itself by ridding the world of its monstrous creation.

Hitchens obviously relishes provoking his left-wing critics, and is most effective in this when attacking their principles. Today, Hitchens argues, his critics can no longer seriously claim to be left-wing. The contemporary Left (in the United States and Europe) has compromised itself by “making a moral equivalence between the US and its enemies, ie. Islamic Fascists.” The so-called Left today is “just another self-interested faction with an attitude towards government and a hope that it can get some of its people in there.” The European Left is not much better: It is a “status quo” force, “content to make voyeuristic comments about the US.”

Hitchens’ problems with the contemporary Left are part of the larger rift within the Left that took place in America in the late 1960’s. While working class activism remained important in England and to a less degree in France, in America, which had little tradition in trade union politics, student protest against the Vietnam War was replaced by very visible efforts to alleviate “ethnic oppression.” Without a focus on alleviating the poor (who were oppressed whether “of color” or not), “fighting racism” quickly lost its broad social vision and became bogged down with the hyper-moralism of middle class politics. A self-serving “diversity” industry (often located in universities) developed in the late eighties and nineties²  and thrived on promoting middle class minorities into highly visible jobs, while generally ignoring those who needed assistance the most. When critics pointed out that “affirmative action” rarely helped those most in need of affirmative action, they were all too often silenced by accusations of racism.³  The grotesque exploitation of race by wealthy “scoundrels-of-color” (such as OJ Simpson) was greeted with silence by the university which (given government money available) was delighted to become a laboratory for meeting the corporate need for “ethnic” (and sexual) harmony within the workplace.

While Hitchens had been unsettled by the Left’s lack of response to the “fatwa” against Salmon Rushdie for the publication of the Satanic Verses, the events of 9/11 made the contemporary Left’s capitulation on its old “rationalist” agenda unmistakable. For instance, reading through the responses to 9/11 in the London Review of Books⁴ not two weeks after the terrorist attacks, one realizes that had the lunatics of 9/11 used nuclear weapons on New York City instead of “merely” plane-bombs, the contemporary Left’s response would have been the same: blame America. Eric Foner, writing from ground zero, insisted he was unsure whether the plane bombs above him made him as afraid as George Bush’s rhetoric from the White House.

The contemporary Left’s “ethnographic” vision of the world is at the root of its unwillingness to make value judgments between societies liberal and illiberal. Previously political liberalism had been a yardstick by which one might assess a country’s degree of modernity. Ethnography, however, which claims to be a science of cultures, is not a political vision of the world. Consequently, rather than holding a theocracy such as Iran up to political criticism, the contemporary Left reduces both Iran and America (however bizarrely) to “ethnicities” or “cultures.” Since the Left fancies itself “in dissent,” its criticism has degenerated into a sort of “rote” outrage at any sort of attempt to hold another country responsible to liberal principles.

The crudeness of “ethnic” thinking has led to some truly bizarre attempts to ensure the leftist critic is “in dissent” (ie. succeeds in blaming America). In the issue of the London Review of Books cited earlier, Frederick Jameson declared that the US had “caused” Saddam Hussein to come to power because it permitted the Iraqi government to “kill Iraqi communists” in the 1930s.  Had the Iraqis done anything that might have made them responsible for Saddam Hussein between 1930 and 2003? It made no difference to Jameson, who preferred a transhistorical causality (however dubious) in order to hold the United States accountable for the Iraqi despotism (and consequently 9/11). To say that the Iraqis might be held responsible for their government implied that they were guilty and America was somehow innocent. In the monolithic world of “ethnic thinking,” this is impossible — if one wishes to remain “in dissent.”

Hitchens’ broader claim, that the Left today has degenerated into a “self-interested” faction, is convincing.  No longer interested in the poor of all color (and sexual persuasion), the Left has been absorbed by “spokespersons of diversity” who seek to advance middle class “constituencies of color” (or sexual preference). The shrill moralism which has accompanied these movements has resulted in student activists “demanding more supervision so that no one gets upset.” The recent spectacle of middle-class “Hillary” supporters squaring off⁵ with middle-class “Obama” supporters over who is the greater victim was the natural outcome of the absence of the regulating concept of social class. The current obsession with the personalities of the presidents, attributing to them omnipotent powers of evil (Bush) or salvation (Obama) is another way a prissy politics avoids available solutions for the still all-too-real problem of the working poor.

The editors have included in their book a number of responses to Hitchens’ polemics. Most are remarkable for their refusal to address Hitchens’ political points and their focus on personally attacking Hitchens’ character.⁶  Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman refused to let their responses to Hitchens be reprinted in this volume. Without the focus on social class, the Left will continue to pursue petty vendettas, with individuals fighting to represent in the media one constituency or ethnic group at the expense of another.

Endnotes

1.  The nature of Saddam’s rule can be found in detail in Robert Fisk’s enormous The Great War for Civilization (Vintage, 2007). While Fisk seems to oppose most American involvement in the Middle East, his account of Saddam’s monstrosities is of such magnitude that it’s hard to see how he draws the conclusion that the Americans should have, on their most recent venture into Mesopotamia, stayed home.

2. See Walter Benn-Michaels’ The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (Holt, 2007).

3. The origins of affirmative action are explored in Kevin Yuill’s Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).  Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom’s America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (Simon and Schuster, 1999), which was the most significant work on race in America in 1999, was not included in subsequent brochures at Harvard University (where Thernstrom teaches) advertising Afro-America studies.

4. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n19/mult01_.html  An exception to this dismal collection of callus ruminations are those of Hal Foster, the well known art critic. Foster “knows” all the anti-American arguments, but standing amidst the ruins of what is probably the most diverse place in the world (Manhattan), he finds the “anti-American posturing of intellectuals inadequate.” While Foster is no friend of the Right, his willingness to see 9/11 in its complexity (ie. something other than the jingoistic “it’s all America’s fault”) makes him an intellectual hero.

5. Of course there is no actual “squaring off.” The police prevent this sort of thing from really taking place. Rather, there is the spectacle of squaring off, which, in the end, is nothing more than posturing for the media.

6. Exceptions are Dennis Perrin’s piece which points out that Hitchens’ attacks on his former Left comrades do not include the late Edward Said, who was one of the worst ethno-race mongers in academia. While Hitchens' relation with Said was a strange one, Perrin’s criticism isn’t wholly accurate. Hitchens takes Said to task in a piece included in the present volume. His crack that adding ‘the other’ in quotations hardly adds anything to a political debate is probably directed at Said. Gary Malone, in another fine essay, argues that the senior Bush administration failed to back the Kurds and the Iraqis after the First Gulf War and chides Hitchens for not being more critical of the younger Bush administration.

Christopher Hitchens and His Critics is available on Amazon.com.

Book Reviews, The Left Wing

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