Mick Hartley

So many excellent articles about Christopher Hitchens. Ian McEwan at the Guardian has a fine tribute to his old friend as he lived out his last weeks. Peter Hitchens' memory of his brother is surprisingly moving. Perhaps the best I've read yet though, in terms of the man's significance as someone who kept faith with his anti-totalitarian beliefs throughout his life – which is to say, someone who didn't abandon the Left, but rather was abandoned by the Left – is David Aaronovitch's piece (£) in the Times today: 

Typical was this, written in May last year, from the high-table revolutionary Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman, claiming that “those who, like Christopher Hitchens, detest a cliché turn into one of the dreariest types of them all: the revolutionary hothead who learns how to stop worrying about imperialism and love [American neoconservative] Paul Wolfowitz”. In other words, he was the lean young man corrupted by proximity to power and need for money, and turned into the fat shill of the people’s enemy.

Is this true? Is Hitchens’ story simply one of those archetypal Fame is the Spur journeys from principle to corruption via compromise?

No. The answer is that it isn’t even remotely true. It’s a self-comforting lozenge that the lazy intellectual Left sucks on to make its pain and doubts go away. But before showing why, let’s just agree that Christopher Hitchens wasn’t a political party and Hitchensism isn’t an ideology. I didn’t agree with either the sectarian tone or the implications of his attack on religion. A decade ago I cautiously expressed the view to him that he was harsh on Bill Clinton (Hitchens had just staged a rather absurd one-man walkout of a Clinton event at the Hay Festival). “People are either herbivores or carnivores,” he replied, “and I’m a carnivore.”

But it wasn’t his style that got him excommunicated from the Left but Iraq, or to be more ideological, liberal interventionism. That’s where the split was. Hitch was one of that group of 1968’ers who emerged from the Cold War with a deep distrust of totalitarianism and excuses for it on the one hand, and of the cynical dictator-hugging realpolitik of the West on the other. No wonder one of his earliest post-Berlin Wall polemics was against Henry Kissinger, who he believed to be one of this period’s most cynical betrayers of humanity.

Rwanda provided the embers, Bosnia the fire. Any internationalist, any progressive, any leftwinger would want to intervene to try to prevent such horrors — and not just because they were horrible either, but because they made the world worse for everyone. After Srebrenica a section of the Left, including people such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit in France and Joschka Fischer in Germany, began to think realistically about what that would mean. In 1999 in Chicago — in the middle of the Kosovan war — Tony Blair almost perfectly expressed the belief and its implications.

And where was the Left? Part of it, including most of the Eagletonian pessimists who have now come to dominate the intellectual Left, simply fell back on their Cold War impulses. The problem was not totalitarianism and authoritarianism, but Western imperialism. Harold Pinter and others rushed to defend a state that gave active encouragement to racist killers such as the gangster Arkan. Pinter compounded this later by becoming part of the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic

As I recall no London Review of Books articles were written lamenting Pinter’s splenetic decline into apologism. When the Iraq war finally began in the spring of 2003 after almost a year of argument, it became clear that many on the Left now regarded being against the war as the test of belief, as the essential membership card for comradeship. But Hitch was for it. He had come to see in Saddam a gold-plated fascist of the most genocidal and war-fostering kind. It had been Kissingerian politics that had, over the years, made whole populations — Shia, Kurds, Marsh Arabs — into collateral damage, and here at least was the chance finally to smash the cycle of toleration and retreat.

Hitchens’ point was angrier and more insistent than mine. I argued that there was a case on the Left for the war. Hitchens argued that any true leftwinger would want to see the deposition of such a regime. And he was duly expelled.

There was then witnessed over and over again the extraordinary spectacle of socialists and liberals embracing George Galloway, that basted accretion of dictators’ leftovers, and tut-tutting the terrible falling off that was Hitchens. It still amazes me to think of it.

To me the Christopher Hitchens who capriciously got himself beaten up by pro-Syrian fascists in Beirut in 2009 (he was defacing one of their nasty memorials) was a far better embodiment of what it is to be “Left” than those who have spent their time weaselling out compliments to Hezbollah, urging listening to the Syrian regime, or cooing over pieces from academics reassuring them about how the Cubans still love the Castros.

Unfortunately, comrades, many of these are still around, and Hitch is dead.

If you want to read about that 2009 Beirut episode, Michael J Totten reproduces his account here.