[D66] Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

[Antid Oto]

(Zelf nooit veel belangstelling gehad voor deze renegaat en pseudo-Trot. Zijn
boekje over Thomas Paine ligt nog ergens stof te verzamelen.)

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)
by Alex Callinicos

The news of the writer Christopher Hitchens’s death fills my mind with
contradictory images and feelings.

I remember the young Christopher. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the
same Oxford college in the late 1960s. He was then the best known activist of
the International Socialists (IS, now the Socialist Workers Party) at Oxford.

Chain-smoking, elegant even in the donkey jacket that was standard issue on the
revolutionary left, he was a brilliant orator. It was from him that I first
learned, often with the force of revelation, many of the main ideas of the
Marxist tradition.

Even then it was clear that Christopher was hedging his bets. In his
autobiography Hitch-22 he concedes he led a double life, “speaking with a
bullhorn from an upturned milk crate outside a factory, and then later
scrambling into a dinner jacket and addressing the Oxford Union debating society
under the rules of parliamentary order”.

This tension became stronger after Christopher left Oxford and became a
journalist in London. He became a central figure in a famous literary set,
including Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, and drifted towards Labourism.

The Portuguese Revolution of 1975-6 brought the reformist Socialist Party into
confrontation with self-organised workers and soldiers. It marked, Christopher
writes, “the end of the line” for his relationship with the IS.

The last time I saw Christopher was in the summer of 1980, when he was about to
move to the US—permanently, as it proved. America was the making of his career.
Chatshow audiences loved watching pompous grandees being skewered and insulted
by someone with a posh English accent.

This isn’t to diminish the political role that Christopher played during the
1980s and 1990s. Being at the very centre of the empire seemed to provide the
pressure that allowed him to flourish as a critic of US foreign policy and
champion of the Palestinians. He also became a fine writer, capable of producing
superb essays.

And then he flipped, responding to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington
by rallying to what would soon become his adopted flag and supporting George W
Bush in his wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

I still find this hard fully to explain. Christopher had developed earlier a
weakness for “progressive” patriotism, supporting Margaret Thatcher’s war
against Argentina over the Falklands.

He managed to convince himself during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s that the
Bosnian Muslims were the contemporary equivalent of the Spanish Republicans of
the 1930s.

But whatever the explanation, nothing can excuse Christopher’s reactionary
rantings against Muslims. His attempt to provide intellectual cover for these
with a superficial and ignorant polemic against religion in general was
memorably demolished by Terry Eagleton.

I remember first reading in an early article by Christopher this passage from an
essay by the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre, then a Marxist:

“Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay … The one is
of JM Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky … The one the intellectual guardian of
the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to
keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal
fortune in the process.

“The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under
Stalin, providing throughout his life a defence of human activity, of the powers
of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with
his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. They are the twin lives
between which intellectual choice in our society lies.”

This passage stuck with Christopher, who quoted it a few years ago in an essay
where he expressed his continuing admiration for Trotsky. But how would he think
his own end matched up compared to those of Keynes and Trotsky?

He seems to have faced his death sentence from cancer bravely enough. But he
died firmly in the embrace of the establishment, a literary celebrity lavished
with praise by mainstream non-entities. This is a sorry end for someone who, at
his best, could articulate much nobler aspirations.

https://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=27053