RUTHFULLY YOURS

DAVID HOROWITZ ON CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS….SUPERB

Posted By Ruth King on July 7th, 2010

Frontpagemag

David Horowitz On July 6, 2010

(I had just finished the draft of this essay when I heard the terrible news that my friend Christopher had a cancer whose prognosis was dire. My heart and thoughts go out to him, as they would to a brother. I have known Christopher as a man of great courage and decency and have an affection for him that is not adequately disclosed in the intellectual argument that follows. As an argument Christopher I am sure will welcome it as a test of his mettle and a testament to the way in which he has – and will continue – to challenge us all. —DH)

I first met Christopher Hitchens in 1970 when I was editing Ramparts, then the largest magazine of the left. Christopher, who was fresh out of Oxford and ten years my junior, was embarking on his first adventure in the New World. When he arrived at my Berkeley office looking for guidance, and after we had gotten acquainted, he asked me in all seriousness, “Where is the working class?” Only the devout left — the “holy rollers” as I thought of them — still believed in this mythical entity in the nation where every man was king. But rather than make an issue of it, I directed my visitor to the local Trotskyists, failing to realize that he was one of them.

Our next encounter took place a dozen years later and was not nearly as pleasant. By then I had abandoned most tenets of the leftist faith, although not yet departed its community. I was invited to a small lunch at which Christopher was present with Nation editors Victor Navasky and Kai Bird, and one or two others. Before long the conversation at the table turned to the Middle East and I found myself confronting what in those days we referred to as a political “gut check.” What was my attitude, Christopher wanted to know, towards Israel’s invasion of Lebanon? The left abhorred the invasion whose purpose was to clear out the PLO terrorists who had entrenched themselves behind an international border and were shelling towns in northern Israel killing civilians. “This is the first Israeli war I have supported,” I said, thereby ending any fraternal possibilities for the remaining conversation.

Two years later, my writing partner Peter Collier and I voted for Ronald Reagan, and three years after that organized a “Second Thoughts” conference, which brought together former radicals like ourselves who had become advocates of the anti-Communist cause, specifically in Nicaragua and Vietnam. Christopher came to the conference with his Nation co-hort and long-time friend, Alexander Cockburn, and attacked us. In the Nation column he filed after our event, Christopher described its implication that second thoughts might be superior to first ones as “smug,” and my suggestion that supporting America’s enemies should be considered treason, as “sinister.”[1] [1] He made his feelings about second thoughts explicit later in a brutal attack on Paul Johnson sneering at his “well advertised stagger from left to right,” which Christopher regarded as the venal maneuver of someone “who, having lost his faith, believes that he had found his reason.”[2] [2]

But times change, and now Christopher himself has been associated with a generation of post-9/11 second-thoughters. He has revised his attitudes towards the left and its loyalties, and has vaunted a patriotism towards America he would once have thought of as, well, sinister. To commemorate and explicate these heresies, which he prefers to describe as a “mutation” rather than a “metamorphosis,” he has written an engrossing memoir, called Hitch-22. Among its other utilities, the book provides a fertile occasion for those of us who preceded him to take a second look at second thoughts, and to measure the distances that we, and our one-time antagonist, have come.

The man his friends call “Hitch” is a figure of such unruly contradictions that it may be said of him, as Dr. Johnson did of the metaphysical poets he has “the ability to yoke heterogeneous ideas by violence together.” Opponent of America’s war in Vietnam and supporter of America’s war in Iraq; libertarian defender of free market capitalism and unabashed admirer of Trotsky and Marx; pro-lifer and feminist doctrinaire; friend to neo-conservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz and to Victor Navasky, an apologist for the Rosenbergs, Hamas and Alger Hiss.

It is not only incompatible ideas and comrades that Christopher comfortably embraces but modes of being. He is both a political renegade and keeper of the flame, a ferocious partisan and practiced ironist, a post-modern skeptic and romantic nostalgist, a passionate moralist and calculating operator, a hard-headed critic and dewy-eyed sentimentalist, a serious thinker and determined attention grabber, irreverent contrarian and serenader of the choir, one-dimensional polemicist and literary polymath, self-styled Man of the People and accomplished social climber, and — most inexplicably – Oxonian gentleman conservative in manner and a master of vitriol and the ad hominem attack.

If there is one thing to be discovered reading Christopher’s memoir, it is that there are not many things you will figure out about Christopher that he has not already thought of himself. Thus his chronicle opens with a wonderfully realized account of origins, containing portraits of his conservative Anglican father and rebellious (secretly) Jewish mother, “two much opposed and sharply discrepant ancestral stems: two stray branches that only war and chance could ever have caused to become entwined.”[3] [3] On the one side a transgressive romantic who refused to know her place; on the other a naval officer Christopher calls the Commander who defended his country and of whom the son says in tribute, “sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day’s work than any I have ever done.”[4] [4]

Those familiar with Christopher’s work have long known what a stylistically elegant writer he was, using language like a musician who plays intricate melodies without having to look at his fingers. But it was not until this book that he has shown he was also a wily one, for whom Homer’s epithet for Ulysses – “deep devising” — is apt, using his roguish charm and jeweled literacy to eat his cake and have it too, and to stutter step past potentially inconvenient truths. At the outset, we are alerted to Christopher’s conscious pursuit of “the Janus-faced mode of life.”[5] [5] The Roman god of temple doorways, Janus looked both ways and is invariably depicted in his statuary with two faces. Grabbing the horns of his own enigma, Christopher observes that the doors of the temple were open in time of war, and war “is a time when the ideas of contradiction and conflict are most naturally regnant,” and that the most intense wars are civil, and the most rending conflicts internal. “What I hope to do now,” he says of the text before us, “is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.”[6] [6]

It is the initial salvo in a campaign to defend a life which aspires to moral authenticity but which often seems to skirt the edge of having it both ways, a tendency that provides his most determined enemies an opening to exploit. Thus Terry Eagleton castigates him in the New Statesman: “It is as though he sees his own double-dealing as a rather agreeable versatility – as testimony to his myriad-mindedness rather than as a privileged, spoilt-brat desire (among other things) to hog it all.”[7] [7] Characteristically, Christopher does not duck but embraces the contradiction, making no effort to hide his desire to have it both ways, or to keep “double-entry books.” Describing an occasion when his radical comrades caught him fraternizing with a notorious symbol of the ruling caste at Oxford he writes: “I could have taken refuge in some ‘know your enemy’ formulation but something in me said that this would be ignoble. I didn’t want a one-dimensional politicized life.”[8] [8]

Whatever may be said of these choices, they are an irresistible source of Christopher’s appeal, the reason he is far more interesting than Eagleton or any of his current batch of leftwing critics, with whom he still shares basic beliefs. It is why reading his memoir — agree with the politics or find them merely confusing, or not – is an enterprise that is generally rewarding and almost always a delight. But the desire not to be confined to a single standard does not explain the life that unfolds along multiple paths, or answer the ethical questions that result.

In attempting to understand Christopher’s politics and to understand him, we are continually frustrated by a troubling lacuna at the heart of his text — a Hitch-22 as it were. Inexplicably for a writer so keenly observant of the world around him, Christopher’s attempt at a self-portrait lacks the introspective curiosity and interior dimension that would facilitate such a task or unwrap his mysteries both for himself and others.

As a way into this labyrinth, permit me the indulgence of a self-reference. A dozen years before Christopher I wrote a memoir in which I also gave an account of reappraisals. Here is the way I described a point in my life when I had to reject the faith that had shaped it until then: “In that very moment a previously unthinkable possibility… entered my head: The Marxist idea, to which I had devoted my entire intellectual life and work was false. … For the first time in my conscious life I was looking at myself in my human nakedness, without the support of revolutionary hopes, without the faith in a revolutionary future – without the sense of self-importance conferred by the role I would play in remaking the world. For the first time in my life I confronted myself as I really was in the endless march of human coming and going. I was nothing.”[9] [9]

It was this crucible of despair in which my conservative perspective was forged, as I set about finding other reasons to go on than the political myths that had sustained me until then. But there is no such moment of crisis and self-revelation disclosed in Christopher’s account, despite the fact that he describes changes in his outlook that would seem to warrant both. The conclusion to be drawn is that through all his changes Christopher has never felt a subtraction from himself. At every stage of his career he is in his own eyes exactly what he’s always been except more so. Each twist in the road presents an opportunity for the accretion of complexity. As my second-thoughts cohort Collier observes, “Christopher is an oyster always working on his own pearl.”

Even if there was no such dark night of the soul when Christopher abandoned his hostility to a nation he had long been at war with, such a night certainly took place, when he was climbing onto the wave of the future as a young man just out of college. The event was the suicide of Yvonne, then still a young woman, in a hotel room in Athens. His mother had ended her life in a pact with the clergyman she had run off with and taken as a lover. It was, Christopher concedes, a “lacerating, howling moment in my life.”[10] [10] He was all of twenty-four.

There is no indication in Christopher’s memoir of how this trauma involving loss and betrayal may have affected the double lives he has engaged, the personal and political triangles he has indulged or the fracturing of commitments he has made. It is left for us to speculate about them from a text that denies us elements that are crucial to the task.

Although Christopher has been married twice and has had other romantic attachments including a briefly mentioned affair with the sister of Martin Amis, none really appear in the 400-page book he has written about his life. Of Christopher’s first wife, a Greek Cypriot lawyer and the mother of his two oldest children, we are told nothing, not even her name. Carol, his second wife, is mentioned several times in passing but we are never introduced to her and there is no portrait to put flesh on the name, no attempt to convey how he feels towards her or towards the commitments of marriage. Of his children he writes mainly to concede his guilt over his absence as a father.

But when it comes to Yvonne, whose chapter-length portrait opens the book, the texture is quite different and his feelings rise rapidly to the surface: “Yvonne then was the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray. She was the cream in the coffee, the gin in the Campari, the offer of wine or champagne instead of beer, the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes.” In a single sentence at the end of this account that follows her death he provides a glimpse of the impact: “Her defeat and despair were also mine for a long time, but I have reason to know that she wanted me to withstand the woe, and when I once heard myself telling someone that she had allowed me a ‘second identity,’ I quickly checked myself and thought no, perhaps with luck she had represented my first and truest one.”[11] [11]

Then, just when we would expect the author’s gaze to continue inward and mine the vein he has opened, the text abruptly interrupts itself with a set piece coldly headed: “A Coda on the Question of Self-Slaughter.” What follows is an academic paper discussing the psychological and sociological observations about suicide in the writings of Durkheim, Alvarez and Sylvia Plath. By telling us that these thoughts represent a quest he has pursued over “four decades,” Christopher reveals without actually conceding it, the pain that did not go away. But why this distraction from the turmoil in his heart? Partly because he is the enemy of moist sentiments, but also because this gratuitous erudition is a squid’s ink to cover his decision not to use the hair pin his mother offers him, in her life and in her death, to pick his own lock. Christopher is as sui generis as a memoirist as he is in other things – not really wishing to be known by others or by himself.[12] [12]

Yvonne was the power behind young Christopher’s throne, vowing, “if there is going to be an upper class in this country, Christopher is going to be in it.”[13] [13] Despite the constraints of their circumstances, she sent him to infiltrate England’s Protestant establishment, first at a posh private school the family could barely afford, and then to Oxford to join the upper crust. She was herself a secret agent, a displaced Polish Jew who in marrying the Commander had infiltrated an alien (and anti-Semitic) culture, hiding her true identity from her new family in order to provide herself and her children opportunities that would otherwise have been denied them.

How did this matrilineal romance and its tragic ending affect Christopher’s attitude towards the sunny tomorrows, which his comrades pursued? How did it color his optimism about the quest for social justice? Where was the justice for him? For Yvonne? Writing of the anarchistic upheavals in France in 1968, Christopher remarks: “If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are hooked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.”[14] [14] And what happens when the engine and the feeling stop?”

While he was making his way through private schools and burrowing into the inner sanctums of the establishment, Christopher was simultaneously becoming a social rebel, taking the very skills those venerable institutions placed in his hands and putting them into the service of the war that was being waged against them. Yet, even his commitment to rebellion was only half-made, or not so much made as hedged: “I was slowly being inducted into a revolution within the revolution, or to a Left that was in and yet not of the ‘Left’ as it was generally understood. This perfectly suited my already-acquired and protective habit of keeping two sets of books.”[15] [15]

The sect Christopher joined was actually a revolution within “the revolution within the revolution.” The International Socialists were Trotskyist sect consisting of 100 or so members. The International Socialists separated themselves from other Trotskysists (and Trotsky himself), who while attacking Stalinism still defended the Soviet Union, regarding themselves as “Bolsheviks” and Russia as a “deformed” socialist state. Christopher’s sect, by contrast, regarded the Soviet Union as having reverted to capitalism and joined the international capitalist enemy. This allowed them to continue their attacks on the democracies of the West without having to defend Russia or make excuses for the totalitarian state.

How does Christopher view this scholastically precious politics of his youth, or interpret its significance today? He doesn’t say. But there is another witness, a Hitchens foil so to speak, available to weigh in on this puzzle. Peter Hitchens is Christopher’s younger brother by two years but virtually invisible in Christopher’s text, despite the fact that they followed intriguingly parallel paths. Peter joined the same International Socialist sect in the same era and later came to have second thoughts. But then the parallel ends. For unlike Christopher, Peter became a religious conservative with no ambivalent attitudes towards his leftist past.

From his present conservative distance, Peter comments on the International Socialists, “The [other Trotskyists] were more honest than we were. Ours was the extreme version of pretending that the USSR was not the fault of socialists, or even of Bolsheviks (which we wished to be). Of course it was their fault, the fault of people exactly like us, but we closed our minds to this with a web of excuses. We pretended not to be who we were, and that the USSR was not what it was.”[16] [16]

Christopher expresses no such insights, and in the text he provides us reveals an attitude strikingly consistent with the views he had then. “Where it was easy to do so,” Peter writes of the International Socialists, “we supported causes – the National Liberation Front in Vietnam in particular – whose objects were to extend Soviet power.”[17] [17] This was one of the realizations that had turned us to second thoughts. When America quit the field of battle under pressure from the anti-war left, and the Communists proceeded to the slaughter of innocents, we recoiled in horror at what our campaigns had helped to make possible, and said goodbye to all that.

Not so Christopher, who has stayed loyal to his positions at the time, regarding the Communists as liberators and America as Vietnam’s oppressor. “The United States was conducting an imperialist war in Indo-China,” he writes in his memoir, “and a holding action against the insistent demands of its own long-oppressed black minority at home.”[18] [18] This are puzzling, troubling remarks. What holding action would Christopher be referring to? The American civil rights movement was supported by the entire nation outside the Deep South, including the White Houses of both Kennedy and the southerner Lyndon Johnson. What imperialist war could he be thinking of? The one bruited in a famous malapropism of Jane Fonda who claimed on national television that America was in Vietnam for the “tung and the tinsten?” Or is Christopher ventriloquizing Ho Chi Min Speak and claiming that Americans wanted to replace the French?

Writing of his participation in a “vast demonstration” to protest the war in front of the American Embassy in London, Christopher recalls “the way in which my throat and heart seemed to swell as the police were temporarily driven back and the advancing allies of the Vietnamese began to sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’” He then comments: “I added to my police record for arrests, of all of which I am still reasonably proud.”[19] [19] But why would he be proud of this arrest? Christopher’s anti-war comrades, the International Socialists among them, were not “allies of the Vietnamese” but of the Vietnamese Communists and, as Peter Hitchens correctly points out, of the Soviet empire behind them. What these leftists actually achieved in Indo-China, in fact, was one of the largest genocides on record and a totalitarian future for the Cambodians and Vietnamese.

To remain an unreconstructed New Leftist into the 21st Century is a particularly troubling failing for a man whose model is George Orwell and whose political persona is anchored in a perceived moral authority. In a statement that amounts to a one sentence credo, Christopher writes: “The synthesis for which one aimed was the Orwellian one of evolving a consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.”[20] [20] But apparently not for the Cambodians and Vietnamese.

Loyalty to bad commitments leads to moral incoherence, which also manifests itself in Christopher’s choices of friends and enemies. The epic struggle against totalitarianism for much of the 20th Century was America’s cold war against the Soviet empire. But during the last decades of this cold war, Christopher’s platform was the Nation magazine – America’s leading journal of the “anti-anti Communist left,” that is, the left of apologists for Communist crimes and enablers of the totalitarian bloc. Although Christopher undoubtedly had internal dissents, Christopher’s political friends are still generously drawn from the Nation editorial board and the English Marxists around New Left Review whom he acknowledges in an end note as “heroes and heroines of the ‘first draft’ and of the work in progress.”[21] [21] (For the record, I was unable to detect a conservative name on the list.) Among his heroes are the aforementioned Victor Navasky, Robin Blackburn, a Castro acolyte and Perry Anderson an anti-American Marxist who regards both the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq as by-products of the “Israel Lobby’s” stranglehold on American policy, and someone whom Christopher himself described to me as an old-fashioned “anti-Semite.”[22] [22]

As a revolutionist within the revolution Christopher’s record was by no means as regrettable as this list might indicate, but it was bad enough. My own experience of Christopher’s malodorous cold war service was his presence on the firing squad that came to our Second Thoughts Conference with intent to stigmatize, discredit and silence the small band we had gathered to announce their revulsion at the slaughter in Indo-China and the second thoughts they had had about their socialist friends. Two years later, Christopher attacked me venomously over Destructive Generation, the account Peter Collier and I had written of the Nineteen Sixties and the way the seductive promises of socialism led to totalitarian ends. I appeared on a PBS book show with Christopher who jabbed me with the remark “Who cares about his pathetic family” after I had related my father’s strange funeral where the political comrades who gathered to eulogize him couldn’t remember the flesh and blood individual he had been. Christopher had brought his friend and Susan Sontag’s son David Rieff along to the green room where he spat at me because Peter and I had noted the way Sontag had trimmed her sails after her famously telling remark that Communism was “fascism with a human face.”[23] [23] I have long since forgiven Christopher (and Rieff) but the incident is a sharp reminder of how fiercely partisan Christopher once was in behalf of the indefensible left.[24] [24]

Another telling elision in Christopher’s backward look is the fall of the Berlin wall and the defeat of Soviet totalitarianism, which pass virtually unnoticed. In so far as Christopher mentions the anti-Communist struggle at all, the heroes he singles out are East European socialists like Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, worthy enough figures whose countrymen finally had their fill of the Soviet empire. But of the conservatives who waged the anti-totalitarian struggle for nearly four decades, resisting the Communist advance, and of Ronald Reagan, the free world leader who actually wielded the power that made those “velvet revolutions” possible — or even thinkable — Christopher says only this: “Even now, when I squint back at him through the more roseate lens of his compromise with Gorbachev, I can easily remember … exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time.”[25] [25] Rebarbative: adj., repellent, unattractive, forbidding, grim.

(And what might Christopher have in mind when he refers to Reagan’s “compromise” with Gorbachev? Gorbachev’s agreement not to send the Red Army to repair the Berlin Wall and crush the revolt in exchange for Reagan’s agreement not to invade the Soviet Union?)

But Christopher is not finished: “There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar,” “he was married to a woman who employed a White House astrologer.” “[He] was frequently photographed in the company of ‘end-times’ Protestant fundamentalists…,” and so on.[26] [26] This litany has actually been cleaned up from its first appearance in the obituary Christopher wrote when Reagan died in 2004, and from which much of the attack in his memoir is cribbed: “I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn’t like … The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard.”[27] [27] This is how Christopher sums up a man who liberated hundreds of millions of victims of totalitarianism and who is revered throughout the former Soviet empire for this very reason.

Contrast this contemptuous performance with Christopher’s enduring sympathies for his long-admired (but now ex-) friend Noam Chomsky, a man who spent the cold war years denying the Cambodian holocaust, promoting a denier of the Jewish Holocaust, and comparing America — unfavorably — to the Third Reich. When Chomsky’s extreme views came under attack from other leftists, Christopher actually defended him in a regrettable article that attempted to explain away Chomsky’s apologetics for genocide. Christopher called his piece, “The Chorus and Cassandra,” as though Chomsky was a prophet of truth to whom no one would listen.[28] [28] Eventually the two comrades fell out over Chomsky’s justification of the 9/11 attacks and opposition to the rescue mission in Bosnia. But in his memoir, written nearly ten years later, Christopher still manages to find Chomsky “a polemical talent well-worth mourning, and [a man with] a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.”[29] [29] As a one-time leftist who had a similar falling out with Chomsky twenty years earlier over his insistence that America was no better than Russia and Pravda a “mirror image” of the New York Times, I can testify that Chomsky’s feelings were rancid and resentful well before 9/11.[30] [30]

A similar myopia clouds Christopher’s otherwise admirable defenses of First Amendment freedoms. His long and courageous battle in behalf of Salman Rushdie after the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa of death on him is one of several memorable set pieces in Christopher’s memoir and a pivotal episode in the evolution of his current beliefs. The Rushdie case was, he writes, “a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. “In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual and the defense of free expression.”[31] [31]

But in the next breath Christopher can fawn over a Communist hack like Jessica Mitford, who spent her life supporting dictatorships, stupidity, demagogy, bullying, intimidation – and censorship, and can call her one of his “heroines.” This small hypocrisy has a larger resonance for me. When Peter Collier and I were still on the left we wrote an article about murders that had been committed by George Jackson and other Black Panthers, then and now regarded as progressive heroes. Leftists who were aware of these crimes suppressed the knowledge and withheld the facts in the name of a higher political truth. Peter and I published our article in the journal of a progressive writers guild and did so at some personal risk, since members of the political gangs responsible for them were still active.

While our article was undergoing the usual editorial scrutiny and also after it appeared, Jessica Mitford and Nation journalist Eve Pell led a campaign to stigmatize us as snitches and racists (since the perpetrators of the crimes were black), and to pressure the journal’s editors into censoring what we had written. In a letter describing our article not as untrue but as “appalling” and “atrocious” because it was true Mitford said: “I deeply wish it had never been written.” At a public meeting of the progressive guild, to which we also belonged, she told the writers assembled that it was their responsibility as progressives to suppress facts that hurt the cause and to print only those facts that helped it.[32] [32] How, in the light of this reality, is Jessica Mitford one of Christopher’s heroines?

Or how, for that matter, is Leon Trotsky one of Christopher’s heroes? The unsentimental Peter Hitchens observes that the Trotskyist left to which he and his brother belonged were in the habit of attacking Communists in power as tyrants but supporting Communists when they were out of power as liberators. As examples, he cites the lionization of Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, who, as it happens, are two of his brother’s “favorite characters in history” (the other three being Socrates, Spinoza and Thomas Paine).[33] [33]

Rosa Luxemburg was a revolutionary murdered young and therefore, as Peter comments, she “never lived to touch power.” Trotsky, on the other hand, became a revolutionary in power and was deeply implicated in the creation of the totalitarian state. He was the commander of the Red Army forces sent to crush the revolt of the Kronstadt sailors who were Bolsheviks protesting the sinister turn the revolution had already taken. He was a promoter of the forced labor policies that led to the gulag, author of the most articulate defense of the Red Terror, as well as one of its enforcers, and a champion of the principle that the ends justifies the means. How, then, does he become one of Christopher’s five favorite historical figures?

One way to do it is to wear political blinders and focus on the figure of Trotsky out of power, the author of The Revolution Betrayed and the leader of the sect of former Communists seeking to overthrow the totalitarian regime he had done so much to create. Which is how Christopher does see and admire him, although he frames the picture a little more magnificently, regarding Trotsky as the hero of an “epic struggle to mount an international resistance” to Stalin and the totalitarian state.[34] [34] It is as an avatar of the anti-Stalinist left, the creator of a movement, which Christopher continues to romanticize, that Trotksy inspires adulation. Trotskyism means that Christopher can regard himself as a Marxist and a revolutionary without having to say he’s sorry.[35] [35]

There is another way, however, that Trotsky appears as a worthy paladin, which is if one believes that the engine of “history” is still running, and that the epic oppressions of Stalinism were merely an unpleasant prelude to a noble future. This is, in fact, the way my one-time mentor Isaac Deutscher, who is also one of Christopher’s heroes, actually did portray and justify Trotsky. His three-volume hagiography was recently the subject of Christopher’s intemperate praise in an Atlantic Monthly review. As it happens, the framework of Deutscher’s entire trilogy is the assumption that the engine of history is still running, that at some point in time the socialist foundations of Soviet society will assert themselves and give birth to an authentic socialist state.[36] [36] Of course, Deutscher was wrong: the socialist foundations of the Soviet Union were bankrupt and caused the Soviet collapse because Marx’s economic theories are bankrupt. But there is no such recognition in Christopher’s review, or for that matter in his memoir.[37] [37]

Instead there is Christopher’s suggestion that “a faint, saintly penumbra still emanates from the Old Man” since the spirit of his “revolution within the revolution” can still be detected in the magical moment of 1968 or in the presence of a handful of Trotskyists in the Polish Solidarity movement during the last days of the Soviet empire.[38] [38] But this is merely the triumph of sentiment over history. An immeasurably greater historical force against Communism in Poland was an institution that Christopher loathes so much he doesn’t deign to mention its role, namely, the Catholic Church.

A better understanding of Christopher comes with the realization that he is really more about sensibility than politics, or that politics is a matter of sensibility for him. Deutscher made Trotsky into an existential hero, a Prometheus daring the gods. This is the reason that Christopher is enamored of him, because Trotsky is the arch romantic, the incarnation of the lost Yvonne.[39] [39]

The same sensibility underlies is otherwise inexplicable attachment to Marx.

In a recent conversation with Martin Amis, he said, “for most of my life I thought the only principle worth upholding, worth defending, worth advocating, worth witnessing for, was socialist internationalism,” and added, “I am no longer a socialist, but I am still a Marxist.”[40] [40]

But how a Marxist? The stab Christopher makes in his memoir at resurrecting the Old Mole to explain the recent economic collapse is merely embarrassing: “My old Marxism came back to me as I contemplated the ‘dead labor’ that had been hoarded…saw it being squandered in a victory for finance capital over industrial capital, noticed the ancient dichotomy between use value and exchange value, and saw again the victory of those monopolists who ‘make’ money over those who only have the power to earn it.”[41] [41] This explication can only be appreciated as a literary trope. As economic theory it is archaic and absurd. But it is also a form of political romance of Tertullian dimensions. The analogy is continue believing in an age where God has been declared dead. Credo quia absurdum est. I believe because it is absurd.[42] [42]

Christopher’s comments to Amis seem to mean he no longer believes that socialism is a future that can actually work. In an interview with Reason Magazine conducted just prior to 9/11 he virtually conceded as much. “There is no longer a general socialist critique of capitalism – certainly not the sort of critique that proposes an alternative or a replacement.”[43] [43] But why then persist in describing oneself as a Marxist, since Marx’s entire critique was based on the assumption that socialism was a real alternative to the social order? Why would Christopher fail to understand that in seeking to achieve an impossible future revolutionaries become a destructive force? But if there can be no socialist future, the effort to achieve one by tearing down existing institutions is simply nihilism.

Despite his disavowals (and because it is a matter of sensibility rather politics) Christopher’s book is rich in testaments to unrepentant utopianism. One particularly notable passage begins with a paean to the “labor movement” of which Christopher says, “For me, this ‘movement’ is everything.” He then proceeds to this remarkable statement: “Official Britain may have its Valhalla of heroes and statesmen and conquerors and empire builders, but we know that the highest point ever reached in the history of civilization was in the city of Basel in 1912 when the leaders of the socialist parties of all countries met to coordinate an opposition to the coming World War.”[44] [44]

What the socialist parties agreed to in Basel in 1912 was to refuse to vote for the war credits in their respective national parliaments, when the impending conflict broke out. Marx had written — and “socialist internationalists” believed — that the working classes had no country, and therefore nothing to lose but their chains. But this was a Marxist fantasy, unanchored in reality, and two years after “the highest point ever reached in human civilization” the same socialist parties turned their back on the pledge and voted to go to war. In other words, the workers did have a country. Marx was wrong, and socialism was exposed as an empty – and dangerous — illusion.

Although he has bravely abandoned his “anti-war” stance, and “internationalist” faith, the romantic (and literary) side of Christopher prefers to live in this fantasy and continue the dream. For this Christopher, the engine of history is still running: “The names of real heroes like [the socialists] Jean Jaures and Karl Liebknecht make the figures of Asquith and Churchill seem like pygmies.” And why would this be so? Because (in this fantasy vision) if an international socialist revolution taken place in 1919, it would have precluded all the subsequent nightmares of the 20th Century, including the ones that faux socialists and Marxists created: “The violence and disruption of a socialist transformation in those years would have been infinitely less than the insane sacrifice of culture to barbarism, and the Nazism and Stalinism that ensued from it.”[45] [45]

Socialism or barbarism – this was the precise slogan and choice that Rosa Luxemburg put before her fellow revolutionaries, of which Christopher would still like to count himself one today. It is little more than a secular version of the choice between heaven and hell. One of the oddities of Christopher’s compartmentalized life is that the author of God Is Not Great and of its brazen anathema of a subtitle – religion poisons everything – should be so passionately attached to this political version of an earthly redemption. But there is a quasi-exit clause for this cul-de-sac as well. The “‘movement which for me is everything,” was for all intents and purposes dead (“all gone now, gone to pieces,”).[46] [46] But then, again, this may not preclude the possibility that one day in the however distant future it might spring back to life.

In the 1970s, Christopher adopted a “second identity,” making more and more frequent trips to America, eventually migrating across the Atlantic and setting up shop at the Nation. It was, as always for him, a two-track engagement. On the one hand there was the America that functioned as the left’s version of capitalist hell — a racist, imperialist bastion of international oppression. Exposing the evils of his new lodging was the way Christophe paid his dues at the Nation but also reconciled himself to the fact that he was enjoying residence in the “belly of the beast.” For America was a land of expansive contradictions and freedoms that were entirely seductive to the other side of Christopher’s personality: “Here was a country that could engage in a frightening and debilitating and unjust war, and undergo a simultaneous convulsion of its cities on the question of justice for its oldest and largest minority, and start a conversation on the rights of women…and have a show trial of confessed saboteurs in Chicago where the incredibly guilty defendants actually got off…”[47] [47]

Would that Christopher had allowed the generous, free-spirited, creative side of America, which spoke with such resonance to his own, to temper the scorn he poured on it in his Nation years. But the guilty pleasures he experienced in enemy territory had to be paid for by a pact he had made which precluded a just accounting. “My personal way of becoming Americanized,” he explains, “was to remain a blood brother of the American left.”[48] [48] But the left that had emerged in the campaign against the Vietnam war was increasingly defined by a corrosive anti-Americanism, incompatible with a proper appreciation of American virtues.

As Christopher became more familiar with his new environment, the increasing irrationality of this anti-American fervor began to take its toll on a sensibility so oppositely tuned. It began with the discordant attitudes his Nation comrades expressed towards the totalitarian enemy, which did not sit well with a Trotskyist familiar with the toll of Stalin’s victims. “I was often made aware in Nation circles that there really were people who did think that Joseph McCarthy had been far, far worse than Joseph Stalin.”[49] [49] Noam Chomsky unnerved him by saying that America’s democracy was morally worse than the Soviet police state. His “much-admired” friend Gore Vidal shocked him by describing the F.B.I. as “our KGB,”[50] [50] and then by writing an anti-Semitic screed, which Christopher protested but the best man at his wedding, Victor Navasky, decided to publish saying “Well, Gore is Gore.”[51] [51]

Christopher’s tensions with the left had actually begun with the election of Bill Clinton, a veteran of the anti-Vietnam war movement, and the first Sixties “progressive” to be elected to the White House. He had met Clinton when they both were students at Oxford, and took a strong disliking to the presidential candidate when he ordered the execution of a mentally retarded black prisoner Ricky Ray Rector as a campaign ploy to demonstrate that he was “tough on crime.” The dislike increased with Clinton’s actions in office and led to a sharp tract Christopher eventually published about the President and the First Lady called No One Left To Lie To: The Worst Family. In the Reason interview Christopher recalled how this reached a point where he felt he might have to resign from the Nation over its embrace of Clinton. “It completely squandered the claim of a magazine like the Nation to be a journal of opposition.”[52] [52]

These tensions came to the surface in the spring of 1999, when Christopher testified before a congressional committee against Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. His testimony ended a fifteen-year friendship with Blumenthal and elicited attacks from a large cohort of Christopher’s comrades. Yet in another of its critical lacunae, Christopher’s memoir fails to mention Blumenthal or the friendship, or the effect this schism may have had on him.

Blumenthal had been tasked with intimidating female witnesses to Clinton’s sexual abuse by defaming them to Washington reporters. He then made the mistake of choosing his friend Christopher as a reporter whom he could trust to pass on these defamations. Christopher chose to expose Blumenthal instead. In the eyes of his leftist comrades, this transgression was compounded by the fact that he gave his testimony to a congressional committee chaired by Henry Hyde, a pro-life conservative they ferociously hated.

The hatred now descended on Christopher’s head, as his radical circles began reviling him as “Snitchens.” In a purification ritual reminiscent of a religious witch-hunt, prominent leftists declared that Christopher would not be allowed to cross their thresholds ever again. Without mentioning Blumenthal or the internal wrenchings the episode caused him or the impact it had on his allegiances to the left, Christopher reproduces in another context a phone message left by Dorothy Healy, a well-known Communist and friend: “You stinking little rat. I always knew you were no good. You are a stool pigeon and a fink. I hope you rot in scab and blackleg hell….”[53] [53]

So much for the warm fraternity of the party of the working class. Christopher did refer to the episode in the Reason interview, where he recalled how his progressive friends now attacked him as a “McCarthyite” and did so in the pages of the Nation. This reaction, he observes “showed the amazing persistence of antediluvian categories and thoughts on the Left…[which were] applied to me in a very mendacious and I thought thuggish way.” Christopher concluded: “there is no such thing as a radical Left anymore. The world of Gloria Steinem and Jesse Jackson, let’s say, has all been, though it does not realize it, hopelessly compromised by selling out to Clintonism. It became, under no pressure at all, and with no excuse and in no danger, a voluntary apologist for abuse of power.”[54] [54]

Although Christopher had been hostile to me until then, and was still refusing to recognize that this was not a new development of the left but its modus operandi, I wrote an article defending him.[55] [55] “This tainting and ostracism of sinners,” I observed, “is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith…. The spectacle of what happens to a heretic like Hitchens when he challenges the party code is a warning to others not to try it.”[56] [56] I explained the attempt to purge Christopher in this way: “The community of the left is a community of meaning and is bound by ties that are fundamentally religious. For the non-religious, politics is the art of managing the possible. For the left it is the path to social redemption….[Therefore,] it is about us being on the side of the angels, and them as the party of the damned.”[57] [57]

Of course, like a good secret agent, Christopher still possessed his packet of false passports and was able to reach a modus vivendi with the Nation editors who agreed not to print any more defamatory attacks on him.[58] [58] This rendered the purge incomplete, enabling him to retain a foothold in the left. When a year passed and he hadn’t contacted me about my piece, I reflected that he probably was resentful that a political enemy had spoken in his behalf and worsened his case. But then we chanced on each other at a Los Angeles Times book festival, and quite unexpectedly he thanked me, warmly and graciously, for the article, and we agreed to make a date for a longer talk. It was the beginning of our friendship, and in that moment I also knew Christopher was in a state of motion in regard to his allegiances on the left, and therefore, his loyalties to the country that defended his freedoms.

The turn in Christopher’s political life would culminate on 9/11 when the United States came under attack by a new totalitarian foe. For Christopher, the threat this adversary posed had been first brought home in the fatwa issued against his friend and fellow writer Salman Rushdie. “The realization that we were in a cultural and political war with Islamic theocracy came to me with force and certainty not on September 11, 2001 but on Febuary 14, 1989,” he said in an interview with the editor of my Internet site, “when the Ayatollah Khomeini offered money in his own name to suborn the murder of my friend Salman Rushdie.”[59] [59]

Soon afterwards there was another revelation. This time it was about the leviathan on whom the left had declared war, and which it regarded as the command center of a global oppression. In Christopher’s eyes the United States military had intervened to stop the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the heart of Europe when no European (or Muslim) nation would. “The realization that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later,” Christopher writes. “It was the first time I found myself in the same trench as people like Paul Wolfowitz and Jeanne Kirkpatrick: a shock I had to learn to get over.”[60] [60]

There were more shocks to come. Christopher was in the Northwest to lecture about one of his personal bête noirs, Henry Kissinger, when his wife called from their Washington home to tell him the World Trade Center had been struck. The attack was mounted by the same enemy who had attempted to kill his friend Salman Rushdie and it was the same war of “everything I hated” against “everything I loved.” As he pondered the moment, he was immediately torn by two thoughts, the first a fear of being swept up in an unthinking totalitarian patriotism and the second revulsion at a comment made by one of the leftwing students who had attended his lecture: “You know what my friends are saying? They are saying it is the chickens coming home to roost.”[61] [61]

The remark infuriated Christopher, provoking a response which “came welling up in me with an almost tidal force: What bloody chickens? Come to think of it, whose bloody ‘home.’” When his Nation colleagues, most prominently Noam Chomsky, regurgitated the same sentiments, a seismic crack parted the ground between them: “Regarding almost everything since Columbus as having been one big succession of genocides and land-thefts, [Chomsky] did not really believe that America was a good idea to begin with. Whereas I had come to appreciate that it most certainly was.”[62] [62]

Christopher began speaking publicly to the same effect, and the more he spoke the more vicious the attacks that were directed at him from former friends on the left. In the process, more troubling thoughts began to percolate in Christopher’s mind: “I could not bear the idea that anything I had written or said myself had contributed to this mood of cynicism and defeatism, not to mention moral imbecility on the left.”[63] [63]

Christopher had found a cause, which was no longer a radical cause, which was not a fantasy of an imagined future but a present, flesh and blood reality that needed his support and defense: “Shall I take out papers of citizenship,” he asked at the end of a poignant post-9/11 article he wrote for Vanity Fair. “Wrong question. In every essential way, I already have.”[64] [64]

Once he had allowed himself to recognize that America, with its passion for liberty and openness to change could be a force for good, other recognitions followed. Christopher became in his own words “part of [the] public opinion” that supported America’s campaigns to remove the perpetrators from Afghanistan and to unseat the despot and mass murderer, Saddam Hussein, in Iraq. “The idea of ‘Reds for Bush’ might be incongruous,” he observed wryly of his support for the president, “but it was a great deal more wholesome than ‘pacifists for Saddam,’” which is what the anti-Iraq war movement that was supported by most of Christopher’s friends had become.[65] [65]

Six months after the beginning of war in Iraq, Christopher reviewed a book of my writings called Left Illusions. “With the Cold War so to speak behind us,” he wrote, “I suspected that Horowitz would find life without the old enemy a little dull. How much of an audience would there be for his twice-told tale about growing up in a doggedly loyal Communist family and his agonizing over the series of wrenches and shocks that had detached him from Marxism all together? But then, I didn’t anticipate that in the fall of 2001, I would be reading solemn polemics by leading intellectualoids proposing a strict moral equivalence – moral equivalence at best in some cases – between America and the Taliban. Nor did I expect to see street theater anti-war demonstrations, organized by open admirers of Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong-Il, united in the sinister line of, in effect, ‘hands off Saddam Hussein. So I admit that I now find the sardonic, experienced pessimism in Horowitz’s book a bit more serviceable than I once did.”[66] [66]

This is not the full-throated endorsement of second-thoughts one might expect after such events, but then it was a familiar Hitch-22. In his final chapter Christopher turns to an assessment of his changes, and titles it: “Decline, Mutation or Metamorphosis?” By this point, there is no mystery the middle term is the preferred one and the ends excluded. One of the unkinder cuts delivered in Christopher’s envoi is to those of us who did not regard ourselves as new born on a particular day of revelation, such as September 11, but undertook the necessary and painful task of reassessing what we did and the damage we inflicted in the life we had lived before: “So I didn’t so much repudiate a former loyalty, like some attention-grabbing defector, as feeling it falling away from me.”[67] [67]

Christopher should blush to ascribe attention-getting to others, particularly those who have been cut off for their efforts from the same cultural platforms that have made Christopher such an intellectual celebrity. And what other reason might prevent Christopher from repudiating the loyalties that sealed the fates of so many innocents, and impeded the efforts to rescue them, as he himself acknowledges? Referring to Oscar Wilde’s suggestion that a map of the world that did not have utopia on it would not be worth consulting, Christopher remarks “I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.” But how, then, does one justify continued loyalty to those responsible?

Christopher’s final chapter opens with the unexpected appearance of his brother, Peter, who has published a book with his own reflections about his parallel life. Peter’s book, The Broken Compass, contains a chapter Christopher finds “unsettling.” It is an assault from a paleo-conservative perspective on the small contingent of leftists who supported the Iraq War, and pointedly is called “A Comfortable Hotel on the Road to Damascus.” The “comfortable hotel” is a reference to the Iraq War and more broadly to the larger “war on terror.” Peter opposes both as crusades to change the world, and therefore as endeavors frowned on by conservatives but appropriate to the utopian left. “For the habitual leftist,” the other Hitchens comments, the war on terror “has the virtue of making him look as if he can change his mind, even when he has not really done so.”[68] [68]

Peter is wrong and Christopher right about the war on terror which is not a crusade to change the world, but the response to a totalitarian movement’s criminal aggressions. But he is right in perceiving that for Christopher it has acquired a dimension that has all the earmarks of the utopian movement he has abandoned but is still reluctant to leave. This is Christopher’s crusade against religion and its believers, which came to the fore in his writings and then became an Hitchens obsession, following the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the attacks of 9/11. “The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time,” Christopher in his last peroration on the final page of his book.[69] [69] But this is difficult for an outsider to comprehend. Science and reason aren’t under anything like the scorched earth attacks that religion is facing at the hands of Christopher and his new political allies. There are no best-selling broadsides called “Reason Is Not Great” or “The Science Delusion” against which Christopher and his band of atheists are forced to contend, nor are scientific institutions being blown up and desecrated as synagogues and churches and mosques are routinely at the hands of rival creeds.

There is an insight of Christopher’s about the religious nature of the left’s convictions, which is self-reflective: “Rather like our then friend Chomsky, Edward (Said) in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”[70] [70] As the center of global oppression, the United States personified the rule of evil in the Manichaean world that radicals inhabited, which no could deed could cancel. But was not Christopher’s view of religion, as a phenomenon which “poisons everything” also that of an institution, which by definition could do no right?

In his war against God, Christopher is thrust against his own origins, when he discovers at the age of forty-five that Yvonne is a Jew. This launches him on a pursuit of the past, and into reflections on Judaism. “As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil,” he writes. “Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism of Judaism and Christianity into the various forms of Islam.”[71] [71] This leaden, totalitarian prose is alarmingly characteristic of Christopher’s writings in general about religion, and the very opposite of the supple textures and multivalent cadences that normally seduce and reward his readers. “Leaden prose,” he warns us in another context, “always tends to be a symptom of other problems.”[72] [72]

The problem here is that he sees religion generally, and Judaism in particular, through his old Marxist lenses, as a “sigh of the oppressed,” and imagines a future liberation achieved by eliminating the oppressor. In the sentence quoted, Christopher casts the “rabbis” as a ruling class that imposes its yoke on a passive flock. But he is wrong on both counts. The 613 commandments are not simply prohibitions and are not merely dour. Two among them, for example (and there are many others), enjoin the flock not to oppress the weak and to honor one’s father and mother, which are commandments that a less ideologically disposed Christopher might embrace. But even if this were not the case, rabbis could hardly impose prohibitions lasting thousands of years on congregations that did not ultimately seek or need or regard them as useful for their earthly sojourns. Has Christopher stopped to ask himself how it is that a tiny, dispersed people like the Jews could survive for several millennia – outlasting virtually all other communities — without beliefs that inspired them and held them together? Unaccountably for someone whose mind is otherwise so impressively alert, Christopher is impervious to the way religion speaks to needs that are timeless and provides comforts that are beneficial; and has contributed to the most spectacular achievements of human culture, including those that are scientific. The very concepts of individual rights and democracy so dear to Christopher are also contributions of religious thought.

The quest for origins that the discovery of Yvonne’s secret sends Christopher on is doomed to ambivalence since he regards Israel, the home of the Jews, as an oppressor nation and the Arabs of the Jordan as the passive oppressed. Christopher’s dilemma is made all the more poignant by a conversation that took place between him and Yvonne just before she took her life. In it, she expressed her desire “to move to Israel” without revealing to her son the reason why. It was a desire, her son now believes, that would have meant if she had actually done it, that in going home she was “taking part in the perpetuation of an injustice.”[73] [73]

For Christopher that injustice is Israel itself. He regards the Jewish inhabitants of Israel as “land-thieves” inspired by a religious myth to establish a “divine claim” and therefore a people who “wanted the land without the people.”[74] [74] According to Christopher, in stealing Arab land the Jews became oppressors who “made” the Arabs victims, “with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation.”[75] [75] For example, the creation of a death cult that promises sainthood and paradise to suicide bombers, who blow up women and children if they happen to be Jews? But Christopher’s premise is fallacious, and his passion misplaced. Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire, not from an Arab – let alone a Palestinian – nation. If a Palestinian state is what the region lacks, there would have been one on the West Bank and Gaza (as there already is in Jordan) all the intervening years, if five Arab countries had not launched an aggressive war to expel the Jews and destroy their home.

Even disregarding (as Christopher does) the historical facts, consider the war in the Middle East as it is prosecuted today: On the one side, Israel, a thriving, modern, democracy containing a million Arab citizens who enjoy more individual rights in the Jewish state than the Arabs of any Muslim country. On the other side, a religious theocracy in Gaza and a fascist regime on the West Bank, without individual rights, who are prosecuting a holy war against the Jews as Jews. “Islamo-fascism” is a term that Christopher is rightly proud to have coined. Is there a single Palestinian faction on the West Bank or in Gaza that does not align itself with the Islamo-fascists and their war against the West? Is not Israel’s war in the Middle East a war of everything that Christopher professes to love against everything he hates? What is it that binds him to this misbegotten cause, then, but his unexamined – and un-repudiated — loyalties to a Marxist past?

Christopher’s blindness in these matters is the most troubling of the confusions to which uncompleted second thoughts have led him and are a source of no pleasure for me. On the contrary, that my friend should be so unjust and incoherent in matters so important not only to others but to himself is both a misfortune and personal source of distress. Yet these reactionary glances do not eclipse the brilliance of the role he has played in the battle for human dignity and freedom. Does he contradict himself? It is a price for the multitudes he contains.

In his crusade against God, and his grappling with the Jews, Christopher is thrown into the nexus of origins and his bisected family root: “one … apparently stern and flinty and martial and continent and pessimistic; the other exotic and beseeching and hopeful and tentative,…” This left him, he writes, “with a strong sense of fight or flight” on family occasions.”[76] [76] More accurately, it left him with a sense of flight and fight, which is as good a summation of Christopher and his life as we are likely to get.

Comments are closed.