STENDRA FOR SALE
I first met Christopher Hitchens STENDRA FOR SALE, when we were both in our early 30's in the early 1980's. Together we produced a day of fundraising for The Nation magazine on the local Pacifica station, I think it was in late 1981, and over the next three decades we remained as friends -- and as colleagues when we overlapped for a half-dozen years at The Nation.
When I learned of his death, I was fairly upset, even though I knew it was coming. As fate would have it, real brand STENDRA online, I got the news moments after his demise as my daughter and I were sitting in the Fireside Lounge in Las Vegas -- the last place we had seen Christopher together (and a bar that Hitch consecrated as surely one of the ten best in the world).
I had been thinking a lot about him lately. Not only because of his terminal illness, STENDRA FOR SALE. But also because staring at me from the top of my desk is his just published 2 lb. anthology of columns and essays that I was commissioned to review some weeks ago. Writer's block is something I have rarely suffered but something was holding me back from writing the review (which I hope to surmount this coming week). All I could do since Thanksgiving was mentally mull over what I knew would be the first line of the piece: "How do you review an encyclopedia?"
The breadth and depth of Christopher's knowledge was absolutely stunning, though that descriptor falls way short. Japan, craiglist, ebay, overseas, paypal, His editor at The Atlantic (and my friend and my editor when I have written there), Ben Schwarz, has written one of the best sketches of Hitch, also marveling at his super-sized scope of knowledge, his amazing memory and his rock-solid discipline as a writer. STENDRA FOR SALE, No, his drinking habits, which were formidable, did anything but impair his abilities. Indeed, he was fueled by drink, perhaps cursed by it, STENDRA from canadian pharmacy, but it was, nevertheless entwined with his soul.
I will mention only two anecdotes in this regard. Back in 2002, after the quit The Nation and was excoriated by what passes for an American Left, he came out to L.A. No prescription STENDRA online, for the Times Book Festival and Arianna Huffington threw him a party. Feted by scores of admirers and friends, Christopher was knocking back copious quantities of his favored Johnny Walker Black Label all night. Around 1 a.m., Arianna called the remaining guests into her spacious living room to toast him and Hitch was visibly supporting himself up against the fireplace mantle. Oh shit, I thought, STENDRA FOR SALE. He's gonna fall over. But no. After Arianna's intro, Hitch -- without so much as a stammer or a slur-- recited about six stanzas of poetry from an author, I am embarrassed to say, I cannot remember, get STENDRA.
A few years earlier, we were together on a Nation fund-raising cruise in Alaska that began with rounds of what he called morning "hand-steadiers" and that progressed until lunch time at which point we made a port stop and were bussed to a salmon bake. After a few more libations, and after a barefoot Hitch chased a bear down a river bed (and I temporarily passed out), we took a long walk to the boat under a misty, cloudy and rather magical sky. STENDRA FOR SALE, He told me he knew 10,000 limericks by heart and I believed him as he reeled off at least three or four dozen in the space of 10 minutes. STENDRA steet value, That night he was lucid enough to write a column on the Balkans war in which, he alone on the Left, called for armed intervention to protect the Bosnian Muslims.
I suppose that brings us to the issue of his politics. I offer no hesitation in affirming that he has greatly informed and influenced my views. And while I claim no special insight into his soul, I will say that we have common political roots and therefore I do make the claim of understanding his political trajectory a bit better than your average mope. Hitch was a serious militant in the British section of the International Socialists, a strand of Trotskyism, taking STENDRA. My own trajectory took me from anarcho-syndicalism in the late 60's into similar Trotskyist politics when I was active in Salvador Allende's Chilean Socialist Party (which was an amalgam of currents, including Trotskyists), STENDRA FOR SALE.
This sort of Marxism is fiercely internationalist and fiercely anti-totalitarian (that's what made it easy for me as a former anti-authoritarian anarchist to join up with anti-authoritarian Marxists).
There's no need to get too deep into the weeds here so I will cut to the chase. Hitchens' trajectory since 9/11 and his support for the war in Iraq was much more one of continuity than of any radical shift or lurch. Unlike Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz liberals, Hitchens did not see the world as only a domestic struggle between nasty Republicans and weak Democrats. STENDRA FOR SALE, His view was that of an internationalist, a revolutionary (albeit of the cafe persuasion) who passionately identified with those fighting for liberation, be it against the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships or the totalitarian Stalinist regimes in Poland or Czechoslavakia.
Those lefties who were shocked and outraged by Hitchens in 2002 when he beat the drum for war in Iraq, STENDRA blogs, those who felt somehow personally betrayed, must be the same folks who had not been paying much attention to Hitchens' writings over the previous 20 years. In 1982, while still pretty much a card-carrying Marxist, Hitch supported Maggie Thatcher's war against the Argentine dictatorship which had tried to seize the British colony on the Falkland Islands. Yes, it was a colony. But the English-speaking inhabitants of the island wanted nothing to do with Argentina and rightly so, STENDRA long term. Hitch (and I will modestly include myself as sharing that position) saw this as a fight between an incomplete but functioning Tory-led western democracy and a barbaric, anti-semitic, openly pro-fascist Argentine dictatorship that was willing to risk the lives of its conscripts in a nationalist ploy to stay in power, STENDRA FOR SALE. Hitch wrote that if the Argentines were defeated the dictatorship would fall, and so it happened.
Fifteen years later, Hitchens was one of the very, very few voices on the Left urging a Western intervention against Milosevic. While knuckleheads like Ramsey Clark fronted for the butcher of Belgrade, What is STENDRA, Hitchens (and Susan Sontag and some activists like my pal Ian Williams), clamored for NATO to put an end to the killing fields salted by the Serbs. When NATO finally did pull the trigger over Kosovo, I found myself on the other side of the issue, opposing the war. Indeed, I helped organize the country's largest teach-in against the war that drew some 1200 attendees and was broadcast live for 4 hours. STENDRA FOR SALE, I sympathized with the Kosovars but saw the war as a ploy to needlessly rehabilitate NATO.
In retrospect, I am not sure at all that I was right about that war, herbal STENDRA. I can argue both sides of it, if forced to. And I can make the counter-argument to my position quite convincing precisely because I had listened quite carefully to Hitchens and I understood his vantage point even if not completely convinced,
The attack on the Twin Towers was, quite obviously, an accelerant in Hitchens' trajectory and that of many others, STENDRA results, myself included. And how could it not be. What it told us was that Maoist simplicities that argued that the "primary contradiction" in the world was between "the people" and "U.S, STENDRA FOR SALE. Imperialism" were, well, for simpletons. An idealized socialism might, in fact, be preferable to capitalism, STENDRA over the counter, but in the meantime we were seeing a rise in armed religious fundamentalism actively engaged in a death cult. An attempt to kill 25,000 civilians in New York City is more than an asterisk in world history. And Western democracy, with all of its flaws, was not something to be sacrificed for "cultural differences."
When the Bush administration set its sights on Iraq, Ordering STENDRA online, what Hitchens saw was an opportunity to take out one of the most odious dictatorships on the planet. I spent some time myself in Iraq days before the onslaught of the first Gulf War and I assure you it was one of the most terrifying places I had ever been (and had nothing to do with Michael Moore's STENDRA FOR SALE, depiction of it as a tranquil playground for kite flyers). Take it or leave it, love him or hate him, but this was not Hitchens as a neo-conservative, but rather Hitchens as an Internationalist (willing to ally with the neo-cons). He had long supported the Kurds in their struggle for national liberation and was greatly influenced by Iraqi leftists who had, in obscurity, fought for three decades against the fascist rule of Saddam.
On the eve of war, there was a magnificent live debate on Iraq held here in Los Angeles before an audience of several hundred at the Wiltern Theater. Bob Scheer and Mark Danner argued against the war. The pro-war side was offered up by Christopher and Michael Ignatieff (a liberal interventionist). It was a wonderful couple of hours of the highest intellectual caliber. My heart was with Hitchens. My head was with Danner. I wrote at the time that if Hitchens and Ignatieff were the U.S, STENDRA FOR SALE. Secretaries of Defense and State I might support the war. But they were not and I did not. I knew that the Bush administration were the wrong people to trust on this matter and I wanted no part of it.
This did not interrupt my friendship, STENDRA online cod, nor my admiration, for Hitchens even though I knew he was wrong on the war. I felt, on the contrary, that his voice was needed then more than ever. STENDRA FOR SALE, Politics is not a tennis match in which you stand by the side, pick your favorite, and live vicariously through your champion's wins and losses. It's about thinking, STENDRA images, making hard decisions, and understanding consequences. Hitchens was wrong about the war in Iraq. But many of those in the anti-war camp were also wrong about Iraq. Jeremy Scahill, darling of the hard Left, hosted on one of Saddam's dog-and-pony junkets, was doing radio reports about how fair Saddam's regional elections were. Ramsey Clark who was defending Milosevic at the time, rx free STENDRA, was fronting for the ANSWER cult who were organizing the anti-Iraq war demos and simultaneously praising North Korea.
More to the point, there were (and are) way too many American lefties who argued that the U.S, STENDRA FOR SALE. had "no right" to intervene against totalitarian states under any circumstances because it would be a violation of national sovereignty of the dictator in question. Others refuse to believe that there could possibly be any evil greater, or any evil at all, other than American Imperialism. They believe that only a "police action" was necessary to crush Al Qaeda (I never understood that one. Where can i find STENDRA online, Were NYPD detectives supposed to serve search warrants on the Taliban in Kabul?). And, then there's the Truthers who, I am afraid to say, were never actively expelled from the ranks of the Left. Hitchens voice was more necessary than ever as it was needed as a counter-balance to some of the more witless crap coming from many quarters of the antiwar crew. STENDRA FOR SALE, When Hitch quit The Nation a year before the war in Iraq, he said the straw that broke his back were the letters to the editor the magazine ran in the wake of 9/11. I remember reading those same letter and feeling sick. Way too many of them were laced at least with a tinge of trutherism, at least to the point of identifying the victim of 9/11, the U.S, STENDRA without a prescription, as the deserving perpetrator of the event. If not materially, then at least morally. The Official Left was mired in the 60's and would not budge. All roads lead back to U.S, STENDRA FOR SALE. Imperialism.
There's a fascinating if somewhat stilted essay that was published by the small neo-Marxist "Platypus" group a couple of years ago that while not wholly uncritical of Hitchens, STENDRA interactions, certainly takes pains to understand his political positioning from a Marxist view. I recommend you read it. It's not fair to sum up its complex arguments in a few sentences. But I would say this much. In many ways, Hitchens' desertion from what passes for the Left tell us more about the latter than the former. STENDRA FOR SALE, There is no credible American Left. And it's not so much that Hitchens left the Left as the Let left him (notwithstanding his mistaken position on Iraq). I think more salient, as the Platypus essay argues, the Left has no self-awareness that the continuity between the progressive and socialist movements of the 20th century, especially the first part of it, STENDRA duration, have been ruptured and severed. The world has changed and continues to change. U.S. imperialism, if you prefer, certainly continues to exist. But so does Chinese Imperialism, STENDRA FOR SALE. STENDRA coupon, India and Pakistan have nukes and millions of adherents to a religious nihilism. Russia has spiraled into an aggressive and dictatorial nationalism. Iran IS building nukes. Israel has 300 of them and this little problem will not be erased by chanting "Whose streets. STENDRA FOR SALE, Our streets!"
Hitchens' voice was necessary because so much of what was left of the Left, both liberal and radical, had turned so insular and myopic. Consider this passage from the Platypus essay. The quoted material is from Hitchens:
Those on the Left who tacitly defended Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did so because of an inherited moral and intellectual rot. A consequence of this was that “instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, STENDRA pharmacy, smirking isolationism” [108], one manifestation of which was the anti-war movement’s willingness to bracket out of consideration the fate of Iraqi Leftist or oppositionist parties and trade unions, if not to condemn them outright as U.S. “stooges.” For their part, groups like the ISO and Spartacist League, by simply dusting off the slogans of earlier struggles, About STENDRA, ignore the historical gulf that separates the current anti-war movement from, say, the movement that opposed the Vietnam War. The claims of such groups that, as they would put it, blows struck against American imperialism are blows in the interests of workers and the oppressed worldwide, have become unmeaning mantras by the muttering repetition of which such groups on the left withdraw into insensibility. Others on the Left are more vulgar, hoping that an Iraqi quagmire would allow for the emergence of Europe as a substantial counter-hegemonic force (as, for instance, in Habermas and Derrida’s joint letter of May 31, 2003), STENDRA FOR SALE. Regarding such Leftism, where can i order STENDRA without prescription, Hitchens remarks, “I am very much put in mind of something from the opening of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It’s not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce. It’s the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know” [55]. Unable to so much as describe the present, STENDRA maximum dosage, the Left has lost its currency for an entire generation. STENDRA FOR SALE, “Members of the Left, along with the far larger number of squishy ‘progressives,’ have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought” [57]. Today’s conservative leftism, with a long pedigree stretching back into the 1960s, first became dominant by couching itself in anti-imperialist language. But, as Hitchens comments, “My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, STENDRA forum, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones” ["'Don't Cross Over if You Have any Intention of Going Back'" Interview with Danny Postel The Common Review 4:1, 7]. The merits of this critique stand, regardless of Hitchens’s position on the Iraq War.
How prescient, STENDRA FOR SALE. I have been revolted this last week by the number of liberals and "progressives" who are running around saying how much they love, just love Ron Paul's "anti-interventionism." I believe this is precisely what Hitch meant when he said: “My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, STENDRA class, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones.” Hmmmm.
Well, Hitchens needs no further defense from me. STENDRA FOR SALE, As I thumb through this daunting, final anthology of his, he does a far superior job even from his fresh grave.
What has nauseated me the most over the last decade is the vile calumny and endless bile heaped upon him because he chose to divert from the party line on Iraq. That's an odd reaction from a rag-tag and impotent Left that willingly allows all sorts of screwballs, sectarians and rather unstable elements in its ranks (as does the organized Right, quite obviously). The reaction that Hitchens' position on Iraq evoked from those who thought he left "the team" tells you exactly that, STENDRA photos. These are folks who look at politics as a spectator sport. These are the folks unable to stand up on their own, incapable of challenging or defeating Hitchens (or likely anybody else) in debate. These are the poor, wretched souls who affirm their very self-identity by-- and actually believe it is a political act-- to read a tract by Chomsky, see a Michael Moore movie or listen to Amy Goodman plead for money. They collect political heroes as if they were hoarding baseball cards. And God help them if one of their favorites fumbles a ball or whiffs in the 9th, STENDRA FOR SALE.
I knew Christopher not only as a startling and prolific writer and thinker but also as a compassionate, Buy STENDRA without prescription, generous and loving friend. He was a ruthless debater and he was ready to dish it out rather savagely. He loved to overwhelm his opponents and he relished the oratorical victory. What he loved more, however, was the process, the debate, the tussle, the engagement. He loved it because his mind never shut off, never shut down and never entered into a drunken stupor as his more petty critics contend. If I knew I could write a tenth of what he has, if I could argue at 10 percent of his strength, I would gladly sign a deal tonight with the Devil to drink a quart a day of booze and to check out a year from now when I reach his age of demise. STENDRA FOR SALE, Christopher leaves a large hole in his passing. He leaves behind, quite literally, millions of admirers (the English edition alone of 'God Is Not Great' has sold something like 400,000 copies). He leaves behind probably thousands of friends in concentric circles of relative intimacy and degree.
I miss him sorely and it's hard for me to imagine the world without him. I am heartbroken for his children and for his wife Carol who so many of us in L.A. have known forever.
And, damnnit, I can't remember a single one of the dozens of limericks he recited that beautiful, cloudy afternoon in Alaska. I am left only with a near empty glass of Johnny Walker Black.
.
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December 21st, 2011 at 8:12 am
I think this is, in many ways, a magnificent essay not just about Hitchens but also about some of the failings of the left. That said, it seems to me that a couple of points make Hitchens a little less appealing. One, someone that smart should have known better than to think that idiots on the right–a term that describes Bush and Cheney and their amen chorus–could accomplish what Hitchens hoped to see. Two, this article reminds me of a beautiful line by a very conservative and superb Lincoln scholar, Allen Guelzo, who referred to one of Lincoln’s racist comments during his debates with Douglas as the line that Lincoln lovers and experts wish he had never said. Hitchens unfortunately descended at times to the level of his allies, and I resent certain implications in this piece on a personal and intellectual level. Namely, I hardly think the Democratic party truly represents the American people, but to oversimplify what some of us who consider ourselves “liberal” believe is an injustice of the sort that both Marc and Christopher Hitchens should be or have been above. That doesn’t mean I think of this as Marc Cooper “breaking” with anybody any more than Hitchens should be considered a traitor to the left for believing the left was wrong on some vital issues. It does mean that statements like that don’t contribute to the discourse they claim to promote.
December 21st, 2011 at 8:14 am
Beautiful.
December 21st, 2011 at 8:34 am
a very moving piece marc. i first discovered hitchens in 2004 when i was just 22, on a “solidarity” trip to cuba (every young leftist makes this pilgrimage, it seems) and the first article of his i read was his attack on michael moore and i hated hime instantly. except that i instantly recognized that he might be right. this began a slow evolution in me. at around this time i also came across you, mr. cooper. i began re evaluating my thoughts on everything and have now ended up as a proud anti authoritarian, and have been booted from my local little cirlce of left peoples, which was not at all painfull because i realized they were not really friends, just people who used me as a number for whatever their “causes” happened to be that week. i am forever greatfull for hitch, and you marc as well in helping educate me and teaching me to think when i was still young. cured me for life.
my only question: bad as iraq turned out to be, what if every other option would have been much worse? what if hitchens was right?
December 21st, 2011 at 10:57 am
I’ll have more to say later, but here’s what may be one of the limericks:
There was a young man named Hyde
Who fell into a privy and died.
His younger brother
Fell into another
And now they’re interred side by side.
December 21st, 2011 at 12:50 pm
thank you.
December 21st, 2011 at 1:47 pm
Michael:
Points well taken.
December 21st, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Thanks, Marc. That said, I don’t want to lose sight of what I said in the first line of my comment: you wrote a magnificent piece here on Hitchens. And Hitchens, to my mind, set an important standard: I found him fascinating and educational even when I found him to be totally wrong and disagreeable. That speaks to his greatness, because that’s what all of us should aspire to.
December 21st, 2011 at 3:23 pm
“There’s no need to get too deep into the weeds here so I will cut to the chase. Hitchens’ trajectory since 9/11 and his support for the war in Iraq was much more one of continuity than of any radical shift or lurch”
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve been making this point to anyone who will put up with me repeating it for the last ten years. It’s become axiomatic amongst the chattering classes that he became a neo-con, which is a position that has largely mystified me, since anyone who has been reading him consistently can clearly see the anti-totalitarian underpinnings of his position on Iraq. The conclusion, I guess, is that these people didn’t read him all that closely, and that, when he departed from the new anti-interventionist orthodoxy of the 90s liberal, they cried over their lost dashboard Mary–a figure that was only part of their team as long as his conclusions could be traced directly over theirs.
I’ve been especially disgusted to see people take quotes shorn of context in order to score cheap points. Someone going by the name of Corey Robin quotes Hitchens’s reaction to 9/11 and then concludes that he gets “excited by mass murder.”
Here is Hitchens about that day: I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view….I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.
Only a willful ignoramus would read that as excitement over mass murder, and there seems to be a lot of that going around. To a thoughtful person, he’s obviously making a point about the unmasking of the hideous face of anti-enlightenment, religious, totalitarianism. Perhaps Robin’s conclusion is the perfect example of the provincial left that Hitchens is talking about.
Glenn Greenwald, who I usually like, piles on in much the same vein. I fear Greenwald is letting his anger over US policy lure him down the dotty Chomsky trail.
In any case, I think Marc is right on the money in this analysis. The thing I couldn’t really find an explanation for in the last few years of Hitchens’s writing, though, was his unwillingness to reassess how things went in Iraq. It was almost as if such an exercise would weaken his resolve on the question, and he just wouldn’t do it.
But he always avoided what’s become of the Manichean left in the US, namely that there is the imperial US, and then the good guys. I would say he was too nuanced to be called a Manichean in any sense, but if he was it was between totalitarians and democrats, and that division explains so much about Hitchens, that what passes for the left today couldn’t understand about him.
Great post Marc.
December 21st, 2011 at 4:06 pm
[...] also: Marc Cooper’s ‘Remembering Christopher’ which looks at the issue of the alleged [...]
December 21st, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Marc, you’re a great writer anyway, but it is one more outstanding achievement of Hitchens’s that even from beyond the grave, he has, by his passing, inspired some of the most eloquent and powerful political essays I’ve read in many months. This one certainly rises to the occasion. Thank you for sharing it with us.
December 21st, 2011 at 6:09 pm
“To a thoughtful person, he’s obviously making a point about the unmasking of the hideous face of anti-enlightenment, religious, totalitarianism.”
Oh please. I’ve had the pleasure of reading Hitchens for a decade but hagiography has its limits. The quote-culled by Corey- equates a dispersed group of religious fanatics with an ideologically coherent industrial killing machine- say Germany in the 30′s. It’s a reminder that Hitch wasn’t only wrong on Iraq, he was badly off on the whole war on terror. If you imagine that “anti-enlightenment” forces and darkness reside over far there, in this Hitchens style formulation, then you embody the same style of black/white thinking you condemn the “Manichean left” for. My last words here.
I will miss reading Hitchens. I sympathize with those- like Marc- who mourn him more personally.
December 21st, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Can’t finish this right now because I’ve got an engagement, but I look forward to reading the rest. Just want to say that all other Hitchens-related issues aside in terms of his various political arguments over the years, his writing on his final illness and the courage with which he faced that was truly extraordinary and undoubtedly the most telling lens into the kind of man he was.
December 21st, 2011 at 6:38 pm
“My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones.”
Thank you.
December 21st, 2011 at 6:40 pm
i read that this morning, and it made my day.
— and the past 25 years of Hitchens-reading so clear.
December 21st, 2011 at 6:52 pm
Ahmed, don’t assume too much. The people who hijacked planes on 9/11 and their associated networks, are exactly as I described them. I didn’t say Muslims, or Arabs, or Persians, or any other blanket assignment, and neither did Hitchens at any point.
“Totalitarian” is an ideology first, a political program second–it doesn’t need to have an industrial killing machine attached to it to be totalitarian. Calvin’s Geneva was totalitarian, so was Stalin’s USSR, and so too would be any lands under the rule of the reactionary fundamentalist Islamists.
To the extent that the Enlightenment was about expanded freedom and equality then the Islamists (again, not Muslims, or Arabs, or Persians) are anti-enlightenment. For what it’s worth, I regard large swaths of the religious right as identically anti-enlightenment in their push to combine religion and government, amongst their many other apostasies against liberal, secular government.
December 21st, 2011 at 7:59 pm
Sadly, the muddled disorganization of the Left has only gotten worse and is depressingly exemplified by Occupy Wall Street. In so many ways it feels like the end. If the Anti-Iraq war folks had a gross misunderstanding of foreign affaris (not sure if I agree, the were right about Iraq but don’t present an alternate internationalist vision), Occupy stubbornly fails to understand the complexity of globalization and late capitalism or post 911 law enforcement in our culture. The insularity is evident in the self-congratulatory backslapping and pronouncements of “making history.” It is a sad state of affairs but you will struggle to find any lefties, even radicals (under inspection many will find that the movement has been co-opted by Democratic Party operatives) refuse to be critical in print. It is the “team play” phenomenon on display.
December 21st, 2011 at 7:59 pm
What I’m suggesting is that the quote articulates a worldview of binaries, outside of history and simplistic, from which the “war on terror”- Hitchens was badly badly wrong here- found articulation. Hitchens keenly understood these divisions before, the interplay between imperial ambitions, multiple fundamentalism, dogmatism and realpolitik. He wrote this around the first Gulf War:
Generally, it must be said that Realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been. . . . [T]he forces of secularism, democracy and reform have been dealt appalling blows. And all these crimes and blunders will necessitate future wars. That is what US policy has done, or helped to do, to the region. What has the same policy done to America? A review of the Pike Commission, the Iran-Contra hearings, even the Tower Report and September’s perfunctory House inquiry into the Baker-Kelly-Glaspie fiasco, will disclose the damage done by official lying, by hostage-trading, by covert arms sales, by the culture of secrecy, and by the habit of including foreign despots in meetings and decisions that are kept secret from American citizens. By Election Day the Gulf build-up had brought about the renewal of a moribund consensus on national security, the disappearance of the bruited “peace dividend” (“If you’re looking for it,” one Pentagon official told a reporter this past fall, “it just left for Saudi Arabia”), and the re-establishment of the red alert as the preferred device for communicating between Washington and the people…An earlier regional player, Benjamin Disraeli, once sarcastically remarked that you could tell a weak government by its eagerness to resort to strong measures. The Bush Administration uses strong measures to ensure weak government abroad and has enfeebled democratic government at home. The reasoned objection must be that this is a dangerous and dishonorable pursuit, in which the wealthy gamblers have become much too accustomed to paying their bad debts with the blood of others.”
Far greater complexity and upstanding here than your bombastic cartoonish world of good secular, pro enlightenment libs versus religious kooks. Cheers.
December 21st, 2011 at 8:02 pm
Okay- now I’m done. And I will dearly miss Hitch. ps Our dear friend Katha added a new and very honest perspective on her old colleague.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher
December 21st, 2011 at 8:52 pm
Although, as a god-fearing Church deacon and Sunday school teacher, Hitch would find repulsive, I still admire the man for his wit and clarity of writing. He’ll be missed.
December 21st, 2011 at 11:10 pm
I think notions of Hitchens’ consistency and claim to anything even approaching a rational or well-considered foreign policy for his adopted US tends to be overstated here and elsewhere. For the record, Hitchens opposed the US intervenion when Saddam Hussein actually did invade a neighbor – Kuwait. In the wake of that war, about which I was conflicted but not an opponent, there was an opportunity for the US to provide the kind of air cover for an internal uprising , without direct intervention by our troops, that we more recently provided to the people of Libya. That would have been defensible and legitimate in my view. And the best way to see Saddam go. Such as Dick Cheney and Colin Powell saw otherwise, when they had the chance to do it with some legitimacy. To their shame.
I assume Hitchens would agree with me in retrospect, but the fact that he actively opposed any military action against Saddam Hussein’s aggression calls a lot of his later posturing into question. This is old stuff, but if it’s going to be re-litigated, let’s do it with full context. Also, Hitchens defended the “WMD” bullshit. This is on record. And it was bullshit – and could be known as such at the time it was being slung at us by some of the biggest pricks in the business. I also hope that Marc is being hyperbolic or ironic or something when he says that he could have supported the Iraq war if Christopher Hitchens (or Ignatieff) were Secretary of Defense or State. I can’t imagine a worse candidate, other than possibly Donald Rumsfeld himself, or Henry Kissinger. Htichens’ pro-war hysterics – and his poleimics were both toxic and hysterical at the time – suggest something less than an appropriate temperament or preparation for such serious responsibilities. An impulsive gadfly like Hitchens couldn’t touch the hem of Hillary’s garment in this regard, and I’m not particularly a fan of Hillary. Hitchens wrote well. His political thinking was often muddled at best. He was an egoist and he conflated politics with his own visceral needs. This “internationalist” pose is pretty thin if it boils down to cheering on Don Rumsfeld totally fucking up Iraq – overseeing hundreds of thousands killed, mostly by unleashing a civil war that anyone with a clue should have seen coming upon the toppling of Saddam. And strengthening Iran’s hand to boot. Hitchens was clueless on this one. Totally.
I have a lot of respect for the guy on a purely persona level, despite this shameful episode. But because one guy has died, I don’t see the need to whitewash a completely crackpot, baseless argument he promoted insufferably that rationalized the deaths of many thousands of others. And to a great extent it was an act of vanity – about his “support” of the Iraqi people, whether they liked it or not. I don’t think he was a monster, but he’s sure as hell no saint. He had tremendous personal courage, but I’m getting kind of sick of one-sided encomiums to the guy. Just the “women can’t be funny” crap alone suggests something less than a first-class moral sensibility. Among other things, his paean to cluster bombs (“A War To Be Proud Of” in that horrible Kristol rag Weekly Standard”) was pretty nauseating.
Or stuff like this: “I am one of those who believe, uncynically, that Osama bin Laden did us all a service (and holy war a great disservice) by his mad decision to assault the American homeland four years ago.” Yeah. Thanks. More context? “Had he not made this world-historical mistake, we would have been able to add a Talibanized and nuclear-armed Pakistan to our list of the threats we failed to recognize in time” Gee, we’ve certainly dodged that bullet now, haven’t we? A stitch in time, etc. etc.
No doubt a brilliant mind in it’s scope, if not it’s judgement – and when all else is said and done, I’m convinced he was a courageous soul and am in awe of his essays on his own illness and fate. But that’s not an excuse for years of serial bullshit, and frankly Hitchens promoted more than his share. I think I give him the credit he richly deserves, but I don’t feel any compunction to absolve the truly worthless stuff. He wasn’t wrong because he had a more complex understanding of the world than, say, Rachel Maddow. He was wrong because he refused to see the complexities that were in front of him and made some terrible judgements that didn’t stand up to examination at the time and certainly don’t stand up to the empirical evidence of the last ten years. This was the most consequential foreign policy decision of the last thirty years IMHO. No small error.
I feel churlish, but this is my honest opinion.
December 21st, 2011 at 11:16 pm
Even when I disagreed with him he made me rethink my assumptions and seek to defend my position more effectively. You can’t ask for more. Nobody is perfect, brilliant people can be incorrect! Take his entire career into account, they guy was amazing. For many young people who were young in the 90′s really looked up to Hitch. “Letter’s To A Young Contrarian” is a really inspirational book and I have bought numerous copies in the last decade for gifts.
December 22nd, 2011 at 2:27 am
A good article and a nice tribute.
I greatly admired Christopher Hitchens. I sometimes did not agree with him. Any argument he made, however, I gave respect.
On many subjects – my favourite being his fantastic and disarming response in a debate that the biggest crime of organised religion was in the suppression and repression of women – he communicated brilliantly.
His voice is now silenced but it will reverberate for a good while. I am sure.
December 22nd, 2011 at 8:55 am
Marc – reading your comments on the Left, I’m wondering was the ideological left of 1968 that Hitchens was so proudly part of – used as his point of reference to the end, more coherent, more aware of contradictions and complexities, or more vigilant regarding the dangers of dictatorships using “anti-imperialism” as cover for their own crimes than…uh…to use Hitchens favorite punching bag, Michael Moore is today? Certainly Rachel Maddow, who you refer to, is less of an embarrassment intellectually and morally than the “Marxist” crap that was becoming dominant in SDS by ’68-69 – or the knee-jerk ideology that was rampant in the solidarity movements of the ’70s. (That Maddow can be silly and tendentious I don’t dispute, but she’s typical of a lot of contemporary liberals whose judgement and political instincts I trust more, frankly, than the mindset most of my “comrades” or the folks Hitchens was allied with were operating within back in the day.) Don’t want to beat this into the ground, but I’m curious if you think that was – at the level of “ideology” – some sort of golden era that we’ve lost. I think it was damaging if not disastrous in terms of realizing a coherent politics and workable strategies for any “serious” left moving forward.
December 22nd, 2011 at 11:24 am
Peter Hitchens on his brother:
The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.
I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been.
A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could…
He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time…
My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember.
December 22nd, 2011 at 12:39 pm
Bruce
Nice words from Peter. No, I don’t think the 60′s was a Golden Era in the ideological aspect. I affirm that because I was a black sheep even then as an ant-authoritarian. The New Left was full of wingnuts wearing Mao buttons and, yes, Kim Il Sung buttons! I do think, however, there was a sizeable minority of ideologically sophisticated folks who felt themselves part of a global movement rather than just as an auxillary of the Democratic Party. And they are for the most part, gone. I will agree that the overall legacy of the 60′s is mixed and that while it politically jumpstarted a generation, it also poorly shaped the politics that emerged from it. Those, now in their 60′s (!), who refuse to adjust their views are forever lost in time and, yes, I will take a cloying Rachel Maddow hands down nowadays over some fool who primarily identifies as an “anti-imperialist.”
December 22nd, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Pretty much how I see it – I think I was imagining more in the implications of your comments than were there.
December 22nd, 2011 at 7:31 pm
Here are some other views on Hitchens:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7919&IBLOCK_ID=35
http://www.thenation.com/blog/165222/regarding-christopher
December 22nd, 2011 at 8:51 pm
A wonderful remembrance of your friend, Marc.
I’d love to hear what you think of Finkelstein’s
“farewell”.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/22/hitchens-passing/
December 22nd, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Marc, I haven’t read anything this direct and moving about Hitchens anywhere else, and I think the comments about the Left are absolutely deadly and much needed, as others here have said. Thank you for your defense of Hitchens and for doing a little armor-piercing where he left off. If buying you some more ammo means another Johnny Walker, the next round’s on me.
December 22nd, 2011 at 10:12 pm
I find Finkelstein to be beneath contempt.
December 22nd, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Thanks Dean
December 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 pm
“I find Finkelstein to be beneath contempt.
Agreed. I thought Alexander Cockburn’s column was the most slimy… until I read Finklestein’s.
December 23rd, 2011 at 12:23 am
Marc,
Thanks for this smart, sympathetic, and thought-provoking appreciation.
And readers — the article in Platypus referenced in Marc’s piece is very much worth reading. It goes deeper than most of the post-mortem chin-wagging in pointing out that a certain kind of “collapse of the left” was the reason that, in his later essays, Hitchens turned from conventional political analysis to moral exhortation.
December 23rd, 2011 at 1:23 pm
From the Platypus article:
“Hitchens argued in effect that social democracy had utterly collapsed and, with it, so had the political salience of the distinction between the Democrats and Republicans.”
This is just an idiotic assertion. Contemptible really in it’s evasion of the impact of “actually existing” politics on people’s lives. People who don’t live in Hitchens’ relatively hermetic world of arguments over drinks. If the “left” has obviously failed – and frankly no one with a clue should have ever assumed any “left” could succeed wrapped in the cloak of “Marxist revolution” or “sociaist internationalism” (and I include myself among the relatively clueless in my youth, but certainly not beyond my twenties) – this kind of proposition, even as the foundation for an argument, is evidence of the utter failure of a certain type of intellectual re: “political salience.” This is armchair bullshit of the worst sort.
December 23rd, 2011 at 5:29 pm
fwiw worth, Bruce, I read everything I could get my hands on by Hitchens over the years, and he never wrote anything like that that I can recall. I have heard through second hand sources that he often had contempt for liberals, but that’s not the same thing, and I also never saw him write that view either.
December 23rd, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Okay – but his Nader-2000ism (I hesitate to mention this) was this kind of thinking in practice. I can’t vouch for the Platypus article, just came upon that and though it was ridiculous. For me Hitchens was never an influence on my political thinking – except for periodic reports that were actual journalism as opposed to opinion slinging. I loved reading his literary essays. My opinion of his politics – dating back to my understanding of his roots in “68″ (at least in retrospect because I have my own “sordid”, asinine past to account for) is that they were mostly rooted in burninshing his self-image rather than anything related to real-world choices. This includes his promotion of the Iraq war as some kind of “solidarity” with the Kurds, or whatever. Just dumb, infantile stuff IMHO.
December 23rd, 2011 at 6:21 pm
Incidentally, some of Hitchens’ most notorious feuds late in life were base on a poor choice of companions when he was in good standing at The Nation. Alexander Cockburn? Who could take this neo-Stalinist asshole seriously, even “back in the day?”
I reiterate that I have a lot of respect for HItchens. But I doubt that he would approve of folks mincing words just because of the fact of someone passing. I loved his excoriating Falwell at the moment of that creep’s final fate. I’m trying to keep to Hitchens’ own standards of honesty here. Not trying to be mean-spirited. I think he was heroic in his grappling with Fate.
December 23rd, 2011 at 6:47 pm
Like any one of us, he was capable of letting his zeal cloud his good sense and for my experience, this was his worst instance. There weren’t facts on his side in this instance; just speculation presented as fact. With all due respect to him as your friend and to his brilliance, that’s a risky path to tread.
December 25th, 2011 at 9:46 am
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204791104577110880355067656.html
December 25th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
My earlier comment notwithstanding, I did live the way he took David Mamet apart here.
December 25th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
Make that “I did like the way he took David Mamet apart.”
December 26th, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Wonderful, wonderful writing.
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-and-end-of.html
January 3rd, 2012 at 6:55 pm
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