Why Hitchens matters (to me)
Before I start this article, I would like to issue a throat clearing, to preempt some of the inevitable criticisms this article is likely to draw from the admirers of the central personality of this essay.
I think it would be a staggering understatement to say that Christopher Hitchens is missed by his admirers and followers.
For the sake of revealing all my cards upfront, I'll say here outright, that the author is an unabashed fan of Christopher. And to write this article, I had to constantly wrestle with myself to inject objectivity and reason at the expense of adulation.
Hence, I would further clarify here that this article is not meant to be anything like a definitive summation of the man and his impact on the literary and polemic world. It is only meant to express the importance his stance on various issues had on me, and to reveal the main reason for my admiration of his public posture on some of the most important debates of our time. Therefore, I added the words “To me” to the title of this essay. My only purpose here is to articulate how Christopher shaped my world view and the parts of his literary and oratorical personality which were most appealing to me.
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More charmed than convinced, but …
Christopher Hitchens entered my field of vision when viewing current affairs programs on C-SPAN. As an avid watcher of that channel, I used to look forward to the call-in shows with Brian Lamb as the host, since Christopher was a regular guest on that show and would answer calls coming into it. I was struck by the remarkable clarity, polemical ease and forthrightness with which he would address various questions concerning domestic and foreign policy and provide various interesting insights into complex international geopolitical problems. As a thoroughbred politico myself, I found myself engaged in new ways into topics and debates relating to international relations that I was previously familiar with, when listening to Christopher. And the one topic which had always arrested my attention was the clash between the global Islamist movement and Western democracies. Since Christopher was one of the front-men of this debate, (and I became aware of this only through his friendship with Salman Rushdie), I was particularly captivated by his take on this clash and where he thought it was headed, specially in the wake of terrorist attacks which struck the West.
Consequently, I started to follow his writings and speeches and began to recognize him as a man very firmly of the left, a self-described Trotskyist and a brilliant polemic speaker. Christopher spent most of his adult life on the hard left, a fierce critic of American foreign and military policy, he was pretty much in agreement with Noam Chomsky’s condemnation of American policy decisions in South East Asia and Palestine in particular, and around the globe in general. A strident detractor of Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik foreign policy decisions in Central and South America, he gave voice (a very erudite and articulate one) to the large body of leftist criticism which was a central feature of public policy discourse in America in the cold war period.
I think it would be inaccurate to claim that he was as much of an influence on the American left as Chomsky, but he certainly became one of the most popular and well-known figures of the American left within the popular culture. His frequent appearances on television cemented his place in the popular cultural consciousness in that context.
In that role, Christopher, to my mind, is an easily recognizable figure in the intellectual landscape of America. He fits in well into the political mosaic which one can imagine in their mind’s eye representing the spectrum of public opinion across America. His fierce intellect made him a voluble critic of organized religion, often attacking the Christian churches for their role in American politics, he was clearly a man who believed in the materialist conception of history, a Marxist, a secularist and a passionate opponent of Israeli behavior in the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza.
While living this role in his life, Christopher is no different intellectually than the vast number of people on the American left who share that world view. They loathe America's support for Israel, berate the fact that a Palestinian state doesn't exist and are generally wary of any American foreign policy intrusion into the middle east, in the belief that, American intervention can never really lead to anything positive in that region, no matter what the original intention. This instinct could accurately be described as one in which a prudent sense of caution and reticence had regressed into one where every problem in the region could be explained away as American-created, whether America had interfered to help create the problem or not.
The main distinguishing feature of Christopher during this phase of his life, was his exceptionally gifted polemic speaking style which made him a very engaging personality. Any verbal encounter with Christopher usually led to a very entertaining spectacle of verbal thrust and parry which was always enjoyable to witness. And myself and many others can now freely admit that it was this entertaining nature of Christopher’s personality which was the initial attraction for many of his admirers. Rather than being convinced by his arguments through rigorous scrutiny, I was initially just charmed by his formidable debating abilities and polemical capabilities.
However, this initial fascination with his oratorical personality inevitably opened the door to the substance of his arguments, particularly when he started talking about the part of the world where I was born. And in any case, if one intellectually stalks someone to the extent that I did with Christopher, one does tend to discover those aspects of their argumentation which make them seem more fallible. And that led to a more nuanced, though still thoroughly persuasive impression of his world view, which I could still agree with partially and circumstantially. Nonetheless, I was always impressed by the seeming sincerity with which he held the views that he did and the magisterial authority with which he expressed them.
Christopher’s forthright description of himself as a contrarian brought with it a revealing relish for controversy which was charming, even at the most serious of times. However, such a label also brought with it, a slightly more serious problem when engaging with the substance of some of his arguments. One of the occupational hazards of being a self-described contrarian is to risk betraying a lack of sincerity in one’s arguments. If one gives the impression that they are arguing for the sake of argument (one of the titles of Christopher’s books, incidentally), they can mislead people into believing that much of what they are saying publicly might be for effect.
The fact that while willingly admitting to his basic contrarian nature, (and thereby accepting to carry the obvious detriments which such an admission would inevitably induce into his arguments), he still had the public confidence to believe that his opinions could stand or fall on their own merit, is what made me take him more seriously than his intellectual contemporaries.
This aspect of his public persona is what made me pay more care towards his spoken words and consequently acquire the ability to extract those parts of his arguments which seemed really heart-felt. And having thus invested that additional attention to his speeches, I was indeed able to decipher in turn, that when he criticized organized religion, for example, that he really meant it. Having thus satisfied myself of my ability to figure out when he was being mischievous and when sincere, I devoured most of his spoken and written words in the confidence that I had the means to separate the wheat from the chaff towards forming a more informed world view.
Which brings me to the seminal moment in Christopher’s career which made the substance of his arguments really speak to me, open a new chapter in my own intellectual journey and bring a moment of clarity into my thinking which I find myself carrying since. I can accurately describe it as the moment when I became less of an entertained admirer of his polemical verbal personality and more of a convinced intellectual consumer of his political thinking. It was also the moment when an immodest conclusion dawned on me, that I might have been inadvertently following one of the most important public intellectuals of our time.
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The moment
The devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on the 11th of September 2001, started a new phase in global history in which we are still currently living. To my mind, it was a truly black and white moment in global history, akin to the discovery of the concentration camps at the end of world war two. An event so utterly horrifying and depraved that it invokes a visceral reaction from most people. It's a moment when one must stop the discussion about global politics, foreign policy, etc., and just acknowledge the horror and human wickedness of the moment.
Having recovered from the initial shock of the incident, when my attention was turned to the inevitable volcanic explosion of public discussion ignited by this epoch-making event, I was initially surprised and subsequently stunned at the apparent lack of understanding which many people on the American left started to display in the aftermath of the incident.
Instead of focusing on the truly wicked nature of the attackers and trying to figure out the source of their mental sickness, the vast body of leftist opinion treated the event as a continuation of their previously held world view which was centered largely on America’s support to Israel and American interference in Middle Eastern politics in general.
That the truly satanic nature of the event didn’t open any new door in the minds of most of the American left, left me truly dumbfounded. That an event of such signal magnitude could evoke such pedestrian reactions from people of otherwise high intellect, left me confounded at best. This astonishment deepened when I discovered that this amazing lack of perspective was shared by leftist thinkers across the globe, thereby giving a global dimension to this thought affliction.
Adding to my surprise and growing concern was the seeming fact that the only spectrum of society which correctly identified the most important aspect of this attack, i.e. the Islamist Jihadi mindset which was set on its lethal course prior to the existence of America and has its own reasons for its propulsion, was the hard-right nationalist and Christian conservative wing of the body politic in every major democracy in the western world.
Having never been interested in the religious right-wing spectrum of western politics, I tried initially to keep their opinions on this matter at arm’s length, my attention having been arrested, in the main, by the leftist horror which I was now becoming a witness to.
Since I consider myself a global citizen, having lived in more than one country, I am not particularly inclined to parochial thinking and the religious right doesn’t exactly fit into a liberal person’s globalized world view where one must think more expansively and try to amalgamate the good features in every society into one set of universal values, if possible.
To my naive mind at the time, if the threat was global, and I would still argue that it is from Islamists, the response to it should also be global and not restricted to a nationalist outlook. This is the reason I initially sought a response from the left to meet the threat from Islamic Jihad, since I had held the view that an expansive world view, not constrained by narrow nationalistic concerns, was the natural intellectual space of the left and since I could visualize the Islamist threat being a massive concern for people who are interested in preserving liberal societies across the globe, not just in the west.
However, in the aftershock of the terrorist attacks on America, I was left searching the left liberal world to find a strident opposition to this hideous attack on a democratic society. But Alas! to my horror I could find none.
Having been simultaneously frightened and intrigued by this insane behavior by the left in the face of such a direct attack on a free society by a bunch of religious bigots, I became curious to find the source of their amazing abdication. As I inquired further into this leftist response, I was horrified and shocked to discover that a portion of the hard left actually felt satisfied and even morally righteous at this monstrosity.
As my curiosity about this attitude led me to inquire further and deeper into the cause of it, I began to feel an increasing sense of uneasiness at the possibility of unearthing the conclusion that this grotesque thought problem within the wider left could lead me to the frightening possibility that the greater threat to western civilization might actually be more from this leftist attitude towards the threat rather than the Islamic threat itself.
As I began to dig, my initial suspicion rested on a conjecture that most of the left knew very little about the political and military force which was now hitting the West, namely the political aspect of Islam along with the direct injunctions to global conquest which were hard wired into its theology. The fact that many people on the left saw Islamists as a kind of liberation movement, fighting against imperialism of some kind, partially confirmed this suspicion of mine. A further revelation emerged when many on the left inadvertently exposed that in their limited thinking, it was only the white, western world which could be imperialist. And to their mind, if someone from the part of the world which was populated mainly by people of a darker skin tone was attacking it, they must be fighting an imperialism of some sort and therefore doing something right.
To add to the list of intellectual horrors that this kind of excavation on my part, of the fossilized leftist mind-space, began to unravel, came the notion that many within the left viewed this event in racial terms, something which the attackers themselves had never expressed as a motivating factor. So, for example, when I would point out to friends in the left, in innumerable interactions over the years, that Islamists had also been attacking a brown skinned democracy called India, which had never dropped a nuclear bomb on anyone, never gone on a colonizing spree, etc., I would inevitably be met either with silence or some facile attempt at name-calling, primarily used as an excuse to avoid facing the facts.
This strand of ignorant thinking within some of the left had led them to genuinely believe that the Islamist assault on the West was some new kind of leftist wave by a section of people from the deprived third world who were opposing an American sponsored global capitalist agenda which the previous Soviet sponsored left had failed to defeat in decades past.
This group of leftist opinion seemed unaware that Islamists have their own historical global narrative with its unique connected motivation, (crystallized, repackaged and re-introduced into the modern world by the Muslim brotherhood in the 1920s), which lay outside the capitalist vs communist global narrative and in fact predates it by more than a thousand years. This confirmed entirely to me, the seeming fact that many in the left didn’t know a whole lot about Islam in general and political Islam (also referred to as “Islamism” these days) in particular.
And true enough, when asked flat out if they had read the Quran, knew anything about the origins of Islam or anything at all about the fourteen hundred years of Islamic history and global conquest, a shocking lack of knowledge was revealed within a vast section of the liberal left, not just in America, but across the western world in general. This knowledge gap was shockingly exemplified when Bill Maher, a comedian and social commentator accidentally revealed in an interview with Charlie Rose, a well respected and intellectual sage of the American left, that Rose didn't know that the Quran had injunctions of global conquest and violence inscribed in it. It seemed that in the minds of some of the liberal left, their “imaginary knowledge” of Islam seemed to originate from limited but pleasant interactions that some of them had experienced in their lives with liberal Muslims in school, college or at work. And that Islam was just another global religion indistinguishable from the rest, which had its share of moderates and extremists. Consequently, they settled on the conclusion that the wave of Islamist inspired attacks that the West was being currently subjected to, was entirely due to contemporary geo-politics and Western interfence in the Muslim world and that the reasons being trotted out by the Jihadis for their anger was completely understandable and deserved accomodation.
One shouldn't be too surprised at the discovery of this ignorance though, since the liberal western world, which can largely be described accurately as a post-Christian secular world (with the notable exception of the Bible belt in America), had lost touch with religious theology and motivation as a driving factor in the modern age, and had thus jettisoned religious belief as a legitimate motivation for anything anyone does in this modern world. The fact that a significant chunk of humanity belonging mainly to one religious identity still does find a driving motivation within their own religion for existence, and most vitally conquest, seemed therefore to be a wild exaggeration to many on the left, which could not be squared with their own secular materialist world view.
Consequently, one was repeatedly subjected to annoying and obviously wrong conclusions about the motivations of the Islamists, chief among them being poverty, a lack of education, lack of opportunity, etc. These conclusions have been pedantically and painstakingly disproved by thinking people over the years. For those of us who have been following the growth of Islamic Jihad and its clashes with the West for decades now, all the counterpoints which thoroughly invalidate the above alleged motivations, are now familiar. The fact that most Islamist ideologues and their Jihadi offspring come from wealthy middle-class families, many of them in high end professions within their own countries and often having been found to have received an education in the West, has, to some extent, shot down this avenue of excuse-seeking.
This position, while flowing from ignorance did still leave one hopeful that those deploying this kind of thinking might be pliant to changing their views when presented with the facts. In other words, that they were speaking from ignorance and therefore making a bonafide mistake. However, the next attempt by the left to justify their ambivalence, didn’t just extinguish any such hope on my part but also revealed within a subset of the hard left, a much darker strain of rejection.
It turned out that for some of the well-travelled, well-educated left, it wasn’t a lack of knowledge about political Islam which was informing their ambivalence, but to the contrary, an excess of it.
They knew indeed about the dangerous aspects of the faith, but had reconciled in their minds, that the unleashing of this wave of violence across the globe had to do with American foreign policy decisions and its impact on the middle east. Other than betraying a deeply navel-gazing view of history, which incidentally continues within vast sections of the American left, it also reveals a ridiculously superficial instinct within the left, which believes that every political force that impacts America must have somehow been American induced or created. That very few people, if any, in America thought in this manner on December 8th, 1941 is testament to the decline of serious thinking about geo-strategic issues within the foot soldiers of the American left post Vietnam.
Without bothering to even find out if their opinions were based on some elementary foundation of knowledge, they started spouting opinions about their understanding of the events which were unfolding in front of them, mainly precipitating into criticisms of American support for Israel and a lack of education in the Muslim world.
The obsession of linking the Israel-Palestine conflict to the rise of Jihadi groups across the planet also revealed within the left a failure to distinguish between various strands of political opinion within the Muslim world. They failed to spot, for example, that when Al Qaeda rhetoric complained about the injustices of eighty years, they were in fact, referring to the abolis of the Caliphate by Kamal Ataturk and not the Israeli occupation of Gaza, an event that tremor-ed the Muslim world more than twenty-five years before Israel was even born as a country.
That this Islamist insurgency was driven by motivations of conquest and wasn’t replying to any offense committed upon it, but was using the conflicts in the middle east as excuses and talking points to enable their own goals of conquest, completely failed to enter the imagination of the left. Primarily because in their haste to find a reason to blame themselves for the attacks which the West was now suffering, they immediately enthroned the attackers to the status of victims.
Therefore, in any clash between the West and the Muslim world, the left was bound to oppose the West because its basic instinct was to distrust the West first. The thought disease which had percolated into vast sections of the left liberal side of Western political thought was to put America at the center of the debate, when in actual fact, the core of this particular debate was the global Islamist agenda of conquest launched by the Muslim brotherhood after World War One, one of whose offshoots is a vile organization like Al Qaeda.
Incidentally, it was confirmed to me by an extract of a public debate on this issue published in a British newspaper that the source of this thought disease was indeed the idea held by many within the left that America was the bigger threat to global security and must therefore be the first subject of any initial suspicion when a clash of this kind broke out.
That this strain of thinking was a perfect replica of the kind of conspiracy peddling that pervades the Arab world of there being a covert Jewish hand guiding American foreign policy, seemed like the darkest irony of the time.
The idea of two floating masses of illiteracy and stupidity on both sides of an encounter seemed comically ridiculous only up to the point where I realized that one of those two sides was supposed to be the vanguard of intellectual thought in the western world and lived in the democratic part of the planet where such opinions carried the weight of a vote and were therefore lethally consequential.
Furthermore, that this suspicion of America within the left, was attempting to disguise itself as a concern for Muslim lives when America was involved also revealed the true dishonesty with which the left held this position.
One of the participants in the above-mentioned debate pointedly exemplified this dishonesty by pointing out that the leftist rage which erupts, for example, when an American drone accidently kills Muslim civilians is conspicuously absent when Muslims kill other Muslims in numbers far larger, on purpose, in far more grotesque circumstances and for purely sectarian religious reasons. “Their focus is not on Muslim lives, it's on America and the West”, he tersely summarized during the debate. Bearing in mind this fitting abridgment, all subsequent examples of seemingly mindless leftist positions are swiftly demystified.
So, if you pointed out to the left that the new Jihadi movement of which Al Qaeda is a product, began in the Philippines and is equally hitting those parts of the globe where there had been no American interference like Nigeria or India, the conversation would unalterably enter the world of conspiracy theories where every act of lunacy anywhere in the planet was somehow woven back to America.
Further, if pointed out to them that a unilateral American led air campaign by NATO in the nineties, saved the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo (areas of the world where there is no oil, incidentally) from complete ethnic genocide at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic in his efforts to create a "Greater Serbia", an engagement on which both Russia and China had decided to take a pass, you would receive either blank expressions of cluelessness or hollow charges of self-interest.
And sacrilegiously if you pointed out that the removal of Saddam from Kuwait by American force led to the freeing of a Muslim / Arab population of Kuwait, and that Western air power had enabled the growth and resuscitation of a Kurdish population in northern Iraq (incidentally also Muslim) which had been poison-gassed by Saddam in the eighties, you would again be confronted with thoughtless charges of oil and self-interest as if those are some uniquely American follies and as if the existence of those interests should prevent a responsible global community from stopping visible genocide when identified.
The fact when spoken plainly, that the Afghan War of the eighties was started by the Soviet Union to nakedly annex the entire country of Afghanistan and merge it with the Soviet Union (something that has never been the stated objective of an American intervention in Iraq with the ostensible aim of putting it into a post-Saddam era), leading to the death and displacement of millions of the Muslim citzenry of Afghanistan, but still somehow lives on in popular imagination as America’s fault, found no meaningful purchase or response either.
The possibility that you could legitimately criticize American excesses during the cold war era and its support for Israeli excess in the occupied parts of Palestine and still manage to see a new threat emerging in the post-Soviet world (something which people like me could then and still are able to easily manage), was considered an option impossible to engage with.
Since the nature of this new threat was global and not America-centric, the Left's uniquely skewed gazing point didn't allow for any rationalization between the positions they had held three decades ago and the reality of the world as it existed now, because it meant confessing that America was just a part of the globe, and therefore vulnerable to all global ebbs and flows and not in control of it and that conclusion was destabilizing to their entire world-view.
This widespread illusion resulting in the left’s distrust of America as the leading creator of global problems, had therefore, bolted their minds shut to the possibility of there being an even bigger and more lethal force out there with its own reasons for wanting to conquer the planet. Consequently, you saw banners in Europe among the brain-dead wing of the left claiming that George Bush was a bigger threat to global peace than Osama Bin Laden, much to the unexpected delight of the Islamists.
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A gift to the Islamists
To make this thought disease more chronic and lethal, the possibility of Islamists dishonestly using these old anti-American talking points to justify their own vile actions towards their equally abhorrent goals, while fully knowing themselves that they neither knew nor really cared about those cold-war atrocities, was simply a leap too far for most leftist minds.
The Islamists, in turn, couldn't believe their luck. In delighted astonishment, to find a section of their target population willing to buy the excuses for their behaviour that they themselves knew were being advanced insincerely, they pressed home their advantage to amplify their deceitful greivance mongering in the hope of gaining more ground before their ugly aims were truly discovered. You thus found the bizarre spectacle of Osama Bin Laden recommending the writings of Noam Chomsky.
In addition to America, Britain and France were particularly affected by this wave of Islamist opportunism where the liberal media space was shamelessly exploited by Islamists and their sympathizers to bend the public discussion in their favour to manufacture some level of support within the voting left for their own expansionist agenda.
In observance of this dire state of affairs within the intellectual left, people like me, who understood the Islamic Jihadi threat, knew of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11, knew of its links to the Muslim brotherhood, knew of their goals and had seen and experienced the effects of Islamic Jihad on those parts of the world which had not been colonial or expansionist, e.g. India, were left groping in the dark.
Our natural political space seemed populated by a liberal base of people who seemed completely out to lunch on a matter of such vital importance and the only people making sense on this issue were right wing zealots in our own open societies. Consequently, for a period, I was left politically homeless. Not wanting to drift anywhere near the ugliness of the hard right and in complete horrified astonishment at the Left’s ineptitude and dangerously moronic attitude towards this matter, I spent about a year in what can only be described as some sort of political no-man’s land.
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Enter Hitchens
It was at this time of flux in my political life, that I started to follow Christopher with much interest and intensity. In the wake of 9/11, Christopher Hitchens famously turned on his own political camp (the Left) with a righteous vengeance which can only be described as biblical. His volte-face was because he was equally horrified as me, not just at the sheer shock of the event but more so at the complete lack of perspective displayed by his political side on a matter of such severe consequence to civilized countries.
In truth, Christopher’s disillusionment and impatience with leftist recalcitrance had begun several years earlier, when American air power took it upon itself (unilaterally and without UN sanction) to save the Muslim populations of Balkan Europe from total ethnic cleansing, only to be met with a howling wilderness of silence from both the Muslim community within the west which had complained so loudly only a decade back about being upset at the writing of a novel and the left which had lazily assumed that any use of American military power was fundamentally unwholesome and therefore unworthy of further scrutiny to ascertain if it was doing any good.
But their tepid reaction to September 11th, was the last straw on the camel’s back as far as Christopher was concerned. In a pivotal moment and a manner which can only be described as virulently activist and bristling with righteous anger, Christopher turned his fierce intellect and formidable debating armory on his own side.
And here’s the crucial part. He did so, while continuing to remain within the fold of the left. His attempts to use the language of the left to open their eyes to what was an obviously illiberal, totalitarian ideology was a completely new political phenomenon for me to witness. A leftist who was showing a mirror to the left to exemplify their own ridiculous thinking while remaining within the tent of the left was a cutting edge idea. This was a unique phenomenon in the post 9/11 world for people like myself to witness. A flag bearer of leftist thinking forcing open an argument within his own side in an attempt to rouse the left to think more holistically and seriously about this issue was something I had never imagined I would be lucky enough to witness.
I didn't know it at the time, but by taking this stance, Christopher would evolve into one of the rarest of political animals in our times. To witness a strident Trotskyist, a firm man of the left, who didn't allow his valid criticisms of America or the West to cloud his judgment about the most severe religious threat posed to all liberal societies across the globe was like seeing a unicorn. The fact that this political move by Hitchens happened in the full glare of the television media and will therefore provoke debate for decades to come makes it a vital event in the political history of the modern left, in my opinion.
It would be staggeringly and sadly revealed to me in subsequent years, that the left liberal class of people of whom Christopher was a champion, refused to see his point, even when he transparently described his actions as defenses of liberalism.
However, since Christopher was nothing if not an instinctive contrarian, he took it upon himself to engage himself in this battle within the left, to try and rouse his own political side into realizing that their blind anti-Western positions were being used dishonestly and cynically by an enemy who did not share any of their concerns or sensibilities. And that they didn't have to become right wingers of any sort to face up to this new threat. It was hopelessly disappointing to witness though the incalculable number of times that his atheist, secular cohorts interpreted this stance of his as just another contrarian attempt on his part. That they simply could not detect the urgency and seriousness in his voice and words when he repeatedly inflicted intellectual shovels to the back of their heads to try and make them see sense, left me with a deflated sense of futility towards the future of left liberal politics in America in particular, and in secular societies in general.
These attempts by Christopher to awaken the left to the threat from Islamic Jihad and to encourage them to fight it from within the left, have been etched in my memory as imperishable historical moments of truth. Notable among these clashes, which can now be followed by those interested in the subject on the Internet were his clashes with Noam Chomsky (his intellectual contemporary within the left), Tariq Ali, (a fellow leftist intellectual), George Galloway, (a demagogic adversary of Christopher), Eric Alterman, (a colleague of his from the Nation magazine), among many others. Posterity will thank YouTube for preserving many of these memorable clashes for generations to come.
Since, in my opinion, no-one could verbally articulate a position better than Hitchens himself, I'll directly quote an excerpt of his from a Mario Savio Memorial Lecture in 2002 when interacting with fellow leftists and trying to rouse them into confronting the Jihadi threat, he perfectly summarized his impatience with the left.
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While addressing an audience member, Hitchens indignantly thundered:
“If you take the case of September 11th, you have an organization that is partly a really corrupt multinational corporation, I’m talking about Al Qaeda now, run by Saudi capital and supported by the Saudi oligarchy and the Pakistani secret police, its partly that. It’s partly a crime family, its partly a cult organization and its partly a fascist group. This, I think, is an enemy, right. A pretty reactionary enemy, it’s not just that its methods are the mass destruction of civilians, using civilian aviation to inflict further death of civilians, but its objective is a stone-age society without music, culture, philosophy, dialectic of any kind at all, the model of it being Taliban Afghanistan. It’s not my objection to their means, it’s to their objectives. This attack puts the working class of New York in the driving seat, it makes a direct attack on democracy and on secularism and on pluralism, and by the indiscriminate nature of its tactics on everything that we hold dear by way of the multi-cultural ethic. Hundreds of Muslims are killed in those attacks, people from every nationality as well. You couldn't really have a more clear confrontation between, lets at least say, left liberalism and the right, and the left says, “Well, I don't know, what about East Timor?”. This is disgraceful! To try and evade, to try and sit out a moment like that really invites historical condemnation of the kind that you can't appeal to later. You can't say, “Well I’m sorry, maybe I think differently”. You’re tested by how you react at a moment like that.”
He goes on to allege in that tirade “People who are looking for neutral or evasive positions here, I think, do not deserve the name radical. So, what you’re really asking me is this, is to say what I’ve come to believe which is that a very large number of the American left have become a status-quo force and what they really wish about all this is that it hadn’t come up and it hadn’t happened and we didn’t have to think about it, cos then they could go on with their domestic agenda, whatever that turns out to be …”
As one can extract from this snippet of explosive verbal tirade on his part, he was primarily trying to use leftist talking points to try and coax the audience into a position from where they could see the threat that he could. Therefore his correct description of the attackers as being fascists, which indeed they were.
And his reference to them indiscriminately attacking people in the working class and from every nationality, which indeed they did. And of course, his correct description of their goals of trying to remove America from the middle east in favour of imposing bleak, medieval, sharia-driven futures on societies and countries which they could catch hold of, which indeed they want to.
Since, these are obviously outcomes which no serious left liberal should want to support, Christopher's forcible confrontation of the left on these points did create a situation where they had to search for the answers, and not just retreat into calling people "right-wingers" for raising this question.
Christopher’s strident opposition to Islamic Jihad and his muscular support for a retaliatory foreign policy by Bush Jr. horrified the left. But that was his exact intention. His stance on Iraq and Afghanistan and his public fights with people on the left about their hopeless inability to recognize threats in this grave hour was an intellectual shovel to the back of the head to a class of people in open societies who’s thinking had become status quo and who were closed to receiving any new ideas in their head.
It also revealed within Christopher a streak of international solidarity for the left, something which distinguishes him clearly from some of his American leftist contemporaries, whose primary leftist positions were centered on how they impacted American society. Christopher clearly did not feel bound by this thinking and while being a part of the American left where he felt the need to, he pursued his leftist agenda based on a global picture.
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The Internationalist
There is a larger point here which deserves further dilation, which is that Christopher's attempts at awakening the left was also an attempt on his part to internationalize their world view. The socialist in him always came out when global affairs were approached and always from a global perspective. This is the reason his support or lack thereof for policy decisions were not based on whether he agreed with any current American administration. A consquence of this thinking on his part often led more simple minded America haters within the left to imagine that he was changing sides simply to further his own positions, or for greater acceptance. But in actual fact, these changes on his part reflected his internationalist leftist outlook for the globe. And was therefore not willing to be bound by any action any nation took, simply based on his personal likes or dislikes of that country.
Far from being an opportunist who let go of his principles, as many in the left began to accuse him of, his adoption of this internationalist stance actually reflected his steadfast view on global socialist thinking, a view which had not reduced his leftist instincts to blind and simplistic anti-Americanism.
His support for the Iraq war of 2003 was the biggest public test of this theory and resultantly became an iconic decision on which Christopher's break from the pack was the most visible and created his biggest divide with the left. His militaristic approach towards taking a proactive step to move Iraq into the post-Saddam era was a unique position taken by someone prominent on the left, particularly when it became clear to anyone watching neutrally that it was a case when America was going on the offensive. To find a modern American leftist enthusiastically supporting such a cause was a blasphemous turn of events within the left, and consequently brought about some of the most abrasive and intellectually violent clashes within the left into which Christopher hurled himself.
Christopher's solidarity with the forces of the Kurdish left, who's blossoming as a community he had witnessed under the air cover afforded by the West, and his support for the Kurdish militia called the Pashmerga along with the leftist opposition to Saddam Hussein, led him to energetically support the proposed war on Saddam's regime, primarily based on a hope that the country could be pushed out of its medieval existence and set on a course where it could become some kind of responsible international nation, thereby enabling some of its more liberal, democratic citizens to come to power.
The additional factor of Iraq being a country where it could plausibly be argued that the regime could hand over a weapon of mass destruction to a terrorist group in the darkness of night, embellished his reasons for supporting it.
Christopher's reasons for supporting the Western intervention in Iraq were derived from his belief that a positive outcome from this clash could lead to the creation of a more liberal, democratic ground reality in that country, in some way, paving the way towards a more stable, responsible and maybe even economically prosperous future for its citizens. And that while the country was a hostage under Saddam's regime, that there was no possible way for that outcome to eventuate.
One can clearly see that this view of his is based on a concern for the future of Iraq and the democratic seeds he saw in that country within the Kurdish community and in other sections of the population. The key part of this stance of his, is that his view on the Iraq intervention was not America-centric and therefore not inflexibly trapped by the concerns about the war within America and particularly within the left. This is a particularly revealing aspect of his personality because it marks him out as a global citizen who's views and postures were shaped from a global perspective and not just an American or Western one.
Though this global viewing lens of Christopher was only a partial derivative of his leftist thought, it does explain his motivation behind many positions he went on to support. I will revisit this aspect of Christopher's personality further along in this piece.
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But there’s more
But even more than his foreign policy postures, I think that Christopher's opposition to the creeping theocratic goals of political Islam in the civil societies of democracies was the real inflexion point on which his break from the leftist pack created the most lasting impact and continues to retain the most relevance.
While its still considered politically correct to strictly separate terrorist incidents from the political goals which Islamist groups with Western societies harbor, the increasing scrutiny which this subject has received in the wake of every attack has made this link clearer to most students and observers of political Islam.
And on this topic, Christopher’s astounding forthrightness made him a seminal figure in the intellectual class. His willingness to link the foreign policy problems within the Islamic world to the actual growth of political Islam within Western societies themselves created a defining moment within the secular left which has been seeing more debate ever since.
Since the left liberal class within the West has always found it more comfortable to criticize Christianity, but has rarely found the courage or moral clarity to do the same to Islam, his stance on this issue was akin to a massive piece of the leftist iceberg breaking away to create a giant wave. Most importantly so, because it was coming from a person who had always been a critic of Israel and had held with the fiercest of certainty, the central idea that Western interference in the Muslim world was an unwholesome project. The fact that he didn’t allow those positions of his to ignore the other strain in the Muslim world which was obviously illegitimate and foul marks him out as an intellectual flag bearer of the times.
You could see attempts by him to aggregate and strengthen this political position whenever possible, when for example, he advocated the removal of the Saddam regime in the hope of a more secular future for Iraq, he did so while simultaneously critisizing the Israeli settlements in the West bank and continuing to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state. It was clear at the time that his public willingness to deliberately conflate both issues was a visible attempt by him to signal to his admirers that his leftist inspired position on national and human rights could not be mis-used by Islamist excess seekers to try and justify their own horrors using some leftist rhetoric.
And his frankness in opposing the spread of Islam in the West with as much vigour and vitality as he had deployed against Christianity marked him out as a novel man of the left, who’s opinions on this matter could not be overlooked and not just because they were being made with masterful oratory.
He argued passionately that if you’re a left liberal and cared about liberal values and about opposing the imposition of violent, theocratic, religious beliefs on secular societies, the threat doesn’t come from a clearer source than Islamic Jihad within secular societies itself. And if you’re found wanting on this critical threat, then you’re nothing more than a useful idiot for the forces who truly do threaten all civilized societies and peoples.
What makes this phase of Christopher’s career particularly poignant and historically crucial is that his instinctive willingness to take on the threat from political Islam has been notably absent from the left even after the passage of many years since this debate was violently forced upon on a sunny day in September of 2001. Christopher’s attempts to create a new awakening within the left which could be regarded as responsible and willing to defend the left liberalism possible in open societies from creeping Islamic theocracy has, so far, yielded very few political results.
There are a handful, if any, members of the political left in democracies across the world, who have followed down this novel path of thought. The number of people on the intellectual left, who oppose Islam publicly for reasons of left liberalism are so few and therefore so well known, that I'll indulge myself to name some of them here. Tariq Fateh, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie are ones that come to mind.
It is no surprise therefore, that the center of the body politic in most secular democracies, who cannot be convinced that the specter of the spread of political Islam is a figment of their imagination and that they might be phobic for worrying about it, has inexorably moved to the right with varying degrees of speed. People who are liberal about most issues, but not willing to accept Islam as a benign presence in their own societies have also found to their horror, that it’s the left liberal part of their own respective political landscapes which are least likely to provide them with any answers on this issue or even to take it up as one. Consequently, large numbers of this contituency have given up on the left and decided to support those on the right who they feel are tolerably presentable as legitimate political candidates and whom they could bring themselves to support.
A further subset of this chunk within the left, when horrified to discover that their own liberal space had an incomprehensible accommodationist view towards Islam quit their own camp altogether in preference for setting up their own parties or organizations in disobedience of the left-right narrative. David Horowitz was one the of the earliest and most prominent people within the American left to have embarked on this move, having settled into running the David Horowitz Freedom Center (a conservative think-tank) now.
This steady defection of people in the center away from the left has also created a kind of crosspollination among parties and ideologies within democratic spectrums world-wide.
Ann Marie Waters, a British politician, who recently launched her own party named “For Britain” is one such public figure. Once a member of the Labour party, she found to her understandable outrage that the British police and establishment were unwilling to confront the misogyny which existed among some Muslim communities in Britain leading to horrific crimes committed on women in their society, only to discover that it was her own side, (the Labour party), which was the most enthusiastic in allowing this to happen and most righteously energetic in opposing anyone who tried to stand up to this problem. Consequently, she quit the Labour party and having tried a brief stint in UKIP and having failed to gain its leadership, she launched her own party with the electoral proclamation of fighting for British values. An increasing number of such examples now dot the political landscape of the West.
With the growing number of people who considered themselves nominally left all their lives finding themselves drifting further and further to the right in the conspicuous absence of any answer from the left on this issue, an additional fallout of this political phenomenon has been the creation of an increased distance between the left and those who consider themselves liberals. Once used almost instinctively to define those who saw themselves as high minded intellectuals of the progressive type, the term “left-liberal” is now suffering from an increasing diminishment of meaning.
The blurring of the left-right dividing line in many countries has led to a realization among truly liberal people that their desire to preserve traditional liberalism within their societies is no longer shared by the left, and perhaps in the mother of all ironies, is now being championed by the right.
“Classical liberals” as this new group now terms itself, defines those who are willing to forego left-right divisions in favour of finding people who will simply defend social liberalism in the face of an Islamic totalitarian advance, no matter where they appear on the political spectrum.
“Neo-conservatives” is another such group sprung from this seedbed of crosspollination, colorfully describing itself as “liberals who’ve been mugged by reality”. This group is a true product of the new reality since they progenated some of the most vocal supporters of the Iraq War within Bush Jr.’s administration and for a more muscular foreign policy in general, which in turn is an attack on a festering status-quo, while using the word “conservative” as part of their self description, a term which to a traditionalist would conjure up the image of an Edmund Burke like figure, someone in favour of maintaining the status quo, not attacking it.
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Why
Having explained myself, I hope not to the point of pointless detail, as to the main reason for my admiration of Christopher, I think its incumbent upon me to clarify why this aspect of his political posturing is so appealing to me.
There are a few main reasons for this and I’ll detail them here.
I come from the politically left liberal part of the spectrum in my country of origin. I’ve always considered liberalism as a must for open societies. My country has been plagued by the effects of political Islam since its independence in 1947 and therefore I’m fully familiar with the issue and its impact on secular societies. Furthermore, I have been painfully aware that the left liberal spectrum of opinion in my home country has steadfastly and over a very long period, stood idly by or enabled this madness to grow or even worse, ridiculed and opposed those from the left who have attempted to stand up to it. Consequently, that part of the world has drifted steadily towards the right.
When political Islam made its presence felt in Western democracies about three decades ago, the only clear view of that phenomenon that I could form at the time, was to recognize it as an existing problem hitting a new part of the globe. And since I do consider Islamic Jihad as just the physical manifestation of the political ideology of Islam, it comes as no surprise to me that Western governments who have been willing to accommodate its presence within their own societies are now facing the brunt of such problems as social division, vote bank politics, illiberal attitudes towards women, intolerance towards freedom of speech and of course, physical acts of terrorism. These are all familiar to me from a different time and a different part of the world.
And for some reason I was hoping that the left liberal class of people in the West would create an intellectual movement to counter it, when the same class of people in India had failed to do so. When I saw no signs of that happening, I turned concerned but not urgently so, since the problem was not on the scale in the West as it was in the Indian subcontinent.
But astonishingly to me, the growth of the problem within the West created no attendant wave of increasing awareness and seriousness within the left. On the contrary, it seemed to solidify and embolden their own dislike of their own societies for reasons mentioned above. And going from the example I’ve seen in India, I was expecting with trepidation a move to the right in western countries too, something which I’m very wary of.
Which is why I consider the emergence of Christopher within the ranks of the left as such a pivotal ray of hope. As I’ve freely admitted, Christopher’s attempts to raise the consciousness of the left have largely met with failure so far. But I think and hope in years ahead that he will stand out as a flag bearer on the left who raised this alarm much before the situation was dire enough to merit it.
The other reason why Christopher stands out in such vivid starkness is because I found within the left in the West, like I had with the left in India, a willingness to critisize illeberal beliefs and medieval backwardness emerging from all religions and all quarters except one.
Liberals everywhere seemed perfectly happy to critisize Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism whenever they felt it was causing a direct threat to secularism in their own societies but unwilling to take on Islam when it was found doing the same on much larger scales.
This is a phenomenon I have been witness to, since the time I started following this issue many decades ago. When it was revealed that their reason for exempting Islam was simply out of physical fear, the same revelation contained within itself the shocking truth that the secularists who seem keen to flaunt their bravery in the face of clerical barbaraism are only able to do when it seems convenient to do it.
And this entire class of liberals in the media, in journalism, in artistic professions, in government, vanish like a puff of smoke, when their secular bravado is required the most or when it might be put to the most exacting test. And in the most comical display of self-unawareness in modern times, this liberal strata also expect to be regarded as courageous for behaving in this manner.
When the greatest illiberal idealogy presenting the greatest and most viscious threat to liberalism emerges upon a democratic society, the left liberal reaction (globally) has been to focus solely on the right wing reaction to this threat and not to the threat itself.
As I've insinuated in this piece, this attitude of left liberals has not only physically endangered democracies across the world by encouraging Islamists to be increasing unreasonable in their demands but has also devalued liberalism as a principle for future generations. To a neutral observer, it might look as if liberals don't really believe in defending the principles of liberalism when seriously challenged and therefore look more than a bit silly when advocating a way of thinking to others that they don't seem willing to fully believe in themselves.
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My other reason for admiring this aspect of Christopher’s political posture has to do with something personal. As part of this journey through the left, I have discovered to my horror that many of the positions they hold are race-derived. Whenever any serious inquiry has been held into the average Western leftist’s reticence in raising his or her voice against Islamic atrocities in their own societies, it has often been discovered that it’s the fear of being labelled racist which is preventing them from doing so.
Other than being bathed in complete intellectual ineptitude, (since Islam is not a race) and as the example of Pakistani jihadis wanting to eliminate all the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent would illustrate, among many others, that their motivation is one of religious bigotry and not race, this position also reveals the left’s willingness to use race as a factor when analyzing their response to a serious problem.
It was revealed by a journalist turned author who departed from a truly leftist flag-bearing newspaper in Britain, that their biased coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue in favour of the Palestinians was largely because they didn’t consider the Palestinians as equals and therefore didn’t feel the need to hold them to a higher standard of behavior than they did. And since the Israelis were considered ethnically and racially to be an extension of the White western world, they were happy to apply their own standard of behavior uniquely to them.
This revelation of thought, incredibly shocking as it is, does explain a lot of the left’s appalling ineptitude on this issue. The soft bigotry of lower expectations from leftists towards people of a darker skin tone, allows Islamists to get away, sometimes literally, with murder. And to make matters worse, this tendency within the left has allowed the dishonesty within Islamists to use racism as an excuse too, in a crude attempt to deflect attention away from their true ugly motives.
Now, as some of the readers of this article might have guessed by now, the author of this piece is not white. I’ve lived a fair share of my life in the western world though. And I have myself been witness to innumerable instances when people of a left liberal persuasion have factored in race when responding to obvious crimes and societal misdemeanors.
As one of my leftist friends once pointed out to me, “You know, if only the Islamists were white, you would find me as angry and hostile towards them as you find me towards Christian bigots”. This honest admission of an otherwise shockingly imbalanced state of mind explains why the left has lost favour with those in liberal democracies who aren't interested in race but want to oppose religious totalitarianism.
And this is the personal reason why Christopher stands out to me as an intellectual champion of our age. The fact that he never factored in race as an excuse to give Islam a free pass it doesn’t deserve showed to me, that he was in-fact a true humanist, who truly didn’t care about race.
When he spotted bigotry among Christians, he attacked that without factoring in any way that most practitioners of that religion were white. When he spotted the same bigotry in Muslims, he attacked them too with equal ferocity, without considering whether they were brown or black. Which showed that he was willing use the same standards on everyone irrespective of their race, to criticize stupidity, poor thinking, bigotry, illiteracy wherever he saw it, from whichever part of the world it originated. “These are the signs of a true humanist”, I found myself gushing on one occasion.
It was only later that I realized that my instinctive admiration of this position had a bit to do with my own identity and a lot to do with the rarity of its occurrence in the arid intellectual landscape of our times.
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The aftermath
In this part of the essay, I’ll try to analyze whether Christopher’s attempts to raise the leftist discourse to face the new threats of a new age were successful or not. I have mentioned earlier that in my opinion, his efforts to raise the left to a newer level of awareness, have largely been unsuccessful. Having said that though, I would like to observe that the kind of titanic shift which I was hoping to see in the left, might have been too ambitious on my part.
Maybe the revitalization of leftist politics in the West which can also protect their societies from Islamic Jihad will take a longer and more gradual process than one had hoped for. The lethal and virulent nature of the threat from political Islam though, infuses a sense of urgency in me which is unwilling to wait for this process to play out. The evidence of Jihadis using this moribund nature of the left to further their own cause by dishonestly using their talking points in the hope that they’ll convince some neutral people into thinking that the leftist position is the correct one to take in this case, is a further reason for my increased anxiety.
And as it looks currently, the only possible defense against the “Islamization” process is emerging from the political right. And indeed, if this current trend continues, this move to the right will intensify eventually leading to some form of a physical clash in the nations of most secular democracies.
For someone hoping that the left has the ability to observe and learn, this shift in the balance of politics in the West, might provide them an opportunity to wake up to the fact that they are losing the center and try and re-invent and re-imagine themselves to take a place in the new center. Maybe a re-imagination process similar to the “New Labour” movement launched by Tony Blair in the nineties to keep some kind of viable leftist narrative alive in a post-soviet world where market economics had won the argument, could spark a new wave within the international left.
But no, as of now, we only see the hard left digging its heels in further in support of Islamization and continuing to unthinkingly shout “racist” from the barricades like some deranged activist, lost in another time-zone. They don't seem to mind giving the impression that they have lost the plot and are indeed willing to allow their own societies to be disfigured and brutalized. And if this trend in the left allows the right wing to take decisive control of their countries, then Christopher Hitchens will remain in history as the last man standing on the left who tried to win a failing battle.
However, as we have noted, many among the left have been categorized unfairly into the right-wing label by a dishonest media, (generally distracted by images and salacious journalism), which is too lazy and cowardly to try and investigate whether opposing the spread of political Islam is really a right-wing position or not.
Hence once must assume that many of the people who are now marching the streets of Europe in anti-Islamization rallies and joining parties such as those led by Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Ann Marie Waters in Britain and the Sweden Democrats are really liberals in their non-political life, who have nowhere else to turn to. And if that’s the case then liberalism itself might find a new home, in some kind of hybrid political setup, which can deliver on the Islam issue and also convey a liberal, socialist sensibility.
Ann Marie Water’s “For Britain” party is one such outfit. Virulently anti-Islam, it also displays a leftist streak in its approach to socialized medicine, for example, talking frequently about preserving and improving the NHS, Britain’s much maligned socialized health care system. While described as hard-right or right-wing nationalist by a dishonest media, their real-world stances are much more aligned towards cultural preservation rather than nationalism. And one such aspect of the culture which they perceive as being threatened by Islam is the liberal flavour of European life. And so, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to describe these parties as fighting for liberalism. Indeed, some of the most strident anti-Islamic intellectuals of this age, do describe themselves as “classical liberals”, for example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
And if such parties were to control the levers of power in the future, they might also inflict a shift in the political discourse back to where you don’t need to be labelled a skin-head for criticizing Islam. That setting can certainly become the seedbed of a new political idiom from where left liberalism can re-emerge in some new form. If that emergence were to happen then Christopher Hitchens would be considered the original intellectual high priest of that movement, as his defense of liberalism from the left in the face of Islam was the original radical leftist revolt of our time. This though, is allowing myself something of a walkabout in the world of conjecture.
As things stand in the real world today, Hitchens stands out as a man more admired than followed. And his message of opposing Islam is being taken seriously only by people largely on the right. Nonetheless, his titanic legacy will live on, since even people on the right feel no shame in admiring him. And if the new-right of today is populated at least to some extent by liberals, then Christopher will still be held up as a hero among the people with whom he identified the most.
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Was this a new challenge for left liberals ?
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Why him ?
Which brings me to a supplementary question. What made Christopher special enough within the left to be able to see this problem when his main contemporaries could not? This would be a speculative detour on my part, since I cannot really look into the man’s mind and can only try to piece together an answer based on the circumstances, his writings and speeches.
It does seem like his friendship with Salman Rushdie had a lot to do with this attitude, not just in terms of triggering an instinctive defense mechanism against those who meant him physical harm, but also in terms of informing his world view where liberal Muslims who were willing to ridicule and satirize their own religion existed in the Muslim world, and were often the target of clerical bigotry, much like the Christian world had undergone in millennia past.
He also traveled a lot more within the Muslim world than most of his later contemporaries. This in turn might have made Christopher view the evolution of the Islamic world in much the same way as he viewed the evolution of the Christian one. One can therefore distinctly notice a tendency on his part to treat the Islamic world with the same rules with which he treated the Christian one, aware of liberal strains within it wanting to break out of clerical backwardness, revealing a truly universal humanist streak in him. Which is why he never felt any hesitation in criticizing the Muslim world, and was never prepared to make any special exemptions for it. Because he didn’t see them as the “other exotic part of the world” which needed to be handled differently just because they are from another part of the planet. His closeness to the Muslim world is what made him see them in real life and therefore apply the same real-life rules on them as he would apply on anyone else.
This, incidentally, is a characteristic which I've noticed as a pattern among those in the West willing to stand up to Islam in general. Among those in the educated elite who end up opposing the spread of political Islam in the West are usually those who have spent a lot of time in Muslim communities, have befriended people from that community and have an intimate knowledge of their culture, their attitudes on various social issues and their history. Contrary to the shallow label of "ignorant bigots" which some uninformed liberals like to apply on such individuals, its their familiarity with and closeness to the reality of the Muslim world which causes them to see the threat, not the lack of it.
Another aspect of Christopher's personality which might have enabled him to see this threat clearly, might have been the fact that he wasn't born in the United States and spent the first part of his life outside it. This aspect of his life had enabled him to be familiar with the way the US was perceived in the world and also made the reality of life in other parts of the world more real and personal to him. Therefore he didn't really have a mindset which thought that America was at the center of the world and responsible for everything good or bad thats afflicting the entire world. One of the thought disabilities which I have found in many of his contemporaries is to assume that America is at the center of everything important happening in the world and therefore by association also reponsible for all the bad things which happen to it. This kind of narrow thinking is pervasive across a very wide swath of the American Left and when logically analyzed it is no surprise that most people who think this way have spent most of their adult lives in America and while they may have read about or travelled to other countries, they don't really have a life experience from any other part of the world, thereby creating an America-centric view of the world.
Christopher, having been born in England and having travelled a lot more than average individuals are able to manage, wasn't beset with this problem.
He did know of historical American excesses in the cold war period and their current fallouts and possessed a deep body of knowledge of American foreign policy involvements in various parts of the world, but that didn't handicap him to the extent of imagining that America was an all-influential global beast which needed to be destroyed by anyone or everyone, an attitude which is found very widely in the left for the reasons described above. He was aware of the civilizational experiences of people across the planet and saw events in that larger global context and was therefore neither wildly pro-American in his outlook nor insanely anti-American when things went wrong.
This is what allowed him to see the Islamic threat for what it really is, a truly global menace, only partially associated with America and in only partial ways.
This attitude on his part, makes Christopher's contemporaries look rather mediocre in comparison, because by blaming the West for all the problems in the Muslim world and by making the most unreasonable accommodations everywhere to Islamist demands, the left was in fact tacitly admitting that in their minds, the West was indeed at the center of the world and responsible for the insane behaviour of other people.
And that they did view the Muslim world as a seething, unwashed, uncivilized place, always on the verge of violence where investing any attention to detect civility or to apply the rules of the same, was a waste of time and therefore needed to be treated differently.
This incidentally and ironically, is that section of the left, which reacts most violently when accused of racism. Their racism of lower expectations from the Muslim world, which they viewed as a part of the planet which resembled some unkempt zooland who's inhabitants cannot be blamed for their own behavior and therefore the responsibility for their destructive actions must lie with the zookeeper whose foolish, accidental or malicious actions might have resulted in the opening of the door of the cage, made it clear that they did indeed see the Islamic world as inferior to themselves and therefore as one needing special treatment and accommodation. But this view can only be sincerely held by people who are broadly unaware of the diversity and progressive instincts in various parts of that world which have existed, although repeatedly crushed by clerical authority, and therefore is a testament to the mediocre thinking within the left.
Christopher in turn, was far too well read and well traveled to hold such bigotry in his thoughts and therefore made no special accommodation towards religious bigotry when spotted within the Islamic world, just by dint of a different race, language or any other such primitive instinct because he truly didn't judge them by different standards. He often revealed that one of his driving motivations to go to war against forces like Saddam Hussein, the Iranian theocracy and the Pakistani Army, was his goal of empowering moderates, liberal democrats, socialists and other liberals within those societies whom he had met and befriended in Kurdistan, Lebanon, Iran and various other places in the Muslim world. Other than being blessed with an exceptionally courageous instinct, this was that special part of his personality because of which he felt no compunction or hesitation in pointing out religious bigotry and derangement in the Muslim world, where others failed.
Was there a Trotsky dimension ?
The coagulation of Christopher's legacy within the left is a process in ferment. As the left struggles to adjust and re-invent itself in a new world drifting inexorably to the right, the few socialists who continue to stand out as individuals willing to follow the evidence, are attempting to reconstruct a space for contemporary leftists.
However, as evidenced by the growing trend of politics in the UK, France and the United States, they are losing the public argument, as of now, to the right.
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Was he the Orwell of our time?
For those readers suspicious that I stole the title of this article from Hitchens’ famous book, “Why Orwell Matters”, I’d like to admit here that I did so and with the intention of subliminally introducing George Orwell into this piece.
This question forms a huge wave in the body of public opinion which Hitchens has left in his wake, and so my choice of topic was intended to signal to the reader that I do intend to discuss this comparison at some stage. And I wouldn't have done so if I didn't at some level equate George Orwell with Christopher Hitchens.
Even though a vast body of his admirers do think of him as the modern Orwell and have compared the two during his lifetime, I actually don't see in Christopher an exact replica of Orwell, although there is a part of him which does make the comparison fitting.
In my encapsulation of him as a public intellectual, I would broadly describe the meat and potatoes of his intellectual persona as being like that of a modern composite of George Orwell and Thomas Paine with a bit of Thomas Jefferson thrown in for garnishing.
So, let me dilate on how and why, I see the Orwell connection, as, in some way, a meritorious comparison.
Christopher’s personality was broadly split into two parts. The first was of a writer and polemic speaker, and for a generation which broadly forms its world view through the media and popular culture, Christopher’s media savvy manners and his appearance of being a natural on TV cemented his place in the popular imagination of people in a way, which an otherwise committed but rigid political activist might have found difficult to do. His polemical rhetoric and verbal battles were so engaging that just in terms of sheer entertainment, he became something of a debating superstar. If his legacy derives its strength from this popularity among TV viewers, then it’s a supplement which is helpful at best.
For me as a political and historical analyst though, this aspect of his personality can only be used fleetingly to really determine his historical value as a public intellectual, since it was largely about an entertaining form of civic engagement and less about discovering some new political thought.
I hesitate to compare the personalities of the two individuals because that might be something of a shallow exercise. Christopher’s verbal charisma was par excellence in our times. Biographically their lives were so different, and they also lived in such different eras that comparing their lives does seem shallow. Christopher never had to pick up a weapon to fight for a cause he believed in, although he did, as a journalist, sometimes put his life as close to the line, as a daring reporter in pursuit of getting as close as possible to a story might do.
During Christopher’s lifetime, any attempt made by an admirer of his to compare him to Orwell, was similarly dismissed by Christopher himself and for similar reasons, and not just for reasons of modesty on his part.
Thus, for me to find the true historical value of Hitchens’s intellect, I must confine myself to the second part of his personality, namely the world of his political instincts and beliefs, to the exclusion of his public persona, which inevitably brings me to his role within the left liberal strata of popular opinion.
I admit that for fans of Hitchens who were in love with his oratorical personality, this might seem cruelly reductive and unnecessarily essentialist on my part.
However, my endevour here is to establish the historical value of Christopher's thinking in the political pantheon of our times. And I do think that that particular aspect of him can only be attained by digging into, and attempting to extract from, what lay at his heart and to do that, one must, in some sense, do away with the cladding of his impressive personality. So I apologize to those here who think that I'm throwing away the most enjoyable parts of Christopher in favour of a more austere scrunity of his mind.
The historical value of any public figure can really be judged by the prescience of their thinking. As with Orwell himself, the main reason we value his opinion today is because of how amazingly relevant it remains to our present.
The strongest political instinct that Christopher displayed was a violent dislike of organized religion because he saw them as forms of totalitarianisms. While I don't entirely agree with his analysis that religions are all basically forms of totalitarianisms, I do agree that this description of his is more applicable to Abrahamic monotheisms in general and one more so than others, within those, in particular.
Because of this deep distrust of organized religion, Hitchens’s radar was always primed and ready to spot and if possible, neutralize, any infringement of religious dogma into the public spaces of secular democracies. Since Islam is guilty of committing this transgression most frequently and most egregiously in the secular world of today, it duly got its fair share of grief from him.
And herein lies the core of Hitchens, which in my opinion, makes his comparison with Orwell a fair one. Christopher’s antipathy to Islam is because he considered it the most virulent form of totalitarianism, effective in the post-fascist, post-Soviet-communist world of today. The fact that the Islamic part of the world is uniquely medieval in our times and continues to present the biggest threat to progressive democratic thought globally, is what makes Hitchens matter.
And since it is the left liberal strata of public opinion which is providing the most succor and support for the growth of this totalitarianism in our time, Christopher’s opposition to it from the left as a defence of liberalism and for humanist reasons, is of monumental relevance, notable for its foresightedness and rarity.
To make a point cognate to the rarity of this phenomenon, the fact that most of Christopher's fellow leftist intellectual travellers have displayed endless energy in opposing Christian right wing encroachments on secular spaces but have failed to make the same move when it comes to Islam, is what makes Christopher's stance on this issue singular and iconic, since it reveals much to the discredit of his contemporaries, that they are indeed familiar with the concept but not courageous enough or convinced enough to actually put it into practice when most needed. This abdication on their behalf has amplified the gravity and stature of Christopher's persona and has increased the intellectual distance between them and Christopher, making him seem gigantic in our times, by comparison.
This stance of Christopher is in turn, very similar to Orwell’s identification of the most pernicious totalitarianisms of his time and the dire fallouts he predicted if the state was allowed to become an all controlling monster. This instinct of Orwell is exactly in line with the one which drove Christopher for most of his life. In that sense, his ceaseless desire to fight totalitarianism wherever he could locate it, makes him, to that extent, a true heir of Orwell’s legacy.
Christopher’s charge that Islam is nothing more than an attempt at total control of populations through religiously sanctioned state power is an accurate one. And he made this observation because he was aware of humanist tendencies within Muslim societies which he saw repeatedly snuffed out by religious bigotry for the sake of a unified sense of conquest. And therefore, he rightly saw 9/11 as an extension of that fight within the Islamic world between liberals and religious theocrats, now having been exported to the West for an attempt at a final victory by the theocrats.
As with the totalitarianisms of Orwell’s age, this trend too can only lead eventually to war.
Christopher, being an avid admirer of Orwell, wrote his book, specifically to keep him relevant in today’s world, to remind citizens that liberty always requires vigilance to keep itself going and fighting totalitarianism doesn't make the problem worse.
And since he can only be described as an international citizen, he applied this line of thinking in every part of the world, irrespective of race or religion, wherever he saw the problem appear or spread. If it meant supporting foreign interventions to topple governments which were imprisoning and brutalizing their own people, then so be it. And on the domestic front, if it meant opposing the spread of religious bigotry by Islam within western societies, then so be that too.
Though, for real-world practitioners of international policy, diplomacy and military order in the world today, this kind of ceaseless desire to fight totalitarianism wherever identified might feel like a utopian longing, impossible to uphold and implement everywhere in a world with limited time and resources.
However, the instinct itself does retain within itself a real sense of untainted purity which one can use, in moments of confusion to check one’s own moral compass, when deciding support for or opposition to military conflicts launched by secular democracies.
That Christopher was willing to allow this utopian theory to be repeatedly tested in the real-world laboratory of western military interventions in favour of humanitarian efforts, was a sign of his activism. Therefore, the label that some have decided to apply on him of being more of an activist than an author is not entirely without reason.
Not for him the isolated world of political theory which often pretends as if it owes no explanation to the practitioners of their conclusions on the geopolitical landscape. One often found in him an impatience with theories which couldn't be proven in the real world, but also a rare honesty in admitting where his analysis in identifying threats had been proven wrong.
This instinct of his of being loyal to a principle rather than to positions derived from that principle is what made him unique among his peers. This is the reason why, for example, he realized that his opposition to the first gulf war was a mistake, and when he found out that humanitarianism's cause was better served by the opposite position, he publicly admitted to being mistaken and took the opposite view when the second gulf war was proposed.
This willingness of his to publicly defend his support for or opposition to matters in international affairs, based on serving only the cause which he considered most effective in advancing humanitarianism would often leave some of his supporters, (more used to offering or withdrawing support based on political labels or parties), puzzled or angry.
This is a rule of thumb he applied upon himself when supporting the NATO air campaign in Bosnia, the strong military response in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam from power subsequently.
And therefore, I think he deserves the title of “Orwellian Literalist” or "Orwellian Extremist", someone who was willing to support physical fights to defend the principles Orwell would have wanted to defend.
And that makes him one of the rarest of intellectual activists. Someone willing to go to war to defend and preserve liberalism, while being happy to wrestle with the irony that making war carries within itself an illiberal essence.
Coming to the literary aspect of his persona, in terms of his polemic writing and use of prose though, Christopher was more similar to Thomas Paine, a brilliant political theorist but also a people’s intellectual. Paine, who emerged from a time when the agrarian and artisan populace of his country was beginning to understand and engage with the high political philosophies of his time, can be considered a people’s intellectual, someone who simplified the arguments of the time, usually in the form of pamphlets, in order to make them consumable by the common masses.
Christopher was a similar vein of intellectual, willing to test out his political compass in the convulsive world of public opinion. I have myself found that his gift for succinctly applying a political principle on a situation was very much in line with the kind of brevity and simplicity that’s reflected in Thomas Paine’s writings and thoughts. The simple moral authority reflected in Paine’s writings are equally echoed in the simplified forms in which Hitchens discussed those principles with the everyday people of his time.
While that ability to explain high political prose in simple terms, seems a necessary ability for any theorist to possess if they intend to discuss the fallouts of their philosophy in open public forums, it’s all too rare a quality and reveals a moral certainty within an activist which lies unafraid of facing the seething mass of everyday public opinion. Since this is a role in which Christopher rejoiced, it's only fitting to compare the moral force of his writing and the clarity of his prose to Thomas Paine.
One got the sense that the public interactions he was so keen to undergo were done for the express motive of sharpening the political thought that he was trying to refine and concertize in his mind and that the resultant thrust and parry which would inevitably follow in a public setting would help him in that process. If viewed with an intellectual monocle, one could detect this trend in his interactions where he would push the argument to a point where a sharpened response from the opposing side would provide the tempering effect on his thinking that he was looking for.
One such example, was when challenged by an audience member to explain how he saw the war on Saddam as an act in furtherance of a secular cause, when most of the soldiers doing the fighting were of a religious hue, Christopher pointed out to the questioner that even though most of soldiers were indeed themselves religious in nature, the state they were trying to forge and then defend would have religious freedom and in that very basic sense would be a secular state, and so the irony, if any, was at their expense.
I found this moment, among several others, brilliantly clear, simple and worthy of a comparison with several such examples from Paine’s writings where he ridiculed the idea of an inherited monarch of being as silly as that of an inherited mathematician.
And where did the Jeffersonian instinct lie within Christopher ? The Jefferson within Christopher revealed itself in the later half of his career when he became comfortable with the idea of spreading and protecting liberal democratic ideas by force overseas.
His desire to use military force overseas for humanitarian efforts or to protect and expand democracies where they might be appearing is very much in line with the Jeffersonian instinct. His desire to protect and expand democratic minorities in societies and cultures where the majority was bent on squashing or subjugating them can be truly described as something Thomas Jefferson would have championed.
Christopher used the example of Jefferson militarily confronting the Barbary pirates of the Ottoman empire when the United States was just a fledgling democracy at a time when it could not have had a history of animosity with the Muslim world.
When the ambassador of the Ottoman Empire, AbdurRehman was confronted about these actions by the pirates and asked to explain himself as to why they were kidnapping and killing the citizens of a new country on the other side of the Atlantic that had no quarrel with them, he plainly stated that since they were non-Muslims, all that the Ottomans needed was the religious sanction that came from within Islam to treat them in the way that they were doing. An enraged Jefferson was roused to send the new born American navy all the way across the Atlantic to successfully defeat this threat militarily.
This is an example Hitchens used to exemplify that a responsible leader recognized and acted upon a threat and that sometimes the West can be attacked by the Islamic world for no reason other than malice and conquest. And to retain the ability to think that in times more modern even while simultaneously retaining the capability to critisize their own societies.