The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

Never hate your enemies: it affects your judgement...

          

Gary Fraser reviews Unhitched -The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour

 

Christopher Hitchens was one of the most talented writers of his generation and also one of the most provocative thinkers. He is a political thinker who is difficult to pin down politically – akin to trying to nail jelly to a wall. For some, like Salman Rushdie, he was a leftist, for others, like Unhitched author Richard Seymour, an apostate, who became a neo-conservative. For Richard Dawkins, Hitchens was too complex to be either left or right, whilst more mainstream commentators usually refer to Hitchens as an ‘iconoclast’, or in that ubiquitous term, a ‘public intellectual’. If we must to label people’s politics then perhaps we should go by how they define themselves, and to his dying day Christopher Hitchens, despite a decade of quarrel with the left continued to describe himself as a Marxist.

 

In his lifetime Hitchens, or the Hitch as friends called him, produced a considerable volume of literary output; however, he has been reduced to one subject, in left wing circles at least, namely his support for the Iraq War, which is the pre-dominant theme in Richard Seymour’s Unhitched-The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. Today, Iraq has become a modern political byword for disaster and whilst the blame for that disaster rests squarely with Bush and the neo-cons in America, and with Tony Blair, whose name will forever be synonymous with lying, we should not forget that the pro-war contingency also contained many liberals and leftists of sorts, who found themselves on the same side as American imperialism. The late Christopher Hitchens was one of them. Hitchens started his political life on the far left and was a member of the International Socialists, the forerunner to today’s SWP. In his youth, he was a fervent anti-imperialist, ultra-leftist even. He opposed America’s war in Vietnam and supported the struggle of the Viet-Cong and in later years he was an opponent of the First Gulf War. How he ended up on the side of Bush and Blair in 2003 is an interesting story, which forms the basis of Unhitched.

Seymour presents the book as a trial (itself a play on Hitchens The Trial of Henry Kissinger) with Seymour’s role as that of crown prosecutor, but also judge, jury and executioner. Hitchens, who stands trial in ‘absentia’ is charged with apostasy. The book begins with a dedication ‘to Marie, whose hatred is pure’. Exactly, what the sources of Marie’s hatred is, he does not say, but my guess is that it is Hitchens, which is perhaps not the best way to start a book. Seymour’s own hatred of Hitchens eventually lets the book down and betrays his argument, which is a pity because on many issues, Iraq being one of them, Seymour is very much in the right.

A few comments on Seymour’s style – he writes well and obviously has a talent and there were times when his prose reminded me of his subject matter. Seymour is arrogant and righteous in equal measures, which are not necessarily bad things, but, and this is a big but, he seems utterly incapable of self-reflection, especially regarding his own political leanings. I couldn’t help but agree with George Eaton, writing in the New Statesman, who argued that Seymour undermines his case from the outset by deploying ‘left’ as a synonym for ‘things I like’ and ‘right’ as a synonym for ‘things I don’t’. After a while, this started to grate.

Unhitched contends that the Hitch was an all-round bad egg: a ‘careerist’, a ‘snob’, a ‘philistine’ (not an insult that usually springs to mind when reading Hitchens I have to say), a ‘drunk’ and get this: someone who was rude to waiters.

There is worse to come. Seymour argues that Hitch was a ‘plagiarist’, possibly the worst thing a writer can be accused of, and a ‘racist’, and finally an ‘Islamophobe’, a favourite term of Seymour’s which is repeated again and again. For Seymour, everything about Hitchens is incorrigible. But as someone familiar with Hitchens work, what Seymour presents is not the entire picture. Hitchens the thoughtful and at times brave journalist who wrote insightful dispatches and polemics, often from the front lines of places like Romania during the dying days of Ceausescu, or the former Yugoslavia, or Iran, or Kurdistan and Nicaragua - is absent. Also missing is the Christopher Hitchens who until his dying day remained an ardent supporter of the Palestinians fight for justice; who continued to believe that Kissinger was a war criminal; who was a staunch opponent of the death penalty; and who understood only too well that the financial crash of 2008 was best explained by Marx.  I’m not defending Hitchens, just pointing out that he was a more complex figure than Seymour acknowledges. Again, this is the problem of constructing the book as a trial – it confines Seymour to a narrative of his own making where contradicting evidence is either missed out or glossed over.

Iraq

Even when Seymour is in the right, for example on the issue of Iraq, he lets his narrative down by distorting Hitchens, or again leaving out the parts that do not confirm his thesis.

Seymour argues, that Hitchens became ‘a propagandist for the American empire’. There is no doubt that in his later years, Hitchens developed a crude patriotism towards America, which at times could be offensive, and like most patriotism, was one dimensional and simplistic. Yet, when I re-read what Hitchens actually wrote, especially his work from the early 1990s, I discovered that Seymour had not done the story justice. Reading Hitchens, it struck me that he had supported the war, initially at least, out of good intention, based in part upon personal experiences which had a profound effect on him. 

Christopher Hitchens road to hell was paved -as the saying goes - with good intention. The origins of his position on Iraq in 2003 are twofold. Firstly, he focused on the nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which he described as a ‘concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it’. He was particularly influenced by Kanan Makiya, who like Hitchens was a former Trotskyist from the 1960s generation, and author of the influential Republic of Fear, a book which promoted the moral case for removing Hussein’s regime. Secondly, Hitchens held firm, in public at least, to a long sense of solidarity with the people of Kurdistan, who had been the victims of genocide at the hands of Hussein (see his essay, The Struggle of the Kurds, 1992); and regarding Iraq as a British colonial invention, he, like many other leftists, was naturally sympathetic to the nationalist narrative of the Kurds.

In 1991, Hitchens visited the Kurdish provinces of Iraq. What he saw changed his political perspective and he later argued that he was wrong about the First Gulf War, a war which he initially opposed. In his memoir Hitch 22, he writes that he crossed Turkey and made an illegal entry into Northern Iraq, and into the Kurdish provinces. At all times he was accompanied by an armed escort and they genuinely feared they would be attacked by Hussein’s forces. He comments on how ‘lush and green the uplands are’. Along the way he visited the village of Qalat Dizah, whose houses were bulldozed by Hussein’s army in 1989. 70,000 people lost their homes. But worse was to come. The next stop on his journey is the Kurdish city of Halabja, which was hit by chemical weapons in 1988. In one afternoon 5,000 Kurds were murdered. In the three years between the massacre and Hitchens visit, an estimated 180,000 Kurds were reported dead, whilst those that survived were packed into concentration camps. A UN report described Saddam’s atrocities as ‘so grave, of such a massive nature that since the Second World War few parallels can be found’. In Halabja, Hitchens writes of seeing people whose wounds were ‘still burning and suppurating, or whose lungs had been corroded’. He interviewed one woman who claimed that twenty five members of her family were murdered in one day. Upon reflection, he says he understands how the Scottish Highlands or Irish farmlands might have felt after the clearances, or how the people of Poland felt in the 1930s.

He writes later, ‘the curse word fascism is easily enough thrown around, including by me on occasion, but, I give you my oath that it makes a difference to you when you see the real thing at work’. Seeing the real thing at work, changed his perspective, not overnight but over a period of years. We should not forget that he witnessed first-hand, again through journalistic endeavour, the tragedy of Bosnia, which also affected his thinking. By the mid-1990s, Hitchens was wrestling with a moral dilemma of his own choosing: he could be anti-imperialist, but only if he decided that imperialism was worse than fascism. Hitchens had begun a journey which led to his conclusion that war was preferable to the survival of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Of course by 2003, it is possible to argue, that Hitchens was giving an imperial war, humanitarian cover. Hitchens would no doubt retort that imperial objectives and humanitarian aims, although contradictory, can sometimes be married – the Second World War being an obvious example. You could argue that Hitchens was wrong to support the war in 2003. I do. You could say he was naïve. I do too. You could argue that he abandoned the position of anti-imperialism. Agreed. Or that he didn’t think hard enough about what Iraq would look like once Hussein was toppled, or that he was foolish to think that democracy could be created by American power alone, or that his sense of fascism is historically incorrect. On all of these points Hitchens got it wrong. But we must concede that his argument was framed within a leftist narrative. Moreover, we need to understand how real life experiences shaped his politics. This is fundamental. Who knows how anyone of us would react to seeing the victims of genocide with our own eyes? Yet, this moral dilemma, is brushed aside by Seymour, who instead focuses on the far easier argument that Hitchens was an apostate.

Hitchens versus God

By the end of his life Hitchens had become a minor celebrity in the US and a regular on late night chat shows. Here he glorified in his own self-made image as a semi drunk, larger than life, posh public school boy, a character that he knew American’s found endearing and Hitchens, who craved fame more than any other vice, played it for all it was worth. During this period he published a book called God is Not Great which became an international best seller. Yet, it is one of Hitchens least convincing books and Seymour is right when he argues that Hitchens critical acclaim, and growing fame, occurred at a time when his intellectual output was in decline. Hitchens placed himself at the helm of a movement led by Richard Dawkins, Daniel C Dennett and Sam Harris, which has been described as ‘new atheism’. Hitchens work suffered in this period and similar to the ‘in your face’ atheism of the aforementioned, it became dogmatic, clichéd even, and dare I say it boring. I also detected a whiff of opportunism inherent in Hitchens militant atheist tirades; the lure of television appearances and lucrative lecture tour contacts were too good to pass. Moreover, Hitchens appeared to enjoy adopting positions that would upset his old comrades on the political left and we cannot underestimate the motivation this played in influencing his politics. Towards the end of his life, he would pick fights with easy left targets such as the filmmaker Michael Moore, whilst also taking on the not so easy targets of Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Gore Vidal.

Even for someone as talented as Christopher Hitchens achieving fame in America, especially as a writer, was no easy thing. Hitchens no doubt calculated, like many before him and since, that the best way to get noticed was to pick public feuds with prominent public figures. But his targets were often easy ones. Seymour quotes Lesley Hazleton:

The bulls Hitchens chose were old and lumbering…so he was never in any danger. Kissinger, long out of power; the wounded Clinton; the pathetically, not so tainted Mother Theresa. And of course the most pathetic, lumbering bull of all, God.

Picking a fight with God served a number of purposes. He could use God to attack the left – Hitchens militant atheism occurred at a time when the left was discussing, even constructing the discourse of Islamophobia. Moreover, it enabled Hitchens to present himself as someone who was still a radical, a manoeuvre which clearly worked on his friend Salman Rushdie who went onto write that, ‘God saved Christopher Hitchens from the right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally, and comically as he did could stay in the pocket of God-bothered American conservatism for long’.

For Seymour, Hitchens militant atheism was a cloak for a more sinister narrative: that of Islamophobia. He writes that Hitchens ‘ferocious American nationalism required that the Islamists be portrayed as symbolic rivals to the US on a par with the late USSR’, adding that ‘like many of the new atheists whom he would go on to call his allies, he would find that Islam was among religions, the worst’. Whilst there are degrees of truth in what Seymour writes, his claims that Hitchens was a racist or Islamophobic are highly problematic.

In fact, he comes dangerously close to arguing that any criticism of Islam is ‘Islamophobic’ and there is more than an element of ‘thought police’ in Seymour’s argument. Hitchens is not an idiot of the kind we normally associate with Islamophobia - the street thugs of the EDL spring to mind. Seymour might contend that Hitchens is a more sophisticated Islamophobe or racist, (he uses the terms interchangeably) but saying a thing and proving it are two different things entirely.

Seymour’s language in this part of the book is also at its most decorative, which indicates that he himself might be perturbed by his own logic. Seymour contends that Hitchens presented his critique of religion as a Marxist one, but then ignored or travestied Marx’s arguments on religion. Again, this is ill founded. Hitchens did not present his critique as Marxist – there are many influences, drawn from both the natural sciences and the social sciences, mixed in with a good deal of literary criticism. In fact, Hitchens arguments against God, are based more on abstract reasoning than any genuine understanding of the material conditions which produce religious ideas. Therefore, it could be argued that his position was anti-Marxist or at the very least philosophically idealist. Hitchens, I suspect couldn’t have cared less. By this point, he was more interested in straw men polemics than in trying to work out a coherent philosophical position and herein lies the danger of trying to pin him down into any consistent narrative.

Seymour accuses Hitchens of being a ‘scientific realist’ who adopted a ‘scientistic’ approach to his analysis of religion. These are strange insults which hints that Seymour might be abandoning a materialist analysis for a postmodern one. Seymour writes that ‘the view that the world described by science is the real world…is by no means obviously the case’. Seymour on more than one occasion, comes perilously close to arguing that science and religion are discursive narratives on equal terms with one another.

Still a Marxist?

In the year of his death Christopher Hitchens did a series of interviews in which he claimed that he was still a Marxist, but not a socialist. But here, caution is advised. Seymour quotes Terry Eagleton, who makes an interesting point that Hitchens was generally uneasy with abstract ideas and ‘structurally simplistic when he strays into the realms of science, philosophy, or theology’. This is true and Hitchens was more comfortable with literary criticism than he was with social sciences or political theory. However, according to Hitchens:

Is there now an international working class movement that has a feasible idea for a better society? No there isn’t. Will it revive? The answer is clearly no. Is there a socialist critique of the capitalist world order? No. Realising that, to call myself a socialist would be a sentimental thing.

His conclusion was that ‘capitalism no longer faced an ideological enemy’ with a ‘plausible theory of power’, adding that ‘capitalism was reasserting itself as the only revolution’, and that ‘it takes a Marxist to see it’. His narrative, whilst provocative and interesting, was hardly original. Elements of it could be traced to a number of sources: Foucault’s understanding of power, or Fukuyama’s End of History thesis, or Schumpeter’s concept that capitalism was based on ‘creative destruction’, for example. And whilst Schumpeter’s theory is correct, acknowledging ‘creative destruction’ as an economic fact, and celebrating it, are two different things entirely.

Seymour has no time for Hitchens ‘still a Marxist’ argument. He notes that ‘socialists often begin their journey to the right when they begin to identify their nation state with the prospects of civilisation’. Taking Hitchens to task, he locates how Hitchens moved to the right after he lost faith in the far leftist assumption that the working class was the agent of socialist transformation. But this is hardly Hitchens fault. In Hitchens lifetime the dream of a socialist society created by the industrial proletariat lay in tatters.  Social democrats all too easily caved in to neo-liberal narratives, whilst actually existing Communism collapsed amidst its own contradictions. Socialist politics went into retreat reduced to a set of disparate sects whose bloated rhetoric sounded absurd when weighed against their size and influence. Hitchens had always been an idealist – philosophically and politically, which may explain why to his dying day he was an admirer of Leon Trotsky. Like many leftists he had a one dimensional view of the Soviet Union, describing it loosely in that ubiquitous of terms, as ‘totalitarian’. He had little time for the ‘new left’ that emerged in the 1970s and was contemptuous of ‘identity politics’ and ‘new social movements’, which he writes about memorably in his memoir.

In many ways Hitchens political life is typical of many of those who start their politics on the hard left – by the laws of physics there is only one direction to travel! During his IS days, he was a typical ultra-leftist – more concerned with Vietnam and the world wide struggle against American imperialism, he had little time or patience for the day to day practicalities of improving the lot of ordinary people under capitalism, the typical bread and butter politics which constitutes the daily grind of pragmatic politics. Hitchens who wanted fame and influence always desired to play on a grander stage and was naturally drawn to the politics of meta-narrative, which possibly reflected his own privileged class position. The problem with this type of ultra-leftism is that in the long run it is generally unsustainable. Hitchens writes of his time in the IS: ‘how was I to know that I was watching the end of a tradition rather than the resurrection of one?’. Given the steady decline of British socialism, and the foundations on which it was built, it was a prescient point.

Hitchens was too complex a figure, and too much of an individualist, to be constrained by the narrow parameters of revolutionary socialism, and the contradiction (and sense of a life wasted?) of being a revolutionary without a revolution would not have been lost on him. But he did record accurately the psychology of revolutionary politics, and their enduring appeal: ‘if you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one’ he writes in his memoir. Once he abandoned the shibboleths of revolutionary socialism, he writes of fighting a battle against pointlessness. Of course none of this is in Seymour’s book, because it would require a level of self-reflection about left discourses that Seymour, who himself remains attached to a world of believers and apostates, does not yet possess.

Conclusion

First of all a word about Richard Seymour and Unhitched. If you are interested in Hitchens then do read this satisfying little book, written by someone whose style is reminiscent of Hitchens. It is my view that Seymour may have more in common with his subject matter beyond a gift for prose. Like Hitchens, Seymour is trying to make a name for himself as an essayist and polemicist; he also possesses a desire to find a more mainstream audience for his work; and based on his recent decision to leave the SWP, he seems to have outgrown (or is outgrowing?) the rather limited world of British revolutionary socialism, a world which would inevitably place discursive limits on what is already an impressive political vocabulary.

In his obituary of Hitchens, Richard Dawkins wrote, that Hitchens ‘was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left-right dimension. He was a one off: unclassifiable’. A wonderful compliment, but sadly one which is not true. All politics are classifiable and the simple truth is that Hitchens had moved to the right on a number of issues. Do I conclude that a man whose passing I mourned, whose prose I found inspiring, was a man of the political right?

Well in a word, yes. But I can handle it. The ‘Hitch’ was an ardent supporter of American imperialism and empire and an aggressive American patriot too boot; he took the wrong position on the Iraq War; he also dismissed, sometimes with scorn, the idea that there was a socialist alternative or any alternative to capitalism. He was an admirer, albeit a secret one at the time, of Margaret Thatcher. I could go on: his contempt for Castro’s Cuba and also the late Hugo Chavez, spring to mind.

But even after compiling such a list, I still have a soft spot for Christopher Hitchens. Moreover, even though there were times when I disagreed with him, there was something innately satisfying about the ways in which he refused to bend to the politics of shibboleth. He was at this literary best when letting rip on figures like Clinton and Kissinger, and taking on the cults that surrounded historically overrated figures like Mahatma Ghandi, John F. Kennedy, Mother Theresa and Diana Spencer. Easy targets - well yes, but as noted earlier when in the right mood, he also took on the likes of Said, Chomsky, and Vidal. Of course some have argued that Hitchens himself is somewhat overrated – see Michael Wolff’s interesting article The Damnation of St. Christopher.  Unlike those he has been compared too, Orwell, Vidal and even Wilde, spring to mind, Hitchens produced no great work of fiction and no sustained attempt at original thought. He was far too much of a polemist and contrarian to be serious about academic rigor and discipline, and whilst these qualities made him a great writer, they could contribute towards one dimensional thinking, which especially in the later years was crude and dogmatic.

But Christopher Hitchens remained one of the finest writers of his generation, a man who on more than one occasion made me question or at least think differently about the political fundamentals. In this respect, his writing is us up there with the likes of Victor Serge, George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. I am always suspicious of people, to use Hitchens terms, who only have one set of books. It’s a cliché, but a truism nonetheless, that you can’t really know your own argument until you have understood other perspectives and Hitchens was a master at putting over the other side of the argument. He wrote, in Hitch 22, that ‘your ideal authors ought to pull you from the foundering of your previous existence, not smilingly guide you into a friendly and peaceable harbour’.

This is very true, and when at his best Hitchens was more than capable of this.

 

Gary Fraser

Unhitched – The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, 2012, is published by Verso.