Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is the former columnist for The Nation, putatively on the left, who in the late 1990s veered to the right to first argue against abortion, and then turn on his former colleagues. Now, Hitchens is considered a neocon who supported the US war of aggression against Iraq, and even travelled to Iraq as an embedded journalist to cheer on the US troops. He now writes mostly for Vanity Fair and Slate.

Attacks on former friends

Beginning shortly after 11 September 2001, Hitchens has written several pieces attacking former friends.

Noam Chomsky

Shortly after 11 September 2001, Hitchens wrote an article deriding the 'masochistic e-mail traffic' that had started circulating from 'the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter'. In a subsequent rejoinder, following Chomsky's reply, Hitchens accused the linguist of failing to 'rise much above the level of half-truth' in comparing the events of 11 September to US atrocities in the Middle East. For highlighting the double standards of US policy, Hitchens writes of Chomsky that his

remorseless logic degenerates into flat-out irrationality...Chomsky's already train-wrecked syllogisms seem to entail the weird and sinister assumption that bin Laden is a ventriloquist for thwarted voices of international justice.

He added: 'the last time we corresponded, some months ago, I was appalled by the robotic element both of his prose and of his opinions.' He called Chomsky's opinions 'a recipe for nothingness...nothingness at the very best' (Chomsky, in his reply, dismissed his claims as distortions carrying 'irrationality to new limits') In his final riposte Hitchens took issue with people who accused him of conducting his warmongering from an 'armchair'. 'I work in a swivel chair', he reminded them, 'in an apartment on the top floor of one of Washington's tallest buildings'. Norman Finkelstein also responded to Hitchens calling him a 'model apostate'. Six years later he renewed the attack while appearing at a fundraiser for David Horowitz's McCarthyite Freedom Center.

Tariq Ali

Hitchens wrote an article in which he described former friend Tariq Ali as well as Naomi Klein and Michael Moore as 'fellow travellers with fascism'. In a single sentence he invoked two neoconservative tropes -- 'isolationism' and 'moral equivalence'--to denounce the left for its 'reactionary' position: refusing to endorse Bush's war against Iraq. He wrote:'The antiwar isolationist "left" started by being merely "status quo": opposing regime change and hinting at moral equivalence between Bush's "terrorism" and the other sort.'

Naomi Klein

In an article in which she described Klein, Tariq Ali and Michael Moore as 'fellow travellers with fascism', Hitchens described a recent article by her as 'nasty, stupid' and accused Klein of 'offering swooning support to theocratic fascists'. He went on to accuse the Nation magazine of 'publishing actual endorsements of jihad'.

Edward Said

At Edward Said's passing away, amidst perfunctory praise, Hitchens questioned Said's 'political judgment' which was perverse enough to 'only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad'. He noted Said's 'slight tendency to self-pity'; the 'too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood' that marred his literary work; his capacity for 'stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones' [Said had written critically of Kanan Makiya, the KDP and PUK]. It was in 2003 -- a quarter of a century after it was first published -- that Hitchens wrote an attack on Edward Said's influential Orientalism as Said was in his final decline. In the latter, Hitchens refers to the 'sheer vulgarity', 'incoherence', 'essential emptiness', 'direly excessive rhetoric' and the 'fantastic' quality of Said's writing; chides him for his opposition to the Iraq war and upbraid's him for suggesting that the US was responsible for the destruction of Iraq's museums and libraries (curiously Hitchens insists this was done by 'the Saddam regime'). Hitchens also berates Said for his 'repeated and venomous attacks on Ahmed Chalabi and Kanan Makiya', who, he insists, are the 'hope of cultural and political cross-pollination between the Levant, the Orient, the Near East, the Middle East, Western Asia (whatever name you may choose to give it), and the citizens of the Occident, the North, the metropole'.

Gore Vidal

His most recent is an attack on Gore Vidal in which, among other things, he insinuates that acclaimed essayist and novelist is an anti-Semite. An article in which he accuses Vidal of 'a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn’t quite belong'; of going 'slumming again' and indulging in 'the lowest in himself and in his followers'; in which he refers to Vidal's 'clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history'; his 'crank-revisionist and denialist history'; his 'awful, spiteful, miserable' ways; his want of 'a bit of dignity'; his descent into 'the cheap, and even to the counterfeit'; his 'barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity'; his 'Sarcastic, tired flippancy' and 'lugubrious resentment'; Hitchens ends by pronouncing 'I have no wish...to assassinate Vidal’s character'!

Vidal's fault, among others, is to say of England: “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.” Hitchens fumes: 'What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?'

Related Articles

Christopher Hitchens, 'Losing the Iraq War: Can the left really want us to?', Slate, 8 August, 2005. (Accessed 7 April, 2009)

Affiliations

Connections

• Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son