Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a former columnist for The Nation, initially on the left, who in the late 1990s shifted to the right to first argue against abortion, and later embracing a neoconservative stance of support for the US invasion of Iraq, which he visited as an embedded journalist during the occupation. In his later years, he wrote mostly for Vanity Fair and Slate.

Attacks on former Comrades

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

Following Hitchens's attacks on Chomsky, Zinn, and Finkelstein, Tariq Ali wrote a piece in Counterpunch.org accusing Hitchens of turning 'his guns against the critics of the war'. The two squared off over the war on terror first in a debate organized by the London Review of Books and later twice on Democracy Now!.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 he 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'.

Harold Pinter

In the wake of 11 September 2001, Hitchens falsely accused Harold Pinter and John Pilger of having written that the victims of the attacks had been 'asking for it'. Shortly afterwards Guardian issued an apology and a retraction and Hitchens wrote a letter claiming that he had been 'wrongly apprised' of Pinter's comments. The day after Harold Pinter was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature, Hitchens took to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to call the choice 'a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque'. The 'ludicrous elevation', he wrote, 'of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq'. He went on to sum up Pinter's recent writings as 'a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity'. In the same article he also lashed out at Jose Saramago, adding: 'without his staunch post-1989 membership of the unusually degenerated Portuguese Communist Party he would not have been considered'. For Hitchens, 'sinister mediocrity has become Mr. Pinter's stock-in-trade...Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy.' After dismissing Pinter's opposition to the Iraq war as a madman-like fight 'against any attempt to liberate [Kurds] in Iraq', Hitchens described the celebrated dramatist as 'a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements.' Finally he invited the readers of his right-wing publication to 'hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long'.

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)

External Resources

• Jeff Stein, What’s the Government Hiding About Hitchens?, Spytalk, 20 March 2012.

Affiliations

Connections

• Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son