Seeker Blog

The Common Review: The magazine of the Great Books Foundation has published a longish interview with former leftist Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens may well be weary of explaining why he left The Nation and left the Left. Nevertheless I found the interview very interesting, and as usual with Hitchens, learned a few things.

A small excerpt, which also captures the essence of the ridiculous Michael Moore "This is the statement of a flat-out brown shirt… He’s a lying, fascist, thug":

Hitchens: Yes, it was. And many fascists as well. And then, most depressingly, after September 11, 2001, you defined your position until it was not just with sometimes, or without sometimes, but actually against quite a bit of the left—people who thought jihadism was in some way an expression of anti-imperialism. There was the reflexive view that somehow the jihadists must represent a grievance or protest against poverty or oppression. Everybody knows what the grievances of the jihadists are, they’re very easy to identify. They grieve for the loss of the caliphate. They’re not anti-imperialists—they’re pro-imperialists. There’s an empire they lost and want back. They’re offended—deeply, grievously offended—by the sight of an undraped woman or the existence of a Shiite Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew. These things they consider to be offensive. They believe God gives them the right to erase these things. Let’s not understate the fact that they do have deep-seated grievances. But to hear this ventriloquized on the left as some sort of perverse populism was too much for me.

I can tell you exactly when the breaking point came, actually. I was invited by Michael Moore to be his interviewer at the Telluride Film Festival for his awful, baggy, dishonest, boring movie, Bowling for Columbine. In that film, clips about the Kosovo war from Serbian television are used as objective. Moore implies that the bombing of Kosovo might have inspired the murderers in Columbine.

You don’t know where to start with someone as mentally lazy as this. This was on the anniversary of September 11 terrorist attacks, and he said, "Well, if it’s true that bin Laden did this thing in New York . . ." It was early in the morning; just a second, I thought. "Say that again? If they did this?" He said, "Well, if they did this."

And he opposed the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan—a reactionary, conservative position couched in radical anti-imperialist language. My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. Reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long; they will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones. He says he considers the Iraqi resistance—the beheaders and kidnappers and rapists, the people who throw petrol and explosives into the mosques of rival Muslims, among other things—the equivalents of the Minutemen of the American Revolution. This is the statement of a flat-out brown shirt. It has to be described as such. And all the people who thought that was a great movie to rock the vote, they should be fucking ashamed. There is no room for compromising on a thing like this. He’s a lying, fascist, thug.

Very definitely, please read the whole thing.