His own loss of faith came in slow degrees. “If someone had asked me my political alignment, well into the 1990s, I would have said that I was a socialist and a Marxist.” Then he found himself writing to students of his and this process developed into the 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian. As he surveyed the 30 years since the catalysing effect of 1968, he says he was forced to admit that there was no longer a socialist international movement, nor even a socialist critique that might help to revive one.
“So what are you doing calling yourself a socialist?” he asks. “All you’re doing is making sure that people don’t confuse you with a liberal—which I’d always considered a position of lily-livered weakness. But that makes it an affectation. So I felt it fall away. I didn’t repudiate it, I didn’t get poisoned by it, I didn’t hate it and I didn’t have a Damascene moment about it. But I did notice that those who do think they’ve got a critique of capitalism turn out to be reactionaries. They prefer feudalism or agrarianism; they’re pre-capitalists. Marxism at least has a theory of development and innovation. And global capitalism now seems to be the only thing that is revolutionary. That’s my Marxist way of looking at it.”
Many of Hitchens’s critics conclude that this is his way of saying he’s a neoconservative. His reply is that he doesn’t consider himself to be “any kind of conservative.” He would rather just be called a human rights hawk. “There should be a word for people who believe US power can and should be used to oppose totalitarianism,” he says. With no faith left in the French and Russian revolutions, or the proletariat, all that now remains is his idea of America as “the last revolution in town”—its spirit of liberty revived by the struggle to transform the middle east.
Alexander Linklater has researched and written an excellent mini-biography of Christoper Hitchens — the cover article for the latest Prospect — the result of three days of interviews in Washington DC.
His main business, he claims, has been to ally himself with what was originally an underground movement of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds—all working towards the overthrow of a latter-day Stalinist monster. “I have felt like I used to in the 1960s,” he says, “working with revolutionaries. That reminds me of my better days.”
When Qubad Talabani arrives at the apartment, the discussion is close and intimate. They discuss his father’s weight, before moving on to the problem of Turkish incursions into northern Iraq. A Washington lobbyist for the Kurdish regional government, the young Talabani is formidably smart. They discuss L Paul Bremer’s big mistake—not the disbanding of the army, Qubad argues, which was in fact his main achievement, but the failure to provide payoffs and pensions. Hitchens talks about the evidence, some of it apparently furnished by Qubad’s brother, that Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda preceded the invasion. Qubad discusses the need to create a federal Iraq. It’s not hard to see in the young Talabani the kind of secular and cosmopolitan vision of Iraq that Hitchens has tried to cling on to as the threat of Sunni-Shia civil war has darkened. Hitchens claims allies among several Iraqi factions, but his first real contact came in the early 1990s, when “trudging around northern Iraq” researching an article for National Geographic on Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. And it was their struggle with which he originally identified.
Highly recommended
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