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PROLOGUE: PREDICTABLE AS HELL

I have never been able, except in my lazier moments, to employ the word predictable as a term of abuse … Speaking purely for myself, I should be alarmed if my knee failed to respond to certain stimuli. It would warn me of a loss of nerve … In the charmed circle of neoliberal and neoconservative journalism, however, ‘unpredictability’ is the special emblem and certificate of self-congratulation. To be able to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the shit out of them. See what I mean? It lacks the sex appeal, somehow. Predictable as hell.

– Christopher Hitchens, ‘Blunt Instruments’

If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops [with cluster bombs] … then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, ‘Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.’ No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. They’ll be dead, in other words.

– Christopher Hitchens to Adam Shatz in the Nation

In his benediction for Christopher Hitchens, who had just died from oesophageal cancer, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair averred: ‘He was a complete one-off in a world full of very stereotypical people, he was deeply unusual … He was also a thoroughly decent person and if he thought a cause was right, took it up even if it wasn’t popular, even if it brought him a certain amount of criticism.’¹ In many ways Hitchens was a one-off. The sum of the attitudes and dispositions he carried with him to the grave made him idiosyncratic rather than simply tendentious. Among the usually forgettable ranks of ex-leftists, Hitchens stood out as one determined to stand out. There have been two well-trodden routes out of the left for those who want to leave it. The first is to gravitate towards a version of what Mark Fisher has called ‘capitalist realism’ – in the US context this would mean supporting the Democratic Party and the centre-right consensus.² The second is to swerve rapidly to the hard right, à la David Horowitz, and reject one’s past commitments as a destructive error of youth. Hitchens rejected both paths, defending his quondam radicalism even as he embraced imperialism and American nationalism. He identified with no tendency, other than his own idiosyncrasy, a mugwump who occasionally masqueraded as a Marxist. The literary critic Terry Eagleton partially captures the strangeness of this brew: ‘In some ways, Hitchens is a reactionary English patrician, in other ways a closet Thatcherite, and in yet other ways a right-leaning liberal.’³

None of this was entirely novel for Hitchens, who always made a virtue of his contradictory stances. Hitchens’s story was, then, not exactly that of a noble mind overthrown, even if there was some form of regime change after the Twin Towers collapsed. Rather, the elements of his peculiar political personality were displaced, shaken up by events, and recomposed in a new articulation that leaned heavily to the right. Where once his career-minded avarice and desire for recognition from the rich and powerful coexisted with socialist commitment (hence the affectionate nickname ‘Hypocritchens’ that he acquired at Oxford), his ambition was soon satisfied by unpredictable and lucrative opinions of the sort he had once satirised. By 2010 he could boast: ‘I’ve made more money than I ever thought I would. I’ve got more readers than I ever thought I would, and more esteem.’⁴

Hitchens had ceased to call himself a socialist by the time he was moved to say, in effect, ‘Let’s bomb the shit out of them.’ In a November 2001 interview with Reason magazine he renounced any belief in the existence of ‘a general socialist critique of capitalism – certainly not the sort of critique that proposes an alternative or a replacement’. Yet until his full debut as the George W. Bush administration’s amanuensis, Hitchens still identified himself in some sense as a man of the left. And even for some interval following his decision to back Bush, Hitchens did not fully renounce his affiliation. Much of the gasp factor in his malediction of the antiwar left derived from his repeated claim that as a lifelong socialist he was calling for cluster bombs in Kabul.

There has to be a stand made against the worst kind of tyranny that there ever could be, which is religious … You couldn’t really have wanted a better and more dynamic and radical confrontation. And the American left decides: ‘Let’s sit this one out.’ That’s historical condemnation. To be neutral or indifferent about that, it’s just giving up. You just want a quiet life … I still think as an internationalist and as a socialist in what you might call the intellectual, the ethical way – I still do. And I accept also the risks of revolutionary strategy even if it’s only a revolution from above.⁵

Predictably unpredictable, then, Hitchens’s war against cliché ended in a cliché: he was for bombing them after all. Moreover, Hitchens’s stance held a tendency towards the ‘moral knight-errantry’ that Alasdair MacIntyre had detected in an earlier strain of ex-Communist.⁶ Such defectors, often reacting to the austere controlling regimes within the official Communist parties that they had left, sometimes resorted to a moral individualism in which their critique of Stalinism was reduced to a statement of conscience: ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ Rejecting the orthodoxy of high Stalinism, in which morality was deliquesced into iron historical law, the defectors affirmed that the individual was the sole source of virtue. But the illusion of moral independence came at the high cost of reducing their critique to arbitrariness. This made them ‘the moral Quixotes of the age’.⁷

Of course, Hitchens had never been a member of a Communist Party, far less the victim of a Stalinist regime. He was, first of all, a left-wing member of the Labour Party until he was expelled because of his activism against the Vietnam War (1965–67). Then for about seven years he was an International Socialist (1967–74), then a member of the Labour Party most likely until his move to the United States (1975–81), and for the majority of his remaining time on the left he was a member of no party or tendency. The sociological basis, as it were, for his leftism was the radical intelligentsia. His main point of contact with these informal circuits in the United States had been Alexander Cockburn, the son of Claud Cockburn, the radical British journalist; as a radical émigré writer in the United States, the younger Cockburn was something of a paragon for the young Hitchens.⁸ But once Hitchens was established, he could be said to have had no particular dependency on anyone of the left, and only his employers – the Nation, London Review of Books, Verso Books, Vanity Fair from the early 1990s, and other occasional patrons in the newspaper and television circuit – had any possible hold over him. So when Hitchens spoke of casting aside his chains of political and ideological fealty, these were the chains of leftist conscience rather than organisational or institutional binds.

Nonetheless, it was very important for him to represent his stance as precisely an affirmation of that conscience. And since Hitchens was not joined in his defection by any major faction of the left, either in the United States or elsewhere, this necessarily entailed the suggestion that power had corrupted almost the entirety of the left, which had purchased its plot in the status quo and was anxious to preserve it. In Hitchens’s account of his life and writing, he was always one step ahead of the fools.

Other tendencies did manifest themselves. One, which MacIntyre also identified, was to substitute one group affiliation for another – from class struggle to religion, say, or country or ‘race’. In Hitchens’s case amor patriae took the place of socialist confraternity. Likewise, the old habits of a certain kind of vulgar historicism came to Hitchens’s aid. This is extremely important in understanding Hitchens’s unique political psychology. For one of the things that he often meant by Marxism was a sense of history as a narrative of progress. In Hitchens’s hands this was rather crude and mechanistic, and tended to express contempt for those on the losing side. As Adam Shatz, a former colleague at the Nation, explained:

Hitchens is drawn to dynamism, to the forces that are actually reshaping the world. I suspect that to him the radical Left increasingly looked like a group of outsiders, losers, and he was tired of the association. It was a short step to embracing revolutionary neoconservatism, which had energy and power on its side.⁹

This must be borne in mind in connection with the slightly ouvrieriste strain in Hitchens’s politics that persisted in a muted form even after his defection. Even if he did not necessarily have much sympathy for the poor, he respected the organised working class and admired its capacity as an historical force. When he decided that it was no longer such a force, allying with the forces of the right in the American state became a more attractive proposition.

The episodes in Hitchens’s trajectory to the right are well known: l’affaire Rushdie, the Bosnia wars, the skirmishes with the Clinton White House, and finally the September 11 attacks. The main conclusions that Hitchens drew from these milestones were that religion, specifically Islam, constituted an underestimated force for evil in world affairs, that the US empire could be a countervailing force for good, and that the left comprised herbivores and unprincipled opportunists who had found themselves detached from any international working-class movement capable of challenging capitalism and thus was on the wrong side of history.

This combination of views was not cut entirely from new cloth. Rather, components of his long-standing beliefs took up enlarged roles in a new ideological articulation. His fascination with America, his antitheism (or theophobia, as it might be called, since it plays a role analogous to that of ‘Stalinophobia’ during the Cold War), his condescending attitude towards the actually existing left, and his faith in empire (for example, his support for Britain during the Falklands War) had long been elements of his worldview. Similarly, his enthrallment with the right, as the truly revolutionary, dynamic force, can be detected in his writings about Thatcherism and indeed Mrs Thatcher herself (‘pure sex’, he vouched).

Yet for all his inconsistencies Hitchens is a recognisable type: a left-wing defector with a soft spot for empire. He would not be wholly out of place among a century of renegades, including John Spargo, Max Eastman, James Burnham, or Irving Kristol. Indeed, the issues of imperialism and nationalism, so critical to Hitchens’s development, were central to the defection of leftists throughout the twentieth century. Leftists often become ex-leftists at the moment they perceive the militarised nation-state as the appropriate defender of progress or democracy. As such Hitchens represents a potentially fascinating instance of a significant political category, well worth examining in his own right, and as an example of something broader.

A MAN OF THE RIGHT

Christopher Hitchens was known as a man of the left. But he was too complex a thinker to be placed on a single left–right dimension. He was a one-off: unclassifiable … You never knew what he would say about anything until you heard him say it.

– Richard Dawkins, ‘Illness Made Hitchens a Symbol’

Despite Hitchens’s idiosyncrasies, the attempt to represent him as anything other than a conservative in the last ten years of his life rests far too much on his own largely sentimental attachment to the rhetoric of left-wing internationalism and is equally too much informed by his mistaken view of conservatism as simply a force for the status quo. In this book I argue that not only was Hitchens a man of the right in his last years, but his predilections for a certain kind of right-wing radicalism – the most compelling recent example of which was the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq – pre-dated his apostasy.

Certainly, a cliché of conservative thought is that it venerates tradition, which is itself a prima facie cause for suspecting the idea. As Ted Honderich has shown, the notion has the decided disadvantage of representing conservative ideology as mere stupidity – the attachment to the familiar regardless of how absurd or intolerable it is. In fact, conservatism, Corey Robin argues, is distinguished not by an appeal to tradition or the gradual emendation and improvement of the status quo but by violent adventurism, brutal modernism, and the desire to radically transform the status quo the better to preserve it. Conservatism, as an ideology of reaction, reviles the status quo precisely for its inadequacy in the face of revolutionary challenge. From Burke onwards, conservatism has been adept at appropriating the ideas and modes of organisation of the Left, for essentially counterrevolutionary purposes: whether it is Joseph de Maistre’s appeal to “citoyens” or the neoconservative appropriation of internationalist rhetoric.¹⁰

This latter tendency can be seen clearly in the case on which Hitchens staked his new creed, the invasion of Iraq. Hitchens justified his support for the venture on multiple grounds, but the keynotes were humanitarian and liberal. The Ba’athist regime was an unusually repressive dictatorship that had perpetrated a genocide against the Kurds. The US was, for all its faults, a pluralist society that would impose the same on Iraq. More broadly, America had found itself ‘at war with the forces of reaction’ since September 2001.¹¹ Hitchens suggested that the neoconservatives were the radicals and the antiwar leftists were conservative. He was for ‘revolution from above’, the peaceniks for the status quo antebellum.

The invocation of the concept of revolution from above is, in this context, telling. Hitchens was, not for the first time, mining the conceptual repertoire of his former Trotskyism to justify his present stance. In the critical idiom of Marxism in which Hitchens was educated, a revolution from above is an historically specific set of political and economic changes imposed on a society by its rulers, or a faction thereof, that establish in a hitherto precapitalist society the bases for an independent centre of capital accumulation. One can think of the Prussian-led construction of the German nation-state as an example of this. Clearly, this would have no bearing on events in Iraq since 2003. Another connotation, as Hitchens would have been well aware, is the establishment by force of ‘People’s Democracies’ in Eastern Europe after World War II. Revolution from above in this sense referred to Stalinist expansionism. But as Hitchens explained in his own plea for ‘regime change’, his own use of the term referred to ‘what colonial idealists used to call the “civilizing mission” ’.¹²

As the invasion of Iraq approached, and Hitchens joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, demanding the final extension and conclusion of Operation Desert Storm (a war he had always argued was imperialist) along neoconservative lines, he extolled a ‘new imperialism’, whose sole remit was to enable local populations to govern themselves. In fact, as the reference to the civilising mission suggests, there was absolutely nothing new about justifying imperialism in such terms. Still, ‘if the United States will declare out loud for empire, it had better be in its capacity as a Thomas Paine arsenal, or at the very least a Jeffersonian one.’¹³

The moral rearmament of imperialism along these lines was a hallmark, not of radicalism but of neoconservatism. It was the neocons who pioneered the hypocritical ‘human rights’ discourse that justified Reaganite revanchism in the 1980s, they who coined the conceit of ‘democracy promotion’ as part of a new, technocratic idiom to justify counterrevolutionary policies in Latin America and elsewhere.¹⁴ If, in doing so, they appropriated some of the vernacular of leftist internationalism, they did so in the tradition of Wilsonian internationalism, itself elaborated as a response to, and attempted containment of, the revolutionary internationalism of the Bolsheviks.¹⁵ This discourse was pioneered by those whose aim was not to revolutionise the world system but to conserve the hierarchies that had been challenged by anticolonial movements. In short, Hitchens’s support for the restoration of empire, taking advantage of the senescence of an Arab nationalism that had once been America’s major regional foe, was decidedly in the tradition of conservatism.

There was also a thrill at the prospect of mass destruction in Hitchens’s rhetoric, another of the things that he meant by ‘radical’. He was desperate to prepare America for the sacrifices necessary in the sweeping civilisational combat between the ‘West’ and its purported enemies which he proposed. ‘Frankly,’ he said, recalling the spectacle of people leaping from the flaming World Trade Center towers, as they began to swoon, it’s

not that terrifying … That kind of thing happens in a war, it has to be expected in a war, if you’re in a war you’re gonna lose a building or a plane, and maybe a small town or a school or – you should reckon about once a week. Get ready for it.¹⁶

I have previously characterised this ideology as a descendant of European Kriegsideologie, a martial discourse that emerged on the right in World War I, was sustained by fascism in the interwar period, and had its consummation in World War II. But it has also distinctly American roots – in the racialised social Darwinism and the ‘creative destruction’ of manifest destiny that permeated both conservatism and the dominant liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The neoconservative Michael Ledeen was one of the few neocons to openly articulate a vision similar to Hitchens’s, that the US would act as a revolutionary bulwark in the Middle East. Ledeen estimated that this legacy of creative destruction was what made America a truly revolutionary society, and he challenged the left’s claim to a monopoly on the revolutionary tradition.¹⁷

It is also worth recalling that even when Hitchens was occasionally revulsed by the right in his later years, it was usually the religious right that he belaboured while defending the modern liberal right. Meanwhile, his loyalty to the United States would no longer permit him ‘critical support’ for a leftist regime in its crosshairs. Unlike the Sandinistas, for example – or even, at one stage, Saddam Hussein – Hugo Chávez was given no indulgence by Hitchens. ‘Getting to know the General’, Hitchens said of a photograph depicting his meeting with Chávez and described him as a dictator.¹⁸ For the record, Chávez never held the post of general; his title when Hitchens met him would have been the civilian one of president. The dictator charge was particularly obtuse, given that, when Hitchens met him, Chávez would not have been in office had his supporters not thwarted a US-supported right-wing coup in 2002 that cleared the way for him to run in and win free elections in 2004 and 2008.

Likewise, when Hitchens remonstrated that ‘Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss’ to underscore Chávez’s claimed political lineage, Hitchens should have known that Venezuelan television is overwhelmingly privately owned, is hostile to Chávez (much of it had participated in the 2002 coup), and is not compelled to run anything by him.¹⁹ Hitchens elsewhere lamented that socialism no longer existed except in the ‘forms of populism and nationalism à la Hugo Chávez that seemed to me repellent’.²⁰ In context, the populist aspect of this couplet is most likely what offended Hitchens, as nationalism was his new creed.

Indeed, apart from Chávez’s international alignments and anti-imperialist stance, it seems to have been the Chávez administration’s redistribution of wealth that offended Hitchens most and drew invocations of Peronism:

He would be a tin-pot, crack-pot … just to provide fodder for cartoonists if he didn’t a) have a great deal of oil, if he didn’t b) make regular visits to Tehran … and if he wasn’t trying to replace Fidel Castro, whose bills he’s been paying for a very long time. All of this makes him a little bit less of a clown than he looks. Juan Peron and his terrible wife Evita were tremendous nuisances who, like Chávez, paid their voters out of their own Treasury and bribed and corrupted their state into bankruptcy and shame, but they didn’t have oil.²¹

Even Aristide was no longer defensible when the US took it upon itself to support a coup d’état in Haiti and coordinate a multilateral intervention that brought death squad leaders and sweatshop owners to power in 2004. Asked to comment on the way in which Clintonite intervention in 1994 seemed to have gone awry, Hitchens remarked: ‘I remember in that campaign, actually, the campaign that brought Clinton to power, remember Pat Buchanan ran – leading Catholic right-winger – and his phrase was always for Aristide – “that dingbat priest”. A lot of people overestimated Mr Aristide’s honesty and capability.’²² This was a remarkable statement for someone who had earlier used the example of Haiti, and the Clinton administration’s conditional ending of the proxy war against the popular movements there, to justify his support for ‘humanitarian intervention’.

Little in all this could not have come from the mouth or pen of a Bush administration flack, modifying and rephrasing the anticommunist bromides of the 1980s counterrevolution in Central America. Traces of Hitchens’s old leftism resurfaced at moments, particularly following the credit crunch. But by that point Hitchens’s nationalism was immovable, and he could not help but see in the miraculous achievements of America’s imperialist armies a counterpoint to the decrepitude of its domestic institutions. Any critique implied in this stance is more akin to Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism than to Das Kapital.

Hitchens’s claim to have gone beyond the valences of left and right, to have no ideological affiliation, was thus facile. Nor can the claim be rescued simply by referring to Hitchens’s refusal to repudiate his past or his tendency to opportunistically strip-mine the cynosures of his old faith in order to defend his new alignments in the conjuncture of the ‘war on terror’. It is typical of left–right defectors to claim that they bear witness to a truer realisation of their old values in a more sustainable context. And, in this as in many other respects, Hitchens was predictable as hell.

A BRIEF EXCURSUS ON APOSTASY

Three great waves of left–right defection occurred in the twentieth century. The first was during and after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Its major sites were in western Europe, as the continent’s socialists capitulated to an imperialist war that they were sworn to oppose. Not every socialist who joined the nationalist frenzies gravitated to the right, but a minority did. Among the prizefighters of this wave of anticommunist reaction were Gustave Hervé in France, the hysterical antimilitarist who had become a ‘national socialist’; Benito Mussolini in Italy, the syndicalist who had turned into a pioneer of fascism; and John Spargo in the United States, the Hyndmanite socialist who proceeded gradually through Bernsteinian revisionism, Christian socialism, and Wilsonian anticommunism, before supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and concluding his life as a supporter of Barry Goldwater.²³

The second and third were at two pivotal moments of the Cold War, with their locus largely in the United States. These were in the immediate aftermath of World War II, as former Communists, Trotskyists, and left-liberals made their adjustments to the Cold War, and in response to the civil rights and antiwar movements that crested about twenty years later, with the neoconservatives. Some of the same figures – notably, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell – populated both camps of reaction, first becoming Cold War liberals, then neoconservatives. But while the cold warriors comprised a broad and ascendant political bloc, with ex-communists forming the vanguard, the neoconservatives arose amid the breakdown of the Cold War consensus and the revival of leftist politics. As a result the ex-communists could be more single-mindedly focused on the international struggle against the Soviet Union, while the politics of neoconservatism were far more substantially inscribed by domestic struggles on issues ranging from race to education – a fact reflected in the ensuing culture wars.

This is to state things in an extremely schematic fashion. In reality turns to the right among the intelligentsia were drawn-out processes punctuated by miniwaves and with distinct temporalities in each society. For example, while the neoconservatives began to take shape in the United States in the wake of the civil rights movement, the French ‘antitotalitarians’ emerged from their Maoist chrysalis in the mid-1970s as the struggles unleashed after May 1968 subsided. Similarly, in the UK a new generation of reactionaries emerged amid the crisis of social democracy and particularly the ‘winter of discontent’. During that nadir ‘former leftwingers such as Kingsley Amis, Max Beloff, Reg Prentice, Paul Johnson and Alun Chalfont anthologised their apostasy in a book proudly titled Right Turn. Most of these would find themselves comfortably in the Thatcherite camp. Another of their number, Robert Conquest, even spent time as Mrs Thatcher’s speechwriter.²⁴

Hitchens, a member of the soixant-huitard generation, could well have defected along with many of his peers in the late 1970s. Indeed, in this period he was close to that informal sodality of Amis, Conquest, et al., who were defined by their staunch antileftism. And in retrospect it now appears that he did have a certain closeted sympathy for Thatcherism. But resistant to cliché as he then was, he instead moved to the United States and positioned himself as an English radical amid compromising liberals. Even his Falklands fever was somewhat covert and never recorded in an article by him at the time, as far as I can discover. The troupe of David Horowitz and Michael Medved could not tempt him away with the prospect of ‘Second Thoughts’ in the late 1980s, nor did he immediately join the Fukuyama-ites in proclaiming the ‘end of history’ when Stalinism toppled over. Aloof from, and seemingly insusceptible to, the gravitational pull of the right, Hitchens nonetheless proceeded to make a gradual rapprochement throughout the 1990s, so that what remained of his leftism could not withstand the challenge by the aerial assault of a handful of motivated jihadis.

The point here is not to identify a tradition of apostasy extending to Washington, DC, circa 2001. It would be absurd to situate Hitchens in any proximity to Mussolini or Hervé, although Hitchens was closer to Spargo and Kristol than he might have been willing to admit. Such defections are historically specific. Even if they draw on the archives of past ideologies – as, for example, the former leftists who signed up for the war on terror and donned the discursive regalia of the Cold War ex-communists – their defection arises from the unfolding of present conditions and their crises. Nevertheless, certain structural similarities in the secessions of each generation deserve attention.

First is the ever-present context of empire and militarism, which, in its different forms, is implicated in each of the waves I have identified. The emphases of different left–right defectors vary, but the issue of international order is an almost constant factor, as is the existence of a Bogey-Scapegoat that can absorb the blame for its chaotic violence. Second, and relatedly, defectors have a propensity to become nationalistic. This is often because in the context of war, or interimperialist rivalry, the nation itself is both threatened and seen as the bulwark against a threat to survival. Socialists often begin their journey to the right when they begin to identify their national state with the prospects for civilisation. Third, as neophyte reactionaries who have suddenly found that they have spent much of their lives working for the wrong side, they prosecute the war against their former confederates far more viciously and devotedly than their newfound allies. Finally, with the turn to the right comes the promulgation of a new theodicy, a manichean doctrine of good vs evil accompanied by a less-than-sanguine appraisal of humanity. From Reinhold Niebuhr’s ‘Children of Darkness/Children of Light’ dichotomy – pioneered for Cold War ideology, which also underpinned neoconservative ideology – to the ‘liberalism of fear’ developed by Judith Shklar and taken up by the ex-Trotskyist Kanan Makiya, such ideological metaphors occupy a central role in antitotalitarian doctrine. The effect of this is profoundly conservative, since its suspicion of what is called utopian thinking – the sort Hitchens derided as ‘sinister perfectionism’ – ultimately proves to be hostile to any but the most gradual and cautious social transformation.²⁵

On each of these points Hitchens proved an exceedingly typical apostate. In truth, it is not hard to see him in the Isaac Deutscher essay Hitchens referenced in reviewing the Second Thoughts conference:

He is haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society; like Koestler, he may even have an ambivalent notion that he has betrayed both. He then tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to camouflage it by a show of extraordinary certitude and frantic aggressiveness. He insists that the world should recognise his uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of them all.

But there is a crucial difference. Deutscher was describing the ex-communists with some sympathy. He understood their sense of betrayal. In their horrified revulsion they were similar to Beethoven and Wordsworth, who resiled on hearing that Napoleon had made himself emperor – an act they regarded as a defeat for humanity. The ex-communists too had seen such a reversal, as the supposedly revolutionary state of Russia forged alliances with Hitler and purged the revolutionaries from Soviet ranks. ‘There can be no greater tragedy’, Deutscher said,

than that of a great revolution’s succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the banners of liberty. The ex-Communist is morally as justified as was the ex-Jacobin in revealing and revolting against that spectacle.²⁶

But Hitchens was coping with no great betrayal, despite his laboured pretence to the contrary. Nor was there anything comparable to the USSR and Warsaw Pact. The histrionics of the Cold War liberals and neocons had been over-the-top about that supposed threat to the ‘free world’. So, how was it that Hitchens had sailed through the Cold War without greatly panicking but nonetheless conjured a civilisational challenge out of a handful of combatants with box cutters?

A MAN IN FULL

This is not a biography but an extended political essay. Therefore I am less interested than most reviewers and columnists in raking through Hitchens’s familial affairs, sex life, and circles of friendship and influence. Yet one cannot ignore these things completely. For all his distaste for the slogan ‘the personal is political’, Hitchens applied it and lived it to the full. Whether it was Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, or George Galloway, Hitchens’s foil had to be shown as an out-and-out unprincipled, mediocre, physically repulsive mountebank. In fairness, Hitchens might have struggled if those standards were applied to him, even before he wound up spinning for President Bush, until there was no one left to lie for. But Hitchens was a great sentimentalist, and his approach to politics was profoundly visceral and instinctual.

To evaluate Hitchens’s politics is to attempt at least some assessment on the type of person he was. His judgement of character – those he chose as friends as well as allies, and those he chose to make enemies or travesty of – is also inseparable from his political development. It is, then, another measure of the declension of his faculties and of his probity. It is one thing to sell out Sidney Blumenthal to the GOP, but to exchange Edward Said for Ahmed Chalabi? To smear Noam Chomsky yet endear oneself to Paul Wolfowitz?

Who, then, was ‘the Hitch’? He was, in an idiom he would have understood, a petty bourgeois individualist who esteemed collectivism at least some of the time but never submitted to it himself. He resented the rich and powerful but enjoyed their company, and he sympathised with the radical working class while lacking pity for the poor. He was rarely deferential, unless it was to the military, but enjoyed abusing social inferiors – his habit of being rude to waiters, perhaps in emulation of the journalist Pappenhacker in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.²⁷ Hitchens was known as an exceptionally warm and generous person by some of his friends but could also be callous to the point of cruel if crossed. A gregarious conversationalist who sustained intense friendships with a small coterie of litterateurs, someone who summoned and expected loyalty, he could unflinchingly betray those he declared were among his closest friends.

As a writer whose gratuitous self-display was nonetheless always selective, he could tactfully conceal aspects of himself. Yet by several accounts he could be trusted with no secret divulged by anyone. He hated the oppression of women by religion but was indulgent of other varieties of misogyny, particularly that passing itself off as wit. A professional ironist, he descended at times into low contrarianism or into depths of puce-faced literalism. His intellect was greatly overvalued in his later years, and he was prone to bouts of unimpressive philistinism. As someone who despised the sentimentality in certain quarters of the left, he was a purveyor of finely honed sentiment, devastatingly quick on his feet with emotionally potent oversimplification but also given to nauseating platitude. He was a gifted writer but also rather lazy at times, sometimes appearing to borrow material from others and not always with attribution. And as someone with uncommonly wide reading, he often lacked depth, either unable or unwilling to cope with the sorts of complex ideas that he occasionally attempted to criticise.

Last, he was cosmopolitan with a profoundly chauvinistic streak, an ouvrieriste with a closet sympathy for Thatcherism (particularly its libertarian, free-market wing), and a progressive imperialist in the tradition of Mill, Tocqueville, Roosevelt, and Wilson who fancied that the US military was the last genuine repository of republican virtue in a decaying liberal capitalism.

Perhaps my point is obvious. One cannot begin to describe Hitchens’s personality without adumbrating his public stances; likewise, none of these stances can be detached from the person he was. Insofar as it attempts to assay the Hitchensian idiolect, this book does attempt to be either exhaustively biographical nor encyclopaedic in their analysis. On the contrary, it lives up to its subtitle. ‘The Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ is, yes, a pun, intended to evoke how the author became, to a degree, what he had loathed. But it is also a literal brief: this is unabashedly a prosecution. And if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result.

ADDENDUM, ON THE COMPLETE AND UTTER WORKS

I have alluded to Hitchens’s propensity for appropriating the ideas and work of others with either oblique or no acknowledgement. In these pages I am evaluating Hitchens’s writing chiefly on its political merits. However, part of the charge I make is that in his journalism, and in his writing more broadly, his standards of evidence and rigour underwent a serious decline as he turned to the right. And this case cannot be made without discussing, at least briefly, the weaknesses in his approach that were already apparent.

It is fair to say that much of Hitchens’s writing consisted of self- plagiarism. There was rarely a good line that did not get more than one airing, while Hitch-22 is made up significantly of anecdotes and arguments published in previous essays. There is no shame in this: he was eminently quotable. The fact is, though, that at least some of what was most laudable in Hitchens’s output was probably not his own work.

One reviewer has already detected plagiarism in the case of large tranches of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, a late book and probably a somewhat opuscular component of the Hitchensian oeuvre.²⁸ The historian Noel Malcolm made a similar allegation about passages in the much earlier The Parthenon Marbles that he said were similar to passages in earlier published work by the much more authoritative William St Clair – although Hitchens rebutted the allegation.²⁹

I argue that a similar problem exists in the Hitchens volume from which I have drawn my subtitle: The Trial of Henry Kissinger. The book was sharp, witty, and devastating for Kissinger, demonstrating to any reasonable person’s satisfaction that he was a war criminal, to say the least of it. Glowingly reviewed, and with an accompanying documentary by Eugene Jarecki, this book was critical to expanding Hitchens’s audience and for a brief time upholding his reputation as a critic of US power even as he swung behind the Bush administration. These are its known credentials.

Among its lesser-known qualities is the way it used its sources. The acknowledgements pages allude delphically to ‘borrowings’ from ‘more original and more courageous work’ by such authors as Lucy Komisar, Mark Hertsgaard, Fred Branfman, Kevin Buckley, and Lawrence Lifschultz. Hitchens also mentioned a general indebtedness to Seymour Hersh, whose work, especially The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House, does seem to have formed the basis for many of the Hitchens book’s claims. This is not a standard form of citation, but it can be assumed that Hitchens did not expect those sources to object. Moreover, this simply reflected how Hitchens, who never included such apparatuses as footnotes or bibliographies in his texts, did business. As a journalist he circulated among the relevant cohort, listened to their story over a few drinks, and then wrote up, almost word for word, what he had been told. To this extent his habits are perfectly comprehensible. However, at least some borrowing is given not even this much acknowledgement, such as the lifting from Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism in Hitchens’s essay ‘Kissinger’s War Crimes in Indochina’.³⁰

A different story obtains with The Missionary Position (1995), which experienced a crescendo of fame as a result of the attention paid to God Is Not Great (2007). The former was an intelligently written, if slight, polemic, released as an accompaniment to a documentary Hitchens had made on Mother Teresa, proving that she was a friend of poverty, not the poor, and an ally and alibi to dictators, the corrupt, wealthy, and reactionary. But an Indian author produced most of the original research for The Missionary Position. The manuscript was judged to need rewriting, and was purchased by Verso with the intention of offering the idea to an Anglophone author. Hitchens, with his acknowledged contempt for religion and propensity for refined iconoclasm, could hardly have been more well suited. What he produced was an intelligently written indictment, but the original hardback made no acknowledgement of the input of several colleagues.³¹

Subtler forms of unacknowledged appropriation, or borrowing without attribution, occur elsewhere in Hitchens’s oeuvre. For example, a great deal of his work on Bill Clinton’s betrayal on health care was lifted from Sam Husseini’s original journalism.³² A reasonable response to all this might be to stress that Hitchens had himself pinned his colours firmly to the mast by writing ‘In Defence of Plagiarism’. ‘Where would most of our culture be’, he asked, ‘without borrowing, adaptation, and derivatives?’³³ Moreover, in most cases of borrowing he was most likely aware that he could rely on the goodwill of his sources towards his project, whether he chose to acknowledge them or not.³⁴ Nor does any of this deny Hitchens’s considerable advantages as a writer and debater – precisely those advantages allowed him to take what others had researched and present it in a perhaps more digestible format.

However, the issue cannot be avoided. First, if Hitchens was used to restating in an accessible form the more courageous and original work of others, if this was in fact how he formed his analyses, what would become of his insight when he had to rely on the cheap foreign policy wisdom of those whom he had once called ‘neoconservative ratbags’?³⁵ Second, such a lax approach in his work cannot be extricated from certain slapdash polemical habits that came to the fore in his later phase. If Hitchens was unaccustomed to normal citation procedures in political writing, and thus did not expect to have his sources queried and checked, the temptation not only to plagiarise but also to, shall we say, overstate certain claims, or overinterpret the claims of others, could be considerable.

This also raises the question of the reliability of his claims. In some of what follows, I demonstrate that Hitchens was untrustworthy, often to the point of travesty, in many of his attributions and imputations. I make this case mainly about his writing after his defection to the right, but I also maintain throughout that none of Hitchens’s obvious flaws in the last ten years of his life could simply have emerged ex nihilo. Whether or not it was true that Hitchens could be a ‘terrific fibber’, as his former confrere Alexander Cockburn wrote in 1999, there certainly seem to have been occasions when Hitchens did not scruple to misrepresent an opponent.³⁶ Again, this was easy enough to do if one had no expectation of being held to account. But his misrepresentation is all the easier to criticise, because Hitchens held to a standard by which it could be criticised: both in a performative sense, in that some of his earlier writing is a model of careful, forensic engagement, and in a rhetorical sense, since Hitchens frequently took opponents to task for being careless or dishonest in debate.

Hitchens was in the end a terrible liar, in both senses. He lied egregiously about important matters and about people who deserved better. And he lied carelessly, sloppily, in ways that an attentive reader would notice. Having decided that the American Revolution was the only one left standing, its legacy still vitally relevant, he made the illogical leap of treating the Bush administration as if it were a revolutionary party and he its John Reed. Neither party could live up to such a standard. But Hitchens did not resile from a quantum of revolutionary realpolitik, evidently including the propagation of necessary illusions – less John Reed, more Walter Duranty. In sum, Hitchens was a propagandist for the American empire, a defamer of its opponents, and someone who suffered the injury this did to his probity and prose as so much collateral damage. The late Christopher Hitchens was late before his time.