There’s a lot of clichéd, posthumous crap written about Christopher Hitchens.
Journalists and writers scramble for their thesauruses at the mere mention of his name. So I’m not going to attempt some magisterial list of monosyllabic attributes which Christopher Hitchens ‘encompassed’ or ‘embodied’. That sort of thing isn’t usually worth writing, anyway. The only thing necessary to say is the bare truth; that Hitchens was the most important political writer since George Orwell, as well as attaining a sphere of influence Orwell never knew in his life time, by elucidating his own view of the world. This view continues to inspire both young and old to think differently about things, be they matters of politics, religion, philosophy, or literature.
It is for this reason that Christopher’s political legacy is worth discussing. When he was around, and would publish his opinion on any given topic, you felt you knew where that opinion fit in with the rest of his outlook, where it was consistent with the other events in the affairs of the international stage, and how its example it could be applied to different situations, past or future. But the world of two years ago was a very different place. The great flux of change has brought with it greyer areas than the more cut and dry political arena that the Hitch saw in his lifetime.
It is one of the many interesting comparisons one can draw between Hitchens and Orwell that Orwell has been laid claim to by both the Left and the Right in the 60 years since his death. Both of those claimants offer a false reductionism, of course; any kind of Orwellian allegiance depends on the context of the topic in question. With Hitchens, such tribalistic claims don’t appear as redundant. For although Hitchens was a staunch employer of the Marxian dialectic to political contentions, he found a happier ideological home with the neoconservatives and the libertarians than with the factions of what he referred to as the “soft Left”.
It is for this reason that we find both a paradox and an irony; that the great Trotskyist Hitchens has inspired a generation of young, right-wing intellectuals, who are clear on their ideas and are willing to apply them to the modern stage. We can see a clear railing in his work against a group of political thinkers, who can be referred to as defending a kind of ‘conservative leftism’ without the worry of contradiction. This group, including lionised figures such as Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky, found themselves trading honesty for a prejudiced Anti-Americanism in the face of terrorism inspired by radical Islam. After a long history of proudly defending the victim against international injustices and supporting intervention to defeat foreign tyrants and despots for the sake of international democracy, much of the Left of Hitchens’ generation and many of his own comrades blamed America for being attacked. The victim was to be blamed.
It was this very public break with much of the Left that Hitchens was referred to, and often condemned, as “moving to the right”. This argument is more non-true than untrue, owing to the tacit slander in it. Hitchens was a real leftist, from a time when the British Left was truly worthy of reverence, when the New Statesman was worth buying and reading, and those like Christopher posed a genuinely interesting dichotomy to the dominant modes of conservative thinking. Now, the self-titled “Trotskyists” of contemporary Britain lack almost all internationalist veneer and promotion of socially democratic values, instead consigning themselves to hanging round at pseudo-academic meetings sipping coffee and discussing Luxemburg, ruining university unions, or giving out poorly printed flyers outside of the colleges and universities of Bloomsbury. Lenin’s tomb, indeed.
But aside from ideology, which Hitchens didn’t seem to care too much for anyway, there were principles. Principles which seemed to be quite black and white only a few years ago. But the barely updated world of two years on is a world in which issues are no longer black and white.
For one thing, there is the principle of humanitarian intervention. Those who sided passionately with Christopher over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot seem to uphold the principles for Syria. In Afghanistan, the Islamist tyrants and theocrats ruled a rapidly decomposing country which, for all its present problems, is a better place for that war. In Iraq, the financier to global terrorism and candidate for the most dangerous ruler in the Middle East (some contest!) is dead, and a free Iraq with open democracy and the sovereign right to determine its own trade is a very real thing.
But Syria? It is not cut and dry. Hitchens hated Assad; that much is clear. But is Assad worse than the vast bulk of those opposing him, namely the Islamist forces with eyes on a renewed caliphate, both in Syria itself, and elsewhere, such as in Lebanon, Turkey and even Britain? Many think not. The Arab Spring was almost certainly a consequence of the liberation of Iraq; but the doves did not fly through clear skies and unleavened bread was not broken to herald in a new democratic movement.
There was also Hitchens’ principle of inherent disgust for religion in all forms. One particular target of his, however, was the Catholic Church. Hitchens’ excoriation of the inherent dogmatism and fundamentalism of ‘saints’ like Theresa of Calcutta, and his maintained criticism of Pope Emeritus Benedict’s disgraceful behaviour towards the endemic tolerance of child rape among a minority of Catholic priests were, without being disrespectful, pretty easy targets. Those issues were black and white.
But, what would, or even could, the Hitch make of Pope Francis? As a new Pope who has eschewed everything that Benedict stood for, who has bashed the fundamentalists within his own church, who provides a renewed confidence in the power of faith in people’s lives even amongst secular audiences, Francis has been, thus far, a man of progress, much welcomed on the world stage for those of faith and for those without. There are philosophical arguments for alluding to religion as damaging, incompatible with rationality, asserted without evidence, etc. But does the most powerful religious leader in the world washing the head and feet of a chronically ill man, who encourages charity and aide, and who lives a life of service and humility really poison everything? It’s hard to imagine what Hitchens would think about the keeper of the Keys of Saint Peter, recently voted TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year.
It is worthy of our gratitude that we can look through the scotch glass darkly to get some idea of how our one of our generation’s most interesting minds would wish to see the world changed just two years after his untimely death. These insights are provided by the speeches on YouTube, the millions of printed and published words, the dozens of books. But life should never be dictated to us in terms of right and wrong; we have to figure that out for ourselves. But thank goodness we had Christopher Hitchens to help us with figuring it out.
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