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Posted on 09/30/2002 7:05:35 AM PDT by Pokey78
In his new and stimulating book on George Orwell, "Why Orwell Matters," Christopher Hitchens asks why the Left for so long excoriated the original Mr Blair. He writes: "George Orwell spent much of his youth investigating the condition of the working class in England, and not merely in describing it but in tabulating and collating the relevant statistics. (The notebooks and research for The Road To Wigan Pier would not have disgraced Friedrich Engels.) When Spain was menaced by fascism he was among the first to shoulder a rifle and feel the weight of a pack. He helped keep alive the socialist press in England through many unpropitious years. His commitment to the egalitarian ideal was so thorough that it can seem positively old-fashioned ... Yet on the political and cultural Left, the very name of Orwell is enough to evoke a shiver of revulsion."
The same fate may, sadly but ineluctably, await Hitchens himself. Last week, he left The Nation magazine after twenty years. The Nation is, in some respects, the flagship of the American left-intelligentsia, a magazine that still believes that Soviet spy Alger Hiss was innocent, that the end of the Soviet Union was a mixed blessing, and that, in Hitchens' formulation, attorney-general John Ashcroft is a bigger threat to America than Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. The departure is notable because Hitchens is, by any reasonable measure, a man of the Left. His most recent campaign was an attempt to indict Henry Kissinger for war-crimes. The last time I saw him, he walked out of a dinner party to protest a fellow-guest's disparagement of Edward Said, the leftist anti-Israel historian. Gore Vidal has anointed Hitchens as his successor in radical literary politics. And Martin Amis just excoriated him for being tardy in his renunciation of Stalin's evil. I don't think I've met a man more viscerally hostile to every form of religious faith, especially Christianity.
But in today's Left, especially in its bitter, internecine rump in the United States, these radical bona fides are still not enough. Hitchens, to be sure, had been something of a renegade for some time. He found Bill Clinton to be one of the most duplicitous, shameless and malevolent men in American politics and didn't mind saying so. His polemic on the subject, "No One Left To Lie To," may well go down as the classic indictment of the ethically-challenged former president. He's a bit of a libertine, a close friend of the bottle, and sworn enemy of the war against tobacco. His crumpled English face, still crowned by a majestic sweep of thick, brown hair, was in itself an affront to the scrubbed, aerobicized visages of his American liberal and neo-liberal peers. He enjoyed a good political scrap, but he always engaged his opponents with an erudition that was as intimidating as it was deep. When he debates, he invokes the strange formalities of Victorian discourse, full of "Sirs" and "I beg your pardons," followed often by laser-like attacks on logical weaknesses in his opponent's argument. I first met him almost twenty years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and despite disagreeing with him on almost everything, found him irresistibly charming, mischievous and kind. He rarely failed to crack me up. And if I ever avoided his company, it was partly because I couldn't begin to keep up with his consumption of alcohol, and because I genuinely hated to disagree with him. I liked him too much. Even when he wrote a rather acerbic and ungenerous article the week after I quit being editor of The New Republic, I let it slide. I knew that, sooner or later, I'd come across him on the streets of our shared neighborhood in Washington and be greeted with elegant bows and sloppy kisses on my cheeks.
But the occasion of Hitchens' self-excommunication was the war. When Islamist fanatics murdered over 3000 people in the heart of Manhattan last year, Hitchens viewed the event as most Americans did. He was appalled, he was angry, he was determined to fight back. He saw the attackers as emblems of everything a good lefty should despise: they were religious fanatics; they hailed from a brutal, anti-Semitic, misogynist, homophobic backwater; they opposed every principle a good liberal should support - free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of conscience. And they weren't exactly new on the scene. Similar types had attempted to have Hitch's close friend, Salman Rushdie, assassinated because of his freely-expressed views and literary output. What else did the Left need to know?
But as Hitchens looked around him, even in the days after the atrocity, he found something rather different. He found that a deep and lingering hatred of America over-powered some leftists' objection to mass murder. He found excuses for totalitarian hatred. He saw exactly what Orwell had seen in the leftist intelligentsia of his own time: not simply a passivity in the face of evil, but almost an admiration for it. And he was disgusted. Since those first days of shock, the hard Left has merely redoubled its assault on a free society's right to self-defense. The endless series of rationalizations, the opposition to any war to fight terror, now the sad and pathetic moral abdication of those who see president Bush as more of a threat to world order and peace than Saddam Hussein - all these responses, under-written by a simpering, barely concealed anti-Semitism, would be enough to turn anyone's stomach, let alone a good liberal's. At some point, when you look around and see that this is the quality of one's ideological allies, you have to break ranks, if only for the sake of personal moral hygiene.
But Hitch's shift is symptomatic of something far deeper than one individual's career. 9/11 presented the American left with an awful quandary. Its intellectual and literary leadership, long marinated in anti-Americanism, was simply unprepared for the stark moral choice in front of them. They couldn't afford the cheap and easy carping of the European and British Left: this was their country under attack, after all. Yet most, with a few honorable exceptions, couldn't make the leap toward support of the war either. So they engaged in a campaign of anti-anti-terrorism, the position of the coward and the sophist, encapsulated by Al Gore's bitter rant of last week. While not opposing war itself, they opposed every single decision that could make war possible, demanding conditions and timetables that would effectively gut any assault on, say, Iraq. A few even came perilously close to siding with terror, minimizing its threat, and all but regarding it as the lesser evil compared with Republican dominance on the domestic political scene. A decent but weak man like Senate Majority leader, Tom Daschle, was therefore under immense pressure in the last few months, knowing that any clear pro-war stance would alienate his ideological base, but that any clear anti-war stance could be electoral suicide. No wonder he exploded in frustration last week. And the Democrats still haven't escaped their predicament.
So think of Hitch as a leading indicator of what the state of the American Left now is. Like Orwell, his sense of loyalty to the land of the Left couldn't quite over-power his disgust at the moral abdication of its current inhabitants. So like Orwell, he quit. Not for the right, not for an unthinking bellicosity, not for social status, not for the fifteen minutes of infamy every turncoat gets. He quit for the possibility of thinking outside of any political loyalties at a time when such loyalties are as trivial as they are corrupting. And one day, the Left will come to realize his point.
What's with the "almost"????
Excellent article.
Excellent article.
No they won't. The left still mainatains the innocence of Hiss and the Rosenbergs, still hate America first, still think Stalin could have been redeemed, still hate the Jews, even though many of them are Jews.
And the idea of writing about someone who is long dead, but who saw the truth and expressed it perfectly, is a good one. The likes of Orwell (Blair) will not pass our way again soon. (That's the same reason I am now writing about Tom Paine.)
Congressman Billybob
Click for "Til Death Do Us Part."
Some believe the Al Goreghoul speech caught the democrats off guard. Far from it; the gore speech from Socialist Bizerkly was the launch signal for a campaign designed by the democrats to divide this nation during an election cycle! It is claaic democrat political strategy and I'm amazed that conservatives haven't figured it out! [HINT: travel plans to Baghdad were made before Goron Stump made his speech. Daschle's rant was anything but spontaneous, and the democrat demagoguery that has followed is also anything but spontaneous. These lying S.O.B.'s have formulated a strategy to undermine the war so that Bush fails, Americans get killed, and the democrats can seize power completely ... and when they get it all this time, they will never relinquish it again because they will tax us so severly and hand the money out so freely, far more than 50% of Americans will be dependant on the fed for their life, one way or the other.
The only flaw in their strategy is the death and destruction a planned weakness of purpose against terrorism will reap; the democrats may come to full power over a nation in chaos, with death and destruction the norm and mayhem the only clear state of the union! I HATE THE DEMOCRAT HEIRARCHY!
Don't count on it. Once the truth of what he says becomes irrefutable Hitchens will simply be forgotten. Do you you think they will give him a chance to say, I told you so?
That the democrats don't see how effectively they have boxed themselves in, with their anti-American philosophies, doesn't surprise me in the least. To be a true-blue democRAT, after all, you have to be immune to reality and facts, logic and common sense. In other words, by definition, you have to be mentally deranged. Those who were impervious to reality before, aren't going to change any time soon...
So I'll simply sit back, and continue to watch Dasche-Hole, Gore, and Gebhart swing in the wind...
Be well,
This can be said of Hitchens. Will P.J. O'Rourke now remove him from his "Enemies List?"
A excellent read and food for thought regarding the self destruction of the left.
I expect them to be openly siding with the communist party as a opus.
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