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COUNTERBLASTS is a series of short, polemical titles that aims to revive a tradition inaugurated by Puritan and Leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when, in the words of one of their number, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was ‘running up like parchment in the fire’. From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions of the last century.
In a period where politicians, media barons, and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it is time to revive the tradition. Verso’s Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
Unhitched: The Trial of
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Seymour
To Marie, whose hatred is pure. With all my love.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Preface: Predictable as Hell
1Christopher Hitchens in Theory and Practice
2English Questions, from Orwell to Thatcher
3Guilty as Sin: Theophobia, from Rushdie to the War on Terror
4The Englishman Abroad and the Road to Empire
Conclusion: Twenty-Twenty Blindfold
Acknowledgements
Notes
About the Author
Copyright
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.
