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.
1 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
In the advanced capitalist world from the mid-1960s a generation of intellectuals was radicalized and won for Marxism. Many of them were disappointed in the hopes they formed – some of these wild but let that pass – and for a good while now we have been witnessing a procession of erstwhile Marxists, a sizeable portion of the generational current they shared in creating, in the business of finding their way ‘out’ and away. This exit is always presented, naturally, in the guise of an intellectual advance. Those of us unpersuaded of it cannot but remind its proponents of what they once knew but seem instantly to forget as they make their exit, namely, that the evolution of ideas has a social and material context.
– Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’
Marxism … had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past … There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.
– Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great
PERMANENT CONTRADICTION
One vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.
– William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays
The amazing, turbulent effect of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars on a certain type of intellectual led William Hazlitt to write ‘On Consistency of Opinion’. His comportment was that of a suave and slightly aloof radical raising a disconcerted eyebrow at the ‘sudden and violent changes of principle’ that these intellectuals had displayed on such trifling matters as the absolute right of the Bourbons to possess France. Wordsworth’s passage from Paineite revolutionary politics to Burkean conservatism had been a case in point. Hazlitt observed that those most susceptible to such transformations were in general not those who seemed the most yielding in argument; on the contrary, they were ‘exclusive, bigoted and intolerant’. This was because, Hazlitt proposed, those who were least capable of sympathetic investment in the points of view of others were the most likely to be hit with ‘double force’ when the unexpected happened.
This is plausible: those who are not serious in the positions they occupy are more likely to abdicate them in sudden revulsion when events test their beliefs. We can readily think of political defectors from our own era whose account of the beliefs they once held is so fantastically crude as to make one wonder how they could have been so childish – and when, if ever, they stopped being so. Yet the early Hitchens was not always lacking in interpretive charity, and he does not seem to have wholly lacked sympathy with certain right-wing tropes before his seeming volte-face.
Hazlitt went on to submit that opinions may reasonably alter over time, but there was no need to ‘discard … the common dictates of reason’. A person whose opinion has changed
need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.
This is instantly applicable to any number of apostate leftists – Max Eastman, James Burnham, David Horowitz, André Glucksmann, and Paul Johnson, to name only a fractional sample.
But what of the late Christopher Hitchens? Did he not swear, even as he was waving adieu and bon débarras to his former comrades, that he had not and did not repudiate his past? Was he not notable for attempting to turn the left’s language – of internationalism, justice, and even revolution – against it in the war about the war? Yes, and again, yes. But even if he did not reject his past, he most certainly travestied his principles and poured execration on those who kept the faith. His attacks on Noam Chomsky, and particularly Edward Said, had a detectable element of Hitchens’s sacrificing his past affiliations ‘at the shrine of matured servility’.
Did Hitchens hew to his old ideas like a religion, so that, having lost his faith, he could be said to have found his reason? The author allowed that the socialist politics he once espoused had had elements of religious experience but assured readers that this was all very much in his past.1 This was yet another fanciful lapse into cliché on Hitchens’s part – in this case the old anticommunist saw of The God That Failed. Not to deny that socialism has its credenda, but the beliefs that Hitchens held dearest in his postleft phase – opposition to dictatorship, support for Jeffersonian imperialism – were precisely of a sort one can assert only without proof and as articles of faith.2 What Hitchens found when he lost the socialist faith was but a Nicene
