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Home , Alexander Cockburn, Blaming the Victims, Christopher Hitchens, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, James Fenton, Money (novel)

The Public : Continuity as a Pre-Requisite for Credibility? A Biography of as a Public Intellectual.

MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam

Author: Glenn Walters

Student number: 11108304

Main Supervisor: Dr. Guido Snel

Second Supervisor: Dr. Alex Drace-Francis

June, 2016

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Table of Contents x. Introduction ...... 3 xi Theoretical Framework ...... 3 xii Methodology ...... 6 1. Chapter One: Christopher Hitchens’ Life and Writing Career ...... 9 1.1 Autobiography and Hitch-22 ...... 9 1.2 Early life, Oxford University, and the International Socialists ...... 10 1.3 Bohemian Bloomsbury and The ...... 13 1.4 America and ...... 17 1.5 Vanity Fair and the 1990’s ...... 20 1.6 Later Career and American Citizenship ...... 22 2. Chapter Two: Criticisms of Hitchens and Attacks on Credibility ...... 25 2.1 Attacks on Personal Integrity ...... 25 2.1.1 Friendship with ...... 27 2.2 The Political Flip-Flopper ...... 29 2.3 Accusations of Imperialism ...... 31 2.4 The Left Wing Apostate ...... 33 2.5 A Note on Aesthetic Rupture ...... 38 3. Chapter Three: Re-establishing Hitchens’ Credibility as a Public Intellectual ...... 41 3.1 Reconsidering Hitchens’ Personal Integrity: Did Hitchens Have a Case Against Clinton? ...... 41 3.1.1 ...... 42 3.1.2 Friendship with Edward Said ...... 43 3.2 A Political Flip Flopper or Contrarian? ...... 45 3.2.1 Hitchens’ and Attraction to Revolutionary Dynamism ...... 47 3.2.2 Opposition to and Conflation with ...... 49 3.3 Imperialist or Internationalist? ...... 52 3.4 The Left Wing Apostate? ...... 56 3.5 A Note on Perceived Aesthetic Rupture ...... 60 4. Conclusion ...... 63 4.1 Deconstructing Contrarianism ...... 63 4.2 Assessing Public ...... 67 5. Bibliography ...... 70

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x. Introduction

This thesis is ostensibly a consideration of the life and works of the late Anglo-American , journalist, author, and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011). Hitchens’ life and were seemingly characterised by discontinuities: From gadfly to imperialist, or internationalist to left wing apostate; critical and chronicling discourse is littered with allusion to rupture and contradiction. A polarising figure, detractors frame the dialectical Christopher Hitchens as incoherent and thus lacking credibility as a public intellectual. It is consideration of this concept which forms the corpus of this thesis. The following investigation of Hitchens’ life and intellectual output and will inform a second layer of enquiry. By using Christopher Hitchens as a case study, broader questions will be asked and answered about the role and nature of public intellectuals: what characterises public intellectuals?; how do they engage the public sphere?; should they perform a specific role?; can public intellectuals traverse British and American public spheres?; and, crucially, what is the relationship between consistency of political ideology and credibility? xi Theoretical Framework

Scholarly theory of public intellectuals and the contexts in which they operate provides the framework for this investigation into Christopher Hitchens. Born in , in the years following the allied defeat of , Hitchens grew into a tradition of western European public intellectuals that had arisen as an oppositional class, fighting ‘retrograde and repressive ideologies,’ which had come into focus during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Unlike the philosophes of the eighteenth century (the intellectual forefathers of Julian Benda and Emile Zola) who ‘frequently acted as individuals,’ the public intellectuals of post-Dreyfus Europe formed a self-conscious societal group.2 These twentieth century public intellectuals were distinguished by non-academic specialisation: They had the ability to speak authoritatively

1 Jules Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” Multi-Ethnic of the (2004), Vol. 29, Accessed 30 May, 2016: 212, http://jstor.org/stable/4141851 2 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 212.

3 on a broad range of societal issues; people such as and Jean Paul Sartre in Europe, or Norman Mailer and in America. Christopher Hitchens began his career in England before moving to America in 1981 on the cusp of what many scholars view as an epoch change in public intellectualism. Michael Ignatieff writes in his article Decline and Fall of the Public Intellectual that on Sartre’s death ‘a chapter which had begun in Paris in 1733, when published his letters concerning the English Nation, came to an end,’3 prompting Ignatieff to ask in 1997 ‘who is left to speak for the public.’4 The end of the Cold War blurred oppositional ideological lines and for many marked the death of the public intellectual. This pessimistic outlook for the prospects of the public intellectual was captured in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of and the Last Man. If human social evolution was to end with the apparent hegemony enjoyed by western liberal democracy, the public intellectual would surely be doomed to become an anachronism. Other scholars accept that the time of the authoritative generalist is over, but that public intellectualism continues to exist, only in different forms and with an uncertain future. Patrick Baert and Josh Booth emphasise the role of the ‘digital age’ in the ‘motives and means by which intellectuals engage their publics.’5 The post-modern technological revolution facilitates a ‘democratisation’ of the public sphere,6 although intuitively this could also engulf public intellectualism in the perceived dumbing down occurring in wider society. Barbara Misztal also sounds a warning in her analysis of increasing academic specialisation and the rise of think tanks in the intellectual space. These experts and knowledge brokers may have a limiting effect on the role of other public intellectuals, ‘and their monopolisation of the public forum could represent a threat to the quality of public debates.’7 It is in this intellectual landscape that theorised a changing role for the public intellectual that Hitchens career unfolded, and it is this landscape that thus provides the theoretical framework for this thesis.

But what are public intellectuals and what do they do? There is much scholarly opinion on the matter. Jules Chametzky offers a compact definition that public intellectuals are ‘those who attempt to influence social and political events and reality directly with their ideas.’8

3 Michael Ignatieff, "Decline and fall of the public intellectual," Queen's Quarterly (1997), Vol. 104, accessed 30 May, 2016: 394-403, http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA30102430&v=2.1&u=amst&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w 4 Ignatieff, "Decline and fall of the public intellectual," 394-403. 5 Patrick Baert and Barbara Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” International Journal of Politics, , and Society (2012), Vol. 25, accessed 30 May 2016: 91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23279949 6 Baert and Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” 91. 7 ibid., 92. 8 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 211.

4 Maria Todorova adds nuance to Chametzky’s useful but limited characterisation by addressing preferred methodologies of public intellectuals. Todorova states that the ‘normal way’ for the public intellectual to actually reach his or her public is by ‘unwrapping’ complex arguments and translating them into decipherable language whilst ‘providing a moral compass.’9 Additionally, says Todorova, the public intellectual must engage in sufficiently rigorous scholarship less they sink into ‘misidentifications, misconceptions, and errors.’10 Irresponsible scholarship represents a ‘breach of historical conventions’ and precludes engagement with other scholars and ultimately the ‘advancement of scholarship.’11 Todorova does however note that a certain flexibility in this regard can create an innovative space which can produce ‘new theoretical or conceptual moves.’12 For Cynthia Ozik public intellectuals are dynamic, self-assured, and courageous: They must have enough self-respect to tell the truth and recognise crisis. The public intellectual must be, in times of growing moral equivalence, prepared to identify and label ‘barbarians,’ by whom Ozik means those ‘who relish evil,’ denigrate reason, and cancel out the humanity of the other.13 This is the responsibility of the public intellectual. As well as moral fibre, public intellectuals require a disposition to activism as this is what separates them from private intellectuals. Additionally, the public intellectual must be philosophically capable: Aware of the currents of history, it is the job of the public intellectual to record and interpret the Zeitgeist. They strive to comprehend and formulate ‘the cognitive and historic patterns that give rise to public issues.’14 Finally, whilst the above criterion implicitly demand a continuity in the behaviourisms, methodologies, and mentalities of public intellectuals, a continuity on societal topics of public concern is an explicit conceptual requirement. In his hugely influential work La Trahison des clercs, Julian Benda famously stated ‘the duty of the intellectual was to defend universal values, over and above the politics of the moment,’15 in effect calling for a form of ultimate consistency. Written at the turn of the twentieth century in opposition to the anti-Semitism suffered by Jewish Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Benda and his fellow Dreyfusards stood up for values of and justice. More recently, prominent black American Intellectual has had his credibility called into question owing to

9 Maria Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” Slavic Review (2015), Vol. 74, Accessed 30 May, 2016: 709, http://jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.74.4.708 10 Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 712. 11 ibid. 12 ibid. 13 Cynthia Ozik, “Public and Private Intellectuals,” The American Scholar (1995), Vol. 64, Accessed 30 May, 2016: 358, http://jstor.org/stable/41212342 14 Ozik, “Public and Private Intellectuals,” 355. 15 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 212.

5 perceived inconsistencies in his political alliances. In the 2000 Presidential election, West threw his support behind the candidacy of Bill Bradley, a politician who campaigned on policies West had spent his career ‘assiduously’ attacking: Multinational capitalist , institutionalised and violence, and the disempowerment of American workers.’16 Public intellectuals are required to engage politics and commit to a position. Having done this, crossing back over political divides can terminally damage credibility. Chametzky states – as in the case of West - that such actions undercut and interrogate the seriousness of the speaker.1718 The following study of Christopher Hitchens is designed to both test and develop these definitions and conceptions, which in themselves provide a sound framework in which to locate this thesis. xii Methodology

This thesis is structured as an intellectual biography of Christopher Hitchens. This is a challenging, yet appropriate vehicle of delivery. Poor biography occurs when ‘criticism clumsily intrudes upon the continuity of a life;’ whilst successful biography relies on ‘sweeping chronology,’ but also the highlighting of ‘major patterns of behaviour that give a life its shape and meaning.’19 However, chronology may also create the illusion of a consistency that never existed. This study of Christopher Hitchens is concerned with rupture and discontinuity, thus intellectual biography drives towards the intended target of this work, enabling discussion of these facets of Hitchens’ life and writing as well as facilitating their potential deconstruction. Indeed, Hitchens provides a perfect subject of enquiry for this paper. A perfunctory glance at his life and writing career reveals manifold discontinuities: Politically, Hitchens has supported and attacked figures and politics on either side of the left/right divide. A ferocious opponent of , Hitchens was equally vociferous in his support of George W. Bush, and was a friend to characters as diverse as political dissident Adam Michnik; prize winning cultural author ; the neoconservative

16 ibid., 224. 17 ibid. 18 Indeed, a recent article published by the American Journal Counter Punch reveals that West is still struggling to regain credibility (see: Ajamu Baraka, “Why is Cornel West Playing a Human Shield for the Democrats – Once Again?,” Counter Punch, September 10, 2015, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/10/why-is-cornel-west-playing-a-human-shield-for-the-democrats-once- again/). 19 Paul Murray Kendall, “Biography: Narrative Genre,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.britannica.com/art/biography-narrative-genre

6 politician and head of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz; and Holocaust denying historian . Hitchens was born of imperialism and yet quickly espoused internationalism; was a fundamentalist, but also opposed abortion. Hitchens was born British and died American, has won literary prizes whilst his prose was simultaneously castigated, and claimed Marxist credentials at a point in his career when he was widely labelled a neoconservative. For those who appreciated his work, Christopher Hitchens was a writer of ‘staggeringly prolific output,’20 for those less enamoured his output represented ‘manic industry.’21 Thus, the polarising Hitchens, one of the most visible public intellectuals in recent British and American history, represents a veritable goldmine of ruptures and contradictions for the purpose of this study, and raises interesting questions about contrarianism – as oppose to ideological political consistency - and and longevity in the public sphere.

Whether one appreciates Hitchens’ works or not, it is indisputable that he produced a formidable amount of literature including fourteen books and another three co-authored or co-edited, and six collections of essays in addition to a staggering amount of newspaper columns and magazine articles not chronicled in book publications. Hence, approaching Christopher Hitchens’ body of work and life in narrower terms of contradictions and ruptures makes the task intelligible. Producing even this study requires much textual analysis, a technique and methodology central of the discipline of intellectual history. With both biography and history dealing mostly with the past, ‘in the hunting down, evaluating, and selection of sources they are akin.’22 Indeed, in his 1830 essay On History wrote that ‘history was the essence of innumerable biographies.’23 Carlyle saw biography as an interrogation of the subjects ‘half-conscious aims’ and ‘beliefs.’24 Conversely, the study of biography also requires the context provided by historical academic methodology: Biography and History enjoy a symbiotic relationship. With public intellectualism having firm roots in European intellectual culture, the medium of intellectual biography with its close relations to historical inquiry appropriately anchors this investigation into a British born American subject in transatlantic intellectual, literary, and scholarly traditions.

20 Nick Gillespie, “Christopher Hitchens RIP,” Reason.com, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/16/christopher-hitchens-rip 21 Michael Wolff, “The damnation of ST Christopher,” GQ Magazine, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.gq- magazine.co.uk/article/michael-wolff-on-christopher-hitchens 22 Murray Kendall, “Biography: Narrative Genre.” 23 Barbara Caine, Biography and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 13. 24 ibid.

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This thesis is divided into three distinct chapters. Chapter one chronicles Hitchens’ life, focussing on rupture both in his personal life and writing career. The chapter seeks to deconstruct these ruptures where possible, and tease out consistencies in a life and career where on first glance there appear to be few. Chapter Two focusses exclusively on criticisms of Hitchens meted out by fellow public intellectuals and social commentators which attacked his credibility as a public intellectual. These criticisms are heavily focussed around inconsistencies in Hitchens’ writings, with Hitchens framed as either a political flip-flopper or left wing apostate. But there were also attacks on ‘unwanted’ consistencies. These were aimed firstly at Hitchens’ person, with many critics pointing to a moral bankruptcy and overriding career avarice. Secondly, Hitchens was accused in some quarters of being an imperialist fighting to maintain a veneer of cosmopolitanism. Chapter Three offers a counter narrative, seeking to locate and explore underlying consistencies of thought and principle which give meaning and structure to Hitchens’ politics, thereby again deconstructing credibility robbing political inconsistencies. In conclusion this thesis will highlight the difficulties of pinning down contrarianism, despite demonstrating that analysis of Hitchens’ career shows salient themes emerge which at least partially serve to dispel some accusations and offer consistency. Additionally, analysis of Hitchens’ career as a public intellectual facilitates an interrogation into how robust the parameters offered by academics are, and will show that salient features of public intellectualism do emerge.

8 1. Chapter One: Christopher Hitchens’ Life and Writing Career

1.1 Autobiography and Hitch-22

In his 1968 life narrative, W.E.B. Debois wrote that ‘autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities.’25 Dubois acknowledged that memory may fail to serve accurately, and his book represented what an old man dreams his life to have been, ‘and what he would like others to believe.’26 In A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson recommend that reading life narratives is an intersubjective process, demanding an adjustment of expectations of truth.27 The reader should consider whether the writer explicitly exerts the coherence of their story, and analysis of omissions, contradictions, and silences inform the reader’s picture of the life being animated on the page.28 Christopher Hitchens’ own life narrative was released in 2010, a year before his death. Towards the end of writing the book, entitled Hitch-22, Hitchens became unusually tired, eventually cancelling the accompanying book tour. He was subsequently diagnosed with stage four oesophageal cancer, an issue discussed in a new preface written for the second printing run. In it, Hitchens emphasises consistency in his his life through the dialectic, that ‘a continuous theme in Hitch- 22 is the requirement, exacted by a life of repeated contradictions, to keep two sets of books.’29 At the time of writing the preface Hitchens explains the rigors of making preparations to die, whilst simultaneously continuing to live; the ultimate final contradictory process of a self-acknowledged – and self-portrayed – contrarian and master of the dialectic.30 Hitch-22, emphasises a coherence underpinning manifold inconsistency and rupture: It is exactly this claim that the following study will investigate. Thus, Hitchens implicitly acknowledges the notion of consistency as a crucial factor in establishing credibility in his own life and career, that of a public intellectual.

25 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Lives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 13. 26 Smith and Watson, “Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Lives,” 13. 27 ibid. 28 ibid., 171. 29 Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (New York: Twelve, 2010), xiii. 30 Christopher Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” xiii.

9 1.2 Early life, Oxford University, and the International Socialists

Christopher Eric Hitchens was born into a context of post-World War II British imperial decline; a phenomenon felt particularly acutely by the Hitchens family. His parents had met during the war where his father, Eric Hitchens, had served as a naval commander, whilst his mother, Yvonne, had volunteered as a Wren. Hitchens’ father was a stoic man of simple needs and few words, who had captained the ship that sunk Hitler’s Scharnhorst.31 By contrast, Hitchens describes his mother as vivacious: A social butterfly and frustrated socialite, with whom he enjoyed a close and loving relationship.32 It was Yvonne who provided Hitchens with what he describes as his ‘first identity.’33 Hitchens’ earliest memories were of living in and observing the British fleet as it crossed the port at Valletta. The Hitchens family were posted to Malta from the English naval town of Portsmouth, where Christopher had been born April 13, 1949. The time in Malta was the high water mark of the Hitchens’ family life: It provided sociability amiable to the sensibilities of Yvonne; whilst his father’s Naval detachment in Valletta still had a ‘shimmer or scintilla of greatness’ to it.34 The post-imperial afterglow of Malta contrasted sharply with the austere surrounding of the Hitchens’ next home, the Scottish naval base at Rosyth, in which Yvonne struggled to flourish. The declining British Empire represented a metaphor for his father’s condition: After the tumultuous days of war and harbours of Malta, Hitchens recalls his father donning his uniform to set foot upon non-seagoing vessels that had become centres of administration and bureaucracy. This caused Eric Hitchens to suffer very deep yet repressed grievance.’35 The war afforded the Hitchens’ upward mobility and they achieved lower-middle class status by the time Christopher was of schooling age. He recalls overhearing a conversation between his parents whilst he was seven years old, whereby Yvonne forcefully stated: ‘If there is to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.’36 It was, according to Hitchens, thanks to his mother’s insistence and the family’s self-imposed frugality that he was afforded him the opportunity of firstly, attending a private school in Cambridge, and ultimately university education.37

31 ibid., 36. 32 ibid., 11. 33 ibid., 22. 34 ibid., 37. 35 ibid. 36 ibid., 13. 37 ibid., 14. This page also includes the single mention of his brother, Peter, in the entirety of the book: …’the money… was instead being spent on school fees for me and my brother, Peter (who had arrived during our time in Malta) …

10 Before arriving at Balliol College, Oxford University in 1967, Hitchens had already joined and been expelled from the Labour Party owing to participation in against Prime Minister ’s ‘contemptible support for the war in .’38 Hitchens’ early propensity for left wing politics was strengthened and ideologically tuned through interactions with fellow Oxford undergraduate Peter Sedgewick. Sedgewick recruited Hitchens for the International Socialists39 after being impressed by his ability in public debates held at Balliol. Attending university to study philosophy, politics, and economics, Hitchens’ interest in the works of was furthered by Sedgewick, who exposed him to the of and Rosa Luxembourg.40 It is probable that Sedgewick also introduced Hitchens to two figures that were fundamental to the formation of his early political principles. The first was Belgian-born left wing revolutionary and anti-Stalinist Victor Serge,41 who Hitchens credits with being the first man to coin the word ‘totalitarian.’42 Sedgewick had translated Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolution in 1963 and published an article called The Crucial Year: Victor Serge on Class and Party in the January/March edition of International Socialism, a small quarterly with a circulation of roughly two thousand copies per quarter.4344 It was probably Sedgewick - also on the editorial staff of International Socialism - who first introduced Hitchens to the writing of : Sedgewick had published in 1969 an article entitled George Orwell: International Socialist?.4546 Hitchens joined the International Socialists against a backdrop of a world engulfed by radical revolutionary upheaval and internationalist sympathy. The year of 1967 had seen a military coup in Greece, America struggling to maintain the ascendency in Vietnam, the Salazar regime on the retreat in Africa, the oppressive Czech Communist Party facing intellectual bankruptcy, and stirrings of the civil rights movement in America: With the 1968 Paris revolt the world appeared ripe for revolution from below. In 1968 Hitchens travelled to Cuba just

38 Christopher Hitchens, “Long Live Labor: Why I’m for ,” Slate, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/04/long_live_labor.html 39 The International Socialists were a forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. 40 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 87. 41 Victor Serge receives much mention and is often quoted in Hitchens’ writing. As late as 2002 Hitchens wrote an article entitled Victor Serge: Pictures from an Inquisition in which he reviewed Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary whilst working as a literary reviewer for the American publication . 42 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 91. 43 Camilla Royal, Deputy Editor International Socialism, e-mail message to author, May 25, 2016. 44 Incidentally also the first issue to feature an article written by Hitchens, a review of The End of Inequality? By David Lane (Christopher Hitchens, “The end of Inequality,” International Socialism, January – March, 1972, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1972/no050/hitchens.htm). 45 http://www.petersedgwick.org/navigation/Writings.html 46 Peter Sedgewick, “George Orwell International Socialist?,” International Socialism, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1969/xx/orwell.htm

11 months after the death of , after extended an invitation to young internationalists. Hitchens claims in his memoirs to have found Cuba anti-climactic: Castro was a less than captivating speaker; whilst the regime’s support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia riled public opinion which was far from sympathetic to Stalin’s governance.47 On returning to England he met Polish dissident Leszek Kolakowski, a reform communist intellectual of the Polish Spring of 1965.48 Hitchens recalls that Kolakowski had become sceptical about the prospects of left wing radicalism.49 Whilst Hitchens offers lucid recollections of these experiences, he is clearly keen to emphasise cognitive dissonance occurring in post-1968 socialists - himself included - possibly as an explanatory vehicle for later life and career events.

At Oxford Hitchens began to live a double existence. One half involved donning a donkey jacket and distributing leaflets or selling copies of the on street corners; whilst the second saw the swapping of donkey for dinner jacket, and attendance of lavish luncheons and cocktail parties populated by young Toryites.50 One important occasion belonging to the finer half of Hitchens’ Oxfordian existence occurred when his tutor invited him to attend a private lecture on John Locke to be given by Noam Chomsky; and weeks later to host Isaiah Berlin at a cocktail party.51 Chomsky’s knowledge was impressive,52 but Hitchens found him uninspiring and a disappointing public speaker.53 Berlin delivered a lecture on Karl Marx, and, by contrast, failed to convince Hitchens with his apparently poor knowledge of Marxism, but dazzled with his wit and easy manner: He was dynamic and engaging, stopping afterwards to relay to Hitchens an anecdote involving and Henry James.54 The young Hitchens was impressed by Berlin’s style of public intellectualism.55 Hitchens went on to graduate from Oxford with a disappointing 3rd class

47 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 115. 48 ibid., 122. 49 ibid. 50 ibid., 102-103. 51 ibid., 95. 52 Hitchens recalls the evening in a 1985 article entitled Chorus and Cassandra, collected in Cristopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst (: Atlantic Books, 1988), 70-94. 53 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 98. 54 ibid., 96-97. 55 There are many parallels between Hitchens’ description of Berlin’s style of delivering public speeches and his own public appearances. Hitchens was often described as being light on his feet, terribly witty and ironic, but occasionally loose on facts (see Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Dove into Hawk,” a review of And Yet… by Christopher Hitchens, Literary Supplement, April 13, 2016, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.the- tls.co.uk/articles/public/dove-into-hawk/). Arguably Berlin was an influence on Hitchens style as a public intellectual. Additionally, Hitchens, like Berlin, was renowned for spending lots of time offering advice to young students and writers, and was a visiting lecturer at , New York. George Eaten, now a

12 degree, and initially struggled as a journalist. His first job at the Times Higher Education Supplement ended abruptly when he was sacked, according to now editor of the British Medical Journal, Annabel Ferriman, ‘for showing a distinct lack of interest in higher education.’56 It was not until 1973 when Oxford roommate introduced him to Anthony Howard, Fenton’s editor of The New Statesman, that Hitchens’ career began in earnest.

1.3 Bohemian Bloomsbury and The New Statesman

It was in 1973 in Bloomsbury, London, that Hitchens first met Anthony Howard. Howard became editor of the New Statesman in 1972 with the task of arresting a malaise that had set in under previous editor in the quality of a magazine’s copy whose circulation had been declining since the 1950’s.57 Howard was a ‘meticulous and courteous editor’ who positioned the magazine politically as the Labour party’s ‘candid friend.’58 He valued journalism that was ‘good, vivid, witty writing – “do me a flashy piece” – he would say.’59 , who co-wrote a short book with Hitchens on , believes Howard’s editing style greatly helped young Hitchens.60 Howard’s decisions were ‘quick, even brusque, and, once made, very hard to shift’, which – along with his demands for entertaining copy – had a formative effect on Hitchens’ journalistic style. The ensemble of journalists Hitchens joined in 1973 would be retrospectively viewed as a golden generation. The staff included poet James Fenton, who by 1973 had already won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.61 Author was also on the payroll. Amis had recently published his first novel The Rachel Papers, which had established him as an exceptional satirical novelist.

journalist at the New Statesman recalls: ‘Perhaps because of his early struggles, Hitchens was always supportive of young journalists starting out. With characteristic generosity, he continued to reply to my emails even as the cancer ravaged him. "Hope you thrive," his final message ended’ (see: George Eaton, “Christopher Hitchens: The New Statesman Years,” The New Statesman, January 2, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/magazines/2012/01/hitchens-write-editor-fenton). 56 Matthew Reisz, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Times Higher Education, October 13, 2011, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/on-the-shoulders-of-giants/417788.article 57 George Eaten, “Christopher Hitchens: The New Statesman Years,” The New Statesman, January 2, 2012, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/magazines/2012/01/hitchens-write-editor-fenton 58 , “Anthony Howard obituary,” , December 20, 2010, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/20/anthony-howard-obituary 59 ibid. 60 Eaton, “Christopher Hitchens: The New Statesman Years.” 61 The British Library, “The PEN Pinter Prize – James Fenton,” The British Library, October 6, 2015, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.bl.uk/events/the-pen-pinter-prize-james-fenton

13 Another employee at the publication was talented young author , who, like Amis and Hitchens, would contribute reviews to The Times Literary Supplement throughout the seventies. Rounding off the team was Australian born author , a poet and columnist for The Observer, whilst past writers who graced the pages of The New Statesman include John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf.62 Hitchens’ breakthrough article for the magazine was steeped in tragic irony and contradictory emotion. In London that year Hitchens had been introduced by his mother to her new lover Timothy Bryan. Both Bryan and Yvonne Hitchens had become devotees of Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation Movement.63 Yvonne had swapped her ‘dutiful and thrifty and devoted husband’ for the ‘improvident, volatile’ and manically-depressed Bryan.64 The pair absconded to where they committed suicide in an apparent pact in a hotel room. Hitchens travelled to Greece to confirm the identities of the deceased at a time when Georgios Papadopoulos, leader of the ruling military Junta, had been supplanted by the more extreme Dimitrios Ioannidis. Whilst in Athens Hitchens wrote a fine article about the political situation entitled The Greek Lesson,65 which became his first lead feature.

At the insistence of Martin Amis66 the New Statesman journalists met on Friday afternoons for lunch in Bloomsbury, accompanied by other members of the London literati. Author Ian McEwan was a regular attendee, as were poets Peter Porter and and cartoonist Mark Boxer. Martin Amis’s father Kingsley would join when occasion permitted, whilst Milan Kundera was also an infrequent attendee.67 Over copious amounts of wine the group would discuss the London cultural scene, politics, and engage in drunken word games.68 It was during this period that Hitchens developed a love of the bohemian lifestyle he would lead throughout his career. Luckily for Hitchens he had an amazing tolerance for alcohol; drinking

62 Jason Cowley, “About the New Statesman,” The New Statesman, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/about-new-statesman 63 Christopher Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 19. 64 ibid., 29 65 Christopher Hitchens, “The Greek Lesson: After the Junta Fell, a Portrait of a Country in Turmoil as Hopes for Democracy were Crushed,” Literature Resource Centre (1974), January 2, 2012, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://go.galegroup.com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2048/ps/i.do?&id=GALE|A278632002&v=2.1&u=amst&it=r&p=Lit RC&sw=w&authCount=1 66 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 169. 67 ibid., 176. 68 ibid., 172: ‘Exchange the word ‘house’ for ‘sock’ and see what literary titles leap into existence: ‘Heartbreak Sock’; ‘The sock of the Rising Sun’. Or, more crudely, the word ‘cunt’ for the word ‘man’: ‘The Cunt Who Shot Liberty Valance’; ‘Batcunt’. Or examine a synthesis of the two such as Clive James’ offering: ‘A Shropshire Cunt’, by A.E. Sockprong.’

14 ‘like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.’69 Hitchens never concealed his passion for grape and grain.70 Rather, his relationship to cigarettes and alcohol became a cornerstone of a roguish persona, and develop into a daily routine: ‘At half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk and ready to repeat the treatment at evening meal. Nightcaps depend on how well the day went.’71

Hitchens’ early career unfolded in an economically challenged Britain. Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was struggling to an arrest an economic slump, achieved only via a bail out from the International Monetary Fund and at the price of 30% inflation.72 With strikes rife and the unions growing, the contradiction that the son of a conservative naval commander with an Oxford education and love for lavish lunches should identify with the causes of the political left requires unpacking. Firstly, Yvonne Hitchens had experienced the pitfalls of lower-artisanship when her small dress-shop business went bankrupt,73 whilst his father finished life as a low income book keeper.74 Hitchens was well aware of the dangers facing the proletariat. Additionally, the war in Indochina had turned many of Hitchens’ generation away from imperialism and made them suspicious of conservative politics. In literary terms the seventies saw the growth of the exposé, with Bernstein and Woodward enjoying success with The Final Days, a documentation of ’s downfall, whilst Alice Walker’s Meridian documented the American civil rights movement.75 The eminent American journalist and contrarian released Burr in 1973, a novel based around fictional memoirs of eighteenth century politician Aaron Burr, confirming a trend in American literature of the increasingly narrowed boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. As the decade wore on, Hitchens became increasingly engaged with foreign reportage. In 1976 he travelled to to meet Jacek Kuron, author of the Socialist Manifesto for

69 ibid. 70 ibid., 350: Grape and Grain is part of the title of a short sub-chapter entitled A Short Footnote on the Grape and the Grain. 71 ibid., 351. 72 BBC News, “Why Does the 70’s get Painted as a such Bad Decade,” BBC News, April 16, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17703483 73 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 15. 74 ibid., 44. 75 Rick Musser, “The 1970’s,” The History of American Journalism, December, 2007, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://history.journalism.ku.edu/1970/1970.shtml

15 Poland76 and organiser of the student uprisings in the late sixties against the authoritarian regime in Warsaw.77 Hitchens recalls that Kuron had become disillusioned with revolutionary politics, claiming the Polish press had become a propaganda tool of an increasingly jumpy, authoritarian government. Kuron had grown to identify the real struggle as the safeguarding of civil and .78 Interestingly, this 2010 recollection of Hitchens’ meeting with Kuron collaborates with a 1977 New Statesman article Hitchens wrote about his experiences in Poland. Entitled Liberté À La Polonaise it suggests that Hitchens’ account of Poland 1976 in Hitch-22 is credible and representative.7980

In December 1977 Hitchens travelled to an Argentina suffering under the authoritarian rule of ’s military government. He arrived in Buenos Aries in the wake of the disappearances of Jacobo Timerman, the missing editor of Buenos Aires newspaper La Opinion, and political activist Claudia Inez Grumberg.81 On meeting Videla82 Hitchens raised Grumberg’s disappearance and was met with the astonishing admission that: ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas, maybe that’s why she’s been detained.’83 During Videla’s ‘process of national re-organisation,’ Argentines critical of the military regime were regularly kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured and killed.84 On returning to England, Hitchens wrote an article about South and and the nature of United States- backed military regimes entitled The Southern Cone. The brilliant exposé not only reflected the political and journalistic Zeitgeist and intermarriage of transatlantic public spheres, but

76 Einde O’Callaghan, “Jacek Kuron & Karel Modzelewski: A Socialist Manifesto for Poland,” International Socialism, Spring, 1967, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1967/no028/kuron.htm 77 Michael Simmons, “Jacek Kuron,” The Guardian, June 18, 2004, accessed June 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/jun/18/guardianobituaries.michaelsimmons 78 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 190. 79 Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst (London: Atlantic, 1988), 261. 80 Hitchens was far from the only Western intellectual who critiqued Eastern and intellectuals. Between 1968-1971 Frenchman Stephan Courtois was a Maoist, who, like Hitchens, was turned away from the radical left owing to the experiences of European nations under communist rule (see: Revolvy, “Stephane Courtois,” Revolvy, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=St%C3%A9phane%20Courtois&item_type=topic). In 1997 he edited a devastating account of the atrocities committed under the banner of Communism entitled The Black Book of Communism. Additionally, like Hitchens, Courtois became a supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and of America and its politics after overcoming a heavy dose of cognitive dissonance (see: Par Bertrand Le Gendre, “Exercice d'américanophilie à la française,” Le Monde, November 22, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2007/11/22/exercice-d-americanophilie-a-la-francaise_981343_3260.html) 81 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 195. 82 ibid., Hitchens describes Videla as ‘bony thin and mediocre in appearance, like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush.’ 83 ibid. 84 H.C., “Death of a Dirty War Criminal,” , May 23, 2013, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.economist.com/blogs/americasview/2013/05/jorge-rafael-videla

16 also prompted Anthony Howard to make him foreign editor in 1979. Nonetheless, Hitchens’ relationship with Howard became strained as he, according to Peter Kellner, no longer wanted to be edited by someone he regarded as an inferior writer.85 Clearly, the unabashed honesty and forcefulness of opinion that characterised Hitchens’ journalism also extended to his professional and private relationships. The final years of the decade were to be Hitchens’ last as a resident of the British Isles. In 1977 he met the leader of the opposition .86 In Thatcher Hitchens recognised an impressive figure – a ‘conviction politician,’87 leading to the ‘awful premonition’ that on some matters Thatcher might be right.88 Appalled by Labour policy towards Northern Ireland, Hitchens neglected to vote in the 1979 general election.89 Hitchens decided to end his relationship with the New Statesman, sever his explicit fraternity with the British left, and end his time in Britain itself: He had decided to leave London for America.

1.4 America and The Nation

Hitchens’ foreign reportage had attracted the attention of , editor of the Nation magazine in the States.90 Hitchens had been contributing occasional articles to the magazine since 1978, but it was in 1981 that the offer of a full time position with the publication materialised. With the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982, Hitchens relocated to Washington D.C. to cover the hostilities where he remained, becoming the magazines first Washington correspondent since the radical Izzy Stone in the sixties. A bi-weekly column, The Minority Report, was born and would remain in print until autumn 2002.91 Hitchens was now writing for the oldest continuous publication in America, and one regarded as the

85 Eaton, “Christopher Hitchens: The New Statesman Years.” 86 In 1977 he had had a curious meeting with the leader of the opposition Margaret Thatcher, which resulted in Hitchens being ‘spanked’ by the Iron Lady with rolled up Parliamentary papers (see: Christopher Hitchens, “Lessons Maggie Taught Me, The Nation, December 17, 1990, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/lessons-maggie-taught-me/). 87 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 178. 88 ibid., 178. 89 ibid., 178; 202-203. 90 Victor Navasky, “Remembering Hitchens,” The Nation, December 22, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/remembering-hitchens/ 91 One underpinning consistency involved in Hitchens’ cross-Atlantic undertakings was ensured as he exported with him his bohemian lifestyle and flamboyant journalistic practices. Navasky recalls: ‘Christopher demonstrated that it was possible to down his share of lunchtime martinis, supplemented by however many glasses of red wine, return to the office and, in fifteen to twenty minutes, write an elegant 250-word unsigned editorial to space, not one word of which had to be altered (see: Navasky, “Remembering Hitchens,”).

17 leading magazine of its kind, boasting a circulation of 40,21992 copies per issue.93 Hitchens negotiated his new social context by ‘remain(ing) a blood brother of the ,’ with whom he already felt a kinship.94 This kinship was felt in an internationalist sense, namely through Karl Marx ‘great ’ with Lincoln in the civil war; the humanism of Eugene Debs; and the class battles that ‘baptised’ the labour movement.’95 These recollections happily lend a socialist veneer to a process of integration into the world’s foremost capitalist nation. However, whilst contributing to the Nation on a freelance basis, Hitchens had written a 1980 article criticising Margaret Thatcher’s rampant privatisation programme in England entitled This Thatchered Land, This England,96 which did provide a bridge across the Atlantic. It was a familiar topic which would resonate with the Nation’s values. Likewise, events in the Falkland Islands were also familiar territory for Hitchens and provided his first major Washington assignment. Hitchens first articles for his American employers exhibited an unlikely congruence to Hitchens journalism and life in England, dealing, as they did, with the intersections of class and empire in a way that would surely have appealed to a liberal American audience. The cognitive dissonance of the competing intuitions involved in analysing contrarianism of this form makes establishing clear lines of continuity or rupture difficult. The level of fractured ideology is as great as to be romantic in a Byronic fashion.

The start of the 1980’s in America coincided with the decline of ‘New Journalism’, a movement prevalent since the sixties. New Journalism increased the subjectivity of objective news reporting: It combined ‘journalistic research with the techniques of fiction writing in the reporting of stories about real-life events.’97 Central figures in the movement include Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote. Whilst the practice went into decline as Hitchens arrived in America, it had nonetheless introduced a literary twist to factual reporting that suited Hitchens journalistic upbringing: In his Bloomsbury days he was surrounded by a generation of great British literary figures; whilst he had long been contributing articles to the the Times Literary Supplement. Hence, this dramatic ‘rupture’ in his career was also a part of a steady evolution.

92 Caitlin Graf, Employee The Nation, e-mail message to author. 93 The editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The Nation American Journal,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Nation-American-journal 94 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 236. 95 ibid. 96 Christopher Hitchens, “This Thatchered Land, This England,” The Nation (1980), Vol. 231, Academic Search Premier EBSCOhost, accessed June 26, 2016. 97 Liz Fakazis, “New Journalism: American literary movement,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Journalism

18 With Ronald Raegan coming to power in 1980 the American political landscape was altered greatly. The liberal attitudes that had punctuated the previous decade succumbed to and political activism declined. Under Raegan tax cuts and big business bias was rife, engendering the promotion of culture of self-interest.98 Hitchens used his platform at The Nation to launch incessant attacks at the Raegan administration, particularly on the topic of the Iran-Contra scandal.99 The eighties also witnessed the release of Hitchens first book , published in 1984. The book was a fusion of Hitchens’ political and private concerns. In Cyprus Hitchens criticised the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger, which he forcefully asserted had resulted in American support for the military regime in Athens provoking the Turkish invasion of independent Cyprus, which in turn created mass displacement of ethnic Greek-Cypriots, war, and humanitarian crisis.100 The Mediterranean was central to Hitchens’ conceptions of his own early family life and as such Cyprus represented a conflation of transatlantic political and personal interests. Whilst in Cyprus conducting research, Hitchens met future wife Eleni Meleagrou who became mother to his son Alexandros and his daughter Sophia.101 Meleagrou is conspicuous by her absence in Hitch-22, as are details of his strained relationship with brother , the conservative Daily Mail journalist, and his relationship with second wife, Carol Blue. Hitchens left Meleagrou for Blue in 1989102 whilst she was pregnant with their second child, no mention of which is found in Hitch-22. Accounts of high profile fall outs with editors and former friends are also omitted. An explanation lies in Hitchens’ labelling of Hitch-22 as a memoir rather than an autobiography. Memoirs are ‘autobiographies that usually emphasise what is remembered rather than who is remembering;’ the author, rather than recounting an entire life, ‘deals with those experiences of his life, people, and events that he considers most significant.’103 Or, if one is to be cynical, those stories and experiences that are most expedient in the creation of desired narratives. Either way, the episodes omitted from Hitchens’ memoir were a cause of at least minor disappointment to professional

98 Rick Musser, “The 1980’s,” History of American Journalism, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://history.journalism.ku.edu/1980/1980.shtml 99 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” Nation, no. 24: 842. Academic Search Premier EBSCOhost, accessed June 26, 2016. 100 Christopher Hitchens, Cyprus (London: Quarter Books, 1984). 101 Theo Panayidis, “The Cypriot Terrorist,” Cyprus Mail, May 27, 2013, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://cyprus- mail.com/2013/05/27/the-cypriot-terrorist/ 102 Theo Panayidis, “The Cypriot Terrorist.” 103 Kendall, “Biography: Narrative Genre.”

19 reviewers104 and fans105 alike. The last momentous moment of Hitchens’ decade arrived in the shape of the 1989 Rushdie Affair. The hysterical reception that greeted Salman Rushdie’s polemic on Islam, The Satanic Verses, culminated in the issuing of a Fatwah by the Ayatollah Khomeini and drew scathing condemnation from Hitchens, sparking a ferocious defence of Rushdie - his personal friend. For Hitchens, the death threats levied upon an author of fiction represented ‘a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual, and the defence of free expression.’106 On this issue Hitchens was quite clear.

1.5 Vanity Fair and the 1990’s

The beginning of the nineties was a successful period for Hitchens. In 1991 his journalism was recognised with the Lannan Award for Nonfiction,107 whilst a year later he landed a regular column for Vanity Fair, a glossy monthly American magazine dealing in a mixture of pop culture, fashion, and current affairs: With over a million subscribers, Vanity Fair offered a massive increase in exposure.108 His new editor Graydon Carter had left the New York Observer to take over in 1992. A greatly respected figure, Carter was honoured at the 2014 where he was inducted into the Editor’s Hall of Fame.109 That Hitchens began writing articles about such topics as the merits of a full body wax in a glossy magazine seems a huge departure from his previous journalism. However, the nineties saw a reincarnation of the American journalistic tradition of New Journalism that became known as Literary Nonfiction.110 Across America journalists and editors drew upon the tropes of New Journalism in experimentations to create a tradition that sought to be ‘simultaneously

104 Jennifer Senior, “Do I Contradict Myself?,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, , June 17, 2010, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/books/review/Senior- t.html?_r=0 105 Matt Hanson, “Panache to Burn: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, The Millions, August 30, 2010, Reviews, http://www.themillions.com/2010/08/panache-to-burn- christopher-hitchens-hitch-22.html 106 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 168. 107 Lannan, “Nonfiction Awards by Last Name,” Lannan, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.lannan.org/literary/awards-list/nonfiction-awards/ 108 Vanity Fair, “Circulation Demographics,” Conde Nast, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair/media-kit/print please note: information for 1992 is not available to the public. 109 American Society of Magazine Editors, “Graydon Carter Elected to Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame,” American Society of Magazine Editors, April 8, 2014, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.magazine.org/asme/graydon-carter-elected-magazine-editors%E2%80%99-hall-fame 110 Fakazis, “New Journalism: American literary movement.”

20 creative, personal, and true.111 Vanity Fair was one of only a handful of leading publications that indulged in of creative nonfiction, with Hitchens deeply involved.112 In addition to easy-reading copy that allowed Hitchens to exploit his witticism honed under Anthony Howard, he also wrote more searching articles ranging from the state of American prisons to the nuclear capabilities of . His first article published in December 1992, Mr. Universe, provided an early insight into Hitchens’ growing as he used his considerable platform to question the .113

In the second half of the decade Hitchens released two pamphlet style publications. The first, released in 1995, was a re-assessment of mainstream opinion of entitled The Missionary Position. Hitchens argued that Mother Teresa was less interested in helping the poor, and was rather intent on spreading fundamental Catholicism. The second extended essay was 1999’s No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, a polemic on the career of the President that critiqued his psychology, record in war, alleged sexual abuses, and his relationship with Hilary. Hitchens’ pursuit of Clinton culminated in controversy when he swore of an affidavit against long-term friend and Clinton aid Sidney Blumenthal in the President’s impeachment trial over the Monica Lewinski scandal. Hitchens’ evidence against the President was based on a conversation between Blumenthal and Hitchens over lunch, in which he divulged information about Lewinsky that contradicted evidence given under oath in the courtroom.114 The two volumes offer more evidence of continuity in Hitchens’ career as a writer. The books were a conflation of the growth in the nineties of biography, but simultaneously harked back to the popularity of exposé, which had been so prevalent during Hitchens’ formative years in the seventies. A third such book was to follow in 2001, entitled The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which Hitchens summarised the arguments he had been making for the trial of Kissinger as a war criminal since the Nixon government took over the handling of the war in Indochina in 1968. Indeed, on the 10th of September 2001 Hitchens had been giving a lecture about Kissinger’s crimes in Whitman

111 ibid. 112 Lee Gutkind, “What is Creative Nonfiction?,” Creative Nonfiction, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/what-creative-nonfiction 113 Christopher Hitchens, “Mr. Universe,” Vanity Fair, December, 1992, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1992/12/mr-universe-199212 114 Todd Gitlin, “Goodbye, Mr. Hitchens, and Enjoy your Betrayal of a Journalist Pal,” The Observer, February 22, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://observer.com/1999/02/goodbye-mr-hitchens-and-enjoy-your-betrayal- of-a-journalist-pal/

21 College, Walla Walla.115 Events on the next day were to ensure discussion of Hitchens’ damning assessment of Kissinger were to be suspended.

1.6 Later Career and American Citizenship

Hitchens final Minority Report, entitled Taking Sides, was published on October 14th 2002. Since the attacks on the World Trade Centre Hitchens had become an isolated figure in left wing circles in his support of the Bush administration’s ‘.’ The article criticises Navasky, claiming that the editorial staff had turned the Nation partisan and relativistic: It was ‘becoming the voice and echo chamber of those who truly believe that is a greater menace than .’116 It was another acrimonious departure from a magazine that he had served with such distinction. Hitchens promptly found a fitting new home for his political journalism at the online current affairs, politics, and culture magazine Slate. The magazine’s journalists wrote short argument driven – often contrarian – pieces. His new editor, June Thomas, described editing his work as ‘the easiest job in journalism,’ as his writing style ‘defied editorial intervention.’117 Hitchens would write for Slate up until his death in December 2011. In 2005, the same year his first Slate article was published, Hitchens was voted fifth in poll of the Top 100 public intellectuals by readers of American news agency .118 Television appearances for a variety of news channels were frequent, as were public debates, often about religion - a topic of increasing concern for Hitchens. Despite frequent public appearances and ever growing visibility, Hitchens never embraced forms of post-modern media theorized by academics to be changing the scenery of the public sphere.119

115 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 240. 116 Christopher Hitchens, “Taking Sides,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York University Press: New York, 2008), 104. 117 June Thomas, “Herewith, Hope it Serves. As Always, Christopher,” Slate, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/christopher_hitchens_his_greatest_sla te_hits_.html 118 Admin, “Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectual Results,” Foreign Policy Magazine, October 15, 2005, accessed June 26, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20150611230220/http://foreignpolicy.com/2005/10/15/prospectfp-top-100-public- intellectuals-results/ 119 In a 2008 public debate on the nature of interactions between YouTube, google, and the printed press, Hitchens was dismissive of the impact of these post-modern phenomenon on the public sphere, and sceptical about online journalistic credibility (see” “Christopher Hitchens Discussing Pop Culture Politics,” 12:30; 16:00: and 28:50 – 36:20, August 1, 2012, accessed June 26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQB5S5ErGo)

22 The year 2007 was momentous for Hitchens both privately and professionally. It was the year he was sworn in as an American citizen by Michael Chertoff, then United States Undersecretary of Homeland Security, in a ceremony at the Jefferson Memorial.120 In Hitch- 22 Hitchens’ becoming an American is portrayed as gradual process, underpinned by consistency of principle. With the American intelligentsia generally opposing George Bush’s foreign policy, Hitchens aligned himself to, in his view, the voice of wider society. He felt compelled to ‘say a word for the fortitude’ that was manifesting in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre.121 Hitchens gradually became aware of departing from the position of the likes of Noam Chomsky: Whereas Chomsky ‘didn’t believe America was a good idea to begin with,’ Hitchens did, and began to fell ‘less shy about saying so,’122 a quality intrinsic to the public intellectual theorised by Cynthia Ozik. Indeed, it was the efforts of the ‘American proletarian’ in the rubble of the Twin Towers that awoke a new respect, particularly when juxtaposed with the efforts of more refined elements who ‘wrung their hands’ of the task.123 The final decision to apply for citizenship was inspired again by the proletariat. Hitchens one day became engrossed in a conversation with a taxi driver, a Bosnian Muslim, who asked him ‘you citizen yet?;’ a question with which he followed up with the apparently profound observation that Hitchens should ‘get on with it: America needs us.’124 In the same year as Hitchens’ conversion, his work for Vanity Fair was officially recognised, as he scooped the National Magazine Award for ‘Columns and Commentary.’125 In 2007 the success kept coming as his new book ‘: How Religion Poisons Everything’ went to number one in the New York Times bestseller list.126 The book was a polemic on religion; heavy on irony and wit, crushingly rhetorical and enjoyable to read. It was framed by subjective interpretation of historical fact, echoing Hitchens’ public debating style and recalling the influence of Isaiah Berlin. It belonged to the increasingly popular genre of creative nonfiction, and was the culmination of a literary career, of which the development can be mapped against changing literary traditions and emanating from

120 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 257. 121 ibid., 245. 122 ibid., 244. 123 ibid., 246. 124 ibid., 250. 125 American Society of Magazine Editors, “2007 National Magazine Award Winners Announced,” American Society of Magazine Editors, January 13, 2009, accessed June 26, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20090114030507/http://www.magazine.org/ASME/ABOUT_ASME/ASME_PRES S_RELEASES/22246.aspx 126 Hawes.com, “New York Times Bestseller List,” Hawes.com, June 3, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.hawes.com/2007/2007-06-03.pdf

23 both sides of the Atlantic. Today, Hitchens’ works are often cited as examples of creative nonfiction young authors interested in the genre should familiarise themselves with.127128 In May 2010 Hitchens returned to the New York Times best sellers list with his memoir Hitch- 22,129 just months before being tragically diagnosed with cancer. Even in his declining days Hitchens continued to write, penning his final original work, , which was published posthumously in 2012. Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15, 2011. His life was remembered in a ninety minute service held in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union in Manhattan, New York, where press and intelligentsia gathered to pay tribute in 2012, led by the stories from Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.130

Reflecting on Hitchens life it appears little wonder that his most renowned work should be a polemic attack on religion. Hitchens’ first hand experiences with religion were tantamount to run ins with a death : His mother committed suicide after joining a quasi-religious cult; his friend Salman Rushdie was threatened with death for the production of a novel; whilst another friend, Barbara Olsen, was a passenger on one of the hijacked planes in 2001.131 He was consistent throughout his career in mercilessly severing ties with those who had been either professionally or privately close to him: He quickly and suddenly ended working relationships with Anthony Howard and Victor Navasky; distanced himself from friends on the left; and showed little scruple in his interactions with his first wife or his long term friend Sidney Blumenthal. Hitchens implicitly acknowledged the importance to public intellectuals of a consistency of principles through his efforts to emphasise a coherent narrative in his memoirs. Declining to divulge details of ruptures in his private life, Hitchens convincingly posits a dialectical approach to life, emphasising a confusing form of coherence. However, this consistency appears strained in the romantic account of his journey to American citizenship. Hitchens couched his ‘Americanisation’ in the of socialism. On this point – perhaps the biggest rupture in a long life of wanton contradiction - Hitchens is least convincing.

127 Gutkind, “What is Creative Nonfiction.” 128 Dave Hood, “Find your Creative Muse,” Creative Nonfiction Writing, July 17, 2013, accessed June 26, 2016, https://davehood59.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/writing-creative-nonfiction-the-opinion-essay/ 129 New York Times, “Hardcover Nonfiction,” The New York Times, June 27, 2010, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2010-06-27/hardcover-nonfiction/list.html 130 Ed Pilkington, “Christopher Hitchens’ wit and warmth remembered as New York pays tribute,” The Guardian, April 20, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/20/christopher- hitchens-memorial-new-york 131 Christopher Hitchens, “Simply Evil,” Slate, September 5, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/09/simply_evil.html

24 2. Chapter Two: Criticisms of Hitchens and Attacks on Credibility

Many public intellectuals and social commentators vehemently claim that Hitchens was consistent in lacking moral integrity and sacrificing friendships owing to a career avarice that cost him credibility. Other critics posit Hitchens’ lack of consistency on political issues as the driving force undermining his credibility as a public intellectual, seeing him simply as an intrinsic flip-flopper. Charges are also brought against him – again in the form of an unwanted consistency - of being an ardent imperialist with capitalist sympathies and never a true man of the left. Hitchens is also accused by numerous prominent intellectuals of following a path many leftist intellectuals had gone before him, that of the left wing apostate. Traditionally the inconsistency regarded as the most pernicious corroder of credibility in the public sphere, apostasy is thought to see the former left wing intellectual lured and attracted by the power of government. Additionally, whilst praise for the quality of his prose was almost universal with regards to his pre-9/11 writing, critics claim of his later work an aesthetic rupture and decline in his abilities as a journalist and writer.

2.1 Attacks on Personal Integrity

A body of criticism levied at Hitchens saw commentators question his morals, character, and personality in a powerful assault on his credibility as a person and as a public intellectual. Academic theorists of public intellectuals and the public sphere Patrick Baert and Josh Booth assert that public intellectuals ‘have always straddled a number of opposing values, one of which is the opposition between critical distance and passionate involvement.132 Throughout the 1990’s Hitchens was a vehement opponent of , a fellow Oxford student of the class of ’68. Hitchens engaged in a decade long pursuit of Clinton many critics saw as a personal obsession devoid of the rational principle that affords credibility to public intellectuals’ interactions with their publics. Hitchens was criticised for attacking Clinton’s personality rather than his politics. Indeed, Clinton did intervene as Hitchens had demanded in Bosnia, and did it in the face of opposition of anti-interventionist Republicans whom Hitchens would later come to support. For the duration of Clinton’s presidency, Hitchens scolded the left for their inaction against what he perceived as the crimes of the White House. However, many on the left felt there was no case to answer: ‘It’s true,’ wrote Chomsky in

132 Baert and Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” 92

25 2001 in reaction to Hitchens’ observation he had not condemned Clinton, ‘that I have sedulously avoided speculation, and will continue to do so until some meaningful evidence is provided.’133 A review of Hitchens’ 1999 No One Left to Lie To in online left wing journal Salon cast the book as the manifestation of personal disdain, observing that ‘Hitchens is motivated by his disgust for the man.’134 The review argues where evidence for wrong doing is thin, Hitchens allows mere association to suffice,’ and, like Chomsky, ridicules Hitchens’ interest in Clinton’s sex life, criticising the ‘ludicrous rationale that Clinton’s relations with are the public’s business because they took place in a public building.’135 In his critics’ eyes, Hitchens fell short of the requisite rigorous professionalism demanded of public intellectuals by Todorova.136 In a 2008 interview with Prospect Magazine’s Alexander Linklater, Hitchens admitted that the core of his distaste for Clinton laid in the subjective regret that Clinton ‘cheapened’ the events and politics of 1968, as he ‘lied’ about the level of his support for the civil rights movement and his participation in anti-war activism.137 Perhaps Hitchens’ anger at Clinton is in part due to his own failure to enter politics, a topic of conversation between himself and ’s Ian Parker in 2006. Hitchens confessed a ‘twinge’ of jealously at author and public intellectual Michael Ignatieff’s move back to his native Canada as a Liberal Member of Parliament, adding it would be incredibly difficult to turn down a peerage in the House of Lords, admitting ‘that I never had the right to walk into parliament is something I’ll always be sorry about.138 In 2000 American public intellectual Cornel West had supported presidential candidate Bill Bradley, a move out of character with West’s politics, for what were personal, not ideological reasons. West stated: I don’t just endorse Bill Bradley… I am in solidarity with him because he is my brother.’139 Jules Chametzky wrote of West’s proclamation that: ‘Such utterances may well undercut or at least interrogate the seriousness of the speaker.’140 Hitchens alleged personal vendetta against Clinton had had the same effect.

133 Noam Chomsky, “Reply to Hitchens,” The Nation, September 24, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/reply-hitchens/ 134 Charles Taylor, “The (un)friendly witness of Christopher Hitchens,” Salon, June 7, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.salon.com/1999/06/07/hitchens/ 135 Charles Taylor, “The (un)friendly witness of Christopher Hitchens.” 136 Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 712. 137 Alexander Linklater, “Christopher Hitchens,” Prospect Magazine, May 24, 2008, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/features/christopher-hitchens-profile-interview 138 Ian Parker, “He Knew He Was Right,” The New Yorker, October 16, 2006, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/16/he-knew-he-was-right-2 139 Jules Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 224 140 ibid.

26 Hitchens’s campaign against Clinton saw friendships literally put on trial. Prior to Hitchens swearing an affidavit against long term friend Sidney Blumenthal that could have seen the Clinton aid liable for up to five years in prison,141 Hitchens had pledged public support to him during the court case in a Minority Report column. Hitchens wrote: ‘together we have soldiered against the neoconservative ratbags… Our life a deux has been, and remains, an open book. Do your worst. Nothing will prevent me from gnawing a future bone at his table, or, I trust, him from gnawing at mine in return.’142 In an article for left wing journal Counter Punch, former Nation journalist Alexander wrote Hitchens had tried to topple Clinton ‘via betrayal of his close friendship with Sid Blumenthal, whom he did his best to ruin financially and get sent to prison for perjury.’143 The episode left Hitchens unpopular, discredited, and isolated in Washington with colleagues labelling him ‘Hitch the Snitch.’144 The affair had also intrestingly increased his celebrity and visibility on the eve of the launch of his anti-Clinton polemic Triangulations.145

2.1.1 Friendship with Edward Said

Another friendship of Hitchens’ that came under scrutiny was his relationship with author of Edward Said. Hitchens first met Said in 1974 in Cyprus at a convention concerning the rights of small nations and a friendship blossomed over a mutual love of literature that would last until Said’s death in 2003.146 Hitchens and Said were both committed to the Palestinian cause in Gaza and the West Bank, and ended up collaborating on two books. The first was a co-edited 1988 collection of essays by various authors called . The second book, Said’s Peace and its Discontents, which criticised the 1993 Peace Agreement between Clinton and Yasser Arafat, included a foreword by Hitchens. Of Said he wrote: ‘It is my speculation that every line of Edward Said’s political work has been explicitly concerned with preventing the replication among of the banana-

141 Jeffrey St. Clair, “Hitch the Snitch,” Counter Punch, June 15, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/1999/06/15/hitch-the-snitch/ 142 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” The Nation 266, no. 11:8 (1998), Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, accessed June 26, 2016. 143 , “Farewell to C.H.,” Counter Punch, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/16/farewell-to-c-h/ 144 Jeffrey St. Clair, “Hitch the Snitch,” 145 , “Something About Christopher,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, Dissent Magazine, 2010, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/something-about-christopher 146 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 385.

27 republic style and method that has become so dismally familiar in the Arab world.’147 In 2003 and with Said terminally ill with cancer148 Hitchens wrote a review of Orientalism on the occasion of the books thirtieth anniversary. Condescendingly entitled ‘Edward Said: Where the Twain Should Have Met,’ Hitchens, according to critics, took a trivialising view of Orientalism’s main premise asking: ‘Who is interpreting what and to whom? It is easy enough to say that Westerners had long been provided with an exotic, sumptuous, but largely misleading account on the Orient… But it is also true that Arab, Indian, Malay, and Iranian societies can operate on a false if not deluded view of “the West.”’149 According to Hitchens, parts of Said’s work were ‘rescued from sheer vulgarity only through incoherence,’ whilst Hitchens also challenged Said’s understanding of Marxism, claiming Marx ultimately justified conquest and exploitation of the Orient as it was ‘an alternative to the terrifying serfdom and stagnation of antiquity, and that creation can take a destructive form.’150 Journalist Clare Brandabur attacked Hitchens ‘smear’ saying his review ‘denigrated’ a book from ‘which he has obviously learned a great deal, though his comments suggest that he has understood it imperfectly.’151 Alexander Cockburn saw the review as an attempt to ‘bask in his former friends fame’ and grab the spotlight by chopping a dying man down to size.152 Biographer and journalist D.D. Guttenplan believed that for Hitchens to smooth a rightwards political trajectory he had to remove his most powerful connection with radical engagement: He had to ‘get rid of Edward.’153 Social scientist Charles Gattone is one academic who explores the need of public intellectuals to balance the tension between ‘remaining loyal to rigour, precision, and objectivity,’ and the ‘want to act politically to ensure their work is socially significant.’154 Hitchens’ critics see him as falling short on rigour and precision; whilst dogmatically chasing recognition and a sense of self-importance. This desire led to him being ostracised by fellow intellectuals in Washington, and the discrediting of his person, , and morals.

147 Christopher Hitchens, “Foreword,” in Peace and its Discontents, by Edward Said (London: Vintage, 1995), xiv. 148 Another sad connection between the two friends 149 Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (London: Atlantic, 2011), 506. 150 Christopher Hitchens, “Arguably,” 511. 151 Clare Brandabur, “Hitchens Smears Edward Said,” Counter Punch, September 19, 2003, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/09/19/hitchens-smears-edward-said/ 152 Cockburn, “Farewell To C.H.” 153 D.D. Guttenplan quoted in Richard Seymour, : The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (London: Verso, 2012), 52. 154 Baert and Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” 92.

28

2.2 The Political Flip-Flopper

To be accused of flip-flopping on political issues must surely be one of the accusations must damaging to a public intellectuals’ credibility. One of the founding fathers of modern western intellectualism Julian Benda - of ‘Dreyfusard’ fame – proclaimed ‘the duty of the intellectual was to defend universal values, over and above the politics of the moment.’155 However, it is precisely these credentials that a clutch of public intellectuals see as lacking in Hitchens’ career. Amongst the most prominent of these is Alexander Cockburn, who knew Christopher Hitchens and his career well. Both men worked for the Nation and were known as exceptional left leaning journalists.156 They were close friends, with Cockburn becoming Godparent to Hitchens’ son Alexandros; whilst Hitchens reciprocated the gesture for the Cockburn family, becoming Godfather for ’s son Henry, Alexander’s nephew.157 However the two fell out over bitter political differences. Cockburn wrote on the occasion of Hitchens’ death that he never thought of him as a radical; more as a monotonous journalist churning out scores of copy on whatever his latest obsession might be. In the eighties Hitchens used his Nation column to attack the Raegan government and wrote often on the backdoor hostage negotiations with Iran, which he believed cost Jimmy Carter a potential bounce at the polls which may have won the 1981 election: ‘He got rather boring,’ wrote Cockburn.158 Cockburn refers to his 90’s pursuit of Clinton – standing on the other side of the American political spectrum to Raegan – as ‘a bee in the bonnet that turned into full- blown obsessive megalomania: Why did a zealous, efficient executive of Empire bother him so much,’ asks Hitchens’ former friend.159 Hitchens attacks in the 90’s on Mother Teresa left Cockburn cold and asking: ‘If you were sitting in rags in a Bombay gutter, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup.’160 Rather from writing from any ideological or principled standpoint, critics claimed that Hitchens would ambush unsuspecting readers with a wildly out of character article or statement. New York Times journalist Michael Kinsley

155 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 212. 156 Comparisons were often drawn between their ideologies and writings, as evidenced by a comparative essay in a 1998 edition of International Socialism (see: William Keech, “In Perspective: Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens,” International Socialism, March 1998, accessed June 26, “http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj78/keach.htm). 157 “Relationship with Hitchens,” last modified 19 June, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Cockburn#Relationship_with_Hitchens 158 Cockburn, “Farewell to C.H.” 159 ibid. 160 ibid.

29 agreed, believing that remaining in the public eye and maintaining the ‘Hitchens product’ took precedent over coherent principles.161 This led, according to Kinsley, to a collection of articles designed to shock and surprise. In 1992 Hitchens wrote that the genocide of native American Indians that accompanied the first British arrivals in the New World should be celebrated as inevitable progress and as espousing Enlightenment values;162 whilst conversely in the same year he denounced Henry Kissinger for ‘identifying with sub-Darwinist depravity’163 and took an internationalist stance on defending Bosnian multiculturalism from Serb aggression in the Yugoslav war. Writing in 1996 for Vanity Fair Hitchens called controversial historian and holocaust denier David Irving a ‘great historian’ who should be rewarded with a mainstream publisher,164 whilst an anti-Liberal Hitchens stance was again in evidence in 2003 when he wrote a pro-life article on abortion entitled Fetal Distraction,165 drawing further howls of derision from fellow journalists who felt Hitchens was flip-flopping to remain interesting after threatening to run dry in the eye of the public.166

Indeed, Hitchens’ critics see his flip-flopping as making him unable to adhere to his own avowed principles. Writing in Letters to a Young Contrarian, released summer 2001, Hitchens offers advice via a series of letters to a fictional recipient referred to as ‘My dear X.’ One piece of advice to ‘X’ was to: ‘Distrust any speaker who talks confidently about “we”, or speaks in the name of “us.” Distrust yourself if you hear these tones creeping into your own style. The search for security and majority is not always the same as solidarity; it can be another name for consensus and tyranny and tribalism.’167 However Hitchens’ final Minority Report in 2002 about the division of American intellectuals following 9/11 carried the absolutist title Taking Sides, whilst in 2005 in the aftermath of the London bombings, Hitchens wrote in an article for the British tabloid The Mirror entitled We Cannot Surrender

161 Michael Kinsley, “In God, Distrust,” review of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens, New York Times, May 13, 2007, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Kinsley-t.html 162 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” (On Native ), The Nation, October 19, 1992, accessed June 26, 2016, https://drive.google.com/a/student.uva.nl/file/d/0B_X_Xetlqv2BN2xiaVF0YXduc2c/view?pli=1 163 Christopher Hitchens, “Touch of Evil,” review of Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson, , October 22, 1992, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n20/christopher-hitchens/touch-of-evil 164 Max Blumenthal, “A Holocaust Denier Hits Manhattan (and hearts Hitchens),” The Huffington Post, July 25, 2008, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/a-holocaust-denier-hits- m_b_115056.html 165 Christopher Hitchens, “Fetal Distraction,” Vanity Fair, February, 2003, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/02/hitchens200302 166 Alterman, “Something about Christopher.” 167 Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (Cambridge MA: Basic Books), 99.

30 that ‘we shall track down those responsible.’168 Further political inconsistency was to follow when, again in 2005, Hitchens wrote an article for Slate Magazine in staunch defence of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main architects of the and later head of the World Bank in an essay titled That Bleeding Heart Wolfowitz.169 Having been confirmed as an American citizen by another inner member of Bush’s neoconservative ring Michael Chertoff in 2007, Hitchens surprisingly threw his support behind the Obama campaign in 2008 writing an article entitled Vote for Obama which carried the subtitle McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace,170 leaving fellow public intellectuals discombobulated and his credibility apparently in tatters.

2.3 Accusations of Imperialism

Marxist academic Richard Seymour171 offers a different mode of attack on Hitchens’ credibility as a public intellectual. Seymour claims that Hitchens was a colonialist whose imperialism was supported by a fabricated . In times of war, Hitchens’ internationalist, cosmopolitan veneer would crack under dialectical weight, revealing his latent parochial jingoism. His book Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens was published six months after Hitchens succumbed to cancer. Seymour begins his imperialist critique by analysing Hitchens’ Thatcherite sympathies, citing a 1990 Nation article in which Hitchens praises Thatcher’s institutional modernisation programme. Hitchens wrote that Thatcher ‘made possible a movement for a serious, law based constitutional republic in Britain,’ and ‘hacked away at the institutions and attitudes that stood in its path.’172 For Seymour, Hitchens’ support for Thatcher’s foreign policy following the outbreak of hostilities with Argentina owed to an intrinsic desire to see a re-establishment of British naval power, with Hitchens’ public professions of concern at the human rights abuses of the Galtieri regime in Argentina little more than ‘left gloss.’173 The cultural cost to Britain of the

168 Christopher Hitchens, “Taking Sides,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 90. Emphasis added. 169 Christopher Hitchens, “That Bleeding Heart Wolfowitz,” Slate, March 22, 2005, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/03/that_bleeding_heart_wolfowitz.html 170 Christopher Hitchens, “Vote for Obama,” Slate, October 13, 2008, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2008/10/vote_for_obama.html 171 Incidentally on the staff of magazine International Socialism 172 Christopher Hitchens, “Lessons Maggie Taught Me.” 173 Richard Seymour, Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens (London: Verso, 2012), 29.

31 imperialists’ policy was an upsurge in nationalism, unimportant to Washington based Hitchens, but which would shatter Britain’s ‘post-war sense of social peace.’174

Ten years later European nations were embroiled in another war, this time in Yugoslavia. Hitchens initially opposed intervention in Bosnia: His first articles on the topic called for the end to an arms embargo which favoured the heavily armed Serbs, who were in control of the armaments of the old Yugoslav army – an action in accordance to what he believed to the wishes of the Bosnians based on his time in Sarajevo in early 1992.175 Hitchens liked Sarajevo, a pluralistic, multicultural city and his articles began trumpeting the Bosnian cause over its ‘fascist’ Serb aggressor. Seymour sees this journalism as tantamount to ‘demonology’ as it ignored Bosnian atrocities in places such as Bugojno or Orasac, and figures such as Naser Oric of the Bosnian Army.176 Indeed, Maria Todorova would likely support Seymour in his observation. She observes that: ‘As scholars we are (or should be) aware of the instrumentalisation and politicisation of concepts.’177 Todorova, like Seymour, would likely have been disappointed to find this ability to discriminate absent in Hitchens writings on Bosnia. Hitchens’ Nation column on March 15, 1993 stated that the author was ‘a convinced anti-interventionist’ who didn’t want to see the Bosnians go the same way as the Kurds.178 Then, according to Seymour, the internationalist veneer cracked, with Hitchens succumbing to his imperialist instincts when he finally called for intervention in a Washington Post article entitled Betrayal Becomes Farce; in Bosnia, the Final Act of Our Own Pathetic Complicity, published in August 1993. But whilst Bosnia only presented the germ of Hitchens imperialism, it was to be fully exposed during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. At the outbreak of hostilities Hitchens again adopted an internationalist stance, writing on April 5th that intervention by bombing would simply cause division and lead to further ethnic cleansing.179 His position throughout April remained consistent.180 However, in November he penned an essay called Genocide and the Body-Baggers in which he wrote: ‘I support military resistance to Serbian racism and aggression and the landing of Australian and other

174 Seymour, “Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens,” 30. 175 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” Nation 256, no. 10:330 (1993), Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, accessed June 26, 2016. 176 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 79. 177 Maria Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 713. 178 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report: Bosnia-Herzegovina.” 179 Christopher Hitchens, “Bloody Blundering: Clinton’s cluelessness is selling out Kosovo,” Salon, April 5, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.salon.com/1999/04/05/hitchens_3/ 180 Christopher Hitchens, “Srebrenica Revisited,” The Nation, April 19, 1999, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/srebrenica-revisited/

32 troops in East Timor, and if it were up to me, both of these decisions would have been taken earlier.’181 Seymour finds no satisfactory explanation offered for this reversal of position other than imperialist sympathy.182

Some critics see Hitchens’ writing and politics post-9/11 and criticism of radical Islam as a cloak of legitimacy for imperialist design, claiming he again instrumentalised political concepts. Hitchens’ support for the Iraq war came accompanied by calls for decisive action against a common Islamo-fascist183 enemy of free society. Hitchens also identified an internal foe, the anti-war left and he conflated internal and external enemies into a coherent other in a 2003 article for the Mirror entitled I Wanted it to Rain on Their Parade. In the article Hitchens describes the organisers of the anti-war protests in London as ‘clapped out Marxists’ and ‘fundamentalist Muslims’ who had formed a ‘gruesome political alliance.’184 In America Hitchens was producing jingoistic copy such as Slate article Oleaginous: People Who Prefer Saddam to Halliburton, which, says Seymour, was a blatant use of an Islamic screen to trumpet American expansionism in the oil rich Middle East and spark a battle of civilisations, never mind an incredibly odd statement for a self-professed student of Karl Marx.185 Seymour’s evaluation of Hitchens is a damning critique of his credibility. His framing of Hitchens manipulation of European Islamophobia for private gains harks back to the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus affair. Unfortunately for Hitchens, Seymour’s assessment places him of the side of the anti-Semites, rather than the Dreyfusards.

2.4 The Left Wing Apostate

In 1991 Christopher Hitchens had written an outstanding critique of the first that appeared in Harper’s magazine. Called Why We Are Stuck In the Sand, Realpolitik in the Gulf: A game gone tilt he analysed the failed U.S. power broking in the Middle East and its facilitating of Syrian incursions into Lebanon and the deaths of many Iraqis and Iranians on

181 Christopher Hitchens, “Genocide and the Body-Baggers,” The Nation, November 29, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-59694168.html 182 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 81. 183 Christopher Hitchens, “Of Sin, the Left & Islamic ,” The Nation, September 24, 2001, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/sin-left-islamic-fascism/ 184 Christopher Hitchens, “I Wanted it to Rain on their Parade,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 110. 185 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 71.

33 the Fao peninsula; as well as the bungled Glaspie negotiations that persuaded that invading Kuwait might be a good idea.186 Hitchens elegantly argued against intervention: ‘An earlier regional player, , once sarcastically remarked that you could tell a weak government by its eagerness to resort to strong measures. The Bush administration uses strong measures to ensure weak government abroad, and has enfeebled democratic government at home… the wealthy gamblers have become much too accustomed to paying their bad debts with the blood of others.187 For many on the left this was Hitchens’ zenith.

According to Middle East activist and author the explanation for Hitchens’ shift in position in 2003 is simple: Hitchens became the latest in a long line of high profile defectors from the political left. Hitchens indulged in the politics of the moment – or worse still, exploited the politics of the moment – and abandoned principle. In his piece Hitchens as Model Apostate for Counter Punch in September 2003, Finkelstein illuminates well-trodden steps taken by apostates on the journey to the right by the likes of public intellectuals such as Paul Johnson, , and Bernard Henri-Levy. In Finkelstein’s theory the gravitational pull of power is determinant, as those on the right rarely develop a natural socialism or internationalism and head in the opposite direction.188 The attractions of left wing apostasy are clear: ‘to cash in, or keep cashing in, on earthly pleasures.’189 According to Finkelstein a ritual of passage in the American public sphere for those heading to the right is to attack the work of Noam Chomsky.190 Hitchens had previously defended Chomsky in a 1985 Article named The Chorus and Cassandra; collaborated with him in Blaming the Victims in 1988; and had in 1995 given a rousing introductory speech in praise of Chomsky’s propensity for solidarity with victims of international conflict prior to the MIT Professor giving a lecture at Columbia University.191 On reading Chomsky’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks,192 Hitchens wrote two articles criticising

186 Christopher Hitchens, “Why We Are Stuck in the Sand: Realpolitik in the Gulf: A game gone tilt,” Harper’s, January 1 1991, accessed June 26, 2016, http://harpers.org/archive/1991/01/why-we-are-stuck-in-the-sand/7/ 187 Hitchens, “Why We Are Stuck In the Sand: Realpolitik in the Gulf: A game gone tilt.” 188 Norman Finkelstein, “Hitchens as Model Apostate,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 243. 189 ibid. 190 Here Finkelstein cites Todd Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist and Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism as prominent examples. 191 “Hitchens Praises Noam Chomsky in 1995 RARE VIDEO,” 0:00, February 7, 2013, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnFGJjEyd04 192 Noam Chomsky, “A quick reaction,” Counter Punch, September 12, 2001, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/chomsky-1.htm

34 the position adopted by Chomsky and the left, sparking a public exchange. The first was Against Rationalization193 written in October 2001, the second, was a follow up entitled Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism.194 Chomsky wrote a reply addressed to Hitchens, accusing him of lacking journalistic integrity and spoiling for a fight.195 Hitchens responded, bemoaning Chomsky’s abhorrent relativism in comparing the attacks to the American bombing under Clinton of the Al-Shifa chemical plant in .196 Chomsky’s reply – the final correspondence – witheringly trivialised the dialogue, accusing Hitchens of straw man argumentation and criticising his public use of private correspondence between the two over the topic.197 This is certainly evidence to support Finkelstein’s theory. Political scientist Edward Herman, who co-authored Manufacturing Consent with Chomsky, weighed in openly calling Hitchens a war monger who could no longer be considered a liberal.198

In his book Exit Right Daniel Oppenheimer traces a longer process in Hitches’ supposed rightwards drift. Hitchens had begun covering Iraq in his capacity with the New Statesman from the early seventies before Saddam Hussein had come to power, lending him gravitas on the subject; whilst since the Rushdie affair in 1989 his distrust of religion had been sown and fermenting. A long, fruitless pursuit of Bill Clinton had shaken his trust and belief in the left – particularly the lack of support he received over the Al-Shifa bombing in 1998199 – whilst the nineties had proved disappointing as radical or revolutionary power bled out of a floundering internationalist movement following the collapse of the . Thus, Hitchens was presented with a chance to correct the mistakes of his two countries, stretching back to the imperial follies that created Iraq out of disparate Mesopotamian lands.200 Much in

193 Christopher Hitchens, “Against Rationalization,” The Nation, September 20, 2011, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/against-rationalization/ 194 Hitchens, “Of Sin, the Left & Islamic Fascism.” 195 Noam Chomsky, “Reply to Hitchens.” 196 Christopher Hitchens, “A Rejoinder to Noam Chomsky,” The Nation, October 4, 2001, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/rejoinder-noam-chomsky/ 197 Noam Chomsky, “A Reply to Hitchens’ Rejoinder,” The Nation, October 5, 2001, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/reply-hitchenss- rejoinder/http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/chomsky-3.htm 198 Edward S. Herman, “Hitchens – Lower than a Liberal,” The Nation, January 10, 2012, accessed 26 June, 2016, www.thenation.com/article/letters-299/ 199 Indeed, in a column for the Nation just a month after the attacks on the World Trade Centre, Hitchens criticised intellectuals associated with the left such as Sam Husseini and Noam Chomsky for relativizing of 9/11 by way of comparing it with Bill Clinton’s attacks on the Al-Shifa chemical plant in Sudan in 1998 (“Christopher Hitchens and his Critics,” 417.), which at the time he had called a ‘gross war crime’ whilst the leftist ‘Chomsky-Zen-Finkelstein quarter’ had remained silent on the issue (ibid., 417). 200 In a review of Georgina Howell’s biography of Gertrude Bell, Hitchens’ laments the manner of the creation of Iraq (see Christopher Hitchens, “The Woman who made Iraq,” review of Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert,

35 the vain of his hero George Orwell, he would take up the fight against fascism, this time presenting itself in Islamic dress: He could, as Richard Seymour also observed, ‘unleash the patriotism that his cosmopolitan conscience had been holding in check for decades.’201 There was a palpable increase in American nationalism in Hitchens’ writings on Iraq post-9/11 and an ever present sense of militarism. In an article called A Liberating written in October 2003 for Vanity Fair, Hitchens described spending time in Baghdad with the U.S. Marines and was effusive in his praise for the troops, stating he was awestruck by the power and capabilities of the American forces.202 Increasingly Hitchens appeared to see the American military as ‘a human rights detachment, an anti-genocide task force, and a vector for democracy.’203

As the war wore Hitchens cut an increasingly isolated figure, with more and more public figures abandoning their support for the war. Even the presence of the overlord of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, on the pro-war side204 of the divide didn’t dissuade Hitchens from continuing to support the increasingly disastrous incursion. In August 2005 Hitchens appeared as a guest on with John Stewart.205. He looked nervous, lacking his usual charisma as the years of being pulverised by criticism seemingly took their toll. By the end of the exchange Hitchens was sat with his back turned to the crowd, shying away as Stewart apparently exposed the hollowness of Hitchens’ platitudinous arguments. Hitchens could muster only limited response, and on one occasion his fabled memory embarrassingly failed him. The episode could be construed as framing Hitchens as an anachronism of the public intellectual from a by-gone era. Academic Jeffrey Goldfarb asserts that John Stewart is representative of a new breed of public intellectual ‘performing a subversive role’ and providing a counterpoint to the likes of conservative Bill O’Reilly – with whom Hitchens’ views on Iraq may have received a warmer reception.206 Stewart’s ‘civic role’ consists of

Shaper on Nations, by Georgina Howell, The Atlantic, June, 2007, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/the-woman-who-made-iraq/305893/ 201 Daniel Oppenheimer, “Christopher Hitchens’ last years: Islam, the Iraq war and how a man of the left found his moment by breaking with the left,” Salon, February 14, 2016, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2016/02/14/christopher_hitchens_last_years_islam_the_iraq_war_and_how_a_man_of_t he_left_found_his_moment_by_breaking_with_the_left/ 202 Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War (London: Atlantic, 2005), 463-475. 203 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 85. 204 , “Dispatches from America: Words in Time in of War,” Asia Times, June 2, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF02Ak04.html 205 “Christopher Hitchens debates on Iraq,” 0:00 November 21, 2012, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI3g3z36y8Q 206 Baert and Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” 92.

36 ‘asking difficult questions,’ and the studio setting and audience certainly seemed to create an environment in which Hitchens displayed a level of discomfort not exuberated in more traditional forums such as the university lecture hall or news studio.207 Baert and Booth observe that in this new post-modern context there is little room left for authoritative, generalist public intellectuals ‘steeped in a high profile discipline like philosophy;’ indeed, Hitchens’ performance on the John Stewart Show in 2005 did little to dissuade the argument that his credibility was damaged and his position in the public sphere increasingly shaky.

Many of Hitchens’ claims and fears publicised post-2003 were dismissed with scorn as nonsensical by other public intellectuals. In 2005 George Scialabba wrote a piece entitled Goodbye Hitch in which he recounted what he considered Hitchens’ fantastical thinking. Hitchens, says Scialabba, ‘proceeded to speculate’ as he claimed that Al Qaeda and its allies: ‘aim to bring their own societies under the reign of the most brutal version of sharia; regards its enemies only as fit for slaughter and contempt; and looks to spread the contagion and visit hell upon the unrighteous.’208 Scialabba discredits Hitchens’ claim by citing C.I.A analyst Michael Scheuer who produced a report stating that militant extremists’ actions are motivated by a few key points in U.S. foreign policy, and that ‘theirs is a war against a specific target and for specific, limited purposes.’209 Norman Finkelstein ridiculed Hitchens’ idea that 9/11 was a watershed moment, a new threat that meant ‘civilians at home are no safer than soldiers abroad.’ ‘The whole point of the present conflict’ wrote Hitchens, ‘is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at citizens.’210 Finkelstein swats Hitchens’ theory aside with sarcastic contempt: ‘No doubt modesty and tact forbid Hitchens from drawing the obvious comparison: while cowardly American soldiers covered themselves in protective gear and held their weapons at the ready, he patrolled his combat zone in Washington DC unencumbered.’211 Undoubtedly, being viewed as a left wing apostate had eroded Hitchens’ credibility in the eyes of his peers. Engagement and mutual discourse had descended into ridicule and contempt. In the eyes of sections of the public too, Hitchens had lost credibility. A popular blog called Christopher Hitchens Watch ridiculing his positions on Iraq and new

207 ibid. 208 George Scialabba, “Farewell Hitch,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 266.

209 George Scialabba, “Farewell Hitch,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, 267. 210 ibid., 246 211 ibid.

37 found conservatism was put online and became another forum for criticism of his apparent political shift.212

2.5 A Note on Aesthetic Rupture

Following the events of 9/11 public intellectuals and journalists – particularly Hitchens’ former comrades on the left – pointed to a rupture in his normally elegant prose. Dennis Perrin suggests after more than two decades in Washington it was inevitable Hitchens’ mind and writing would suffer, the ‘madness’ of Washington became ‘more evident in Christopher’ to the point where Perrin ‘could barely read him anymore:’ ‘The elegant style is dead,’ declared Perrin.213 Gary Malone wrote in Arena Journal in 2005 that Hitchens’ bombast and continued defence of the Iraq war made it obvious he was not returning to the left, that Malone and his colleagues were reading him ‘posthumously.’214 Richard Seymour was no less withering in his observations that Hitchens’ style became ‘lugubrious’ and ‘sentimental,’ that ‘an abrupt change’ had occurred in his writing.’215

It was at the time of Hitchens acrimonious, and very public, departure from the Nation after a twenty-eight-year association that critics allege a new style emerged, one that saw Hitchens dealing in accusatory bombast and absolutes. In his dichotomised thinking that underscored much of his ‘new’ political writing, Hitchens betrayed one of Todorova’s pillars of public intellectualism that ‘it is unacceptable to reduce complicated issues to a Manichean parable and to neglect arguments.’216 An article that appeared in the Guardian in 2001 rather crudely entitled Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists criticised again the reaction of many on the left to the invasion of Afghanistan and the spectre of the world’s poorest nation being bombed by the richest, to which Hitchens responded: ‘Poor fools. They should never try to beat me at this game. What about, ‘Afghanistan, where the world’s most open society confronts the world’s most closed one?’217 The article was rounded off with a triumphant ‘well, ha ha ha, and yah,

212 Christopher Hitchens Watch: http://christopherhitchenswatch.blogspot.nl/ 213 Dennis Perrin, “Obituary for a Former Contrarian,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, 263. 214 Gary Malone, “Christopher Hitchens: Flickering Firebrand,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, 298. 215 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 86. 216 Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 714. 217 Christopher Hitchens, “Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, 53.

38 boo.218 Hitchens wrote a 2005 article entitled Abu Ghraib is not Guernica in which he took the opportunity to criticise many on the left who found parallels between the two. Rather than condemning American treatment of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious former Baathist dungeons, Hitchens wrote: ‘How shady is it that our modern leftists and peaceniks can detect fascism absolutely everywhere except when it is staring them in the face. The next thing, of course, would be for them to sign a pact with it. And this, some of them have already done.219 Hitchens’ sophisticated arguments had also degenerated as he began to pick quarrels with straw men – sometimes stooping to the language of McCarthyism. In a 2004 article Why I’m (Slightly) For Bush Hitchens wrote: ‘Anybody but Bush… The amazing thing is the literalness with which the mantra is chanted. Anybody? Including Muqtada al-Sadr? The chilling answer is, quite often, yes. This is nihilism. If it isn’t treason to the country – let us by all means not go there – it is certainly treason to the principles of the left.’220 Indeed, the employment of such language is a retrograde step for public intellectualism in the American public sphere, which since a collection of public intellectual opinion in a 1952 symposium had defined itself as oppositional to uncritical patriotism.221 In 2004 a book comprising a collection of Hitchens’ essays was published called Love, Poverty and War. A review of the book in the New York Times praised the majority of the writing and the quality of investigative journalism, but was scathing of the post 9/11 articles. On an essay documenting a trip accompanying the American military in Pakistan reviewer Colm Toibin writes Hitchens’ ‘subtlety and street wisdom left him, all his wit was gone. He was simply an arrogant Englishman in a hot country having a snarl at the natives;’ whilst his praise of the American military was of a quality that at one time would have left Hitchens ‘enjoying its foolishness’ as he turned into a parody of himself; ‘a bit-part figure in a Graham Greene novel.’222 Hitchens’ apostasy was clearly a trope running through much commentary on his career post-Iraq.

Arguably one might posit that many factors that had previously made Hitchens a brilliant journalist and had won him praise from his colleagues on the left and editors alike were now

218 Christopher Hitchens, “Ha Ha Ha to the Pacifists,” 53. 219 Christopher Hitchens, “Abu Ghraib Isn’t Guernica,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, 136. 220 Christopher Hitchens, “Why I’m (slightly) for Bush,” The Nation, October 21, 2004, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/why-im-slightly-bush/ 221 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 217. 222 Colm Toibin, “Love, Poverty, and War’: Of Bellow and Baghdad,” review of Love, Poverty, and War, by Christopher Hitchens, New York Times, February 6, 2005, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/love-poverty-and-war-of-bellow-and-baghdad.html?_r=0

39 working against him; as Alexander Cockburn suggests ‘the ravages of entropy’ were at work.223 His bourgeois life style that saw him rattle off copy at a frightening pace, often while under the influence of a glass of Johnny Walker Black; and his off the cuff polemic prose, and unwillingness to swerve from initial positioning on political issues, once combined with the frenetic pace of criticism he endured seemingly took its toll on his normally stylish and erudite writing.

223 Cockburn, “Farewell to C.H.”

40 3. Chapter Three: Re-establishing Hitchens’ Credibility as a Public Intellectual

This chapter is expressly concerned with offering a counter-narrative to chapter two. The following passages re-examine Hitchens’ writing career and politics, attempting to tease out consistencies in thought and principle that Hitchens and his supporters suggest underpinned his career in the public sphere. This exercise is then exploring the possibility of re- establishing a coherence and by extension Hitchens’ credibility as a public intellectual. The chapter is structured under the same headings as chapter two in order to offer a direct comparison and reconsideration of the criticisms and attacks on credibility analysed in the previous chapter. Accusations of a lack of personal integrity are thusly revisited, as are claims that Hitchens was a flip flopper, an imperialist, and a left wing apostate; whilst the chapter is rounded off by investigating the claims that Hitchens’ writings went into decline following the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

3.1 Reconsidering Hitchens’ Personal Integrity: Did Hitchens Have a Case Against Clinton?

The earliest controversial episode in Clinton’s career scrutinised by Hitchens was the coming to light in 1992 of criminal activity surrounding a property development scheme in the 70’s and 80’s. Known as the Whitewater Controversy, Clinton was accused by an Arkansas Judge and Banker, David Hale, of blackmailing him into transferring an illegal 300,000 dollars into the scheme. Fifteen people, including Hale, were subsequently sentenced to prison terms for fraud, while Bill and Hilary Clinton – who had been the legal representative for the project – avoided custodial sentences.224 Also in 1992, during his presidential campaign Clinton, then governor of Arkansas and allegedly a member of an all-white Golf Club,225 personally oversaw the botched execution of black convict Ricky Ray Rector. Rector had been ‘lobotomised’ by a gunshot wound in a failed suicide attempt after shooting dead a police officer. Rector’s mental state was such, that ‘strapped to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. He thought they were doctors trying to cure him.’226 Clinton did not, claims Hitchens, oversee the vegetative Rector’s execution in cynical support his campaign

224 Christopher Hitchens, “A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch,” London Review of Books, June 6, 1996, accessed on June 26, 2016, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n11/christopher-hitchens/a-hard-dog-to-keep-on-the-porch 225 Christopher Hitchens, “A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch.” 226 ibid.

41 platform of being tough on crime, but to deflect attention away from a brewing sex scandal involving Gennifer Flowers.227

In 1996 Hitchens attacked Clinton’s policy reforms during the presidential election, and was not the only leftist commentator to do so. Charles Taylor, journalist for Salon Magazine, criticised fellow ‘leftists’ for accepting legislation ‘they would have condemned from a right- winger: The ‘callous’ Welfare Reform Act; the ‘misnamed’ Defence of Act; and the ‘First Amendment-trashing’ Communications Decency Act were legislation characterised by Hitchens and Taylor as ‘legislation that might have been expected of the far right.’228 Two years later in the aftermath of the bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant Al-Shifa by American forces, Hitchens labelled Clinton a ‘war criminal’ for undertaking military intervention without first consulting Congress.229 The bombing caused countless Sudanese deaths as the government was no longer able to produce adequate medical supplies for its population. Indeed, senior intelligence officer Mary McCarthy had warned the Clinton administration that ‘the plan relied on inconclusive intelligence.’230

3.1.1 Sidney Blumenthal

The biggest controversy of Clinton’s presidency arrived in the 1998 impeachment trial precipitated by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In his Vanity Fair column Hitchens explained his reasons for swearing an affidavit against Blumenthal. Hitchens acknowledged the affair had damaged his credibility; putting over him ‘an enduring question mark,’ but simultaneously defended himself saying ‘what I did was testify against the authorities and not to them.’231

227 ibid. 228 Charles Taylor, “The (un)friendly witness of Christopher Hitchens, Salon, June 7, 1999, accessed 26 June, 2016, http://www.salon.com/1999/06/07/hitchens/ 229 Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (London: Verso, 1999), 101-103. 230 David S. Cloud, “Colleagues Say C.I.A. Analyst Plated by the Rules,” The New York Times, April 23, 2006, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/washington/colleagues-say-cia-analyst-played-by- the-rules.html 231 Christopher Hitchens, “I’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again,” Vanity Fair, May, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/05/christopher-hitchens-testifies-monica-lewinsky

42 Hitchens alleges that Blumenthal ‘was interested in power and access,’ and seemed ‘ventriloquized’ by Clinton.232 During the now infamous lunch, Blumenthal portrayed Clinton as the victim in the affair, labelling Lewinski a stalker who blackmailed Clinton into having sex with her.233 Kathleen Willey, a figure from a previous 1993 Clinton sex scandal, was intimidated and warned off testifying in the impeachment trial. A private detective named Jared Stern had been hired to follow Willey, but became ‘sickened of his work’ and instead warned her that she had powerful enemies.234 Prior to being called to testify Hitchens had already written about the lunch with Blumenthal in on September 13, 1998. Thus, wrote Hitchens: ‘To disown the story I would have to risk committing perjury… to safeguard a dirty tactic used by Clinton’s proxies. Well thanks, but then again, no thanks.’235 Following the publication of No One Left to Lie to Lewinsky wrote Hitchens a letter, posted to the Nation, thanking him for defending her and being ‘the only journalist to stand up to the Clinton spin machine.’236 A re-reading of Hitchens opposition to Clinton suggests Hitchens was acting in the oppositional tradition of American public intellectualism. In the 1952 Partisan Review Norman Mailer had declared: ‘The writer does not need to be integrated into his society, and often works best in opposition to it;’ whilst C. Wright Mills bemoaned trends American intellectualism towards ‘a shrinking deference to the status quo; often a soft and anxious compliance,’ and the ‘synthetic, feeble search to justify this intellectual conduct.’237 Arguably, Hitchens was bucking a trend and remaining an oppositional activist, whilst fellow leftist intellectuals acquiesced to the Clinton regime. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens could provide the answer to Michael Ignatieff’s question posed in 1997 as to who was standing up for the public.

3.1.2 Friendship with Edward Said

Hitchens warmly recalls the early years of his friendship with Said in various articles about the Palestinian author, commenting on his sophisticated nature, love of literature, and musical

232 Christopher Hitchens, “I’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again.” 233 Hitchens’ story was collaborated in a television appearance by editor of the James Warren, who in a CNN interview said that the claims of Charles Ruff – counsel to the president – that no one had ever smeared or threatened Lewinsky were untrue: ibid. 234 ibid. 235 ibid. 236 Douglas Brinkley, Foreword to Christopher Hitchens, No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton (London: Atlantic, 1999), xv. 237 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 218.

43 prowess: ‘to see him play the piano was to be filled with envy as well as joy,’238 wrote Hitchens: it was ‘impossible not to captivated by him.’239 In his memoirs Hitchens recalls that it was in the 1980’s that with Said he found himself again ‘keeping two sets of books.’240

Hitchens claims that a political disconnect festered between the two: Said underrated Turkish imperialism as compared to Western; whilst Said’s Covering Islam – a ‘lesser work’ - compounded their political divide.241 The two disagreed over the nature of Western involvement in Middle Eastern issues including Iran, Yasser Arafat, the relationship between Hamas and Islamic jihad, and the intentions of America in the Arab world. In 1989, between the publications of Blaming the Victims and Peace and its Discontents, Hitchens had pushed for the publication of Iraqi author ’s Republic of Fear, a portrait of life under Saddam Hussein. Underlining the differences of political sympathies, Said wrote of the book: ‘Most of what Makiya wrote… was revolting, based… on cowardly innuendo and false interpretation, but the book… confirmed the view in the West that were villainous and shabby conformists.’242 Said would later quote an article by Hitchens which, without naming the author, he decried as racist.243 The two had long had political differences but an enduring friendship.

Hitchens recalls with poignancy the day Said telephoned to break the news of his leukaemia. Having incontestably given Orientalism a bad review on its thirtieth birthday with Said terminally ill, Hitchens concedes Said was weaker than he realised whilst penning the article, but ‘his-long precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternative.’244 A harsh but principled verdict, Hitchens was consistent on this point. In a 2002 review of best friend Martin Amis’s entitled Don’t. Be. Silly., Hitchens wrote a direct letter to Amis, heavily criticising the book, albeit, in a fraternal manner.245 Rather than basking in

238 Christopher Hitchens, “My Friend Edward,” The Guardian, September 28, 2003, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/sep/28/highereducation.israelandthepalestinians 239 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 384 240 ibid., 391. 241 ibid. 242 Edward Said, quoted in Thomas Padilla “What Does Kanan Makiya Think Now About the Iraq War,” History News Network, May 13, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/38393#_ftn3 243 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 398. 244 ibid., 397. 245 Christopher Hitchens, “Don’t. Be. Silly.,” review of Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis, The Guardian, September 4, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/04/history.highereducation

44 Said’s reputation, reinterpretation of the episode suggests Hitchens was in fact honouring his own set of principles.

3.2 A Political Flip Flopper or Contrarian?

The back cover of Hitchens’ Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (2000) displays a quote from American author and contrarian Gore Vidal, it reads: ‘I have been asked if I wish to nominate a successor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.’246 The Oxford Dictionary defines a contrarian as ‘a person who opposes or rejects popular opinion,247 suggesting contrarianism is a default position of opposition to the majority. This definition is only partially satisfactory, as Hitchens himself recognised. In Letters to a Young Contrarian Hitchens grapples with the term: Replying to ‘My dear X,’ who asks how a contrarian life should be lived, Hitchens writes: ‘Almost by definition a single existence cannot furnish any pattern. The embarrassment lies in the very title you propose. It is a strange thing, but it remains true that our language and culture contain no proper word for your aspiration.’248 Nonetheless, Hitchens’ brand of contrarianism was often oppositional in nature. In the 1952 Partisan Review the editors asked ‘can the tradition of critical non-conformism… be maintained as strongly as ever.’249 This tradition is certainly evident in Hitchens’ career.

In his 2002 book Why Orwell Matters Hitchens says of Orwell that he ‘illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth,’ that ‘"views" do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.’250 In a 2006 essay entitled Fellow Contrarians? Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell, John Rodden, a scholar of George Orwell, recognises in Hitchens the ability to address uncomfortable facts, which was the primary quality Hitchens admired in Orwell who ‘said that the prime responsibility (of intellectuals) lay in being able to tell people what they did not wish to hear.’251 When in early 2001 Hitchens stopped identifying

246 Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2002), back cover. 247 “Contrarian,” Oxford Dictionaries, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/contrarian 248 Hitchens, “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” 1. 249 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 216. 250 Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 211. 251 Hitchens, “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” 29.

45 as a socialist he became, says Rodden, less ideologically motivated and more an issue- oriented thinker, following his own conscience ‘with no intellectual coterie for support;’252 a convincing assessment of Hitchens’ contrarianism.

Rodden reasons that Hitchens’ split from the Nation due not to left wing apostasy, but ‘because he would not break faith with his own conception of intellectual integrity, of which Orwell formed a key part.’253 Hitchens was fulfilling his obligation as a public intellectual ‘to break with whatever reference group they have been identified and follow their own consciences - whether they temporarily join sides with the Right or Left or, in Hitchens' case, opt out of both camps and remain an intellectual gadfly.’254 Pre-9/11 Hitchens had already explicitly sounded doubts about the benefits of fraternity, writing: ‘Despite the “mutual aid” and potential “brother- and sisterhood” it has too many suffocating qualities, and many if not most of the benefits can be acquired in other ways.255 Following September 11, Hitchens’ support for American interventionism saw him temporarily adopted by the conservative right. However, in 2007 the ‘gadfly’ came to the fore. After accepting his American citizenship from Michael Chertoff, Hitchens’ best seller god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was released. In ‘Hitchensian’ style he attacked public religious figures, many of whom were darlings of the right. On the demise of the Reverend Jerry Falwell in 2007, Hitchens appeared on Fox News programme Hannity and Colmes, calling Falwell an ‘ugly little charlatan’, whom ‘if you gave an enema you could bury in a matchbox.’256 By confronting monotheistic religion in such withering manner, Hitchens offended a societal pillar of conservative America. Having avidly supported Bush’s foreign policy since 2001, the political right was shell-shocked. Ahead of the 2008 presidential election, Hitchens wrote an article his article Vote for Obama: McCain lacks the temperament to be President. And Sarah Palin is Simply A Disgrace.257 Again Hitchens was attacking two giant figures of the right leaving conservatives astonished, as captured in an interview with Fox News presenter Laura Ingham.258 A harsh critic of policy towards Pakistan,259 Hitchens praised Obama’s

252 ibid., 19. 253 John Rodden, “Fellow Contrarians? Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell,” The Kenyon Review (2006), Vol. 28, Accessed June 26, 2016: 158. http://jstor.org/stable/433886/ 254 ibid. 255 ibid. 256 “Christopher Hitchens on FOX News concerning Jerry Falwell’s death,” 9:40-9:46, May 17, 2011, accessed 26, June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSzRhkzSCoo 257 Christopher Hitchens, “Vote for Obama.” 258 “Hitchslap 30 – Hitchens invited on FOX News to be spoken over!,” 0:00 – 4:31, January 17, 2002, accessed on June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iwxwobmofM 259 Hitchens, “Love, War, and Poverty,” 438.

46 position on the issue and the appointment of John Biden as running mate due to his record on Bosnia.260 Indeed, Hitchens had long advocated closer political ties with India.261 Rodden sees this moment as ‘a kind of apotheosis’ for Hitchens:262 He now stood alone, a contrarian rather than a flip-flopper, approaching politics from a non-partisan position.

3.2.1 Hitchens’ Marxism and Attraction to Revolutionary Dynamism

In his 2010 article Changing Places?, Nation columnist D.D. Gutenplan offers insight into the International Socialist (IS) organization Hitchens joined at Oxford University. According to Gutenplan IS differed from other Trotskyist organisations as it framed the Soviet Union as a state capitalist society rather than, ‘as Trotsky maintained in The Revolution Betrayed, a degenerated workers’ state.’263 In a review of In the Heat of Struggle: Twenty-five Years of Socialist Worker by IS member Paul Foot, Hitchens summarised the groups’ Marxist beliefs. Only temporarily stabilised, state was based not on the welfare state but on war economy which made the system irrational, destroying, not nurturing, socialism. The members of IS believed while capitalism remained the modus operandi of super powers, Third World revolution remained a pipe dream.264 According to Gutenplan, this resulted in the group being concerned with becoming ‘thoroughly wised-up about conditions that made revolutionary change unlikely’.265 On Vietnam Hitchens mused: ‘One should openly declare for the Vietcong while regretfully bearing in mind that their revolution could only produce an emaciated and regimented mutation of Stalinist autarchy. I found that I rather liked this implication that one could with perfect honesty keep two sets of books.’266 Thus, rather than subscribing to Marxist orthodoxy, Hitchens’ early socialist sensibilities facilitated evolution in his Marxism whereby it became a prism for viewing worker/capital relations.

260 “Hitchens defends Obama endorsement,” 1:50 – 2:30, October 21, 2008, accessed June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzmXa8ylHfA 261 Christopher Hitchens, “There’ll Always be India, Vanity Fair, August, 1997, accessed June 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1997/08/hitchens-199708 262 Oppenheimer, “Christopher Hitchens’ Last Years.” 263 D.D. Gutenplan, “Changing Places: The Double Bookkeeping of Christopher Hitchens,” The Nation, July 28, 2010, Accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/changing-places/ 264 Christopher Hitchens, “In the bright autumn of my senescence,” review of In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of the Socialist Worker, by Paul Foot, London Review of Books, January 6, 1994, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v16/n01/christopher-hitchens/in-the-bright-autumn-of-my-senescence 265 D.D. Gutenplan, “Changing Places: The Double Bookkeeping of Christopher Hitchens.” 266 ibid.

47 In a 2001 interview with Reason Magazine267 Hitchens – reacting to the economic and social conditions of the 90’s - stated he no longer identified as a socialist, and that a socialist critique of capitalism no longer existed.268 As he had done in a 1989 public debate with Dinesh D’Souza,269 Hitchens proclaimed the Communist Manifesto as the first accurate critique of capitalism as a revolutionary force: Capitalism had the ability to sever the bonds of ; to promote scientific enquiry in seeking efficient means of production; and create a system of wealth underpinned by innovation:270 A revolution from above.’271 Marx, says Hitchens, saw capitalism’s inherent destructivity as a revolutionary force. Hitchens’ revisionist Marxism owes much to Austrian born American economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory ‘creative destruction’: the notion that capitalism destroys, creating instability, which in turn leads to innovation and efficiency. Hitchens describes Schumpeter as an ‘instinctual socialist’ with ‘great respect for capitalism.’272 For Hitchens ‘anyone can recognize (capitalism) as a revolution. It’s the only revolution in town.’273

This conflation of conservatism, Marxism, and revolutionary dynamism is captured in Hitchens’ writing on Margaret Thatcher. Attracted to revolutionary force regardless of where it lay on the political spectrum, Hitchens praised Thatcher’s institutional ‘revolution’ waged against the House of Lords, the Conservative Party, the university system, and the House of Windsor.’274 But whilst praising her institutional reform at the national level he also attacked ‘the police mentality that she evinced when faced with dissent; the awful toadying to Raegan; the indulgence shown to ; the coarse, racist betrayal of Hong Kong; (and) the destruction of local democracy and autonomous popular institutions,’ all tropes of leftist critique of right wing politics.275 Writing in 1980, Hitchens assessed and predicted a peril of widespread privatisation and social difficulty, whilst supporting her position on the Falklands.276 For orthodox Marxist commentators such as Richard Seymour,

267 Crucially, the interview was given prior to the September 11th attacks and Hitchens’ alleged apostasy from the left. 268 Rhys Southan, “An Interview with Christopher Hitchens Part I,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 168. 269 “Is Socialism Obsolete? Dinesh D’Souza vs Christopher Hitchens,” 27:50 – 28:50, January 10, 2014, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSnHE_Yj11I 270 Rhys Southan, “An Interview with Christopher Hitchens Part I,” 176. 271 ibid., 174 272 Steven Marshall, “The last revolution in town,” 3AM Magazine, May 29, 2007, accessed 2016, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/hitchens-on-wye/ 273 Steven Marshall, “The last revolution in town.” 274 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 203. 275 ibid. 276 Christopher Hitchens, ‘This Thatchered Land, This England.”

48 this à la carte approach to politics and Marxism represents flip-flopping and ideological poverty. However, a different reading posits a contrarian with Romantic sensibilities, using Marxism as a schematic. Arguably then, Hitchens was performing a key task of public intellectuals: To innovate and develop ideas and discourse. Loose and theoretical, his Marxism – particularly from the 90’s onwards – lacked the rigorous scholarship of Marxist orthodoxy but expanded traditional theoretical frameworks in which worker/capital relations are usually analysed. Maria Todorova argues this is not necessarily to the detriment of Hitchens’ credibility. She writes: ‘Definitional rigidity can be broken in order to open up space for innovation, for new theoretical or conceptual moves.’ Todorova recalls that ‘numerous examples exist in this respect’ and reconsideration of class, gender, race, the social, and the everyday that have spawned ‘new perspectives and lines of enquiry and have ultimately advanced knowledge.’277 Analysis of Hitchens’ Marxism suggests a coherence of thought stretching back to the sixties that offers his contrarianism underpinning consistency.

3.2.2 Opposition to Totalitarianism and Conflation with Religion

Throughout Hitchens’ life and career he was a staunch opponent of totalitarianism. The IS movement he joined at Oxford was overtly anti-Stalinist; whilst Hitchens was appalled at the various regimes he saw first-hand: Videla’s rule in Argentina; the authoritarian regimes in 70’s Prague and Warsaw; and had deplored the effects of hard-line governments in Athens and Istanbul on Cypriot sovereignty. In the seventies he had also denounced the rise of the totalitarian Gaddafi regime in Libya, on which he commented: ‘Evidently, Gaddafi does not think that Libyan statecraft calls for very much in the way of checks and balances.’278 He condemned Mother Teresa’s dealings with the Duvalier’s in Haiti,279 and chastised Henry Kissinger for, amongst other things, his role in of the rule of Pinochet in Chile.280 In 2001 he wrote an article called Visit to a Small Planet, in which he deplored the effects of single party governance in North Korea;281 detested Pakistani political militarism;

277 Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 712. 278 Christopher Hitchens, “Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya,” The Nation, 1976, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/2012/01/arab-libya-colonel-ghaddafi 279 Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (London: Verso, 1995), 5. 280 Hitchens, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” 84. 281 Christopher Hitchens, “Visit to a Small Planet,” Vanity Fair, June, 2001, accessed June 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/01/hitchens-200101

49 and fought for and celebrated independence in East Timor.282 Additionally, Hitchens was a keen reviewer of anti-totalitarian literature, reviewing such authors as Victor Serge, , Andre Malraux, Isabel Allende, and Victor Klemperer.283 A great lover of George Orwell and Orwellian principles, Hitchens was consistent in his opposition to totalitarianism.

Hitchens labelled religion the ultimate totalitarianism: It negates freedom of thought, expression, and human progression; whilst he saw living under ‘unchallengeable celestial dictatorship,’ as constituting ‘a radical attack on the very concept of human decency.’284 A perfunctory examination of his works shows this conflation manifesting in the eighties. In a 1987 essay Hitchens praised Polish Holocaust survivor and secular thinker Shahak position on ,285 whilst in a 1986 article entitled The Charmer, he called for the defence of American against the threat of demagogue ’s Nation of Islam group, which aggressively sought to disseminate fundamentalist Sunni ideology. In 1989 Hitchens took a public stand and rallied public opinion in support of Salman Rushdie after the author of the allegedly blasphemous The Satanic Verses was subjected to a fatwah issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini. In his Minority Report column on February 14 1989, Hitchens took the fight to those ‘relativizing’ the affair. He impassionedly criticised articles written by Gregg Easterbrook for the Atlantic and Washington Monthly, in which Easterbrook lamented the apparently euro- or western-centric criticism of Muslim outrage to the blasphemy of the Satanic Verses.286 Hitchens wrote: ‘Nobody should shrink from the accusation of blasphemy. It is a term of moral blackmail, used by the dogmatic to put an end to discussion.’287 On February 23 of the same year public intellectuals gathered in New York in a show of solidarity with Rushdie. The gathering discredits notions of a decline in intellectual activism alleged by some scholars to have manifested in the 80’s. In the event Hitchens’ was the star turn, declaring: ‘Until the threat of murder by contract is lifted, all authors should declare themselves as co-conspirators. It is time for all of us to don the yellow

282 Christopher Hitchens, “Kissinger’s Green Light to Suharto,” The Nation, January 31, 2002, accessed June 26, https://www.thenation.com/article/kissingers-green-light-suharto/ 283 These essays are compiled in a section entitled Legacies of Totalitarianism in Arguably. 284 Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist (Philadelphia: De Capo, 2007), xvi. 285 Hitchens, “Prepared for the worst,” 46. 286 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” Quoted in Richard Kreitner, February 14 1989: Ayatollah Khomeini issues a Fatwah against Salman Rushdie,” The Nation, February 14, 2015, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/february-14-1989-ayatollah-khomeini-iran-issues-fatwa-calling-murder- salman-rushdie/ 287 Christopher Hitchens, “Minority Report,” Quoted in Richard Kreitner, February 14 1989: Ayatollah Khomeini issues a Fatwah against Salman Rushdie.”

50 star and end the hateful isolation of our colleague.’288 In his speech Hitchens suggested that all intellectuals of New York sign a petition, declaring themselves co-conspirators for the publication of the Satanic Verses in an expression of solidarity with Rushdie and to spread the risk he faced.289 In doing so Hitchens was operating in the tradition of the European Dreyfusards. In 1898 Emile Zola published J’Accuse which included a petition signed by intellectuals in solidarity with Alfred Dreyfus.290 The list was called Protestation des intellectuals and stood in opposition to the continued injustice.291 Hitchens was appealing to the European roots of public intellectualism in a transnational context, supporting a British author, in New York, against a Middle Eastern threat.

In the 2000’s Hitchens again raised his pen and voice in opposition to alleged religious totalitarianism. In the wake of the murder of Theo van Gogh292 Hitchens published an article in defence of freedom of speech called Jihad in the Netherlands; whilst in the aftermath of the 2005 controversy surrounding cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the Copenhagen press he wrote an essay entitled Stand Up for Denmark, again attacking the relativism of western journalism and intellectual reaction to the Islamic world’s demands that non-Muslims adhere to Quranic blasphemy laws. Hitchens wrote: ‘And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary: That we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage.’293 Hitchens continued that ‘all compassion and concern is saved for those who lit the powder trail… Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals feelings.’294

During a 2008 debate with his brother Peter, Christopher Hitchens made explicit the synonymity he sees between religion and totalitarianism:

‘Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought

288 Richard Bernstein, “Passages in Defence of a Colleague: Writers Read and Speak for Rushdie,” New York Times, February 23, 1989, accessed June 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/23/world/passages-in-defense- of-a-colleague-writers-read-and-speak-for-rushdie.html?pagewanted=all 289 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 278. 290 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 212. 291 ibid. 292 The co-producer of the film Submission, which tackled the suppression of Muslim women in Western society. 293 Hitchens, “Arguably,” 704-705. 294 ibid., 705.

51 crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea.’295

The final page of Hitch-22 poignantly sums up Hitchens commitment to principles and a way of thinking that seemingly underscored an entire career: ‘It is depressing for the thinker that the pursuit of knowledge only serves to illuminate how little one knows, and yet there are those who believe they know everything and require no further information.296 ‘It is,’ says Hitchens, ‘quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.’297 Hitchens’ concise expression of complicated conflations surely satisfies Todorova’s demand of public intellectuals that they ‘unwrap’ complex argumentation and and translate it ‘in a way the public can grasp it while at the same time retaining the complexity and providing a moral compass.’298 Rather than attacking religion to keep the Hitchens’ ‘product’ interesting as suggested by Kinsley, Hitchens’ assault on religion can also be viewed as forming a facet to his consistent opposition to totalitarianism which spanned the entirety of his career in the public sphere.

3.3 Imperialist or Internationalist?

That Hitchens was incredibly well read and on international affairs and authoritatively versed in conflict zones is attested to by author and journalist Fred Kaplin. Commissioned to write a ‘thumbnail sketch’ of active conflicts across the globe, Kaplin sought Hitchens’ help.299 He recalls that Hitchens boasted ‘a dizzyingly deep’ knowledge of the wars ‘and the countries that bred them – their political structures, social fabrics, cultural peculiarities,’300 with

295 Christopher Hitchens vs Peter Hitchens, 2008, Part 5 of 14,” 3:32, May 27, 2009, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcDbMklrOBI 296 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 422. 297 ibid. 298 Todorova, “On Public Intellectuals and Their Conceptual Frameworks,” 709. 299 Fred Kaplan, “Hitchens Teaches me about every War in the World,” Slate, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/christopher_hitchens_death_fred_kapl an_on_hitch_s_dizzying_knowledge_of_international_relations_.html 300 Kaplan, “Hitchens Teaches me about every War in the World.”

52 Hitchens even offering a detailed account of the Polisario Front who were fighting for the independence of Western Sahara from Moroccan rule.301

An examination of Hitchens’ responses to major international confrontations during his early career suggests no consistent foreign policy tendencies. In a 1993 column for the Boston Review, ironically302 entitled Never Trust Imperialists records Hitchens’ opposition to the continued deployment of British forces in Aden in 1965, in what he labels Britain’s ‘East of Suez’ colonial policy.303 At the same time white supremacists had launched a coup in Rhodesia, with Hitchens accusing the British establishment of a whispered unwillingness to send ‘British boys to shoot at their own.’304 Hitchens recalls: ‘It therefore seemed like a good to me, and to many others, to disrupt the speeches of government ministers by shouting “Out of Aden - Into Rhodesia.’305 In 1975 Hitchens wrote an early article on Cyprus for the Review called Détente and Destabilization: Report from Cyprus. Hitchens was heavily critical of Britain’s lack of protection for Cypriot sovereignty in the wake of the Turkish invasion, which had been promised under the terms of a 1960 treaty between London and Nicosia. In 1984 Hitchens released his first book, Cyprus, criticising the great powers’ engagement with Kissingerian realpolitik. A documentary film followed in 1989 entitled Cyprus: Stranded in Time. The film recorded the continued illegal repatriation of unhappy Turkish citizens forced from the mainland to bolster numbers in northern Cyprus; and documents the mass killings perpetrated by both sides of the divide.306 In the case of Cyprus, Hitchens consistently lamented the non-deployment of international forces, and the inability of NATO to protect a sovereign member state from the auspices of two fellow NATO members. In 1982 Hitchens had supported Thatcher’s invasion of the Falklands after a visit to Argentina and a face to face engagement with the horrors of Buenos Aries’ brand of authoritarian government and human rights abuses. In a review of Richard Seymour’s Unhitched, Huffington Post journalist Andrew Doyle wrote that Seymour’s assertion that Hitchens’ opposition to the Galtieri regime was ‘left gloss’307 designed to mask

301 ibid. 302 Ironic for the purposes of this thesis 303 Christopher Hitchens, “Never Trust Imperialists,” Boston Review, December 2, 1993, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.bostonreview.net/world/hitchens-never-trust-imperialists 304 Hitchens, “Never Trust Imperialists.” 305 ibid. 306 Christopher Hitchens – Cyprus: Stranded in Time (1998),” 16:00 – 18:00, December 21, 2015, accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSUkHW6UT0 307 Seymour, “Unhitched,” 29.

53 imperialist design was a crass misrepresentation.308 Throughout the eighties Hitchens used his column in the Nation as an oppositional platform to confront American imperialism in Latin America, consistently criticising human rights abuses in countries such as and El Salvador. After returning to America following a trip to Nicaragua in 1985 Hitchens wrote that in Washington ‘the conservatives believe that the law of history is that all revolutions turn into totalitarianism,’ and that inaction would push the Nicaraguans into the arms of Moscow. ‘Surely Nicaragua is better,’ continued Hitchens, ‘than the abattoir states of El Salvador and Guatemala, which enjoy American patronage.’309 His second book The , published in 1987, called for the repatriation to Greece of the classical sculptural works of the artist Phidias, taken from the Pantheon by the British under the auspices of the Earl of Elgin. Hitchens called upon the British to return the sculptures to Athens, ‘not extorted by pressure or complaint but freely offered as an act of homage to the indivisibility of art and – why not say it without embarrassment? – of justice too.’310

In the nineties Hitchens’ writing shows an interventionist trend. A supporter of military deployment in Bosnia, Hitchens demanded the defence of a multicultural, pluralistic society. Having spent much of the war stationed in Bosnia, he saw Sarajevo as one of Europe’s most precious cities. ‘Bosnia matters,’ stated Hitchens in a 1992 Nation column, ‘because it has chosen to defend not just its own self-determination but the values of multicultural, long- evolved and mutually fruitful co- habitation.’311 For Hitchens, Sarajevo represented a religious and ethnic pluralism not witnessed since Ottoman Andalusia. Non-intervention represented de-facto collusion with heavily armed Serbs, whom Hitchens decried as fascists desecrating enlightened values: ‘A Society long sun in political stagnation, but one nevertheless well across the threshold of modernity, is convulsed: puking up great rancid chunks of undigested barbarism.’312 In Asia, Hitchens supported the international community’s efforts to free East Timor of Indonesian rule, again deploring Kissinger’s role in ensuring that then Portuguese Timor passed into the hands of another dictatorship.313 In the

308 Andrew Doyle, “Review: Unhitched – The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour, review of Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, by Richard Seymour, Huffington Post, February 11, 2013, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-doyle/review-unhitched-the-trial-christopher- hitchens_b_2632921.html 309 Hitchens, “Prepared for the Worst,” 212. 310 Christopher Hitchens, The Elgin Marbles (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 105. 311 Christopher Hitchens, “Appointment in Sarajevo,” The Nation, September 14, 1992, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/92092137592.pdf 312 Christopher Hitchens, “Appointment in Sarajevo.” 313 Hitchens, “Kissinger’s Green Light to Suharto.”

54 Middle Eastern theatre Hitchens had been opposed to the removal of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War in 1991. However, as early as 1992 he began questioning the wisdom of his position after visiting northern Iraq, a visit that resulted in a long article for National Geographic on the plight of the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey. In 1999 he wrote a column entitled Ocalan, the Kurds and History, in which he criticised C.I.A compliance in a Turkish operation that saw PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan arrested in Nairobi, deported to Turkey, and imprisoned.314 Also in 1999 Hitchens called for intervention in Kosovan war. His writing on Kosovo indicates the beginnings of a tremor with the ‘left’ as Hitchens sarcastically writes: ‘Without saying so explicitly, many liberal and “left” types, and many conservatives and isolationists, have implied that the Kosovars did not suffer quite enough to deserve their deliverance.’315 The interventionist trend in Hitchens’ politics continued into the 2000’s when he penned an articles on the crisis in Darfur, Sudan. Critical of United Nations peace negotiations with Khartoum, Hitchens saw the dialogue as a ruse by the Sudanese government, designed to facilitate the continued slaughter of black Sudanese via an artificial ‘distancing’ of themselves from their Janjaweed paramilitary.316 On Palestine even some of Hitchens’ fiercest critics acknowledged a consistent position; with the critical Alexander Cockburn writing that he thought Hitchens ‘was relatively solid on Israel/Palestine.’317 In an early article published in 1979 entitled West Bank Autonomy: The P.L.O and the Palestinians, Hitchens criticised the ‘fallacy’ of autonomy – an option that would serve to placate international opinion but leave Palestinians under the rule of the Israeli ‘yoke.’318 Hitchens continued to publish copy in support of Palestine, releasing the co-edited book Blaming the Victims with Edward Said in 1988.319 Hitchens own original contribution was a chapter titled Broadcasts, which sought to put to bed a myth perpetuated in Israeli media that in 1948 Palestinians left their homesteads of their own volition, not due to the threat of the

314 Christopher Hitchens, “Ocalan, the Kurds, and History,” The Nation, February 25, 1999, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/ocalan-kurds-and-history/ 315 Hitchens, “Body Count in Kosovo.” 316 Christopher Hitchens, “Realism in Darfur,” Slate, November 7, 2005, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2005/11/realism_in_darfur.html 317 Cockburn, “Farewell to C.H.” 318 Christopher Hitchens, “West Bank Autonomy” The P.L.O. and the Palestinians,” UNZ.org, February 17, 1979, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.unz.org/Pub/Nation-1979feb17-00161 319 Hitchens discovery in 1988 from his elderly Grandma that he had Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side did little to dissuade him from continuing his support of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Liberation Army. On learning that his family roots on his mother’s side were located in the Slovakian city of Pressburg, he was ‘pleased to find that (he) was pleased (see: Christopher Hitchens, “On Not Knowing the Half of it,” Grand Street (1988), Vol. 7, accessed June 26, 2016, www.jstor.org/stable/25007142).

55 advancing Israeli forces.320

There is seemingly little in Hitchens career prior to the 9/11 attacks that could be construed as wanton imperialism. When Hitchens called for intervention it was often in opposition to totalitarianism; to protect small nations from the designs of powerful neighbours; and to defend the rights of ethnic groups who lacked representation and the protection of statehood. Numerous incidences exist whereby Hitchens stood in direct opposition to imperialism, particularly American designs on creating client states in Latin America. A strong case can be made that Hitchens was more internationalist than imperialist, judging each case on its individual merits, with this Internationalism being grounded in a hatred of totalitarianism; a fear of inaction; and a concern for the liberties of disenfranchised individuals lacking proper protection.

3.4 The Left Wing Apostate?

Christopher Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, and more generally the Bush administration’s foreign policy. He was the choice public intellectual of conservative American news channels, and his numerous essays on the topic were captured in three collections.321 Hitchens was wrong on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and continued to defend this position as late as 2008.322 Prior to the invasion Hitchens was contacted by and and developed an odd friendship with Paul Wolfowitz. It was a strange marriage, one that close friend Salman Rushdie struggled to explain: ‘He became oddly enamoured with Paul Wolfowitz,’ wrote Rushdie in an obituary for Hitchens, ‘I wondered how long Christopher could tolerate such bedfellows.’323 Hitchens believed C.I.A reports were correct; that the American government was operating on reliable intelligence. Having previously questioned such assumptions, the Wolfowitz factor seemingly had a profound impact upon him, and

320 Christopher Hitchens, “Broadcasts,” in Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said. eds. Blaming the Victims (London: Verso, 1988), 73-85. 321 The first, released in 2003 was called A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, and was a compilation of twenty essays Hitchens had penned for Slate Magazine. The second, a 2005 offering called Love, Poverty & War, split Hitchens’ essays on Iraq into two sections in chapter III, pre- and post-9/11. The second, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, was released in 2008 by co-editors Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman, and featured Hitchens’ own essays, those criticising him by left wing opponents, and exchanges between the two camps. 322 Christopher Hitchens, “A War to be Proud of,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 153. 323 Salman Rushdie, “Christopher Hitchens: 1949-2011,” Vanity Fair, February, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/rushdie-on-hitchens-201202

56 correlates to Finkelstein’s theory of the role of power in attracting left wing apostates.

However, being wrong does not necessarily equate to political apostasy. Arguably, Hitchens had been getting it wrong about Saddam his whole career. He first travelled to Iraq in the 1970’s. The article his visit produced, entitled Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle, described Saddam Hussein as ‘perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser,’ for outwardly socialist actions of nationalising the country’s oil reserves.324 In 1991 Hitchens again arguably got it wrong when his lack of trust in American foreign policy put him on the side of the non- interventionists during the first Gulf War.325 Ostensibly Hitchens got it wrong again in 2003.

Hitchens did not view himself as a neoconservative, but as part of a left wing cabal: A dissident standing for leftist principles against the left. Hitchens’ ‘cabal’ included Iraqi dissident, Trotskyist, and author Kana Makiya; Peter Galbraith, who had helped Benazir Bhutto hold relatively free elections in Pakistan in 1988; Ann Clwyd, a left wing backbencher in Tony Blair’s cabinet and sponsor of the group Indict, an organisation whose aim was to bring Saddam Hussein to trial for crimes against humanity. Former U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish Democrat, dedicated to international disarmament completed the group.326 Vaclav Havel, a figure of moral authority and a man steeped in leftist politics also supported the invasion;327 whilst Hitchens’ long-time friend, Polish dissident Adam Michnik, also backed the war, citing many of the same reasons Hitchens would in his various columns.328 Indeed, ‘Hitchens’s shift to the right,’ writes Andrew Doyle in the Huffington Post, was motivated by a desire to defend the principles of the left.’329 Hitchens and his fellow ‘war-hawks’330 had seen the cost of inaction in Rwanda and Srebrenica, and feared that the non-intervention in Iraq would leave the Kurds to a similar fate. Many of Hitchens’ critics claim these and other concerns aired in his writing and public appearances in the aftermath of the invasion were platitudinous. One such claim was made during his infamous

324 Christopher Hitchens, “Iraq Flexes Arab Muscle,” The New Statesman, April 2, 1976, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/society/2007/07/iraq-arab-saddam-iran-hitchens 325 Hitchens, “Why we are Stuck in the Sand: Realpolitik in the Gulf.” 326 Hitchens, “Hitch-22,” 298-301. 327 Jan Culik, “Why Washington Needs to Get Over Vaclav Havel,” Foreign Policy, January 11, 2015, accessed June 26, 2016, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/11/why-washington-needs-to-get-over-vaclav-havel/ 328 ‘Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a totalitarian state. It was a country where people were murdered and tortured. So I'm looking at this through the eyes of the political prisoner in Baghdad. We (Michnik and other east European former dissidents) take this position because we know what dictatorship is. And in the conflict between totalitarian regimes and democracy you must not hesitate to declare which side you are on.’ (See: Norm, May 10, 2004 (12:08 pm), “Adam Michnik on Iraq,” Normblog, accessed June 26, 2016, http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/05/adam_michnik_on.html) 329 Doyle, “Review: Unhitched – The Trial of Christopher Hitchens.” 330 This group included other liberal intellectuals associated with centre left politics such as Michael Ignatieff.

57 interview with John Stewart on The Daily Show. During the heated interview Hitchens said: ‘we are not trying to re-draw the map, the bin Ladenists are trying to re-draw the map. They don’t think Iraq should exist. They don’t recognize the borders of Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine: they think it should all be part of a huge Islamic caliphate.’331 Whilst Stewart dismantled this argument in 2005, it seems more salient now given the rise in the Middle East of the Islamic State. Likewise, another of Hitchens’ critics to dismiss out of hand his reasoning was Norman Finkelstein. In 2003 Hitchens had broadcasted his belief , ridiculed by Finkelstein, that a shift in the tactics of extremists had occurred, which meant civilians were now the primary target of aggression. The comment seems less ludicrous now in the light of the attacks of recent terrorist attacks on civilians in Europe. George Scialabba also rejected Hitchens claims that Al-Qaeda and its allies sought to extend Sharia, with the whole world a target, and that generalised Muslim grievances exist.332 Scialabba rebutted this remark claiming Islamic extremists’ targets are specific and few. There is little to support this statement in a contemporary context in the light of events such as the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in 2015. For public intellectuals such as Hitchens who ‘are always audible in the forum, there resides the great ‘destructive’ peril that ‘they risk being judged mistaken.’333 Getting it wrong in the public sphere, says Ozik, is enormously damaging to credibility. Not only was Hitchens’ credibility damaged for being wrong on Iraq, he suffered further attacks on his credibility for a lack of consistency. Reassessing Hitchens’ career suggests both criticisms seem contestable.

Hitchens may, as Daniel Oppenheimer suggests, have been too ‘personally invested’ in the plight of the Kurds and failed in the task of the public intellectual to view the war in Iraq from a distance.’334 He may, as attested to by Salman Rushdie, have developed an unfathomable relationship with Paul Wolfowitz that blunted his scepticism of authority. Nevertheless, and as Oppenheimer alludes to, Hitchens was clearly motivated in his support for the war at least in part by a sense of internationalism and fear of the price of inaction. He had long been a defender of freedom of expression and freedom from theocratic bullying; whilst a hatred of the form of brutal totalitarianism practiced by Saddam Hussein and his Baath party stretched back to his formative years in the 1960’s. As George Eaton wrote in the

331 “Christopher Hitchens Debates Jon Stewart on Iraq,” 5:18 – 5:30, November 21, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI3g3z36y8Q 332 Perrin, “Obituary for a Former Contrarian,” 266. 333 Ozik, “Public and Private Intellectuals,” 358. 334 Oppenheimer, “Christopher Hitchens’ Last Years.”

58 New Statesman: ‘His support for the "war on terror" was premised not on conservative notions but on liberal principles.’335 Indeed in an article in the Nation published on September 20, 2001 Hitchens wrote about the 9/11 terrorists: ‘What they abominate about “the west”, to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state." Hitchens was not afraid to identify ‘barbarians’336 and used that precise term in a 2007 public debate in which he also labelled moral relativism as ‘cultural suicide.’337 Despite seemingly being wrong on Iraq, Hitchens position on the issue saw him fulfill many of the criterion demanded by academics of public intellectuals. Cynthia Ozik says public intellectuals must recognize evil: ‘It is not sufficient to have beautiful thoughts whilst the barbarians rage on.’338 The responsibility of the public intellectual ‘must’ include the ‘unhappy recognition’ of the existence of human beings who ‘relish evil joy, and pursue it; who long ago cancelled out the humanity of the Other:’ For Ozik, if the responsibility of public intellectuals does not include this, ‘it is no responsibility at all.’339 Both Hitchens and Ozik were clearly in agreement that public intellectuals are obliged to make ‘distinctions, especially in a time of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence.’340

Unlike other public intellectuals accused of crossing the left/right divide, Hitchens never disowned his previous journalism; nor did he renounce his commitment to any of his long standing principles: Hitchens continued to call for the prosecution of Henry Kissinger, was unrelenting in his pursuit of religion and totalitarianism and defence of freedom of expression, continued to analyse worker/capital relations with his perspective of Marxism, and remained an ardent public supporter of the causes of the Kurds, Palestinians, and other oppressed minorities.

335 George Eaton, Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011,” The New Statesman, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/12/hitchens-cancer-war-religion 336 “Hitchens’ 07: Danish Muhammed Cartoons,” 03:00 – 6:20, April 16, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZZ96SArpuc 337 “Christopher Hitchens: Britain’s Cultural Suicide,” 0:00 – 1:27, January 31, 2015, accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj2eJdhSvBI 338 Ozik, “Public and Private Intellectuals,” 356. 339 ibid., 358. 340 ibid.

59 3.5 A Note on Perceived Aesthetic Rupture

Prior to 2001 Christopher Hitchens’ disarmingly witty, yet sardonically biting journalism received virtually universal praise. In an obituary written by the Nation’s Richard Lingeman Hitchens’ style is remembered as being: ‘Dry like good champagne, sharp, ironic, sometimes dishevelled (as he might be on a hungover morning), occasionally opaque, cliché-avoiding, easily colloquial yet lightly erudite.’341 It was after the World Trade Centre attacks that critics detected a rupture in Hitchens’ journalistic style, claiming the quality of his work declined. Hitchens admitted as much himself. In a 2008 volume of essays written by Hitchens and a score of his critics post 9/11, Hitchens wrote an original afterword. He conceded he could not criticise those slurring him, as he not always resisted the chance to be ‘ad hominem’ himself.342 Hitchens admitted he ‘was out of temper and exhausted,’ and that ‘Scott Lucas343 was probably right’ when he talked about the incessant pressure of Washington, newspapers, and critics getting to him.344 Hitchens acknowledges that a danger of incessant pressure for opinion in print and in public debates ‘is the permanent temptation for a deformation professionel, of instant or improvised answers,’ writing ‘I hereby swear to try and reform.’345

But away from the columns of Slate and the tabloid press, Hitchens was continuing to craft exceptional copy. As well literary reviews for publications including The New York Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, Hitchens was continuing to write his column for Vanity Fair. In 2007 Hitchens’ contributions won the publication recognition in the National Magazine Awards. His writing landed Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter the prize for Columns and Commentary. The category ‘recognizes excellence in short-form political, social, economic or humorous commentary. The award honours the eloquence, force of argument and succinctness with which the writer presents his or her views.’346 Vanity Fair was awarded the accolade for three columns by Hitchens. The first, Childhoods End, was an

341 Richard Lingeman, “Reading Christopher,” The Nation, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/reading-christopher/ 342 Richard Lingeman, “Reading Christopher,” 332. 343 Scott Lucas is a left leaning public intellectual, whose criticism of Hitchens’ position on Iraq and the War on Terror was also published in Hitchens and His Critics. 344 Christopher Hitchens, “Afterword,” in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds. Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 333. 345 Christopher Hitchens, “Afterword,” 333. 346 American Society of Magazine Editors, “Magazine Awards 2007 Winners Announced,” American Society of Magazine Editors, May 1, 2007, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.magazine.org/asme/about- asme/pressroom/asme-press-releases/national-magazine-awards-2007-winners-announced

60 exposé written whilst Hitchens was travelling in Uganda about child soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army.347 An article about the continued devastating effects of ‘Agent Orange’ in Vietnam entitled The Vietnam Syndrome was the second to gain recognition; 348 whilst the third - entitled The Art of Interview - was about the journalism of renowned Italian .349 Commentating on the essays the awarding body was effusive in its praise: ‘Whether describing terrors inflicted on Ugandan children, bearing witness to the lingering effects of Agent Orange, or noting the passing of a great political interviewer, Christopher Hitchens incisive eloquence and expansive intellect puts his controversial subjects into context and reveals their larger meaning.’350

Criticism of Hitchens’ articles for Slate magazine requires qualification. Now editor of Slate Julia Turner joined the publication in 2003 as an editorial assistant, and discussed in a 2014 interview the magazine’s values: ‘We're not fundamentally a breaking news source, we're a place that helps you analyse and understand and interpret. We also strive to do it with a bit of writerly finesse and wit.’351 Turner added: ‘But journalism is more interesting when it surprises you either with the conclusions that it reaches or the ways that it reaches them. And I'm not interested in editing a magazine that tells you what you already know in a boring and predictable way.’352 Hitchens was writing the essays his editor June Thomas wanted. Thomas described editing Hitchens’ work ‘as the easiest job in journalism.’353 The year that Hitchens won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary was the same year god is not Great became a best seller. This fact alone does not offer evidence that Hitchens remained a brilliant writer, but it certainly suggests that plenty of people still enjoyed reading his works. George Eaten of the New Statesman wrote an obituary for Hitchens that carried the subheading A Tribute To a Brilliant Orator, Essayist, and Wit. In the article Eaten states that

347 Christopher Hitchens, “Childhood’s End,” Vanity Fair, January, 2006, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/01/hitchens200601 348 Christopher Hitchens, “The Vietnam Syndrome,” Vanity Fair, August, 2006, accessed June 10, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/08/nachtwey_photoessay200608 349 Christopher Hitchens, “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of Interview,” Vanity Fair, December 2006, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2006/12/hitchens200612 350 Christopher Hitchens, “Oriana Fallaci and the Art of Interview.” 351 Nicola Levy, “Long-serving Deputy Julia turner Takes the Reins at Slate,” Slate, September 30, 2014, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/09/long-serving-deputy-julia-turner-takes- the-reins-at-slate-002912 352 Nicola Levy, “Long-serving Deputy Julia turner Takes the Reins at Slate.” 353 June Thomas, “Herewith, Hope it Serves. As Always, Christopher.”

61 Hitchens was terribly wrong on Iraq ‘yet those who stopped reading Hitchens after 11 September 2001 are all the poorer for it.’354

354 Eaton, “Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011.”

62 4. Conclusion

Attempting to draw conclusions on the life and works on Christopher Hitchens is a difficult task. Daniel Oppenheimer says Hitchens career enjoyed a renaissance post-Iraq as he turned his sights on religion, but ‘despite how inspiring he was on the topic ‘the chains of Iraq rattled behind everything he said,’ ensuring posterity would remember him for ‘having got it wrong on the defining political question of his time.’355 By contrast, John Rodden sees Hitchens as ‘an individualist and a rebel on the left: a bridge between the eras of the modern and post-modern intellectual.356 Confusingly there is plentiful evidence to support both claims.

4.1 Deconstructing Contrarianism

It is reasonable to postulate based on the biographical account offered in chapter one of Hitchens’ life and writings that his early life was conducive to the formation of a contrarian. Perhaps unsurprisingly the son of a stoic naval commander found agreeable the sense of duty that accompanied left wing radicalism and the selling of socialist newspapers on street corners; whilst it is equally as unsurprising that the son of the vivacious socialite Yvonne Hitchens felt equally at ease attending lavish luncheons and dinner parties. Making a synthesis of inconsistency and rupture were central to the formation of his private and professional self. This ability was also reflected in his writing career as he managed to smooth the rupture of writing in different contexts on either side of the Atlantic. Having spent his formative years in the company of a generation of brilliant European literary figures, Hitchens slipped effortlessly into an American journalistic landscape that was both alien and conducive to his literary journalism and subjective, off the cuff writing style. The roguish persona and idiosyncratic journalistic practices that manifested themselves through his bohemian lifestyle created an easily likable and intriguing contrarian that had the ability to captivate audiences both American and English, and throughout his career Hitchens remained active in both the British and American public spheres. His brand suave contrarianism had, perhaps logically, more than a whiff of the romantic about it. His famous love of keeping two sets of books owes at least an aesthetic reference to the fractured mind of the Byronic hero and the Romantic modern man of the nineteenth century. The uncertain social context in

355 Oppenheimer, “Christopher Hitchens’ Last Years,” 356 Rodden, “Fellow Contrarians? Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell,” 159.

63 which Hitchens grew up fermented in him a quasi-Romantic love of dynamism as evidenced by his love-hate infatuation with Thatcher. It made him the perfect correspondent to be based in Washington, the seat of what he came to recognise as the only revolutionary force in the world by the beginning of the 2000’s.

As discussed in chapter two, Hitchens received vociferous criticism from a wide spectrum of intellectuals operating in the public sphere. Nonetheless, it was in 2007 that he achieved literary stardom with his best seller god is not Great. Arguably, Hitchens career included not only a journalistic ‘face,’ but also one in which he was a leading exponent of a growing genre of literature known as creative nonfiction. The two facets of his career are at the same time separate yet inextricably linked. Hitchens career spanned changing literary traditions and contexts, all the while moving with a literary Zeitgeist, that would ultimately create a perfect storm whereby his journalistic experience informed his penning of his best sellers shortly before his death when his public was at its largest. Having started out writing for International Socialism, by the end of his life ‘with regular slots in Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Slate, several bestselling books and a lucrative place on the lecture circuit, Hitchens was earning nearly $1m a year.’357 His life and writing career can certainly be characterised more as one of evolution than rupture, with the latter negotiated and subsumed into the former through a synthesis of disparities.

In effect chapters two and three compiled two competing narratives of Hitchens’ writings and politics: The first a story of discrediting political inconsistencies and character defaming attacks on his person; the second presented a picture of a career’s worth of political journalism underpinned by coherent principles and a commitment to a set of morals widely theorised to be pre-requisites of the public intellectual. It is little wonder Hitchens was such a divisive figure. That he polarised opinion is captured in various obituaries. Former editors were effusive in their praise: Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic recalled both the man and the talent with an emotional fondness;358 whilst Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter also produced a fitting tribute to a man who had served the magazine with such distinction for almost twenty years.359 Slate magazine complied a collection of tributes to him from the likes of Salman

357 Eaton, “Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011.” 358 Benjamin Schwarz, “Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011,” The Atlantic, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/christopher-hitchens-1949-2011/250095/ 359 Graydon Carter, “Christopher Hitchens, 1949 – 2011: In Memoriam, Vanity Fair, December 15, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2011/12/graydon-201112

64 Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and James Fenton.360 By contrast, in Salon magazine left wing journalist Glenn Greenwald described Hitchens’ views as ‘nothing short of repellent.’361 The Gawker’s John Cook accused Hitchens of needing to shoulder blame for the thousands of deaths in Iraq, questioning how the man who doggedly hunted Henry Kissinger could support the foreign policy of Donald Rumsfeld.362 Other obituaries claimed that he was only consistent in his inconsistency such as John MacArthur’s How Christopher Hitchens Flip- Flopped and Fell From Grace, an article published by one of Hitchens former employers, Harper’s.363

Clearly there is merit to both narratives. Hitchens’ contrarianism and his astonishing output meant that enough material exists to make possible framing Hitchens in a number of different lights, if only at the exclusion of articles offering counter evidence. This realisation raises pertinent questions about the relationship between contrarianism and accountability. One might legitimately posit that the label contrarian might act as a shield, with criticisms of inconsistency being deflected by acknowledging that Hitchens approached issues on an ad hoc basis. However, with Hitchens this can only be partially true. It is arguable that through his career he seldom wavered from his initial stance on political issues and targets: He doggedly hunted the likes of Clinton and Kissinger, whilst he defended his position on Iraq until the bitter end. In the case of Iraq – the most controversial episode of a controversial career – Hitchens arguably attempted to fulfil Cynthia Ozik’s demanding criteria that the public intellectual identifies and theorises the Zeitgeist of the age. Hitchens clearly believed he had done this, and that contemporary free society based on Enlightenment values was being faced down by a totalitarian religiosity that threatened freedom of speech and free society. Summarising what he believed to be the Enlightenment values for which he was prepared to fight he wrote in god is not Great:

360 Slate, “Christopher Hitchens Remembered,” Slate, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/12/tributes_to_the_journalist_and_intelle ctual_from_julian_barnes_anne_applebaum_james_fenton_and_others_.html 361 Glenn Greenwald, “Christopher Hitchens and the protocol for public figure deaths,” Salon, December 17, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.salon.com/2011/12/17/christohper_hitchens_and_the_protocol_for_public_figure_deaths/ 362 John Cooke, “Christopher Hitchens’ Unforgivable Mistake,” Gawker, December 16, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://gawker.com/5868761/christopher-hitchens-unforgivable-mistake 363 John R. Macarthur, “How Christopher Hitchens Flip-Flopped and Fell from Grace,” Harper’s, January 18, 2012, accessed June 26, 2016, http://harpers.org/blog/2012/01/how-christopher-hitchens-flip-flopped-and-fell- from-grace/

65 ‘Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is , open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.’364

Whether Hitchens was correct or not in recognising an epoch defining Zeitgeist remains contestable, although current trends in society suggest history may not yet have decided the issue.

Undoubtedly consistency is a key issue in public intellectuals’ credibility. This is evidenced by academic studies on public intellectuals, through analysis of Hitch-22. The majority of Hitchens’ intellectual opponents attacked his credibility on the basis of a lack of consistency; whilst his defenders pointed to a consistency of principles and thought. Consistency was not the only issue that critics saw as undermining his credibility though, as this thesis’ investigations into attacks on his person and accusations of imperialism show. However, just as examination of Hitchens’ political inconsistencies (or otherwise) reveal, it is quite possible to construct competing narratives of these other two categories of critique. In Unhitched Richard Seymour constructed a case based on rigorous scholarship that Hitchens was a latent imperialist who could only so long temper his natural sympathies; whilst evidence is also abound to suggest Hitchens was an internationalist. Founder of the Harambee Foundation for sub-Saharan studies Michael Mungai wrote an article on Hitchens’ passing entitled Why Africa Will Miss Christopher Hitchens. Mungai argued that Hitchens’ assault on religion had combatted superstition in Africa and helped in the fight against HIV and the practice of witchcraft proclaiming that ‘Africa has just lost one of its greatest allies in the fight for human rights.’365 Hitchens was heavily criticised for his support and reasoning for the invasion of Iraq, but evidence exists of humanistic, not imperial design. Iraqi dissident Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar escaped Iraq after the American led invasion to found the Global Secular Humanist Movement, which is dedicated to rescuing and protecting dissidents in theocracies across the Middle East. In an article entitled Christopher Hitchens is My Hero, Al-Mutar poignantly recalls how Hitchens firstly inspired him to become a dissident against

364 Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 6. 365 Michael Mungai, “Why Africa Will Miss Christopher Hitchens,” The Huffington Post, December 18, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-mungai/why-africa-will-miss- chri_b_1155507.html

66 the Saddam regime and acknowledges his continuing influence on Al-Mutar’s own career as a public intellectual of ever increasing standing.366 To confirm or deny the position of either Hitchens’ supporters or detractors is difficult, but the weight of evidence highlighting the existence of coherent principles and thought underpinning a measured and rational contrarianism is too strong to dismiss.

4.2 Assessing Public Intellectuals

Analysis of Christopher Hitchens’ career has served to vindicate the parameters academics have developed in consideration of public intellectuals. The academic theories on public intellectuals used as a framework for this thesis seem robust. Many of the parameters established by academics reflected the criteria drawn upon by critics and supporters of Hitchens to critique his writings and career; whilst Hitchens’ own engagements with the public sphere correlate to the tropes of public intellectualism theorised by academics and are evidenced by historical example. The volume of work examined in researching this thesis suggests that theories of decline in the public intellectual since the 1980’s are, as Patrick Baert suggests, misguided. There exists still a burgeoning public sphere populated by a swathe of public intellectuals and intellectual discourse. Additionally, one can posit that a generational hand down occurs amongst public intellectuals, with the older generation influencing a new generation, as evidenced by the rise of the likes of Faisal Al-Mutar’s career as a direct result of Hitchens’ own engagement with the public sphere. The immense success as a public intellectual enjoyed by Hitchens also shows that the hypothesised death of the generalist is premature. Public intellectuals are operating in a changing post-modern landscape, but as Hitchens shows, this sea-change can be negotiated from the outside. However, this needs qualification. Whilst Hitchens rejected the post-modern context of the public sphere, he was arguably on the cutting edge of literary tradition and a key figure in the emergence of a new genre. Public intellectuals cannot become anachronisms and a connection to aspects of contemporary culture seems a pre-requisite.

The need for consistency is present either explicitly or implicitly in the criteria of the academic works used in this study. The public intellectual should be consistent in their

366 Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar, “Christopher Hitchens is my Hero,” Faisal Al-Mutar.com, December 22, 2011, accessed June 26, 2016, http://www.faisalalmutar.com/2011/12/22/christopher-hitchens-is-my-hero/

67 methodology; in how they interact with the public and in the way they disseminate their ideas in the public sphere. To be successful (i.e. to have a public) the public intellectual must consistently unpack complex topics in a way that makes them digestible for the public. This is no easy task, as simultaneously there is a consistent requirement to not lose the nuances and complexities of issues, whilst including moral underpinnings. Engagement between public intellectuals thus provides the public with different political and moral perspectives through which they sift before deciding their own positions on issues of public interest. Hitchens was a master in engaging and entertaining his public, and despite his erudition captivated large and diverse audiences at different points in his career. The public intellectual must also be consistent in having the moral fibre and courage to pin their colours to one side of a political issue, which brings with it the danger of being thought wrong and having heavy criticism wrought upon them. Hitchens’ career was certainly an example whereby an outspoken and extremely visible public intellectual had to shoulder a tremendous amount of criticism both personal and professional: Being a public intellectual is not a career for the thin skinned. There is also the requirement that public intellectuals be consistent in principle as well as politically. Here, Hitchens’ contrarianism provides a rebuttal to an otherwise neat set of criterion.

Examining Hitchens’ career suggests that consistency in principle compensates for a contrarian approach to politics that might appear inconsistent: If the public had agreed with many of his colleagues’ assessments that he was not only politically unstable, but also bankrupt in terms of principles and thought, it is unlikely his career could have survived the enormous criticism sustained in the aftermath of Iraq. The stardom achieved by Hitchens late in his career is suggestive of the fact that he did indeed have a consistency of principle and idea throughout his career; and that this is a quality valued by the public.

In closing, it seems reasonable to postulate that consistency to principle and idea outweighs the need for political consistency: If the opposite was true contrarianism would unlikely exist and Hitchens would have long since been completely discredited in the eyes of not only his peers, but of the public. It is perhaps Hitchens’ contrarianism combined with a consistency of principle that allowed him to amass such an audience: He had access at different times to publics on opposite sides of the political divide throughout his career. Rather than losing them from his audience when the next political rupture or inconsistency occurred, it appears they remained amiable to his writings, or reignited interest at different points of his career:

68 The potential readership for a contrarian is feasibly much larger than the political ideologue. Arguably it was Hitchens’ contrarianism, working in harmony with other criteria demanded of the public intellectual – combined with his persona and literary talents - that ensured his astonishing longevity, visibility, and popularity.

69 5. Bibliography

Books

Caine, Barbara. Biography and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Cottee, Simon and Cushman, Thomas eds. Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, eds.. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Hitchens, Christopher. And Yet… London: Atlantic, 2005.

Hitchens, Christopher. Arguably. London: Atlantic, 2011.

Hitchens, Christopher. Cyprus. London: Quarter Books, 1984.

Hitchens, Christopher. Foreword to Peace and its Discontents, by Edward Said, ix - xxxii London: Vintage, 1995.

Hitchens, Christopher. god is not Great: How religion poisons everything. New York: Hatchett, 2007.

Hitchens, Christopher. Hitch-22. New York: Twelve, 2010.

Hitchens, Christopher. Letters to a Young Contrarian. Cambridge MA: Basic Books, 2001.

Hitchens, Christopher. Love, Poverty, and War. London: Atlantic, 2005.

Hitchens, Christopher. No One Left to Lie to: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. London: Verso, 1999.

Hitchens, Christopher. Prepared for the Worst. London: Atlantic Books, 1988.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Elgin Marbles. London: Chatto & Windus, 1987.

70 Hitchens, Christopher. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. London: Verso, 1995.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Portable Atheist. Philadelphia: De Capo, 2007.

Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Atlantic, 2002.

Hitchens, Christopher. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. London: Verso, 2002.

Hitchens, Christopher. Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Said, Edward and Hitchens, Christopher. eds. Blaming the Victims, New York: Verso, 1988.

Seymour, Richard. Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens. London: Verso, 2012.

Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Book Reviews

Alterman, Eric. “Something About Christopher,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, Dissent Magazine, 2010. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/something- about-christopher

Doyle, Andrew. “Review: Unhitched – The Trial of Christopher Hitchens by Richard Seymour, review of Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens, by Richard Seymour, Huffington Post, February 11, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/andrew-doyle/review- unhitched-the-trial-christopher-hitchens_b_2632921.html

Hanson, Matt “Panache to Burn: Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, The Millions, August 30, 2010. Reviews. http://www.themillions.com/2010/08/panache-to-burn-christopher-hitchens-hitch-22.html

71 Hitchens, Christopher. “Don’t. Be. Silly.,” review of Koba the Dread, by Martin Amis, The Guardian, September 4, 2002. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/04/history.highereducation

Hitchens, Christopher. “In the bright autumn of my senescence,” review of In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of the Socialist Worker, by Paul Foot, London Review of Books, January 6, 1994. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v16/n01/christopher-hitchens/in-the-bright-autumn-of-my-senescence

Hitchens, Christopher. “The Woman who made Iraq,” review of Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper on Nations, by Georgina Howell, The Atlantic, June, 2007. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/06/the-woman-who-made-iraq/305893/

Hitchens, Christopher. “Touch of Evil,” review of Kissinger: A Biography, by Walter Isaacson, London Review of Books, October 22, 1992. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v14/n20/christopher-hitchens/touch-of-evil

Kinsley, Michael. “In God, Distrust,” review of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens, New York Times, May 13, 2007. Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Kinsley-t.html

Senior, Jennifer. “Do I Contradict Myself?,” review of Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens, The New York Times, June 17, 2010, Sunday Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/books/review/Senior-t.html?_r=0

Toibin, Colm. “Love, Poverty, and War’: Of Bellow and Baghdad,” review of Love, Poverty, and War, by Christopher Hitchens, New York Times, February 6, 2005, Sunday Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/books/review/love-poverty-and-war-of-bellow- and-baghdad.html?_r=0

Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. “Dove into Hawk,” a review of And Yet… by Christopher Hitchens, The Times Literary Supplement, April 13, 2016. http://www.the- tls.co.uk/articles/public/dove-into-hawk/

72 Videos

D’Souza, Dinesh and Hitchens, Christopher. “Is Socialism Obsolete? Dinesh D’Souza vs Christopher Hitchens,” YouTube video, 27:50 – 28:50 Posted by “Thomistic Theist,” January 10, 2014. Accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSnHE_Yj11I

Hitchens, Christopher and Hitchens, Peter. “Christopher Hitchens vs Peter Hitchens, 2008, Part 5 of 14,” YouTube video, 3:32. Posted by “mccainisthrough,” May 27, 2009. Accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcDbMklrOBI

Hitchens, Christopher. “Christopher Hitchens: Britain’s Cultural Suicide,” YouTube video, 0:00 – 1:27. Posted by “The Sceptic Isle,” January 31, 2015. Accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj2eJdhSvBI

Hitchens, Christopher. “Christopher Hitchens – Cyprus: Stranded in Time (1998),” YouTube video, 16:00 – 18:00. Posted by “CaNANDian,” December 21, 2015. Accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGSUkHW6UT0

Hitchens, Christopher. “Christopher Hitchens debates Jon Stewart on Iraq,” YouTube video, 0:00-9:25 Posted by “Derick,” November 21, 2012. Accessed 26 June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI3g3z36y8Q

Hitchens, Christopher. “Christopher Hitchens Discussing Pop Culture Politics,” YouTube video,12:30; 16:00: and 28:50 – 36:20. Posted by “CaNANDian,” August 1, 2012. Accessed June 26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATQB5S5ErGo

Hitchens, Christopher. “Christopher Hitchens on FOX News concerning Jerry Falwell’s death,” YouTube video, 9:40-9:46. Posted by “reasonparty’s channel,” May 17, 2011. Accessed 26, June, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSzRhkzSCoo

Hitchens, Christopher. “Hitchens defends Obama endorsement,” YouTube video, 1:50 – 2:30. Posted by “The Patriot’s Maxims,” October 21, 2008. Accessed June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzmXa8ylHfA

73 Hitchens, Christopher. “Hitchens Praises Noam Chomsky in 1995 RARE VIDEO,” YouTube video, 0:00-12:16. Posted by “Noam Chomsky Videos,” February 7, 2013. Accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnFGJjEyd04

Hitchens, Christopher. “Hitchens’ 07: Danish Muhammed Cartoons,” YouTube video, 03:00 – 6:20. Posted by “Mr. Mindfeed,” April 16, 2012. Accessed June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZZ96SArpuc

Hitchens, Christopher. “Hitchslap 30 – Hitchens invited on FOX News to be spoken over!,” YouTube video, 0:00 – 4:31. Posted by “Hitchslap by Carter von Reidel, January 17, 2002. Accessed on June 26, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iwxwobmofM

Online Newspapers and Popular Magazines

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Bernstein, Richard. “Passages in Defence of a Colleague: Writers Read and Speak for Rushdie,” New York Times, February 23, 1989. Accessed June 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/23/world/passages-in-defense-of-a-colleague-writers-read- and-speak-for-rushdie.html?pagewanted=all

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Normblog. http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/05/adam_michnik_on.html

Find your Creative Muse. https://davehood59.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/writing-creative- nonfiction-the-opinion-essay/

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