“I have been both a Marxist and a journalist, and in some eclectic ways still am both these things..”
- Christopher Hitchens, Marx’s Journalism, The Guardian, June 16, 2007.
I do not judge Hitchens for his drinking or other habits nor would I use an ad hominem argument. He was clearly beloved by people who knew him and is virtually adored by many. I focus on what he told us about himself. He was upfront. Yet many do not give him the respect of focusing on what he was actually saying. Indeed one of his strengths was to pay attention to what was said or written.
He was indeed a battler. Hitchens hit chins. He went against the conceptual Greatest. In his popular work - which argued that religion was inevitably poisonous - he ends by encouraging the reader to identify the enemy (presumably God, religion and religious people) and fight. With enormous irony he claimed to be a modern secular universalist motivated by ethics he could choose to articulate. He expressed selective horror at human rights abuse whilst ignoring them in other contexts. Indeed his failure to respect religion and its freedom goes against the spirit of international conventions he supposedly sympathises with. He condemns Islam and people from cultures adhering thereto on the basis of supposed Enlightenment values whilst encouraging policies which lead to flows of Muslim population into Europe in a way which must undermine the Western structure he claimed to support.
You may think Hitchens is a scintillating genius, writer, speaker, polemicist or rhetorician and even an honourable, ethical advocate of freedom or instead something like a smirking bar-room bore with overblown expression. That is not the most important thing. It is critical to comprehend what he was doing and what he was saying. I suggest he was fundamentally a revolutionary, of the singular type (see A Singular Revolution from the Tower of Babel). He tells us consistently about his Marxist foundation. That explains his scientism, hatred of God and religion and global perspective. His gin-soaked journalist ethos is part of self-definition and self-description of a former Fleet Street writer, informed by his own mental association with famous figures who had been paid to write, like Marx. His political technique was not dissimilar to the style of the Rules for Radicals. His ideological sympathy set up the whole trend of his work. But the major model for his career as a political theorist or activist was probably Leon Trotsky. He tells us of his admiration for him. His heroes often had connections with Trotsky. That links him to Orwell. Even his idea of totalitarianism seems based on thoughts of the left opposition Viktor Serge, who had close correspondence with Trotskyism. He suggests, or considers at least, whether Stieg Larsson was killed - yet he rejects out of hand the idea that Princess Di was, though the evidence would justify the reverse. He does however ultimately recognise that intensive smoking, late nights and constant coffee may be the more prosaic reasons. But Larsson was also a successful Trotskyist activist and writer whose fame as a novelist grew posthumously. That many communists lamented his apparent defection to the establishment miss Hitchens’ utter consistency in his revolutionary evolution. Hitchens was stuck in a Marxist vortex of revolution with an eerily similarly structured counter-revolution in Germany.
His approach was essentially ideological, masked in a claim to Enlightenment reason and rationality. Such ideologies then make little demands on originality in theory but may make big ones on tactics. From Plato onwards, deep thinkers have realised that reason not orientated to the Good is directionless. Hitchens was interested in a classic atheistic revolution against God. His interest in military intervention demonstrated his adherence to power. Hitchens relied on a culturally Protestant base to promote an Anglo-American perspective that chimed with Atlanticist enterprise and endeavour (see my deep exploration of this enterprise in Plantation of the Automatons). This enterprise became a propagandistic enterprose that claimed allegiance to the atheistic and anti-Church Enlightenment base that informed Franklin and most especially Jefferson. The attack on the Muslim pirates by Jefferson is consistent with Hitchens’s claim to enlightened entitlement to rule globally - see his essay on ‘Jefferson versus the Muslim Pirates’ (City Journal, Spring 2007). Hitchens sees a progression of enlightenment in the USA, which included the ability to act globally especially through naval power, just like its father the British Empire. When he writes about ‘Gods of our Fathers: The United States of Enlightenment,’ (The Wilson Quarterly, 2005) he lays out a path from Franklin and his intellectual freedom through political freedom of Jefferson to John Brown and Lincoln on freedom from slavery. But they were also part of a revolutionary tradition.
Hitchens criticised power in the US and oligarchy yet was willing to argue for integrity of the system in its exercise of emancipatory power through foreign policy. His rejection of the accusation of total decay in the US system in ‘America the Banana Republic’ (Vanity Fair, online, October 9, 2008) was largely based on his defence or admiration of the US armed forces. Such forces were critical in the struggle of the Anglosphere against totalitarianism and theocracy which he associated with ‘Bin-ladenism’ and Jihadism, in ‘An Anglosphere Future,’ (City Journal, Fall 2007). He never seriously considers that the neo-imperialist, neo-colonialist militarism he advocates from an oligarchical system he criticises, is part of an even greater claim to rule the new world through techno-scientific power and a dangerous potential tech-totalitarianism. In the rebellious advocacy of Hitchens, people’s uprisings in Arab and other lands were the true revolution, not Hamas and others. If, as I argue, revolution involves removal of the shadow of God and religion from rule, then Hitchens is being consistent. But he is also consistently supporting Atlanticist foreign policy and the process of intervention. Certainly a state has an obligation to protect its citizens and military means are justified in certain contexts. But a general right of intervention does not exist in international law and is prohibited save in exceptional circumstances. Hitchens would widen those circumstances.
Christopher Hitchens seems to be becoming an atheist saint elevated to a writer of incomparable ability whose supporters see only a cleverness embodying a deeply ethical essence. He writes very well and reflects a dominant stream in the political zeitgeist, but his ideas should stick in the craw if you get the true gist. I have no doubt that he would have been very convivial over a few drinks if he was not in a bellicose, hectoring or performative role. Galloway famously asserted that he was “a drink-sodden, former Trotskyist poppinjay”. Is ‘former’ correct? In his famous debate with Hitchens, Galloway argued the former was ‘the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug.’
Whilst he sneered at sainthood and religion, Hitchens also paradoxically likened his political heroes and their doctrines to religion. While he thought God was not great, he still clung onto ‘The God that Failed’ (1949) of communism and a process of dialectical materialism from his progressive Left Opposition viewpoint.
Galloway could be seen as a more traditional socialist or Marxist. He was flummoxed that Alistair Darling (who supported the Iraq War) used to be handing out Trotskyist leaflets in Edinburgh. When I asked Galloway about his famous debate with Hitchens, George said it was like his cup-final. Galloway is a brilliant debater and orator.
Hitchens seems to have much more support than critics, though Galloway, Finkelstein and many other produce keen counterpoints. My analysis is simple. Hitchens was a committed revolutionary who merely changed the specific target of his strategy instead of betraying it. It is a very convenient and comfortable canard or simply contained view from the left that fails to analyse continuity of his revolutionary zeal. The revolution is ultimately against God and humanity itself via a tech-totalitarian technocracy pending posthuman assimilation of the human into technical networks. It is a Singular revolution to the Singularity. But the anti-homeostatic left and right are united in their dialectical momentum towards the end of humanity. Tech-apocalypse and its eschatology become an unconstrained kamikaze religion whilst removing the traditional type, through caricature, constant attack and assault. Hitchens was a spearhead in this new atheist attack. He gladly assumes a gadfly position and advocated an Ebenezer Scrooge approach to Christmas. His cleverly constructed claims were often deconstructive in intent. He proclaimed protection of the West whilst weakening it. The underlying euthanasic views modelled on Malthus which flashes in Scrooge also glint in Hitchens. There is no fundamental ethical position he advocates but propagandistic embellishment of revolutionary action presented in reasonable demeanour which concealed an unreasonable ideology. All is to be resolved by superior force and will.
I used find it very hard to reconcile the deft literary analyses of Christopher Hitchens, his radical left origin, claim to a glorious focus on reason and rationality with opposition to fundamentalism, strident and shrill denunciation of all religion and support of military power. The supposed champion of reason became a smug defender of scientism and techno-scientific war-power whilst concocting a subjective sense of entitlements with a spuriously cobbled-together claim in a mosaic of ethical and moral universalism. I nod when I re-read many of his articles recently, especially in the big book Arguably. But when you pay attention and sift (just as he urges you to do when reading Lolita), you see a poisonous and dangerous ideology. Hitchens inhabited an intellectual Trojan Horse which gave him a position to deny the West as he apparently decried opponents thereof. Glaring inconsistencies in his positions, from anti-imperialism to pro neo-imperialism, are enough to cause alarm. His cavalier dismissal of effects of war (especially on women and children) belies apparent concern for other victims. His genuine critique of Agent Orange in Vietnam and its long-term effects makes it harder to justify his embrace of military intervention later.
Much of his journalism seems to prime for subsequent establishment policy. We find him floating around with Sean Penn in Venezuela. He gives the impression, through privileged access and platforming, of something like an embedded Western regime journalist. When he became a supporter of Wolfowitz, the pretence of his anti-establishment position was surely exposed beyond repair?
His scientism, promotion of corporate techno-science and hatred of religion (and figures like Mother Theresa) show the true quality of his open reasonableness. It reveals a potentially hysterical sticky ideology under a plastic outerlayer of apparent calm packaged in a grand English mode suggestive of an old imperial sense. Of course he would see vaccines as the badge of modernisation and not question the context of production. The science of chemical warfare in one essay is initially linked to God before he pulls back and rejects that. He has a technique of argumentative coitus interruptus which enables him make suggestion and backtrack. Furthermore, he fails to see the continuity between his later positions and the complex that linked them. He liked to have his cake and eat it and his bread buttered on both sides.
A turning point in my own general views was the revelation of the Iraq war and exposure of the liberal fiction of international law over a cloak of power. Many wolves-in-sheeps’ clothing appeared and the Fabian flavour of Hitchens manifested. That was the culmination of a 9/11 attack built on a long history of engagement in that area.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall had shifted geopolitical emphasis. For the Western left, it induced a period of realignment. The Stalinist type was subdued. Trotskyists could say ‘I told you so!’ Yet many from that ilk had to then shift to a new enemy. Islam became a more explicit ally for many on the left. It could be supported to transform the West. Islam also became a (supposed) target of some others, on the former left and right. Attack on Islam whilst using the results to destabilise the West suited some of both. The newly dominant Atlanticist-informed power systems saw an opportunity for re-alignment and became entranced and engaged with a plan for ‘regime change.’ From the Project for the New American Century and revelation of General Wesley Clark, a striking pattern emerged of planned intervention for strategic reasons. This explains the otherwise unjustifiable interventions in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia and so on. I have consistently argued there was no justification for these interventions. Yet there is an explanation however. These traditional imperialist theatres are to be taken over by the neo-imperialist tech-totalitarian regime of the New World Order. Those interventions, from Bosnia onwards, undermined and destroyed Christian Europe. Hawks that were cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex thus supported the massive flows of people that changed European demography. Many hawks were bitterly and ideologically opposed to the Christian and especially Catholic culture of the West. A deep and poisonous hatred of all things culturally Catholic made it a central target for the revolutionary mindset. Many people notionally anti-Islam contributed in their false zeal for liberation to the rise of Islam in Europe. People had forgotten revolution comes as well from the top-down.
I am not a fan of what he stood for. I think he has become something like an idol. He appeals to people who supported the Western military-industrial complex he promoted. He also appeals to people who think appearance of absolute certainty is a sure sign of cleverness and clever analysis or that ripostes are somehow evidence of the truth itself. Thus he becomes a sacred cow himself having ironically attempted to pulverise existing sacred cows in contexts he opposed. But continuity underlying his worldview is another sacred cow - namely that of permanent, persistent or perpetual revolution. For this context I will use persistent revolution to include both the Trotskyist form from the left and the Jeffersonian right. The carapace of his prose does not conceal deadliness of his political philosophy or rather ideology, no matter how camouflaged. As a champion of Atlanticist military activism in a number of ‘war theatres’ he was more of a dry old thespian oscillating between deadpanning monstrous ideas and dramatic indignation on behalf of people he has no real relation with. I will only defend him on one thing. Unlike the sound criticisms of Finkelstein and Galloway, I argue he is not a turncoat. He never betrayed his revolutionary zeal. In true Jeffersonian-Trotskyist fashion, he continued his revolution in another guise.
I have sought to explain the chief characteristic of modern revolution is the effort to destroy religion (and in particular Catholic culture) and replace it with systems that claim to promote princes or the proletariat. In both cases, powerful constituencies come to power and intensify existing structures they create. Both left and right constitute anti-homeostatic forces. Margaret Thatcher shared a deconstructive attitude her Trotskyist opponents embodied. Remember the Trotskyists helped deposed Thatcher through their Poll Tax campaign. As my book Trotsky vs Jesus argues, removal of essential power of ancient Christianity, especially Catholicism and Orthodoxy, was a defining aspect of modern revolution from the Protestant Reformation to the Bolshevik revolution. Hitchens was a Trotskyist. Finkelstein felt he had betrayed it. Finkelstein should know, as he still seems to claim that tradition. But maybe Finkelstein is a conservative revolutionary. Hitchens is not. That many neo-cons had a Trotskyist intellectual pedigree is no accident. Hitchens continued with his revolution. His brother Peter mentioned a few times that when they were enamoured by Trotsky and they were willing to wade through a sea of blood to reach their paradise. The problem is that Hitchens seems to have never left that attitude behind.
Finkelstein writes in ‘On Christopher Hitchens,’ June 12, 2006;
“Most of Long Short War is given over to parsing words. According to Hitchens, all the key terms of the debate on Iraq were meaningless. In his hands this is probably true. For many years Hitchens awed readers with his formidable control over the English language. Now his ego delights in testing whether, through sheer manipulation of words, he can pass off flatulent emissions as bouquets. It perhaps would be funny watching fatuous readers fawn over gibberish - were not human life at stake. Hitchens can’t believe a word he’s saying. In contrast to bursting windbags like Vaclav Havel, Hitchens is too smart to take his vaporizings seriously. It’s almost an inside joke as he signals each ridiculous point with the assertion that it’s “obvious.”
Earlier Finkelstein remarks,
“He says that Wolfowitz wants “democracy and emancipation” - which must be why Wolfowitz rebuked the Turkish military for not stepping in after the Turkish people vetoed participation in the war. A “principled policy cannot be measured,” Hitchens sniffs, “by the number of people who endorse it.” But for a principled democrat the number of people endorsing a policy does decide whether to implement it. Hitchens’s notion of democracy is his “comrade,” ex-Trotskyist but ever-opportunist Kanan Makiya, conjuring up a “complex and ambitious plan” to totally remake Iraq in Boston and presenting it for ratification at an émigré conference in London. The invective he hurls at French, German and Turkish leaders for heeding the popular will shows that Hitchens hasn’t, at any rate, completely broken faith with his past: contemptuous of “transient polls of opinion,” he’s still a Trotskyist at heart, guiding the benighted masses to the Promised Land, if through endless wars and safely from the rear.”
Trotskyism was a persistent fringe and attracted a certain type of intellectual, including Finkelstein. In a more recent interview Finkelstein rejects the idea Hitchens was a deep-thinking intellectual. This view is shared by many disciplined thinkers, even critics of religion. Hitchens is seen as trolling and provoking on flimsy foundations with the vestments of indignation and righteousness presented as ethically motivated. I see a black-and-white magpie pursuit of shiny facts and a mole-like blindness to the other worlds beyond. His writings about our origins, for example, merely indicate the atomist views that Marx wrote about in his PhD. His talk of a unified theory seems to contain a lot of hot air from some Big Bang. Yet Hitchens could inhabit a habit of science and an aura of seriousness in that domain that his work or studied hardly justified.
Finkelstein identifies the volte-face associated with 9/11 that many on the left do. Hitchens became a right-winger to Finkelstein. He thought Hitchens had no moral core. Yet if Hitchens followed a Trotskyist-neo-con pipeline, connected to a WASPish, Jeffersonian, Atlanticist matrix of power, his journey is more explicable. Put in scientism and atheism and you have the technocratic tendency clearly manifest in Trotsky. Finkelstein argued Hitchens often used three arcane facts to construct an empty argument in his articles. The Hitchens approach to Russia is also determined by his Trotskyist background and hatred of the Orthodox Church. Trotskyists never liked what followed in Russia after Trotsky was expelled. They believed they were the true heirs. With great irony Hitchens see Russian imperialism from a platform of the greatest tradition of imperialism he denies he belongs to. While Hitchens is quick to link present believers and religious practitioners to any wrong he can dredge from thousands of years, he bears no responsibility for consequences of Marxism or Trotskyism. We have been gulled and lulled into illusions of his reasonableness whilst he can still effectively preach doctrines that killed tens of millions. His regret about the return of the Orthodox Church in Russia may be related to the fact that millions were killed in its extirpation including many priests and monks and his hero Trotsky stripped the altars on a false pretext, just like in the Protestant Revolution Hitchens also approved of. I’m sure his anti-religionist supporters will try harder next time.
In my analysis of revolution, the Reformation is an important part. Hitchens celebrates the ‘Protestant Revolution.’ He came from a Protestant background. He absurdly claims in an essay of Graham Greene (whose Catholicism irked him) that Shakespeare’s London was ‘relatively uncensored’ precisely when censorship was genuinely instantiated.
In the USA, he was accepted as a British intellectual in the upper circles of governance and Atlanticist power. He knew that Englishness had a certain cachet that could contribute to his panache. That stratum involved a matrix of power including what used to be called WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) being from the context of former empire. That business and corporate foundation context contributed to severance of the ASP element - which conveniently severs historical continuity of the contemporary system of power. Thus the system could ensure equal distribution of the blame among all ‘whites’ including the poor Protestants in Appalachia and other ‘mudsill’ and the Irish they had tried to eradicate whilst maintaining their power. Hitchens emphasised the Protestant Revolution but not Protestantism. His heroes in American politics represented a culturally Protestant milieu relinquishing the Anglican and religious system towards deism, theism and a more agnostic and atheistic direction. Modern revolution represented a movement from the transcendent as a source of rule to the transactional rule of man and power. This movement or trajectory corroborates my analysis of the nature of revolution. The ultimate enemy becomes God and any instantiation of a regulatory or legal system which purports to exist under that hierarchy. The objective then becomes a claim to power based on reason elevated almost to a goddess. This was the movement in the French Revolution. De-institutionalisation of religion allows the next stage. That is rejection of religion wholesale and establishment of a new total system as we saw in Russia and China.
Hitchens Protestantism is cultural. The growth of modern science and later penumbra of scientism was inextricably linked to the Reformation and progression to the Enlightenment. Hitchens strangely criticises Evangelicals for being anti-capitalistic even though academic studies emphasise the connection between the origin of modern capitalism and Protestantism, especially Calvinism. Hitchens does not have to abide by disciplines inherent in academic endeavour and could move between very defensible and interesting slants on literature and exaggerated or selective history. Many articles he wrote were essentially book-reviews or considerations of autobiographies. Inherent in the Protestant Reformation was the project for a New Atlantis involving rule by scientific elite as advanced by Francis Bacon. Out of this milieu came ideas from Protestantism about creating a Jewish state. New trading routes established connections to places like Persia. These connections would involve British imperial interests in the Muslim world and Middle East. Later it would become the Great Game.
Hitchens notes the absence of Lenin in some discussions about Stalinism and opposition thereto. He notes this in his analysis of Animal Farm. We might also consider that Lenin had a keen emphasis on colonialism. Hitchens demonstrates a great ambivalence. His views are very much informed by the imperial milieu he came from. Even his Flashman interest implies some odd sense of colonial acceptance. He maintains a disdain for many cultures the British Empire was involved in. He obscures the consequence of empire. This allows him to disingenuously reduce Northern Ireland’s problems to religion. That suits his argument that religion poisons all. When colonisation began in Ireland, there was no Protestantism. He knows his religious characterisation is a shorthand justification for the delusionary mission civilatrice he advocated. His rationale for intervention often involved rights of women. Yet he was not so concerned about their rights after or during intervention. Hitchens was an Atlanticist neo-imperialist whose justifications for interventions were applied to domains fundamentally associated with British imperial ambitions in the past. The new justification for the civilising mission was based on a selective claim to universal values of an old liberal type. His bullying John Bull bluster never involved an argument to intervene in China. Yes, he was extremely critical of Maoism and what happened. Most Trotskyists are. But why not invade China? It seems easy enough to pick out tin-pot dictators, especially when mixing over dinner tables with many in the military-industrial complex with supreme investments in the hardware much techno-science is directed to and an eye to potential loot. The British ‘White Man’s Burden’ becomes a Global(ist) Man’s Burden for him. Read him closely, just as he urges us to read Lolita closely.
The conceit of his dichotomising of religion is manifest in the claim he would be afraid to meet people coming from a prayer meeting in places like Belfast and Belgrade. He implies such people would be inherently dangerous in such locations. Rather he ought to have been afraid of people who were secular like him and not interested in religion, like the communist ideologues in Republicanism (of which he seemed to approve) or the Shankill Butchers cruising from pubs (the latter establishments of which he very much approved). No doubts frenzied killings of the Butchers could be justified by their own ‘reasons’ and there was no evidence of God in this story despite the convenience of that narrative of the occupying forces. Hitchens often identifies ‘reason’ with the provisions of reasons. Indeed, if the tap of conditions of violence had not been turned off by the British establishment during the Peace Process, Britain would not have had the freedom to roam the world in military adventurism which Hitchens approved of.
As Protestantism abandons its original base and Protestant states become secular, with a great emphasis and accommodation of Islam, forces tend towards the ideology of scientism (see The End of Protestantism and Biblical Scientism). Atheism becomes an often unreasonable badge of reason. Scientific materialists make spirit immaterial and in their fundamentalist approach project fundamentalism on everyone that sees a more complex universe than their technoscientific instruments of power. Spirit may become spirits. It is no surprise AA recovery involves a return to a conception of the divine. Scientism and atheism as ideology may involve a sneering claim to omniscience, denial of spiritual consciousness and the supernatural or preternatural. Hitchens cites modern Isaac Newtons such as Lawrence Krauss (Vanity Fair Online April 14, 2008). So we are to relinquish God and have replacement with Epstein’s pals. As I have argued, dialectical materialism operates to produce technocracy and new gods with an AI-God. It is not about liberating knowledge but elite power deconstructing competitive institutions that might purport to constrain them.
Then we have the absurd but predictable attempt to conjure away Christmas through the standard inversions we notice as technique. Hence ‘Hitchmas’ opposes Christmas. Thus in December 2024, the neutral, reasonable chums of Hitchens; Dawkins, Fry, Murray and the esteemed Kraus did a podcast to celebrate Hitchens’ hatred of Christmas. With no sense of irony, Fry remembered Hitchens responding to an actor friend being called a Pabloite, an offshoot of Trotskyism. The reasonable alternative to Christmas and Christ stated clearly,
“If indeed his is Pabloite he should be burned.”
How his chums smiled and laughed at this shark chum! How ironic that they sit and preach at Christmas about the humour of violent speech from ideologues who preach understanding whilst practicing political exclusion and excision. Those who are quick to repeat the British Imperial Black Legends of the Inquisition and their horror at burning-at-the-stake (done under Spanish state control with much less numbers than commonly cited) find it funny their Trotskyist friend would voice approval for the same tactic. Maybe at the next world war, initiated by the power systems and death cults these people support and propagandise for, we might have a Hitchmas truce instead of the Christmas Truce. Remembrance of the birth of Christ was one event which caused a little punctuation in the horror the machine monsters industrial techno-science produces. Or maybe, Hitchmas will ensure no such blips in the unfolding new world emerge.
As Hitchens made plain in his work Blood, Class and Empire (2004), the Anglo-American relationship was an enduring one. It was paradoxically an imperial, cultural continuity. From his connections in The Atlantic, to Atlantic Books, to Atlanticism, his New Atlantis credentials are complete.
Hitchens, by his own self-description, was a journalist from the hack milieu of Fleet Street (see Fleet Street’s Finest: From Waugh to Frayn, The Guardian, Dec. 3, 2005). ‘Hack’ describes him very well. First, he was a hack in the sense of an opinionated journalist with a market demand for opinions he constructed. Second, he was a hack in his hacking style which sought to shred his opponents. Third, he was a hack, in the sense of a computational or mental hack. He hacked the sociological context of God. Hitchens hacked sacred cows and sat himself in a position to become one to liberated atheists who embraced a new quasi-religion of scientism enforced by new world techno-power, where might is right. He hacked away with determination that convinced lazy thinkers. That does not mean his critiques lack all truth. His high-and-mighty haughty air of duchess-type offence concealed a lack of moral, ethical and objective basis. He was almost divine to some of his supporters to view by their reverence. But he was a real revolutionary. I think Finkelstein and the others are wrong. Because they do not often take religion seriously (though Finkelstein is much fairer on religion) they may fail to see how rebellion against revelation or the reality of the spiritual world, constitute the core function of the revolutionary in the Singular Revolution. Hitchens may have been a hireling to some. In other respects he may have understood what the traditional principled left did not. Namely, revolution is not about collective politics and optimum distribution on an equal basis. No, revolution is about a new world scientocracy and a posthuman existence. That a black or white cat can catch a mouse is clear to China. A red or blue hammer does not make any instrumental difference. Hitchens was a black-and-white cat in that sense or maybe a black-and-white sacred secular cow. He caught attention for the new world. He never relinquished the delusions of Karl Marx, hatched in walking distance from old Fleet Street. He saw that a switch of tactics could yield fruit in a changing world.
I recall being in Wapping forty years ago and witnessing the printers’ dispute, as Fleet St. shifted to the Isle of Dogs that I knew well. Hitchens’s world was fundamentally reconstructed by the forces of technology he champions. He admires revolutionary tradition and followed the hurricanes. Hitchens writes about Benjamin Franklin who Kant described as the modern Prometheus. Hitchens praises Milton and the rebelliousness of his characters. Hitchens fits into the Marxist Promethean path of power of technology being used to overthrow the existing gods. It may not be really that Hitchens does not believe in God but rather could do but rejects. Hitchens, like Trotsky, kept the battle going to the end. He was proud of hacking away at God and the system that would come through the power of technology and would be inevitably positive progression. Meanwhile his jingoist anti-Jihadist (or jingoist secular Jihad) allowed a new focus of opposition that projected totalitarianism away from the new potential global totalitarianism.
The great sham in his conveniently-compartmentalised victim-identifications was his failure to support the West itself rather than the elites he was accustomed to engage with. He would risk the lives of Western soldiers in expensive military adventures which he would window-dress in the language of concern for others. He would encourage reckless interventions that ultimately undermined Europe and America. He caricatured religion because he knew such satire was effective in speaking to the working-class he had long left to their own devices (and new explosive ones introduced by angry others). He was more interested in notional women struggles in Rawalpindi than Rochdale. To say he was an engaging and entertaining writer is not sufficient to cover the cost of his ideological involvement in deconstructing the West through over-extension. What you want to destroy you must first over-extend. The Tao-Te-Ching told us that centuries ago.
Scialabba in n+1 in 2005 wrote a scathing critique of Hitchens.
“Hitchens might want to insist, contrarily, that although he has changed his allies, he has not changed his opinions. Unlike, say, David Horowitz, he still believes that the Cold War was an interimperial rivalry, the Vietnam War was immoral, the overthrow of Allende was infamous, and American support for Mobutu, Suharto, the Greek colonels, the Guatemalan and Salvadoran generals, the Shah of Iran, and the Israeli dispossession of Palestinians was and is indefensible. He still believes in progressive taxation; the New Deal; vigilant environmental, occupational safety, and consumer protection regulation; unions (or some form of worker self-organization); and, in general, firm and constant opposition to the very frequent efforts of the rich and their agents to grind the faces of the poor. It’s just that he now cordially despises most of the people who proclaim or advocate these things. Why?”
He proceeds,
“Why? What accounts for Hitchens’s astonishing loss of moral and intellectual balance? I think he had a plausible and even creditable reason. Anyone intelligent enough to understand that there are institutional and structural, not merely contingent, constraints on the behavior of states will also understand how difficult it is to budge those constraints and produce a fundamental change in policy. To make the United States an effective democracy - to shift control over the state from the centers of financial and industrial power, now global in reach, to broadly based, self-financed and self-governing groups of active citizens with only average resources - will take several generations, at least. This is a daunting prospect for just about anyone. For someone of Hitchens’s generous and romantic temperament, it is potentially demoralizing. The temptation to believe that this long, slow process could be speeded up if only he could find and ally himself with a faction of sympathetic souls close to the seat of executive power who really understood - i.e., the neoconservatives, the only ones, Hitchens has written, willing to take “the radical risk of regime change”- must have been overpowering.”
I agree that Hitchens was opportunistic and that the neo-liberal neo-con right and left are both interchangeable in a dialectical materialist, anti-homeostatic struggle against a human world that recognises spirituality. The terminus is our terminus. He hacked at the divine because he was a genuine eternal revolutionary propagandist. He lives on as a sacred cow worshipped by people who purport to reject religiosity. His hot air lives on along with his entrancing argumentation however much sophistry it contains. He hacked the Western conservative concepts as a journalistic hack to find their weaknesses and mentally hacked away a new path to revolution from the political hackney of the Atlanticist dream of global power. While his expression was not hackneyed his thoughts, especially on God were. Whilst now he is away somewhere in a hack, his utility to the system continues.
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