Today marks the tenth anniversary of the death of one of my heroes, Christopher Hitchens. Like many people, I discovered him as a nerdy high school student via the collection of debates, speeches and interviews on YouTube that he took part in throughout his career as a public intellectual. I have vague memories of reading about his death, but never really knew who he was until shortly after his demise. As a deeply intellectual young man, rebelling against the bigoted fundamentalist Christianity of my upbringing, and seeking answers to life’s problems, I turned to Hitchens. I was quickly convinced that he was the coolest man to ever walk the earth. He was witty, eloquent and contemptuous of idiocy, ignorance and superstition. His take-no-prisoners attitude played well in his bitter battles with the enemies of reason and the intellect. He ridiculed Christianity and defended the West from its far-left and Islamist enemies in equal measure. It was Hitchens who was pivotal in helping turn me into a devoted defender of Western civilisation and the open society. Ironically, he was famously an ex-Trotskyist, who retained a misguided admiration for Trotsky and his ideas to the very end, even as reality forced him to break with the left.
Hitchens’ life story was to me the stuff of legends. It was the kind of life I wished I had lived, and bore some similarity to mine. Like myself, Hitchens as a boy was a curious young bibliophile who felt suffocated by his family life. His doting mother, Yvonne, fuelled her son’s ambition and pushed him to join the ranks of the establishment. The bright young thing found himself at Oxford, where he discovered the joys of revolutionary politics, sex, drink, debate and partying like there was no tomorrow. In all honesty, his time at university sounds a lot more fun than mine was, though Hitchens suggests in his memoir, Hitch-22, that it was not that enjoyable. Admittedly I am much more puritanical than Hitchens was and do not drink, smoke or enjoy partying until the early hours of the morning. I was also much more serious with my studies, whereas Hitchens was only able to gain a Third after his three years at Oxford.
Like myself, Hitchens devoted most of his time at university to a suffocating existence in a Trotskyist sect, the International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP), having been groomed into it just before he came to university by Paul Sedgwick, one of its leading members. In fairness, the IS was quite different from the IMT, and appears to have been a much more intellectually open and democratic organisation, influenced by a mixture of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, before Cliff transformed it into a hidebound cult like every other Trotskyist groupuscule. Still, there were undoubtedly cult-like aspects to the group even then, and Hitchens’ memoir bears this out, even if he won’t admit it explicitly. Even decades later, he was still suffused with the sense of moral righteousness and even arrogance that marks a Trotskyist militant, looking back fondly at these heady days of radicalisation. I doubt he ever meditated on the fact that he had been manipulated as a naive and ignorant young man into joining this rather sinister groupuscule. He even favourably compares the IS to the Healyites in his memoir, as if not having a leader who raped and beat his members is to be regarded as some sort of accomplishment! Ian Buruma is right in his review of the memoir to detect some of these unpleasant aspects in the young Hitchens, which would also manifest themselves in the adult.
What drew me to Hitchens and put me in awe of him was the courage he had, in his later years, to break from all his old friends and comrades, and take a stand for what he thought was right. One discerns the same often aggravating self-righteousness and sense of conviction he had as a young man, but this time, against his former allies, on the side of freedom, individualism and scepticism. In a certain sense, Hitchens had always believed in these values, and indeed, saw the left as defending them from reaction. However, in the post-Cold War world, the old revolutionary left, reeling from the collapse of the communist ideal, was so embittered with anti-Western sentiment that it now began looking for bedfellows from the very dregs of humanity – first Milosevic and his murderous confederates in the former Yugoslavia, then al-Qaeda after 9/11. The left had once stood against such barbarism. Now it was supporting it. Hitchens had the bravery to stand alone, to call out his former comrades as cowards and deserters, and champion the cause of the West against its enemies. He did not call himself a conservative, indeed, he still loathed the conservative right with a passion in a great many ways. But he could ally himself with them on this one, fundamental question – the defence of open, liberal societies, for all their flaws and imperfections, against its reactionary, Islamist enemies. Not for him the Leninist formula of ‘revolutionary defeatism’, not for him the disingenuous equivocation between the terrorist thugs and primeval murderers and those who stood for freedom of expression and for the rights of women. The modern left believes that the West and its enemies are morally equal. Hitchens always believed that, for all its flaws, the West had much that was worth preserving, and had to be critically supported against religious fundamentalism. Today’s left would prefer to appease it, and instead blame the West for ‘provoking’ terrorism and extremism. Loathsome, far-left talking-heads like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are given air time and treated as serious figures, but none of them will ever have the bravery and the eloquence that Hitchens had. Had he lived, he would have despised Jeremy Corbyn and everything he stood for. Nor do I think he would have cared for the right-wing populism that has infected much of the Tory Party.
It was watching Hitchens’ speeches on the Iraq War on YouTube around 2014 or so that convinced me that the war had been justified after all. Before that I had had much more sympathy with the isolationist view that the Middle East was none of our business and that the wars there had been nothing short of disastrous. Hitchens won me over to the view that Saddam was an evil tyrant who had to be deposed, whether he had WMDs or not, and that the Middle East had to be remade in order to avert an even greater calamity should the status quo be left in being. You can call this position ‘liberal interventionist’, ‘neoconservative’, or whatever you will. I watched his debate with George Galloway back in 2005, and was disgusted by Galloway’s idiotic name-calling, boorishness and demagoguery, as well as open sympathy for terrorism. Hitchens worked his magic, responding to Galloway’s insults with charm and grace, and made a strong case for war.
Beside his strong defence of the West, and his rubbishing of religious bigotry (in both its Christian and Islamic iterations) in debates, speeches and books such as God Is Not Great, and his prescient warnings against identity politics, Hitchens defended scepticism and critical thinking as a way of life. Like my other hero, Friedrich Nietzsche (whom Hitchens greatly admired), Hitchens was not satisfied with easy answers to complex problems. In later years, he admitted that he had mostly (but not entirely) lost his faith in Marxism, and that he preferred to allow his ‘chainless mind to do its own thinking’. In his Letters to a Young Contrarian, which I have read at least three times, he counsels his young readers and admirers to pursue truth unsparingly, and to question everything and everyone, even if it upsets our tribal allegiances. Reading this book after leaving the IMT, I was filled with a feeling of validation and an immense sense of pride in having discovered Hitchens and being able to read his work. It was as if he was in the room, guiding and encouraging me on my path to emancipation from cultism. Curiously, he retained the preposterous belief that dialectical materialism is somehow profound, but then one cannot expect that he would have abandoned all of the precepts of Marxism completely. To the very end, he retained his sentimental attachment to Trotsky, and never fully realised what a monster he was. Back in 2009, he participated in a couple of discussions with Robert Service on Trotsky in which he was utterly unconvincing in trying to defend his hero, a rare example of an intellectual flop committed by the Hitch. My biggest criticism of Hitchens is probably his failure to make a detailed intellectual examination and scrutiny of his former Trotskyist views, which seem to have fallen away via an accumulation of life experience and a sense of disappointment with the delay of the revolution, rather than any serious intellectual process.
Hitchens was a ‘renegade’ in the eyes of his former friends and comrades, who promptly ‘disconnected’ from him once he broke from the party line in the aftermath of 9/11. But that is all the more reason to admire him. He obeyed the still, small voice within him, and refused to go along with the herd, rejoicing at the assault on Western civilisation. Faced with a choice between betraying his comrades or betraying himself, he chose the former. It is Hitchens who remained principled in the face of change. It is his enemies who betrayed their suppposed humanitarian sentiments to stand by thugs and killers like Milosevic, Khomeini and Saddam. Whilst Hitchens will be forever remembered as a shining star in the intellectual firmament, a peerless prose stylist and a champion orator, the Chomskys, Galloways, Cliffs, Woodses and Taaffes of this world will die and be forgotten, their names mud, their ‘achievements’ hollow or non-existent, their sects irrelevant and in decline.
When I joined the IMT, I shamefully cast aside my hero, even criticising him publicly, so as to conform with the group. Inwardly, I felt like a phony. I still loved and admired Hitchens, and could not admit it, even to myself. In my misery I would guiltily watch his old videos and be charmed all over again. I wondered whether I was on the wrong side. I knew that in leaving, I was channelling my inner Hitchens. I decided that I loved life and truth more than I loved being in this cult and hanging out with these totalitarian control freaks, and chose to take a Hitchensian stand in favour of what was right. And though the mob may call me renegade, and denounce me with baying and abuse, I know that Hitchens would have been by my side. And that is all that matters. Of course, he was not a saint. His vendetta against Bill Clinton was absurd, beneath him and a waste of his intellectual energy. Moreover, I have grown out of New Atheism and think it is a rather simplistic attitude to religion, which blames it for all that is bad and credits secular ideology with all that is good. (Hitchens’ cop-out for those who pointed to the monstrosities of secular movements like communism was to brand them forms of ‘secular religion’, and therefore not truly secular at all – a sort of No True Scotsman if you think about it.) He also continued to trumpet a lot of anti-American bullshit from leftist mythology from time to time, a relic of his leftist past as a determined enemy of American imperialism. For all that, I still admire and respect Christopher Hitchens. It is the sheer complexity of the man that makes him so great. Like Albert Camus, he believed that the real difference was not between left and right, but between right and wrong. On this tenth anniversary of his death, I would like to say – thank you for everything, Hitch.