There is no longer any such thing as a radical left. That
was what Christopher Hitchens said in an interview with the journalist Rhys
Southan in 2001 on the topic of radicalism in a post-socialist world. According
to Hitchens, the left was now a conservative rather than an emancipatory force,
and it was this, rather than any clichéd shuffle to the right, which resulted
in Hitchens no longer identifying with the political left.
While the time to pen glowing tributes or fierce
denunciations of the man has probably passed, it still feels rather too early to
be assessing any broad “legacy” Hitchens may (or may not) have left behind. For
one thing, many of the arguments he contested remain unresolved. Iran is on the
way to acquiring a nuclear weapon and the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad continues
to mow-down the green shoots of democratic rebellion with AK47s. Calls for the immediate
withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan (and to hell with the consequences) reverberate
around almost every “progressive” march on London; and religion continues, as
always, to demand a level of “respect” undeserving of any “faith-based”
doctrine.
Everything, as someone once said, is still left to play for.
There is good reason, however, to discuss one of the ideas which
animated the politics of Christopher Hitchens during his final decade: his
belief that the main ideological war in the 21st century would be fought between
those who did and those who did not believe the citizen should be the property
of religion or the state. When it came to the right of people in far-away lands
to pursue happiness, it was this idea, as opposed to the tendency of portions
of the left to place “anti-imperialism” above opposition to dictatorship, which
led Hitchens to abandon former comrades for forces willing to support the
overthrow of tyrants. Hitchens’s politics may indeed have changed as he grew
older, and the parties he chose to align himself with in later years may not
have been as concerned with liberating people as he once imagined; but it was the
left, rather than Hitchens, whose international outlook became increasingly parochial
and conservative after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and this was reflected in its
protests, where cries of “troops out” and “no to war” often trumped any opposition
to totalitarianism.
In order to understand a little about how this happened, it’s
important first of all to recognise that there is no longer a viable socialist
critique of capitalism – not that is, a critique which proposes a suitable
alternative economic system. This does not mean that one could not exist; rather
it means there isn’t an attractive one around at this point in time. Social democratic
alternatives, even radical ones, still hold weight (more by the day in fact;
for basing an economy on the speculations of the stock market has proven disastrous),
but any attempt at introducing more than essential planning to an economy would,
as in the past, confront the insurmountable objection that it requires the sort
of perfect knowledge that is unattainable to ordinary mortals. Writing about
the economic disasters unleashed by Bolshevism almost 100 years ago, Ralph
Raico summed things up rather well when he said: “These ‘materialists’ and
‘scientific socialists’ lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel,
Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring's philosophical errors was
infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a
price.”
As a result of its economic ideas being found out, today’s radicals
are more often than not defined by what they are against, rather than what they
are for. Topping that list, ahead of even capitalism itself, is the United
States. Shortly after 9/11, the Oxford Academic Mary Beard wrote approvingly in
the London Review of Books about the
“feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it
coming”. Further to the left, the Socialist Workers’ Party refused even to
condemn the attacks, and instead launched the “Stop the War Coalition” a mere ten
days after thousands of people had been murdered. The professed aims of the “coalition”,
which mainly consisted of SWP rank and file under the cover of a less overtly
noxious brand, were misleading, however, and disguised the fact that the movement
was built not to oppose the war Al Qaeda had openly declared on free society,
but rather to rally people against any potential Western response. At this
point the writing should have been on the wall. However justified Western military
action might be, the placards would still come out. A war was only a war if it
involved the West. As Hitchens put it in an essay for The Nation at the time: “If there is now an international
intervention, whether intelligent and humane, or brutal and stupid, against the
Taliban, some people will take to the streets, or at least mount some ‘Candle
in the Wind’ or ‘Strawberry Fields’ peace vigils. They did not take to the
streets, or even go moist and musical, when the Administration supported the Taliban.”
There can be little doubt that to some of Hitchens’s
generation 9/11 was, in their eyes, their very own Orwell moment. Just as
Orwell had recognised that civilisation depended on defeating Hitler in the
Second World War, many formally of the left were shaken out of any post-Cold
War lethargy by the random murder that punctured the New York skyline on that
clear September morning. The spectacle of many so-called progressives drawing a
false equivalence between John Ashcroft and Osama Bin Laden did the rest, and
again would have been all too familiar to Orwell. In a letter written to him in
1942, the poet D. S. Savage assured Orwell that Hitler required, “not
condemnation, but understanding”. Similar tropes began to appear in the
aftermath of 9/11 in a number of left-liberal publications, with wide-ranging
appeals to “understand” the “root causes” of religiously-inspired murder. The possibility
of remaining aloof from the struggle with fascism was of course only possible for
those living in stable liberal democracies at a great distance from any real
danger – those people usually inhabited a very comfortable position within
those “democracies” (their brackets, not mine), too.
Hitchens is no longer with us and the stories of Iraq and
Afghanistan remain unfinished. It is impossible to predict the post-war
trajectory of either of those countries, just as it would be equally futile to try
to guess at what would have befallen them had intervention not occurred. Simply
reeling off the number of civilian casualties without considering the potential
casualties of not going to war, however, betrays little more than a desire not
to follow ones’ thoughts beyond the point at which they remain politically
convenient. The real answers to questions of this sort will come not from the party-minded,
but from those who, as Hitchens himself put it, “insist on thinking for
themselves”.
What really illuminates the political path Christopher
Hitchens took in his last decade are the struggles of those in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and North Korea, to name but a
few, and the relative indifference those struggles summoned and continue to
summon in those who once professed solidarity with the oppressed as a first
principle. Apart from “no to war”, does anyone know what the left position today
is on Syria, for example? What dictators fear is military force, not
chanting in drafty rooms above Islington pubs of “long live the workers”.
To have any relevance to the struggles against tyrannical
authority today, the left must get over its obsession with imperialism, an idea
based on the antiquated doctrines of long-dead and somewhat unendearing
revolutionaries. The alternative is to risk being left behind by history and viewed
by the millions who continue to languish under dictatorship as a fringe and
irrelevant movement with parochial and remote concerns. It is a fitting time
for the left to put the purely abstract away and look real people and their suffering
in the face. That is an idea worth keeping, and it is one that was left behind
in no small part by Christopher Hitchens.
