The bad boy of the left [Christopher Hitchens]

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By MARGARET WENTE Saturday, November 2, 2002 – Page A17

Christopher Hitchens's list of the people he loathes is long and varied. It includes Henry Kissinger (a war criminal), Bill Clinton ("a man of reptilian purpose") and Mother Teresa (an evil dwarf).

Not surprisingly, the list of people who loathe him back is quite extensive. It includes John Fraser, master of the University of Toronto's Massey College, who branded Mr. Hitchens a "literary roué" and dismissed his new book, Why Orwell Matters,as a self-indulgent vanity effort. It also includes thousands of ex-admirers on the intellectual left who used to think that Mr. Hitchens was one of them.

That changed on Sept. 11. The public intellectual who once stood up for Chile, Vietnam and Palestinians against the imperialist depredations of the West is now a hawk. And he is accusing his former comrades of massive moral idiocy.

"I can only hint at how much I despise a left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist," he wrote recently. "Instead of internationalism, we find among the left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism" and "a masochistic refusal to admit that our own civil society has any merit."

As for Iraq, Mr. Hitchens is arguing the case for war. Not against Iraq, he stresses -- against Saddam Hussein. "There is no sense in which it can be said that Saddam represents the Iraqi people," he contends. Because of his nasty weapons and his inclination to use them, deterrence is not an option. "Would you rather take out such a person now, or later at a time of his choosing and under circumstances where he might, as Kim Jong-il now can, himself practise deterrence? Or would you just rather fold the whole tent and say, 'Well, let him get on with it'?"

Mr. Hitchens is a 54-year-old British expat who now makes his home in Washington. He calls himself a contrarian and an independent thinker. His critics, including Mr. Fraser, call him grating and egotistical. They think his moral thunder doesn't sit well. They say he is a man of limitless arrogance and self-regard, a relentless seeker of celebrity (he writes for Vanity Fair) and a liar.

Worse still, he appears to have turned himself into an apologist for George W. Bush.

I asked him about that yesterday. He replied with courtesy, and also with a certain withering contempt for the question. "I was a friend of the Iraq opposition and the Kurdish rebels in Iraq when Bush and all their family were friends of Hussein. I've been in favour of regime change for a long time. If anything, Bush has become an apologist for me."

Mr. Hitchens has been a long-time champion of the Kurds, who also strenuously favour regime change. He wonders why the peace faction seems to have forgotten they exist. He regards the suffering of the Kurds and their betrayal by the West as a terrible injustice that ought to be undone as soon as possible. And yet, as he wrote recently, "I haven't seen an anti-war meeting all this year at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam."

Among the best-known polemicists against the war is Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine. In a recent column, he dismissed the Iraqi opposition as a bunch of malcontents. "It was really a low point," says Mr. Hitchens. "There may well be disagreement about what to do, but it's not his job to piss on people who have sacrificed everything as dissenters. Neither he nor I would be able to live their lives for a single day."

For the record, he's also disgusted that Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Jimmy Carter was the man who encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran," he pointed out the other day.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Hitchens wrote his last column in The Nation, the leading leftist magazine he has appeared in for 20 years. In it, he says he quit because he believes the magazine "is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."

"Islamofascism" is the word Mr. Hitchens coined after Sept. 11 to describe radical Islamic fundamentalism. He has always loathed religious fundamentalism of every kind and, for that matter, religion of every kind (which helps explain his evisceration of Mother Teresa). He calls himself a committed "anti-theist," and defines the real ideological battle not as Islam v. the West but as faith v. reason. He is certain that it cannot be won peacefully.

Some people suspect Mr. Hitchens may be too prolific and too fond of the mass media to be a serious thinker. He does crank it out -- books, magazine pieces, newspaper articles, talk-show appearances, debates and panels. He claims he is congenitally incapable of turning down an assignment. This discipline is not mirrored in his personal life, a refreshing throwback to the days when intellectuals were supposed to be rather dissipated. He drinks with gusto, smokes to excess, and despises leafy vegetables. He does not believe in exercise. He also left his first wife when she was pregnant with their second child (although that was years ago, and she seems to have forgiven him).

The worst rap against his character is that he went out of his way to accuse an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal, of perjury during the Monica Lewinsky affair. It is a serious charge, and a curious story. Mr. Blumenthal, a journalist who had taken a high-level job at Clinton White House, had testified before the Senate that he had no part in a media smear campaign that portrayed Monica Lewinsky as a sexual predator and a stalker. Mr. Hitchens thought he knew otherwise, and swore out an affidavit saying his friend was lying.

Why would he do such a thing? As he explained recently to The Times of London, once Mr. Blumenthal went to the White House, he seemed to succumb to the Clintons' moral rot.

At lunch one day, he alleges, Mr. Blumenthal told him darkly: "We're going to take care of these bitches." Mr. Hitchens was so disgusted at the persecution of a vulnerable young woman that he felt compelled to tell on his old friend. That, at any rate, is his side of the story. It was the end of a 15-year friendship.

No doubt it's not the last friendship that will be shattered. Mr. Hitchens used to call himself a socialist living in a time when capitalism is more revolutionary. And now he's stopped calling himself a socialist. There will be many people who will not forgive him.

He says he has no regrets. Besides, he's absolutely certain he's right.

"Have you ever lost an argument with anyone?" I ask.

"No," he says cheerily.

Christopher Hitchens will be speaking at the International Festival of Authors at noon today at Toronto's Harbourfront.



-- Anonymous, November 02, 2002


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