Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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As the invasion of Iraq approached, and Hitchens joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, demanding the final extension and conclusion of Operation Desert Storm (a war he had always argued was imperialist) along neoconservative lines, he extolled a ‘new imperialism’, whose sole remit was to enable local populations to govern themselves. In fact, as the reference to the civilising mission suggests, there was absolutely nothing new about justifying imperialism in such terms. Still, ‘if the United States will declare out loud for empire, it had better be in its capacity as a Thomas Paine arsenal, or at the very least a Jeffersonian one.’13
The moral rearmament of imperialism along these lines was a hallmark, not of radicalism but of neoconservatism. It was the neocons who pioneered the hypocritical ‘human rights’ discourse that justified Reaganite revanchism in the 1980s, they who coined the conceit of ‘democracy promotion’ as part of a new, technocratic idiom to justify counterrevolutionary policies in Latin America and elsewhere.14 If, in doing so, they appropriated some of the vernacular of leftist internationalism, they did so in the tradition of Wilsonian internationalism, itself elaborated as a response to, and attempted containment of, the revolutionary internationalism of the Bolsheviks.15 This discourse was pioneered by those whose aim was not to revolutionise the world system but to conserve the hierarchies that had been challenged by anticolonial movements. In short, Hitchens’s support for the restoration of empire, taking advantage of the senescence of an Arab nationalism that had once been America’s major regional foe, was decidedly in the tradition of conservatism.
There was also a thrill at the prospect of mass destruction in Hitchens’s rhetoric, another of the things that he meant by ‘radical’. He was desperate to prepare America for the sacrifices necessary in the sweeping civilisational combat between the ‘West’ and its purported enemies which he proposed. ‘Frankly,’ he said, recalling the spectacle of people leaping from the flaming World Trade Center towers, as they began to swoon, it’s
not that terrifying … That kind of thing happens in a war, it has to be expected in a war, if you’re in a war you’re gonna lose a building or a plane, and maybe a small town or a school or – you should reckon about once a week. Get ready for it.16
I have previously characterised this ideology as a descendant of European Kriegsideologie, a martial discourse that emerged on the right in World War I, was sustained by fascism in the interwar period, and had its consummation in World War II. But it has also distinctly American roots – in the racialised social Darwinism and the ‘creative destruction’ of manifest destiny that permeated both conservatism and the dominant liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The neoconservative Michael Ledeen was one of the few neocons to openly articulate a vision similar to Hitchens’s, that the US would act as a revolutionary bulwark in the Middle East. Ledeen estimated that this legacy of creative destruction was what made America a truly revolutionary society, and he challenged the left’s claim to a monopoly on the revolutionary tradition.17
It is also worth recalling that even when Hitchens was occasionally revulsed by the right in his later years, it was usually the religious right that he belaboured while defending the modern liberal right. Meanwhile, his loyalty to the United States would no longer permit him ‘critical support’ for a leftist regime in its crosshairs. Unlike the Sandinistas, for example – or even, at one stage, Saddam Hussein – Hugo Chávez was given no indulgence by Hitchens. ‘Getting to know the General’, Hitchens said of a photograph depicting his meeting with Chávez and described him as a dictator.18 For the record, Chávez never held the post of general; his title when Hitchens met him would have been the civilian one of president. The dictator charge was particularly obtuse, given that, when Hitchens met him, Chávez would not have been in office had his supporters not thwarted a US-supported right-wing coup in 2002 that cleared the way for him to run in and win free elections in 2004 and 2008.
Likewise, when Hitchens remonstrated that ‘Venezuelan television was compelled to run images of Bolívar, followed by footage of the remains, and then pictures of the boss’ to underscore Chávez’s claimed political lineage, Hitchens should have known that Venezuelan television is overwhelmingly privately owned, is hostile to Chávez (much of it had participated in the 2002 coup), and is not compelled to run anything by him.19 Hitchens elsewhere lamented that socialism no longer existed except in the ‘forms of populism and nationalism à la Hugo Chávez that seemed to me repellent’.20 In context, the populist aspect of this couplet is most likely what offended Hitchens, as nationalism was his new creed.
Indeed, apart from Chávez’s international alignments and anti-imperialist stance, it seems to have been the Chávez administration’s redistribution of wealth that offended Hitchens most and drew invocations of Peronism:
He would be a tin-pot, crack-pot … just to provide fodder for cartoonists if he didn’t a) have a great deal of oil, if he didn’t b) make regular visits to Tehran … and if he wasn’t trying to replace Fidel Castro, whose bills he’s been paying for a very long time. All of this makes him a little bit less of a clown than he looks. Juan Peron and his terrible wife Evita were tremendous nuisances who, like Chávez, paid their voters out of their own Treasury and bribed and corrupted their state into bankruptcy and shame, but they didn’t have oil.21
Even Aristide was no longer defensible when the US took it upon itself to support a coup d’état in Haiti and coordinate a multilateral intervention that brought death squad leaders and sweatshop owners to power in 2004. Asked to comment on the way in which Clintonite intervention in 1994 seemed to have gone awry, Hitchens remarked: ‘I remember in that campaign, actually, the campaign that brought Clinton to power, remember Pat Buchanan ran – leading Catholic right-winger – and his phrase was always for Aristide – “that dingbat priest”. A lot of people overestimated Mr Aristide’s honesty and capability.’22 This was a remarkable statement for someone who had earlier used the example of Haiti, and the Clinton administration’s conditional ending of the proxy war against the popular movements there, to justify his support for ‘humanitarian intervention’.
Little in all this could not have come from the mouth or pen of a Bush administration flack, modifying and rephrasing the anticommunist bromides of the 1980s counterrevolution in Central America. Traces of Hitchens’s old leftism resurfaced at moments, particularly following the credit crunch. But by that point Hitchens’s nationalism was immovable, and he could not help but see in the miraculous achievements of America’s imperialist armies a counterpoint to the decrepitude of its domestic institutions. Any critique implied in this stance is more akin to Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism than to Das Kapital.
Hitchens’s claim to have gone beyond the valences of left and right, to have no ideological affiliation, was thus facile. Nor can the claim be rescued simply by referring to Hitchens’s refusal to repudiate his past or his tendency to opportunistically strip-mine the cynosures of his old faith in order to defend his new alignments in the conjuncture of the ‘war on terror’. It is typical of left–right defectors to claim that they bear witness to a truer realisation of their old values in a more sustainable context. And, in this as in many other respects, Hitchens was predictable as hell.
A BRIEF EXCURSUS ON APOSTASY
Three great waves of left–right defection occurred in the twentieth century. The first was during and after World War I and the Russian Revolution. Its major sites were in western Europe, as the continent’s socialists capitulated to an imperialist war that they were sworn to oppose. Not every socialist who joined the nationalist frenzies gravitated to the right, but a minority did. Among the prizefighters of this wave of anticommunist reaction were Gustave Hervé in France, the hysterical antimilitarist who had become a ‘national socialist’; Benito Mussolini in Italy, the syndicalist who had turned into a pioneer of fascism; and John Spargo in the United States, the Hyndmanite socialist who proceeded gradually through Bernsteinian revisionism, Christian socialism, and Wilsonian anticommunism, before supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and concluding his life as a supporter of Barry Goldwater.23
The second and third were at two pivotal moments of the Cold War, with their