Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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the United Kingdom and making off for the United States – a surrogate patria, so far as Hitchens was concerned, and a more promising prospect for a talented writer.
A COMPOUND IDENTITY: AMERICAN AND JEWISH QUESTIONS
Hitchens had been, before he joined the International Socialists, what he called a ‘Left Social Democrat (or “LSD” in the jargon of the movement)’.25 This, roughly speaking, is the position to which he reverted after leaving amid the backwash of the revolutionary upsurge of 1968. But the state of social democracy was dire, its left was weaker than ever, and Hitchens had a troubling feeling that Thatcher might have a point. Yet if he did not have much faith in the British left, he was increasingly interested in two other, larger political canvases: Third World revolutionary movements, and the United States, to which he emigrated. Hitchens’s brief fondness for Saddam – ‘the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser’ – was of a piece with the former but so was his far more enduring interest in the issue of Cyprus.26
In his early years in America, Hitchens seemed to have moved slightly to the left, barring the brief expostulation of patriotic bullishness over the Falklands/Malvinas. Partly, this may reflect the milieu upon which he was initially dependent – friends such as Alexander Cockburn provided Hitchens’s entrées to the New York scene, while his colleagues at the Nation were unlikely to be susceptible to any pleading for Mrs Thatcher. But his focus on international struggles also gave him a strong position from which to assail the Reaganites, even if he had no enthusiasm for the Democrats.
D. D. Guttenplan, a correspondent at the Nation who knew Hitchens well through the 1980s, recalls that when Hitchens migrated to the United States and began working at the Nation, he ‘came across as a left internationalist, someone for whom liberation movements were much more important than the internal politics of any country, certainly the US, where he was deeply uninterested in American politics’. Mike Davis had a similar recollection of Hitchens in the 1990s, as ‘a charming and bighearted guy’ who ‘had a tendency to develop profound emotional attachments to third world groups, particularly the Cypriots and the Kurds, and I think that eventually blinded him to the reality of American wars’.27
Yet, if Hitchens’s interest in domestic politics was limited, his early writing on US foreign policy did not substantially deviate from an anti-imperialist position. Indeed, he consistently drew a direct relationship between the US invasion of Vietnam and the proxy wars in Central America. But ascending the steep career slope in US media circles also encouraged Hitchens’s propensity for ingratiating himself with the chattering class. Guttenplan recalls:
I remember in ’88, I was writing a media column for New York Newsday, and there was a fake award which Christopher organised for journalists in Washington called the Osric Award, for the most suck-up journalists. It was a roll-call of shame. They had an awards dinner, and I was invited to report on it … And it was a kind of Washington snark-fest. Most of the people there were vaguely liberal, left-of-centre, but it was much more about attitude than politics. And Christopher was really in his element. You could tell that all these people looked up to him, and thought he was just a swell fellow. I remember thinking, ‘This is very clever self- promotion.’ If you get publicity for being the person who denounces other people, then you get a kind of power.28
In the summer of 1988 Hitchens brought the tidings to his reading public that he was Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.
‘I was pleased’, he said, ‘to find that I was pleased.’ Perhaps Lesley Hazleton erred on an uncharitable interpretation of this by suggesting that he obviously expected another response. But let us recall what he had said about his mother. She was the daughter of Dorothy Levin, who in turn was the daughter of Lionel Levin, who had married the daughter of a Mr Nathaniel Blumenthal, a nineteenth–century Jewish refugee from Poland who had ‘married out’ but nonetheless raised all his children in the Orthodox manner. This was the basis for Hitchens’s claim to Jewish descent. But according to Hitchens, his mother had attempted ‘to “pass” as English’ in order to avoid being the subject of anti-Semitism. The invocation of the concept of racial passing in this context is odd. By implication his mother was not English, because she was Jewish; thus to be English was to be white and Christian. Ironically, Hitchens, in describing his mother’s dilemma, performed the racialising gesture that had victimised his grandparents and forced his mother to disavow her lineage.29
Moreover, Hitchens had a tendency, particularly in his later writing, to speak of the ‘Jewish people’ as if they were all implicated in the state of Israel. For example, in the context of a fairly standard argument against Zionism, he added: ‘A sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning.’30 Of course, this is not anti-Semitism in its most toxic sense. But it does remind one that philo-Semitism is a not-too-distant cousin of anti-Semitism (particularly in England). And, when read in conjunction with his critique of Said (see Chapter 2), it does suggest that the latter had a point when he said that Orientalism and anti-Semitism are joined at the hip.31 Further, an unavoidable aspect of this discovery must be Hitchens’s sense of how it would affect his career.
‘When I read that piece in Grand Street’, Guttenplan recalled,
I remember calling Christopher up and saying, ‘Welcome to the club.’ But I also remember thinking, when it came out, two things. One was ‘Oh, that’s useful because Christopher has always been very pro- Palestinian, and much more forthrightly pro-Palestinian than any other non-Palestinian in the US.’ And he had edited that collection with Edward Said. And I thought, ‘This will make it harder to accuse him of being an anti-Semite.’
I must say I never thought of him as being an anti-Semite, he always struck me as being very scrupulous in his politics. On the other hand, I knew he was friends with a lot of the New Republic people. And I thought, ‘Well, this is convenient, because it will help him with the New Republic people, because a certain amount of eccentricity is tolerated among Jews. That will help him with people like Michael Kinsley and Leon Wieseltier.’ And I think to a certain extent that happened. I don’t think it happened just because he discovered he was Jewish, but he was taken up by the New Republic for a time. Christopher wrote for the New Republic and went to their parties.32
In a sense, then, the Brit abroad had just acquired a new dimension to his identity, one that may have slightly taken the edge off his anti- Zionism. And it may have made his provocations over the Holocaust slightly less toxic for his audience. One of Hitchens’s brief passions in the late 1990s was the defence of the pro-Nazi historian David Irving and, increasingly, Hitchens’s sympathy with Irving’s view that the numbers of those murdered in the Holocaust have been grossly inflated. Hitchens told anyone who would listen that it would be wrong to dismiss Irving’s work, for there was a real issue at stake. To Tariq Ali and quite a few others, Hitchens divulged an interest in making a film about the subject.
He came to me and said, ‘Tariq, do you think six million Jews were killed in the Judeocide?’ I said to him, ‘What difference does it make?’ And he said, ‘You’re wrong to poo-poo this – the figures don’t add up. If it was 4.3 million Jews who were killed, we should use that figure.’33
It was not only the figures that Hitchens found dubious but, following Irving, the details of what the Nazis are alleged to have done. Dennis Perrin says Hitchens dismissed ‘the concept of lamp shades [made of human skin] and human soap in the Nazi camps as Stalinist propaganda’.34
All three issues have a margin of legitimate historical controversy. At the very least, there is disagreement about precisely how many Jews the Nazis murdered and certainly doubt about the extent of human soap-making. But what is suggestive is that Hitchens seems to have believed that he could not engage with the questions from within mainstream historical scholarship and thus needed to hear them from a scholar with a weak spot for Hitlerism. This was, to be fair to Hitchens, before the conclusion of the trial in which Irving was taken to pieces over his fabrications – a libel case he had brought against the historian Deborah Lipstadt because of her characterisation of him as a ‘Holocaust denier’. It was also therefore before the publication of the historian Richard J. Evans’s