"The Thinking Man’s Leftist Denounces the Wimpy Left"

“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist,” wrote George Orwell in 1942.


Orwell, as you probably know, was a famous leftist and frequent critic of governments, but he argued that Britain’s enemies during World War II were so morally repugnant that the left’s rebellious tendencies had become obsolete. Many accused him of becoming more right wing with age, but that’s not really accurate, some would argue. Chalk it up to pragmatism, or even wisdom.

Sixty years later, think of what’s happening with a certain someone who idolizes Orwell, and whom many in the press have called Britain’s finest essayist since him. Christopher Hitchens, that wisecracking British intellectual you often see on news shows getting the best of other pundits, has a new book out titled Letters to a Young Contrarian, a paean for rational thinking, and was in the Bay Area recently for some public readings (Book Passage in Corte Madera on January 7th and Cody’s Books in Berkeley on January 11th.)

He read excerpts he’s written and answered questions freely on a variety of topics (I apologize if I didn’t get all of what he said absolute verbatim. I haven’t had a chance to read the whole book yet, but I took notes at the readings.) On his role as a mentor or “How are you such a pain in the ass all day?” he replies that it’s a box on the front page of the New York Times that energizes him. It’s a small box that says “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, which he finds insulting and wonders why more people aren’t offended by this as well. “Who are they to tell us what’s fit to print?”

On his nemesis Henry Kissinger whom he argued should be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in his last book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger: “Henry Kissinger can’t return to France because he got a summons at the Ritz in Paris regarding his role in the disappearance of five French citizens by his friend Pinochet in Chile. Perhaps he should now vacation in Laos, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor, or some other place where he has had more influence on the lives of people there. The noose around this intolerable individual is tightening. He’ll never spend a day without consulting his lawyers for the rest of his life.”

Hitchens finds it shameful that the families of Kissinger’s victims abroad have to file a lawsuit against him; that America should be the one prosecuting their former Secretary of State. On “Why you shouldn’t be religious” he said he could go into criticisms of the Pope, the Ayatollah Khomeni, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, etc., but since he was in Marin County, he’d “piss on the Dali Lama.” “The Dali Lama says he’s a god and a hereditary god at that. A double affront to reason.” Hitchens denies he’s an atheist, but calls himself an anti-theist; as he believes all religions are wrong, and feels that recent discoveries regarding DNA research and the Big Bang theory will bear this out. Speaking of religion, the events surrounding 9/11 were too late to include in Letters but Hitchens was able to discuss them at the readings. Many of his fans were surprised to hear what the famous leftist, well-known for advocating dovish policies, told them about the current war in Afghanistan.

“The war against Islamic fascism should have begun years ago,” he announced to a crowd of stunned peaceniks in Berkeley. Hitchens traced the beginning of this arguably modern movement to 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the leader of Iran, put a “fatwa” (or religious edict) on the head of British author Salmon Rushdie. The murder-for-money bounty was in response to Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses, as Khomeni claimed Rushdie insulted Islam. His fellow writers didn’t stick up for him. George Bush, the U.S. president at the time, decided not to intervene, stating, “As far as I can see no American interests are involved.”

Susan Sontag publicly noted that wasn’t the case, as Rushdie’s American wife had to go into hiding. This led someone in the crowd to ask a supposedly serious question comparing the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Rushdie to Bill Clinton’s criticism of Sister Souljah and her diatribes against white people. Hitchens responded that if that person could have seen the bullet-riddled body of The Satanic Verses Norwegian edition’s publisher, he wouldn’t be so flippant about fatwas.

A rather smarter fellow didn’t really offer a question so much as a comment on how, as someone who would consider himself aligned with the left ideologically, he’s disappointed in what Hitchens calls the ultraleft or the soft left. The same left that considers abuses of authority and human rights violations (shameful as they are) on the part of the U.S. to be as bad or worse than the drastically more severe ones of America’s enemies.
Hitchens agreed and went on to mention a few idiotic pronouncements of this sect of the left (which apparently, and ironically, has a lot in common with right-wingers like Pat Buchanan and Oliver North, both of whom warned against U.S. “imperialist” moves after 9/11.) Where to begin? Hitchens mentioned those sharp tacks at Pacifica Radio (headquarters of KPFA in Berkeley) who said the reason why the World Trade Center collapsed is because the contractors who built the Twin Towers made them too flimsy -- too flimsy to support a commercial airliner full of fuel hitting them.

Then, of course, we have film director Oliver Stone, who found 9/11 to be an offshoot of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.
Hitchens’ former friend and fellow leftist journalist Noam Chomsky was also criticized. Chomsky has expressed his feeling that 9/11 was no worse than Bill Clinton’s bombing of pharmaceutical plants in Sudan and Afghanistan, which the former president claims were believed to be terrorist training facilities of Osama bin Laden. Ironically, no one has written more criticism of this possible Clinton “Wag the Dog” scenario than Hitchens himself. However, even the fiercest critic of that 1998 bombing points out that a cruise missile attack on a possible military target (though probably a shameful opportunistic one) and the “collateral damage” that resulted from it, is indeed different than willfully cutting the throats of flight attendants and flying planes full of terrified passengers into skyscrapers full of people in the most densely populated region of a nation.

“Furthermore, anyone who blurs that distinction is a moral idiot and a political fool.” He went on to say how he has met people whose family members have been murdered in Chile as a result of the actions of Henry Kissinger and the policies of Richard Nixon. People who had relatives whose bodies were fed to pigs. People whose lives have been ruined by Yankee imperialism. And that not one of those people would have wanted to see 9/11 happen. The information age has been a thorn in the side of government repression, Hitchens asserted, and most people are smart enough to be wary of false information and urban legends circulating on the internet (i.e. “All the Jews evacuated the South Tower”, “The WTC clean-up crew was hired a month before 9/11”.)

One such rumor he feels is false and that many of us will soon see in our email inbox is from two agents of French intelligence, who claim that the U.S. knew 9/11 was going to happen. They write of John J. O’Neil, a very tough, conservative F.B.I. man who became convinced there was an al Qaeda network and was sure they were behind the first WTC bombing eight years ago. On one occasion he became distraught and drunk, leaving a briefcase in a hotel room which was later found. As a result he was fired. He later found a job, beginning work on September 9th, as head of security at the World Trade Center.

“It’s a shame these French characters are saying this about him. He was fired for a professional breach, not that he knew too much. It’s crap.”
This former Marxist but still tireless critic of big business and advocate of human rights went on to discount two other popular 9/11 conspiracy theories:

“This wouldn’t be the way to get the Unoal oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Besides, they’ve lost the contract for that. This wasn’t done just so Attorney General John Ashcroft could get wiretaps on us. I know people in the Bush administration and they would never want to relive those two horrible days again. They were just as scared and ignorant as we were.” Hitchens went on to say that the left, rather than heeding half-baked conspiracy theories, might do better to make sure Mr. Ashcroft doesn’t take his “security first” approach to civil rights too far. “Here’s what’s real, though. On September 12th, no one could fly. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, a neighbor of mine and not a desirable one at that, arranged, and the F.B.I. helped, 24 members of bin Laden’s family to, ironically, Boston’s Logan Airport, and then back to Saudi Arabia, before they could be questioned.” “After this national disaster, no one has resigned, no one has been fired, there have been no congressional inquiries.”
“They knew 90%, not the last 10% of this attack plan. The only one who infiltrated the Taliban was John Walker of Marin County.”
“When Bush said ‘We make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them’ I said ‘Impossible; is he going to include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, too?”

Though certainly no fan of the Bush administration, “Hitch” has been more impressed with the people running the war than those opposing it, and explains why:

“The U.S. and Britain waited a month before they started bombing. The anti-war people were protesting before the war even started. If the Bush administration had listened to the peace movement, and the Pakistani secret police who were telling them not to bomb on Ramadan, etc., there would have been a fundamentalist Islamic takeover of Pakistan and their nuclear arsenal.” “U.S. bombers were prohibited to hit convoys they knew had al Qaeda because they wouldn’t pass lawsuits filed against the government. This has been a success of the peace movement.”

On that note, self-satisfied smiles crept over the faces of Berkeley’s old lefties, until:

“If it was me, I would have said ‘Let’s drop the bomb. Kill them.’ The peaceniks are these bon vivants with the same dreary mantra who thought the bombing in Kosovo wouldn’t stop Milosovic.” He also said he shudders to think what would have happened if Flight 93 was full of members of the peace movement as opposed to the brave men who fought their hijackers and forced the plane into a field instead of the U.S. Capital or another densely populated area, which made some members of the audience visibly uneasy. “I never thought I’d say this. But this is the first time I can think of where the United States has actually bombed a country OUT of the Stone Age.”

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