From: Stuart323 at aol.com
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 09:12:49 EST
Subject:[DemocraticLeft] Ian Williams on Hitchens on Orwell--brilliant
Why Hitchens Matters By Ian Williams In These Times
http://www.inthesetimes.org/issue/27/02/culture1.shtml
Christopher Hitchens explains Why Orwell Matters, and does so with feeling.
One can see that he identifies strongly with his countryman, the socialist
daring to stand up against doublethink and prepared to think and speak
thoughtcrime against the orthodox. The identification is not totally
misplaced. The would-be Big Brothers on the left have indeed vilified
Hitchens for several years now for daring to question the lines they laid
down on. The interesting question, made even more topical by his recent
defection from The Nation, is whether Hitchens himself has broken under this
intellectual torture and deserted the cause of a humane and democratic
socialism.
An earlier generation on the left used Israel as their excuse to defect and
become neoconservative: There are some disturbing indications that Hitchens’
disillusion with some of the left has him veering toward Israel, from his
recent comments that one of the reasons for supporting the Bush drang nach
Baghdad is that it would cut off support for some of the more thuggish
elements around Arafat. This may be true, but the most thuggish elements
around Arafat at the moment are Sharon and his ilk.
In 1984, Goldstein’s heretical text read: “In the general hardening of
outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long
abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years—imprisonment without trial,
the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract
confessions, the use of hostages, and deportation of whole populations—not
only became common again, but tolerated and even defended by people who
considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
Orwell wrote this in the aftermath of Spain, Manchuria and World War II, and
while Stalin continued to use the techniques he had perfected at home to
seize Eastern Europe. The horrifying thing about the turn of the millennium
is that there are still apologists for all these practices and more.
They span the whole traditional political spectrum. On the establishment
side, there has been toleration for death squads in Central and Latin
America; on the left, apologetics for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and
users of poison gas in Iraq. The Khmer Rouge found support from both the
left and the right as a stick to beat the Soviets and Vietnamese; while
recently both right isolationists and alleged left anti-imperialists found
common cause in defending Slobodan Milosevic.
Orwell would have berated them all— just as Hitchens has honorably done,
too, although with an increasing intemperance that hints at a shared
polemical heritage with his detractors.
--------------
On reading Hitchens’ defense, my first reaction was almost “why bother,”
since the direction and motivation of Orwell’s detractors is so clear. In
any event, Hitchens correctly shows that Orwell matters because he was so
accurate in his depiction of so many of the people who are now his
detractors and, one regrets to say, even some who would see themselves as
his supporters.
After the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party confirmed what Orwell
and others had said about Stalin, leading British Communist theoretician R.
Palme Dutt was asked why he had not mentioned these details in his constant
praise of the alleged socialism of the USSR. “I never said there were no
spots on the sun,” he replied.
You can see why such people hate Orwell for depicting just how in reality
the sun was eclipsed with mass terror. He was never forgiven for being so
accurate about the nature of totalitarianism even when it donned a red fig
leaf. Hitchens robustly defends the “List,” a catalogue of people who Orwell
thought were not suitable writers to be employed by a British Social
Democratic government agency, which brought some of the Big Fraternity to
apoplexy.
If anything, Hitchens understates the defense here. Orwell escaped from
Spain with the KGB on his tail; other independent socialists were not so
lucky. Stalin was an ally of Hitler for two years of war, during which
German Communists and socialists met their end. Victory in Eastern Europe
led to a purge of socialists across the region—and people are angry that
Orwell compiled a list of fellow travelers, most of whom would, on the
evidence of their previous work, have found excuses for his liquidation if
he had been late leaving Spain!
Indeed, there are portions of the book where one feels the need to spring to
the defense of Orwell against Hitchens, such as the persistent insinuation
that Orwell was a Trotskyist, whether he knew it or not, and that his ire
was reserved for “Stalinism.” In fact, Orwell called it “Communism” and, as
Hitchens himself admits, saw the line of succession from Lenin and Trotsky
to Stalin. In Animal Farm, Lenin and Trotsky are rolled into one exiled pig
for just that reason. Hitchens quotes Orwell as feeling that “something
like” the purges was “implicit in Bolshevist rule.”
There is a conflict here between Hitchens’ intellectual honesty and his
nostalgia for Trotsky, whose record while in power in the Soviet Union
showed no signs of overly deep attachment to democracy or human rights.
Hitchens’ introduction claims that the three great subjects of the 20th
century were fascism, imperialism and “Stalinism.” In fact, looking at
Orwell’s work, the one subject is totalitarianism, which encompasses clogged
rivers in Rwanda, death squads in Central America—and Leninism in all its
forms.
But why go on about Trotskyism in 57 varieties? Well, there are two reasons.
One is that I suspect Hitchens’ residual adherence to it has distorted some
of his analysis of where Orwell stands in the socialist tradition. While he
establishes firmly that Orwell is in that tradition, and remained so until
he died, Hitchens underestimates the homegrown influences on Orwell.
Throughout the ’30s, the large cooperative movement, and even some of the
unions in Britain, considered the dangers of state control and
centralization before Hayek ever put pen to paper on the subject.
Hitchens mentions the Independent Labour Party, which was a Marxist-leaning
but non-Leninist body with its own traditions of activism and militancy. It
was Orwell’s political home until it and he rejoined the Labour Party, which
he supported even in government. It is fashionable among many on the
American left to mock the achievements of British Labour. But when the
American left builds large unions committed to socialism, has legislated
universal health care, pretty much free education at all levels, and the
type of social benefits that remain in Britain even after Thatcher, maybe
their mockery will have more substance.
The other reason for dwelling on Hitchens’ roots has nothing to do with
Orwell. In the Troskyist/Leninist milieu where Hitchens has spent so many
years, the polemical approach takes no prisoners. Luckily, Trotsky’s
followers have not had the power of life and death for some time. The reason
for that is the same reason we should rejoice that it is so. The concept of
“thoughtcrime” in active use has meant that expulsions or splits afflict any
section of the Fourth International whose membership looms much above the
high three figures. Every week is “Hate Week” in the sects.
In his enjoyable and generally accurate literary eviscerations of the likes
of Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa, Hitchens shows few signs
of human sympathy. This is most un-Orwellian. We almost like O’Brien in
1984, and we feel for the apparatchiks who do Big Brother’s work. Hitchens
himself shows that Orwell went out of his way to defend and maintain
friendly relations with people he disagreed with, sometimes profoundly.
My worry is that Hitchens’ time in the Fourth International dimension has
affected his sense of relativity so that the constant ad-hominem attacks on
him, which are indeed often of the specious sort leveled at Orwell, may have
driven him into a political form of “synecdochism”—taking the part for the
whole. The would-be Big Brotherhood who have reviled him may manufacture
more vitriol than the real left, but they do not represent it. I suspect
that a majority of Nation readers might actually agree with him most of the
time.
Hitchens is right about the nature of the Iraqi regime, but I’d like to see
a little more ambivalence from him about signing up for the obsessive
crusade against it. Quite what motivates the Bush hawks’ quasi-theological
obsession with Iraq is a mystery to most observers—but looking at the
personnel, from Sharon to Rumsfeld, surely no one believes that concern for
the Iraqi people or the spread of democracy is one of their motives.
I invite Hitchens to read his own book, where he praises Orwell for his
realization that there was no facile analogy with appeasement when he
resisted suggestions for a quick war against Stalin’s Russia. With Animal
Farm already out, and 1984 in preparation, he points out that Orwell opposed
what could have been a successful—if bloody—attempt to overthrow a
tyrannical evil regime guilty of monstrous crimes against its own people and
its neighbors.
The left needs contrarians: It doesn’t need neo-neocons while the original
breed have so much power in the White House. So I hope Hitchens sticks
around. Orwell did.
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