Fw: [DemocraticLeft] Ian Williams on Hitchens on Orwell--brilliant

Stuart323 at aol.com Stuart323 at aol.com
Thu Nov 28 13:56:26 PST 2002


To: DemocraticLeft at yahoogroups.com

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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