I'm with Chomsky and Cockburn on the war, but I think Nathan raises excellent points. I know several progressives who quietly but passionately support the Afghan war and who bite their tongues when anti-war lefties (like me) monopolize the table talk. These are the kind of people who identified with Hitchens after 9/11 and who may well now drift away from The Nation and other left venues. That is a loss, and we should not be happy about it.
The alternative to war--an international police action under strict U.N. supervision- was a viable one that would have worked better than unilateral U.S. action. Most of my anti-war colleagues support this alternative, but you have to drag it out of them. Meanwhile, they launch a verbal barrage of left boilerplate at anyone who supports the war. If I meet one more left drone from the International Stalinist (oh, sorry, "Trotskyist") Organization, I'm going to strangle him.
Stephen Shalom of Z has attempted to engage pro-war lefties in honest dialogue. (By the way, for all you Z-bashers out there, Z and Shalom have done a better job than The Nation and Richard [If it's Tuesday, this must be a just war"] Falk at grappling with 9/11.) But he's an exception.
Hitchens is important because he gave many of us our political education, he's a magnificent writer, and he makes you confront your prejudices and presumptions. It is heartbreaking to watch him move to the right. Unfortunately, he's taking a lot of people with him.
From: "Wojtek Sokolowski" <sokol at jhu.edu>
> The Hitch thread has been dominating this post for
several days. Can
anyone explain to me what is so fascinating about
celebrities? I though
that who's who and who did what is the domain of
tabloids.
>
> wojtek
Aside from the fact that a number of folks on the list know Hitchens-- so nothing is more fascinating than a celebrity you know and can gossip about first hand - we have the added element of apostacy and defection. Whether Hitchens will move the whole spectrum to a Horowitz-style position is interesting although I think unlikely. He didn't have the partisanship on the left to become a lapdog on the Right.
But the fact is that Hitchens departure from the Nation, like any political break, does emphasize fracture points in the political world. A lot of folks on the Left and this list have gone out of their way to not only disagree with progressives who thought Milosevic's, the Taliban's and Hussein's thuggery were bad enough to deserve intervention, but have read them out of the left altogether.
I talked to a nice young woman about 26 years old the other night who spends her every waking hour working with unions and working to elect progressives through the Working Families Party. She met a prominent member of this list a few years ago and found herself dismissed as an "imperialist" barely worth talking to because she supported intervention in Kosovo-- note she was not talking abstractly but had lived in Kosovo in the mid-90s and saw the pain of the population first hand. She had been a member of DSA but, along with other experiences, this dismissal and issue has left her a little bit disheartened by dealing with what is perceived as "the left."
It's one thing for folks to trash me as a cruise missile liberal or whatever, since a bit of rough-and-tumble with contemporaries is par for the course, but it really bothers me that young activists are attacked this way.
Hitchens is being both personally high-handed but also reacting to the high-handed ideological litmus testing around the left on these issues. It's a bad situation and while Hitchens is a poor poster child for the problem, his exit from what he sees as his progressive home parallels many others alienation from it.
-- Nathan Newman
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