>This is of course pathetic and contemptible; Hitch is
>now devouring his own rotting body parts to live. It
>is very sad. But the rest of the piece here cited is
>both hateful and stupid. I believe that in very short
>order, really no more than a year, Hitch has
>recapitulated and intensified David Horowitz's slower
>self-immolation.
As Hitch himself wrote in his November 7, 1987, Nation column on the Horowitz-Collier Second Thoughts conference:
>David Horowitz and Peter Collier, former editors of Ramparts, have
>come all the way from pink Pampers through Black Panthers to
>one-dimensional Reaganism. With a bit of effort, they could succeed
>in their current modest ambition, which is to become quite nasty.
>They make a good fit with the diagnosis offered by Isaac Deutscher
>in his 1950 review of The God That Failed. Speaking of a certain
>kind of former Communist, Deutscher wrote:
>
><block>
>He is haunted by a vague sense that he has betrayed either his
>former ideals or the ideals of bourgeois society; like Koestler, he
>may even have an ambivalent notion that he has betrayed both. He
>then tries to suppress his sense of guilt and uncertainty, or to
>camouflage it by a show of *extraordinary certitude and frantic
>aggressiveness*. He insists that the world should recognise his
>uneasy conscience as the clearest conscience of all. [Emphasis
>added.]
></block>
[...]
>But the absurdity of the HC-R faction doesn't necessarily define it
>as innocuous. There will be further spasms of lunacy down the road,
>and fresh occasions for the paranoid style to express itself. As
>Deutscher put it so aptly in speaking of the penitent:
>
><block>
>His former illusion at least implied a positive ideal His
>disillusionment is utterly negative. His role is therefore
>intellectually and politically barren. He advances bravely in the
>front rank of every witch-hunt. His blind hatred of his former ideal
>is leaven to contemporary conservatism.
></block>