He showed a similar naïveté, I thought, the next time I came across him, in a debate with Tariq Ali, amongst others, in the Logan Hall, London, after the war on Iraq. He quaintly seemed to believe that the Bush/Cheney White House had seen the light for peace, justice and democracy that had so eluded, a generation earlier, the Nixon/Kissinger White House.
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On 16 Dec 2011, at 12:22, "Lenin's Tomb" <leninstombblog at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 16/12/2011 12:12, James Heartfield wrote:
>> Really? He was a member of the SWP then, I think, which was opposed to the war. In fact if you read over his memoirs he seems to have carried on speaking at SWP meetings for some time after he moved to America, on his visits home, and there is an indication in the memoirs that he back-dates his breach with them.
>
> I'm afraid you've been misinformed. I think you'd find the breach with the IS took place over the issue of the Portugese revolution, or at least that was the specific catalyst. That's how he seems to remember it in an old LRB article, and it's how Alex Callinicos remembers it. By the time he had moved to the United States, Callinicos' judgment is that he was a 'left social democrat'. The fact that he continued to speak at SWP meetings is not relevant. Hitchens was appearing at SWP meetings and speaking at Bookmarks right up until he capsized post-9/11.
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