Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  But I hope and believe that my advancing age has not quite shamed my youth. I have actually seen more prisons broken open, more people and territory “liberated,” and more taboos broken and censors flouted, since I let go of the idea, or at any rate the plan, of a radiant future. Those “simple” ordinary propositions, of the open society, especially when contrasted with the lethal simplifications of that society’s sworn enemies, were all I required. This wasn’t a dreary shuffle to the Right, either. It used to be that the Right made tactical excuses for friendly dictatorships, whereas now most conservatives are frantic to avoid even the appearance of doing so, and at least some on the Left can take at least some of the credit for at least some of that. It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful. One reason, then, that I would not relive my life is that one cannot be born knowing such things, but must find them out, even when they then seem bloody obvious, for oneself. If I had set out to put this on paper so as to spare you some or even any of the effort, I would be doing you an injustice.

  I began this highly selective narrative by citing Auden on the unadvisability of being born in the first place—a view from which he quickly waltzed to Plan B: make the most of the dance (or, as Dorothy Parker elsewhere phrased it, “You might as well live”). In better moments I prefer the lyrical stoicism of my friend and ally Richard Dawkins, who never loses his sense of wonder at the sheer unlikelihood of having briefly “made it” on a planet where crude extinction has held such sway, and where the chance of being conceived, let alone safely delivered, is so infinitesimal.

  When my beloved friend James Fenton came back from Indochina, having witnessed the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh and the end, both tragic and ambiguous, of a war which so many of us had regarded as a test of sheer commitment, he was somewhat shaken. The closing words of one of his most exquisite poems from that period were: “I’m afraid that all my friends are dead.” But he knew that if there were any survivors they would know how to contact him, and when some of them did, and being the conscience-determined person he was and is, he went straight back to the frontiers and the camps to see how he could be of help. The resulting poems—collected as Children in Exile—comprise an essential complement to their predecessors in Memory of War. One of the latter is titled “Prison Island.” I happen to remember the genesis of this outwardly melancholy but diamond-hard poem particularly well: we had both just been verbally and aurally assailed by a braggart dogmatist who asserted of his own sect: “The possibility of defeat does not enter our calculations.”

  This honking, tyrannical self-regard so annoyed James, and I think so much put him in mind of the deadly certainties that had brought such havoc to his Asian friends, that he could not rest until he had caught its hubris in the net of his verses. I have a poignant memory of him reading the first draft aloud to me, in the attic room where he was then lodging. One stanza in particular caught and held me, too:

  My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?

  I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your mind

  As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,

  Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.

  Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.

  Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need… More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.

  It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them. After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism. Membership in the skeptical faction or tendency is not at all a soft option. The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time, and I feel absurdly honored to be grouped in the public mind with great teachers and scholars such as Richard Dawkins (a true Balliol man if ever there was one), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded.” It is, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that’s my Hitch-22. I have already described some of the rehearsals for this war, which the relativists so plaintively call “endless”—as if it were not indeed the latest chapter of an eternal struggle—and I find that for the remainder of my days I shall be happy enough to see if I can emulate the understatement of Commander Hitchens, and to say that at least I know what I am supposed to be doing.

  Photographs

  Portrait of the author as a young man. The novel is called Soft Answers, and it proved to be second-rate.

  With Yvonne.

  The Commander.

  Yvonne.

  King and Country. The Commander (far right) welcomes the future King George to the HMS Ajax. The woman in the picture was to become the last Empress of India.

  Without any previous qualifications, I became a member of the Church of England. Malta, 1949.

  Another Hitchens against Hitler: Yvonne joins the Royal Navy.

  Nathan Blumenthal, my great-great-grandfather.

  Sarah Blumenthal.

  Nathan and Sarah.

  Great-Uncle Harry, posed as “Young England,” 1900.

  School general election, 1964. Michael Prest stands guard, while my Communist opponent Bevis Sale dominates the foreground.

  Rabble-rousing at Oxford.

  Blockading a racist hairdresser, 1968. Arrest to follow.

  My first television appearance. In this prestige quiz show, Balliol’s reputation as the college for “effortless superiority” received a near knock-out blow.

  With friend and tutor.

  Card carrying.

  In Cuba, at a work camp for young revolutionaries, 1968.

  Pursuing my studies at Oxford, 1968. (© Billett Potter, Oxford)

  On the picket line at a non-union factory.

  In Babylon, Iraq, 1975.

  In Iraq with a Ba’athist banner, 1975.

  Striking an attitude in Kurdistan with Saddam’s enemies during the first Gulf War.

  With Jalal Talabani at his mountain HQ in 1991: then the leader of a murdered and dispossessed people, and now the first-ever elected president of Iraq.

  Liberating Iraq.

  In Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz, 2003.

  Swallowing vomit while greeting General Videla of Argentina in Juan Peron’s old palace, 1977.

  In Zimbabwe, 1977.

  With the only priest I’ve ever liked, Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus.

  In the Sahara with Polisario guerrillas around a captured Moroccan tank, 1977.

  With an extremely moderate Muslim in Malaysia.

  With Sayeed Khomeini, courageous foe of his grandfather’s theocracy, in Qum, Iran, in 2006.

  With Ugandan soldiers pursuing the Lord’s Resistance Army, 2007.

  Getting to know the General: in Venezuela with Sean Penn, Douglas Brinkley, and the dictator,
October 2008.

  The Romanian Revolution, 1989.

  In Nicaragua with Vice President Sergio Ramirez, a Sandinista and novelist.

  In Paris with James Fenton and Martin Amis, 1979. (Angela Gorgas, © Angela Gorgas)

  With Angela Gorgas, shot by Martin, Paris, 1979. (Martin Amis and Angela Gorgas, © Angela Gorgas)

  With James Fenton and “The Skip.”

  With Martin at the Soames house in Hampshire, taking a break from croquet, 1977.

  Reviewing the situation with Martin in Cape Cod, 1985.

  Passing on our genes: with Louis Amis and Alexander Hitchens, Cape Cod, 1985.

  In Cyprus with Alexander.

  Shoulder to shoulder with Salman during his time in hiding: (standing) Andrew Wylie, SR, David Rieff, Your Humble Servant, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth West; (foreground) Erica Wylie, Carol Blue, and Martin Amis. (© Elizabeth West)

  On the beach with Salman, at an undisclosed location (somewhere near West Egg, c. 1992). (© Elizabeth West)

  With Ian and Martin in Uruguay near Charles Darwin’s landfall. This is where I started writing god Is Not Great.

  Famous at last: The New Yorker knows who I am. (© David Sipress/CondéNast Publications/www.cartoonbank.com)

  Advising George Bush to leave Nicaragua alone and stop trading arms for hostages in Iran, at Christopher Buckley’s wedding in 1984. Lucy Buckley and Camilla Horne appear to be enthusing with this advice-not-taken.

  With Nelson Mandela at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.

  On Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Harrison Salisbury, and Robert Conquest.

  Taking the oath of citizenship from Michael Chertoff on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, 2007. I am holding a copy of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.

  With Susan Sontag, Victor Navasky, and Carol. (Annie Leibovitz)

  With the First Lady at Sidney Blumenthal’s birthday in 1994. This was before he disgraced my other family name, and well before he became Mrs. Clinton’s muck-spreader against Barack Obama in the 2008 election.

  Speaking up for the intifadah with Edward Said at Columbia University.

  Making a documentary in Scotland.

  At last, a party of positive non-belief to which I can be fully committed. With Professors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Dr. Sam Harris, at the inaugural meeting of the “Four Horsemen” faction at my home in Washington. I look and feel flattered by the implied parity. (Photo by Josh Timonen)

  Acknowledgments

  I HAVE TRIED TO DEFRAY some of my debts of acknowledgment in these very pages, but I must not omit those who made it possible for me to set down the work in the first place. Much nonsense is talked in our day about the decay of publishing, and it will remain nonsense while people like Jonathan Karp, Colin Shepherd, Bob Castillo, Cary Goldstein and Toby Mundy have the ordering of things at houses like Twelve and Atlantic. I have been especially fortunate in boasting a friend and comrade, Steve Wasserman, as, at different times, my editor for reviews, my editor for books, and last and perhaps best of all my agent. I have to thank Robin Blackburn of the New Left Review for effecting my introduction to Steve thirty years ago, and for much else besides.

  Maciej Sikierski, the unsleeping archivist for Polish affairs at the library of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, went to uncommon trouble to assist me in tracing my families’ lineages in the arduous history and geography of his indomitable country.

  I sometimes like to think that I could have been one of those I praise in this book, who, like Victor Serge, had the intestinal fortitude to write “for the bottom drawer, and for history.” But I know damn well that without certain editors and publishers I would have drooped like a wet sock. Undying and moist thanks, then, to Paul Barker, Anthony Howard, Harold Evans and Tina Brown, Charles Wintour, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Moore, Jeremy Treglown, Sally Emerson, Peter Stothard, Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman and Hamilton Fish and Betsy Pochoda, Barbara Epstein, Michael Kelly (RIP) and James Bennett and Cullen Murphy and Ben Schwarz, David Rieff, Jon Meacham and Mark Miller, Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz and June Thomas, Lewis Lapham and Gerry Marzorati, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Inigo Thomas, Deirdre English, and Conor Hanna. All of them are heroes and heroines of the “first draft” and of the work in progress, and the readers of many other authors should not omit to thank them as warmly as I do.

  Many thanks to Windsor Mann for help on archives and photographs.

  To thank my adored father-in-law, Edwin Blue, and my delightful daughter for their expert assistance to a techno peasant would be to say the least of it.

  Impossible, though, not to make the most special and snufflingly moist noises about Graydon Carter, Aimee Bell, Walter Owen, and David Friend. It’s quite something for a writer, whose promiscuous mandate is to be interested in everything, to know that he possesses friends and backers and colleagues who are determined to give him latitude while scrutinizing every line, providing every help in the field, noticing every weakness, and enhancing every paragraph. (One short passage in this book was originally written for them.) If it were not for their intensive care and meticulous attention, I would want to call them my luck.

  ABOUT TWELVE

  TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works—that is our ultimate purpose.

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  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

  Books

  Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger

  Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies

  Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles

  Why Orwell Matters

  No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton

  Letters to a Young Contrarian

  The Trial of Henry Kissinger

  Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

  Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography

  god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

  Pamphlets

  Karl Marx and the Paris Commune

  The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish

  The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

  A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

  Collected Essays

  Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

  For the Sake of Argument

  Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere

  Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

  Collaborations

  Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)

  James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)

  Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)

  When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)

  International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)

  The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (edited)

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2010 by Christopher Hitchens

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The “Postscript” on here first appeared in Vanity Fair, November 2007.

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  First eBook Edition: June 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56896-8

  Endnotes

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