> From: Jim Beha
> To: American Constitution Society at NYU Law
> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 15:32:19 -0500
> Subject: Hitchens interview
> It's been brought to my attention by a couple of people that the
> Christopher Hitchens interview I forwarded earlier is only available
> to subscribers to the Atlantic. If you're interested, I've pasted the
> text below.
> Regards,
> JJB
>
> The hostility toward Christopher Hitchens from certain members of the
> political left is presently immeasurable. The writer and activist
> Tariq Ali has called him a "vile replica" of his former self.
> Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation—a position Hitchens
> himself held until he quit in 2002—has accused him of "frothing
> crudity." The writer Dennis Perrin has published an "obituary" of his
> former mentor in radical politics. And the leftist critic George
> Scialabba has written that Hitchens has been making an "egregious ass
> of himself."
>
> What has made Hitchens—the journalist, critic, lecturer, and
> self-proclaimed "contrarian"—into the object of such vociferous scorn
> is his muscular support for the war in Iraq. Soon after September 11,
> with the Pentagon (not far from his Washington home) in ruins,
> Hitchens became arguably the most prominent American journalistic
> opponent of Saddam's regime. And since that time he has focused the
> bulk of his famously voluminous energy on making the legal, moral, and
> political case for war. Coming from a mainstay of the radical press,
> this turn has been perceived by some as apostasy and by others as
> symbolic of the ideological differences that currently divide the
> American left—and gallons of ink have therefore been spilled in an
> attempt to analyze the political "defection" of Christopher Hitchens.
>
> In one sense, the Hitchens-watchers see a great deal more
> discontinuity than actually exists. In 1989, when the Ayatollah
> Khomeini sentenced Hitchens's close friend Salman Rushdie to death,
> Hitchens became finely attuned to, and repulsed by, Islamic
> fundamentalism. He was a supporter of the American bombing of Serbia,
> in 1999, when many on the left opposed it, and of the idea that the
> United States military could be a force for positive change. Most
> fundamentally, Hitchens has had a long-stated and intense hatred for
> organized religion—and for unorganized religion as well—an aspect of
> his personality that many commentators miss, but one that plays a
> central part in his political worldview. September 11 gave focus to
> these already present convictions.
>
> In another sense, however, there has been an obvious shift in the
> nature of Hitchens's discourse. Though his work remains as biting, as
> committed to Enlightenment ideals, and as elegant as ever, it has also
> become decidedly and self-consciously single-minded. During the run-up
> to the 2004 election, Hitchens proudly declared himself a "one-issue"
> voter. That issue was Iraq, and his obvious scorn for those who
> opposed military intervention. Very little has seeped through this new
> scrim—not critiques of economic globalization, nor of American
> imperialism, nor of the Bush Administration's evasiveness and
> mendacity. And these conspicuous absences have lent critics of
> Hitchens's work a great deal of fuel, and their criticisms a
> noticeable, often condescending, anger.
>
> If the Hitchens backlash and Hitchens's own combativeness are in part
> emblematic of the riven state of leftist politics, they have also
> served to drown out a great deal of Hitchens's other work. Though he
> is first and foremost a political writer—well-known for his polemics
> on Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Mother Teresa—Hitchens is also
> an accomplished literary critic (he is a reviewer for this magazine,
> among other publications). It is a role the eclipse of which he
> sometimes laments. But not too loudly. With Hitchens there are always
> more pressing things to shout about, and very little into which
> politics does not enter.
>
> I spoke with Hitchens by phone on December 20 on the occasion of the
> publication of his latest book, a collection of essays and reviews
> titled Love, Poverty, and War.
>
> —Daniel Smith
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> Christopher Hitchens
>
> I have several subjects I want to ask you about—for example, Mayor
> Bloomberg, politics, God. But first I want to ask you about Mayor
> Bloomberg playing God. In a Vanity Fair essay that's reprinted in this
> volume, you call New York a "nanny state." More pointedly you call
> Bloomberg a "picknose control freak." Are your complaints regarding
> New York politics rooted in the city's recent smoking ban, or are they
> based on a broader complaint about mayoral policies?
>
> In the essay you're talking about I accuse Bloomberg of "penis envy"
> for Rudy Giuliani and the former New York police chief William
> Bratton, both of whom made a point about zero tolerance in the matter
> of crime and delinquency. Bloomberg hoping, I think, to gain some
> reputation, applied that attitude to behaviors that are not really
> antisocial—old people feeding pigeons, for example, or people sitting
> on milk crates on the sidewalk, or standing outside their own place of
> employment. Those policies demonstrate a mentality of insecurity and
> ambition and pseudo-zeal. But undoubtedly you're right. The thing that
> more than symbolizes Bloomberg for me is the ban on smoking. It's
> moved a sensible aim—namely, the protection of nonsmokers from
> smoke—into behavior modification.
>
> At one point, for instance, Bloomberg actually sent police around to
> the Vanity Fair offices, on what must have been a tip-off from someone
> in the building, to stop [Editor-in-chief] Graydon Carter and I from
> having a cigarette. At a later time they came when Graydon was on
> vacation because on his unoccupied desk, in his empty office, was a
> receptacle that might have been usable for an ashtray. Now, this is
> the sort of thing one laughs about. But if they'd had cops to spare
> for this sort of thing, and if they're going to rely on anonymous
> informers and do this to people who aren't even present, then it
> doesn't take much alteration to that anecdote to make it sound rather
> nasty. You tip things just a little further and you're living in a
> very unpleasant country.
>
> A lesser objection I have is simply that it makes bar owners and
> bartenders and waiters into de facto enforcers of the law. The law
> inverts the relationship between host and guest. It's a small thing,
> but it has kind of spoiled New York for me. I went out to a restaurant
> recently in Union Square—it was a very cold day, but my friends and I
> decided we would sit outside anyway so that we could have a smoke and
> not bother anybody. They said, "You can't do that." Why not? "Because
> you're underneath an awning. We have a table that's completely
> unprotected from the weather, just outside the awning. You can sit
> there if you like." And this all occurred before they told us what the
> specials were! Now, if you can't put up a shingle that says, "This is
> McShane's Old Irish Lodge, and if you don't like cigarette smoke you
> can stay the fuck out of my bar," then something essential about the
> whole idea of New York is gone.
>
> But wasn't it Mayor Giuliani who introduced that authoritarian
> atmosphere into the city?
>
> Yes, but he had the justification of law and order. Or at least what
> he did had an aura of defensibility. Bloomberg's is simply
> state-enforced behavior modification. I'm appalled by that. The whole
> point of moving to New York used to be that there wasn't anyone
> saying, "Don't wear this," or "Don't smoke that." It was nobody's
> business.
>
> In general I've found that over the past few years what you might call
> libertarian issues mean more to me. Something has gone wrong with the
> liberal mentality. What used to be diversity, or could claim to be,
> has mutated into conformism in a rather sinister way.
>
> The way you're speaking about the New York smoking ban as
> government-sponsored behavior modification seems very much in line
> with your writings about totalitarian states. But I'm tempted first to
> ask whether you think the Bush Administration has anything to do with
> a wider undercutting of libertarian concerns.
>
> The Republican coalition appears to have created a new political
> constituency that's made up of quite a number of free-market
> libertarian types. Many of those people were anti-authoritarian types
> in the sixties, and they now make up part of the new right. Another
> part of the new right is made up of moralists, and another—as
> always—is made up of law-and-order types. (Some members of that third
> category have been attracted to it as a result of jihadism.) But there
> the problem is the willingness of people to surrender their rights
> rather than the state's eagerness to take them away.
>
> So you don't put any stock in the contention that the Bush
> Administration has watered down civil rights in the name of protecting
> America?
>
> The antiwar left made a huge thing about saying that Bush ignored too
> many warnings before September 11. But from the way they've reacted
> since, one would presume that they would have protested if he had
> taken the steps necessary to forestall the problem. I think what
> everyone ought to do at the basic minimum here is admit that there are
> contradictions in their position.
>
> I recently wrote a review in The New York Times of professor Geoffrey
> Stone's book, Perilous Times, about free speech in wartime. His book
> shows, among other things, that a lot of the liberal panic is just
> that, because wartime incursions into free speech never last very
> long. Very often they are repealed in such a way that one has more
> freedoms than one had before, not less. There hasn't been a speech
> prosecution in a time of war in the U.S. for a very long time now, and
> not one since September 11. The precedents that were established in
> the sixties with the antiwar movement would be very, very hard to
> overturn. The presumption now is that you can say whatever you like in
> wartime. That was not the case at all, for example, in the thirties.
>
> But there is no foreseeable end to this particular war.
>
> Once it's defined as terrorism that's true. But I'm against defining
> it as a war on terrorism. And I also insist that the most oppressive
> piece of legislation, the one under which most of the more arbitrary
> prosecutions have occurred, is the Clinton Administration's so-called
> Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which, among other
> things, put capital punishment on the fast track so as to shorten the
> appeals procedure. It led to a terrible speedup of executions. That
> very oppressive piece of legislation was done merely in response to
> the Oklahoma City bombing. So what I said in my review of the Stone
> book is that it ought to be a principle that no legislation should be
> passed within six months of any atrocity.
>
> Staying with Iraq and your support of the war there, what about other
> regimes that clearly pose a risk to the United States? North Korea,
> for one. How do you apply the logic of regime change in Iraq to the
> rest of the world?
>
> North Korea has threatened the invasion of South Korea; it's starving
> its own people to death; it's repeatedly caught sponsoring
> international terrorism; and it's obviously violating the
> Non-Proliferation Treaty. But North Korea has us in a stranglehold
> that Saddam didn't. We've let things get to the point where North
> Korea can—and might, given what we know of the nature of its
> regime—destroy the capital city of South Korea if we make a move
> against it. If we were an imperialist state we wouldn't give a shit
> about that. We'd just say, It's in our interest if the North Korean
> regime ceases to exist—too bad if South Korea ends up getting blown
> up. But we can't do that.
>
> So essentially it's a military calculation?
>
> Yes. The calculation made by the Administration—in my opinion, quite
> rightly—was that we're not going to let Saddam Hussein get to the
> point where he could say, like Kim Jong Il, "Come and get me if you'd
> like, but look what I've got." Of course, Saddam was continually
> trying to get into that position.
>
> Does your belief in the validity of the military effort in Iraq pose
> any problem to your belief in the importance of the military effort in
> Afghanistan? Do you think, as many people argue, that the war in Iraq
> has distracted from the military effort in Afghanistan?
>
> I've simply never heard anyone say that the job in Afghanistan needs
> more people. And it doesn't look as if it does. I mean, the Taliban
> and al-Qaeda forces in Afghanistan are totally negligible militarily.
> It's a police operation. Afghanistan is now run by NATO. It's the
> strongest military alliance in the history of the world. That's the
> first thing. The second is that it would have been very unwise to say
> in advance that, "Given our engagement in Afghanistan, alas we are
> unable to do anything about Iraq." I don't think that's exactly what
> one should have been telling Saddam Hussein. Many people seem to think
> now that there was no threat of weaponry or terrorism from that
> quarter. I regard that belief as utterly fantastic. Because I'm an old
> left-sectarian street fighter, I happen to remember that most of the
> people who are saying this are the same people who were not in favor
> of invading Afghanistan either. They said it would be a quagmire like
> Vietnam and a graveyard of ambition as it was for Russia and Britain.
> I remember thinking that was nonsense at the time. Everyone now says
> that of course they thought all along that military action in
> Afghanistan would be great. No, they didn't! They hope that people
> will forget. They hope in vain in my case. I will never let them
> forget what they said.
>
> I know you won't. But setting aside whatever one believes about the
> military rectitude of the war in Iraq, what about the argument, which
> seems well-founded, that it has increased opportunities for terrorism
> in Iraq?
>
> Well, that's based on the assumption that al-Qaeda is in itself a
> response to the sins of omission or commission by the West. That's not
> true. The Administration had to find a legal and international
> justification for kicking out a keystone regime in the Middle East in
> order to alter the balance of power in the Muslim world. It needed to
> be done. But one couldn't just say, "Well, after an attack like
> September 11 we're going to have to alter the balance of power in the
> region." I wouldn't have minded if they had said that, but if you're
> going to go to the UN, you have to phrase it as if you're talking
> about something else. But let's just recognize, without being too
> Straussian or Machiavellian, that all politics is a bit like that. I
> do not believe, for example, that the First World War was declared
> because of the British belief that Belgian neutrality should be
> guaranteed. I don't think so.
>
> But my question was about the success of the occupation, about the
> so-called liberation of Iraq. In recent weeks, the attacks on the
> Administration have been growing in this regard. Do you think the
> occupation is working?
>
> The forces are in a position where they could withdraw if they wished,
> which is an unusual position for an occupier. They could say to the
> Iraqis and their neighbors, "We don't have to be here if we don't want
> to. It's not absolutely essential to us. We can leave. Do you really
> want this to happen? If you unanimously say that you do, and you want
> it to happen now, we could accommodate you. Are you sure that's what
> you want?" I think the same should be said to those who characterize
> this as a debacle. I think they should be forced to ask themselves
> very carefully, Do we in any way secretly hope that the occupation
> fails? Are we aware of what that would mean?
>
> One thing we definitely know is what would happen to Iraq if the
> coalition withdrew or were defeated. I don't believe I would get any
> argument from anyone about that. And it would not just be a defeat for
> Bush and Cheney. It would not just be a defeat for the
> neoconservatives. I think it should be taken a lot more seriously than
> it is.
>
> You're referring to the possibility of defeat?
>
> Yes, and the wish on the part of many people who claim to be
> antiwar—and who therefore presumably are also humanitarians—that the
> occupation fail.
>
> I was quite shocked by the number of people in mainstream Democratic
> politics who said to me, "I don't mind what happens in Iraq so long as
> Bush is defeated" without any ambivalence. I find that very
> objectionable. I spend a good deal of my life at the moment fighting
> that mentality. It's very common here—it's extremely common in Europe.
>
> I suppose we should move on to other issues. A lot of the book—
>
> I can see we haven't gotten past the "War" section yet.
>
> No, I had a feeling that was going to happen. I probably shouldn't
> have started with "War."
>
> I'm used to it, but it makes me slightly sad.
>
> What does?
>
> That most of my interviewers want to do this, though I realize I can't
> really complain. I have advertised a certain view of the situation,
> and banged on about it a lot.
>
> I'd hoped to avoid that trap. This book, after all, is only partially
> about Iraq.
>
> Well, what I hope I was telling you was not what I thought, but how I
> thought, which is more important.
>
> Well, that's a good segue into one of the big subjects of this
> collection, which is religion. You've been trying to argue against the
> dangers of religious belief for many years. But reading this book, it
> strikes me that your critique of religion is based much more on the
> hypocrisy of its adherents—and perhaps on a sort of Enlightenment
> desire for evidence—than on the experience of faith. Do you have any
> respect for the individual who professes a more personal faith based
> on, say, the "oceanic feeling"?
>
> Well, first off, I'm not, as people sometimes claim me to be, an
> atheist. I'm an anti-theist. I think the influence of religious belief
> is horrible. Take Garry Wills, for example. I have read him with great
> profit on many subjects (and have learned from reading him and from
> disagreeing with him on quite a number of topics). But when he gets
> into writing about, say, the spirituality of St. Augustine, it becomes
> white noise. All his standards completely collapse. He's not scholarly
> about it, and he's not even expected to be. How could he know about
> St. Augustine's spirituality? But there he is writing about it, as
> though it were something we all agreed about. And what's true of him
> is true of our species in general—we are only partly rational. We do
> have the reasoning faculty, but when we abandon it for a second, the
> result is something like Garry Wills's driveling on about St.
> Augustine.
>
> Your basic objection to religion, however, seems less experiential
> than it is political. You object in this book not to individual
> belief, but to the politicization of belief.
>
> Listen, if a child tells me he's seen a ghost, I'll say, "Well, I'm
> sure you did, but I don't think I'll be able to see it myself, and I
> don't think it's really there, though I do think you must have a very
> vivid imagination." However, if a grown-up says "I've just a heard a
> voice telling me what to do," what they really mean is "I can now tell
> you what to do." That's what I don't like. What I noticed when I was a
> kid wasn't just that what the headmaster was preaching at sermon time
> was rubbish (which was easy to see), it was also that it seemed very
> important that the headmaster be able to invest his otherwise rather
> feeble authority with religious authority. In other words, I could see
> already when I was eight that religion is used to say, "You better
> listen to what I say. My power is not just of this world. I have
> divine right." That's where you have to say, "Say that again and I'll
> burn your church." That's fascism. I loathe it. And I tend to loathe
> the people who believe it, because they are making a claim on me.
>
> This is how I explained your so-called defection from the left to a
> friend recently—that in order to understand your political views one
> has to understand your views of religion.
>
> Actually, it makes my day to hear you say that. The thought that
> someone else was there to say it for me cheers me up. It means that I
> haven't wasted my time completely. I don't see how anyone who reads me
> could miss that. But they do.
>
> It seems hard to miss. You refer in the introduction to this book, for
> example, to your "cold, steely hatred" for religion.
>
> It's the root of my whole existence as a writer—to destroy the
> illusions that arise from faith. And only some of those illusions are
> religious, which means that I'll never be out of business. There'll
> always be work to do.
>
> And yet, in an exchange with Jim Fallows elsewhere on this Web site
> you complain about being called an "attack dog." Is that an epithet
> that continues to bother you?
>
> I guess I shouldn't really complain, because at least it means I have
> a reputation for something. It must be the same if you're a
> politician—you make one remark and it ends up being the thing that
> people remember about you. I suppose Dan Quayle must have to force
> himself to laugh along with all those people who make potato jokes.
> When people introduce me by saying something like, "This is the guy
> who said Mother Teresa is no good," I just have to suppress a sigh.
>
> I just thought one day, after I'd run into Mother Teresa in Calcutta,
> Has anyone ever taken a second look at this woman? Is it possible that
> what we believe about her isn't in fact true? And then it was just too
> easy. I couldn't believe that people had left this field to me.
>
> My book about Clinton was another case. I was writing strictly as a
> left polemicist, trying to point out to liberals, If you think this
> guy is your friend, you're setting yourself up for a terrible beating.
> I wrote that book essentially as an appeal to the left to see that
> this guy is a reactionary and a thug and that in the end he would do
> immense, lasting damage to what was left of the American liberal and
> democratic constituency. And I think I will be vindicated on that if I
> haven't been already.
>
> And Henry Kissinger ... I mean, good grief! The idea of his
> tolerability has long been—intolerable. It was right when I finally
> decided to write a book about him that I found out by accident that he
> was afraid of being prosecuted in the course of the Pinochet
> investigation. And I thought, Well, now I know how I can write it—as a
> trial document.
>
> Any closer to prosecutorial success?
>
> Oh, yes, all the time. I can say this for myself: I know that I have
> slightly inconvenienced Henry Kissinger and caused some changes in his
> schedule. And I think I may also have changed how his obituary will be
> written. He will die realizing that the obits he was once certain of
> will not be written in that way anymore. Judge Le Loire, the
> magistrate who summoned him to Paris in 2001, did so as a result of my
> book being translated into French. The authorities decided to try to
> get a hold of him for questioning, and he had to run for it. And I
> know further that he was very upset when I sued him.
>
> For calling you an anti-Semite.
>
> Yes. He actually apologized with amazing alacrity on that. It was a
> very grudging apology, but it was enough. He was made to retract his
> statement. First, through his lawyer, he said, "Okay, I promise never
> to say it again." And I said, "That's not good enough; you have to say
> you shouldn't have said it the first time."
>
> Publicly?
>
> Well, I published the correspondence. It's on my Web site. I didn't
> put an ad in The New York Times. Maybe I should have. The truth was
> that I was hoping he wouldn't apologize, that he'd say, "I'll see you
> in court." Because in court I could have produced witnesses from
> Cambodia and Cyprus and Chile and asked, "Well isn't it true that
> you're a habitual liar, a falsifier of documents, and so on?" I've
> actually been to Chile to testify in front of the judge who has just
> lifted the immunity of General Pinochet: Judge Guzman, who's a heroic
> magistrate—an ultra conservative, by the way; a member of the hard
> right in Chile, but an absolutely honest gentleman. He's lifted the
> immunity of Pinochet now and he's on the trail of the Condor cases and
> I think he also has jurisdiction in the case of the murder of Charles
> Horman. [Operation Condor was a campaign of political assassinations
> sponsored by South American governments in the 1970s; Horman was an
> American journalist murdered by the Chilean regime in 1973.] He knows
> very well that this will lead—can lead, should lead, appears to
> lead—into an inquiry into Mr. Kissinger. I've testified before this
> judge, and it's a very proud moment of my life. The second proudest
> was appearing at the request of the Vatican against the sainthood of
> Teresa.
>
> You describe that in the book. How remarkable an experience was it?
>
> It could have been more remarkable, if for example they had invited me
> to Rome and had me testify in some wonderful old building. They made
> it as banal and as grudging as they could, but they did know that they
> had to do it and that they had to listen to me. And I thought, Well,
> okay, it means that I haven't been completely wasting my time. I have
> lived to be taken seriously. These were not just balloon-puncturing,
> publicity-seeking operations, which is what's implied in the idea that
> I'm an attack dog. They were fairly well-organized reconsiderations of
> what these people have really been responsible for—such that it has
> forced several quite important review bodies to seek my testimony.
> That's not a bad thing. And I'm hoping I have a few more such
> opportunities. It would be nice to be able to go to the trials of
> Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, too.
>
> Do you find yourself channeling your energies into less polemical work
> at all as the years move on? I'm thinking especially of your review
> work for The Atlantic.
>
> Well, after the Clinton book, I realized that I'd failed to persuade
> the majority of the left. And I thought, If you argue on their terms
> and they say, "No, we don't agree," maybe you're wrong in assuming
> that you do share a point of view. I'd wondered even before that
> whether maybe I belonged in the libertarian camp. Then I did the
> Kissinger thing, which obviously a lot of people on the left
> liked—though a lot of conservatives liked it as well. And then I went
> off to write the Orwell book, which I had been wanting to do all my
> life and was finally asked to do for the centennial. When that was
> over I sort of sat down and felt very tired. Politics was losing its
> flavor for me. I decided I would take on a reading project—pick up
> something serious to read. So I decided that it was really time I read
> Marcel Proust properly. I made that my work for the whole of 2001. I
> finished it in September, wishing it had been longer. I had a vague
> idea of writing a reply to Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change
> Your Life—as if to take him up on it and say, "Here's how it has
> changed mine." But then my wife woke me up one morning—I was on the
> West Coast and she was in Washington—and told me to turn on the TV.
> And of course I saw what everyone else saw. And I realized that
> politics was back in my life. It was stupid to think I could avoid it.
> I had always been telling people you can't get out of politics—it will
> come and find you, and here's the absolute proof. And I've been doing
> that ever since.
>
> But the rest of the time I'd far rather be writing about Joyce.
>
> ---
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>
>
> --
> David Livshiz
> Symposium Editor
> Annual Survey of American Law
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