Archive for April 27th, 2008

If there’s anything that still identifies Hitchens as a man of the radical left, it’s that he’s willing to take this kind of thinking to its logical conclusion; to declare there is a map of positions that everyone should have navigated correctly since the fall of the wall. “Wanna hear?” Certainly I want to hear. What he outlines is a checklist for being right—as a leftist—over all the big international issues since 1989: “First, everyone should have welcomed the fall of the Berlin wall and the overthrow of Ceausescu… As they should have been pro-Tiananmen crowd earlier that year. That’s the baseline.” Next, he continues, everyone on the left should have defended Salman Rushdie, “unequivocally, against the ayatollah.” The left should then have perceived that the “semi-utopian, Fukuyama, end-of-history stuff” was an illusion, and that the age of the totalitarian state hadn’t stopped. And when Milosevic invaded Bosnia, and Saddam invaded Kuwait, they should have been “not just for stopping that, but for overthrowing the people responsible… One has to be opposed to totalitarianism and its racist and theocratic version in particular. And the inescapable thing that lies behind all this is that it’s bound to make 1960s people reconsider their view of the US… anyone who hasn’t reconsidered it at all… I have no respect for.“

Aus der Titelstory des Prospect Magazine für Mai 2008: “Christopher Hitchens” by Alexander Linklater.