Somewhere, the late great journalist Christopher Hitchens is seeing his wish come true. Hitchens, who died in 2011, was a leftist who tirelessly advocated for change in the Middle East, including overthrowing the mullahs and envisioning the secular Kurds having a role in the liberation of Iran and Iraq.
Hitchens was also a champion of the author Salman Rushdie, who was the target of a 1988 fatwa after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses. Hitchens was an atheist who had emerged from socialist movements in Britain, yet expressed doubt about abortion and supported the Iraq War. Hitchens never held back an opinion, but he had not arrived at that opinion in a careless way. Only Hitchens could go to the Oscars and report approvingly of a vulgar gesture an audience member made about the self-adoring nature of movie people, and in the next paragraph blast Forrest Gump, a movie loved by conservatives. Right on both counts. Hitchens also came out against the Clintons when they sent aids out to smear Monica Lewinsky, who had an affair with Bill Clinton. What liberal journalist would do the same today? They can’t even be bothered to investigate the Biden family corruption.
In a brilliant essay in the collection A Hitch in Time, Hitchens defends Rushdie, making the point that the attack against the author was fought not just by Western liberals but by plenty of artists and writers in the Muslim world. In fact, Hitchens noted, many Western elites were showing cowardice in coming to Rushdie’s defense:
It’s been remarked before, by keener minds than my own, that almost all great moments in the history of censorship and free expression have turned on the question of blasphemy. There’s a question of proportion here, and I’m sure that Rushdie himself would blush and wriggle at the implied comparison with Socrates, Jesus Christ, Galileo, Luther, Spinoza and Tyndale. Still, a phrase keeps recurring to my mind. It comes, bizarrely, from Paul Newman in The Verdict, as he mutters anxiously outside the courtroom: “There are no other cases. This is the case.” By this he plainly means to convey, not that there are no other disputes or dramas or miscarriages of justice, but that this one has become the unavoidable one, or the defining one. The acid test. The test case. The crux. In our time, those of us who unavoidably missed the opportunity to discover where we might have stood on earlier occasions of sheep-goat separation have now been offered the chance in a rather direct fashion. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is the minds of certain “Oriental” scholars and dissidents which have been swifter to recognize this than many of their self-constrained “Western” counterparts.
Bingo. While Iranian women are dancing in the streets to celebrate their newfound freedom, American and European “intellectuals” are ambivalent – or worse, rooting for the mullahs. I want to emphasize that I am not arguing that you have to agree with war or have no questions about President Trump’s foreign policy. I’m saying that when it comes to free speech and artistic expression, conservatives and liberals have both fallen short.
Readers of Hot Air have accused me, with justification, of obsessively bringing up the Brett Kavanaugh nightmare that I was involved in, yet in re-reading Hitchens and witnessing the cowardice of those who said Salmon Rushdie “had it coming” – a sentiment Hitchens finds absolutely nauseating – I relived a nasty memory of conservative editors going silent when I was under fire in 2018 and no one was speaking up. Conservative author and editor Joseph Bottum was an exception: “The treatment of@markgjudge was awful,” he tweeted, “and the failure of those who published him to defend him was among the most despicable.” Yes, it was.
I was lucky enough to have known Hitchens briefly. I was an intern at the Nation magazine in the 1980s. Hitchens was leaving the Nation to go to Harper’s, but our time overlapped for a brief period. When we met at a party he was in trouble for expressing doubt about abortion. “I don’t think feminism should contradict humanism,” he was quoted as saying. Then this: “Nobody on the left can avoid noticing that the so-called ‘pro-life’ forces are overwhelmingly female and from income groups that traditionally voted Democratic. Yet this simple rebellion by what one might dare to term humble people has been written off as reactionary by people who can’t or won’t see the essential dignity of the right-to-life position.”
Hitchens savaged Mother Teresa in a petulant book that I hated, and at one point, we argued about the band the Clash. He called the socialist rockers “nihilistic,” and I responded that he was flat-out wrong. The Clash was deeply moral. Yet Hitchens was always thoughtful and never boring.
In his introduction to A Hitch in Time, James Wolcott notes that people are still arguing about Hitchens more than a decade after his death: “Few things sink a reputation in posterity as irretrievably ad a well-formed consensus that functions like enabling fluid, leaving behind a waxy, respectable relic, and there’s no danger if that with Hitchens. Even in death he remains uncontainable.”
Whatever your opinion on Iran, Christopher Hitchens went to the wall when it mattered. He knew that literature, art, free speech, and free expression can change cultures for the better – indeed, much more so than bombs and tanks. It’s shameful but not unexpected that the left is not coming to the aid of Iranian women. I’ve been pleased to see that conservatives, who failed so badly with me during Kavanaugh, are doing much better.
