Christopher Hitchens, the ex-Trotskyist poppinjay and blathering drunk who has made a second career out of hailing the Bush Doctrine, has a very talented and quite rational brother, and Peter Hitchens seems to have his sibling’s number down cold. At a recent event sponsored by the left-wing Guardian newspaper, the Hitchens brothers confronted each other over Christopher’s sudden affinity for the U.S. — or, rather, the U.S. military — as opposed to his formerly anti-American position, pre-9/11. Hitch was in a snit because his brother had recalled an incident in which The Hitch had said that he would rather have the Red Army in the middle class suburb of Hendon than U.S. cruise missiles defending against the alleged Soviet threat. Brother Chris denied ever making such a statement, but when cornered by admitted it, which led to Peter’s rather insightful analysis of his brother’s evolving neocon psychopathology:
“Hendon’s vice in the eyes of people of your fashion is that it’s suburb, and therefore bad, and it contains half-timbered, fake Tudor houses and people who wash their cars… that’s why I think it was at the end of your joke. It didn’t convey to me that you were a Stalinist, though we had earlier on discussed the makeup of the ’36 constitution of the soviet union, and its implications for the argument about whether the evils of Stalin and the evils of Hitler could be compared (but it’s more complicated than that, and couldn’t possibly bring us to the conclusion that you or I were a Stalinist). What you were saying was that you didn’t care. That ultimately that argument wasn’t of any interest to you. At the time you were very busy supporting the unilateral disarmament of the Western democracies in the face of the most heavily armed totalitarian power that had ever existed . And I thought you were wrong. And I still do. But what was interesting about it in September 2001, was that you had transferred your affections to the United States. And the point that I was trying to make was that – partly because you were altered, as everybody alters, in such periods; but also, because the United States had altered, and had become from having been to some extent the arsenal of reaction (which is why I liked it) – [the US] had instead become a sort of multicultural, liberal global force which you rather more approved of.”
Their interviewer — or, rather, referee — interposes at one point to ask if Chrstopher Hitchens’ neoconization hasn’t led to a certain ideological convergence with his right-leaning brother, to which The Hitch replies:
“I would think not. I’ve tried to formulate it before that it seems to me quite right that a conservative would oppose the war [in Iraq] and it’s a misrepresentation of the division over the regime change to make it left-right in the opposite way. I’m not surprised that the institutional forces of conservatism in America are generally anti-war. Vice-president Cheney’s conversion to intervention of this kind is very recent and not, I think, completely sincere. But it’s better than nothing. Our side won that argument very narrowly…
This is precisely the point I have been making — albeit from quite another viewpoint — for quite some time. In his heart of hearts, Hitchens is still a Trotskyist — not in the sense that he’s any longer a socialist, in the strict sense of that word, but that he’s for a revolutionary change that smashes the status quo — especially religion — and has merely, as his brother says, transferred his affections from one internationalist movement to another. This is why the political biography of the regime-change crowd is, in many cases, so similar to Hitchens left-to-right odyssey: these people aren’t conservatives in any meaningful sense of the term, but rather neo-Jacobins, as Clae Ryn describes them: would-be social engineers on a global scale. Yesterday they were hailing the Five Year Plan, today they are praising the Bush Doctrine: in both instances, they kneel before whatever power it is that seems likely to win, and invest it with all their hopes and desires.
The contrast between the Brothers Hitchens couldn’t be more dramatic, and especially in this confrontation. Christopher is rude — at one point he tells a woman in the audience to “kiss my as*” for daring to suggest that he stop smoking a cigarette — and spends most of his time kissing up to the leftie audience and trying to charm us with his inventive evasions. On the other hand, Peter is thoughtful, and comes close to expressing the very essence of conservative opposition to the foreign policy of the transatlantic cabal that is dragging us all down to perdition. What he calls “idealist internationalism” is, in his view:
“A displacement activity. Conservatism in the United States, for instance, has now become almost entirely a matter of campaigning around the world against regimes it doesn’t like. Which seems to me to be a dodge. It doesn’t help the fact that [at home in the US] schools teach rubbish, marriage is breaking down, that society is [inaudible]. What I have come to value above all things is liberty and liberty of conscience, without which we don’t seem to me to be able to survive. The assault on the liberty of the subject and the citizen under the guise of this war against terror seems to me to be deeply shocking. To find in my lifetime that habeas corpus and the presumption of innocence are under threat and that we’re going to be compelled to carry identity cards because we will have to be responsible to the state rather than the other way round – all as consequences of this supposed idealist campaign to bring liberty to Iraq and Afghanistan – seems to me much more important than flanneling away about how you dislike oppression abroad. We can do an awful lot about combating it at home.”
