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Thread: Honestly this is an easy thing for anti-war leftists to tell ourselves--it flatters us (we care about the real stuff) and serves as a nice dumb pat cautionary tale (this is where the path of sin leads!) but I don't actually think there's much truth to it. https://twitter.com/Marusya_1312/status/1304266530151161856
I'm in the early stages of working on a book about Hitchens and I'm still figuring some of this stuff out but my strong feeling is that seeing it as opportunism or gleeful hippie-punching for its own sake misses most of what was going on there.
It's more useful (and almost certainly gets us closer to the truth) to think of Hitchens' right turn on foreign policy more like leftists in a previous generation whose sincere commitment to bringing about a better world led them into making excuses for Stalin's reign of terror.
Hitchens spent much of his life as a journalist traveling to despotic regimes. He knew of course that many were propped up by U.S. imperialism and in any case held out hope for them to all be eventually swept into the dustbin of history by a victorious tide of global socialism.
But in the "End of History" era in the 90s, he wasn't able to keep the faith. In "Letters to a Young Contrarian" (written pre-9/11) he officially gives up on the possibility--though not the desirability--of socialism.
But he still deeply cared about ending the nightmarish conditions imposed by those regimes. And in a unipolar world with no hope for the working class reasserting itself as the subject of history, the only agent of change that seemed plausible was the Empire itself.
So he convinced itself that the U.S. military could act as an agent of real democratic revolutions, focused on the desirability of the goal and criticizing the parts of the anti-war movement that didn't seem to get that, and just learned to ignore all the obvious contradictions.
Ironically, the first stirrings of possibility for exactly the kind of renewed global movement he'd given up on (Occupy and the Arab Spring) were happening while Hitchens' was battling cancer at the bitter end of his life.
How he would have reacted to e.g. Bernie Sanders' two campaigns for President is basically unknowable but I have a hard time imagining that e.g. Bernie's denunciation of Hillary Clinton's friendship with Henry Kissinger wouldn't have struck a chord with him.
And for aesthetic reasons if nothing else it's impossible to imagine following his New Atheist buddy Sam Harris into the IDW.
None of that's to say that he would have ended up on the right side of anything going on now.
So much of his ego was invested in battling the rest of the left on his terrible end of life foreign policy positions that it may not have been psychologically possible for him to walk any of it back. And more generally who the hell knows.
But the "he sold out" or "he was just being a contrarian dick, none of this really mattered to him" narratives miss most of the point--and in any case stop us from learning anything from thinking about *why* he went wrong at the end.
