Document Options

Word Lookup

Dictionary     Thesaurus

An Englishman by birth and upbringing, Hitchens came to America in the early 1980s, living first in New York City and then in Washington, D.C. In 1994, I was Hitchens's intern at The Nation. I discovered that we both went to the same college at Oxford--Balliol--and studied the same course: Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Now, aged forty- seven, Hitchens lives with his wife, Carol Blue, and their three-year- old daughter, Antonia, in a spacious apartment in the Adams-Morgan district of Washington, D.C.

I talked with Hitchens in his apartment. He was chain-smoking cigarettes, and we both drank generous glasses of whiskey. As with so many British journalists, Hitchens is a heavy drinker and smoker, a bon vivant with a quick tongue and an often deadly pen. At one point in the interview, "You Say You Want a Revolution" by the Beatles came on. Hitchens said: "I hate this song, it's one of the few I really hate. This was the one praised by Mayor Daley as a healthy alternative to the Rolling Stones." After four hours of talking, the bottle was empty, and, as I left, Hitchens was getting ready for a late night of work.

Q: I remember reading that you grew up a navy brat.

HItchens: Well, I was born in 1949, in Portsmouth. It's a navy town, where all my father's ancestors seemed to come from. My father was a lifetime naval officer. The first memory I have is of Malta, which was still a British colony, technically, where my brother was born. I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class-lower-middle class actually--after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

After the war, the general feeling was that Britain had been cheated out of its Empire. A sort of politics of resentment. It would be very common to hear people say, round about the cocktail hour, "Well, I thought we won the war," with rather heavy sarcasm, as the news came in that yet again Britain had had to back down over Suez, or bases in Cyprus, or whatever it might be. It was a very resentful feeling that all that Churchillian rhetoric hadn't really amounted to very much in the long run. It had a powerful effect on me.

Q: What were your formative political impressions?

Hitchens: I was precocious enough to watch the news and read the papers, and I can remember October 1956, the simultaneous crisis in Hungary and Suez, very well. And getting a sense that the world was dangerous, a sense that the game was up, that The Empire was over.

I didn't form any political opinions of my own until I was a little bit older. I remember the first time I ever made a public speech, I would have been eleven or twelve. My prep school had a debate on the question of whether or not the Commonwealth Immigration Bill, which the Tories had just proposed to restrict West-Indian immigration, was justified or not. I spoke against the bill. I think I did it because nobody else would. And then, I remember deciding quite early on, having read a book by Arthur Koestler on hanging, that I was on principle opposed to capital punishment.

In 1964, when Wilson ran for Labour in October, we had a mock election in the high school. I decided I wanted the Labour Party to win, and again it wasn't very difficult to become nominated for the candidacy- -because there wasn't much rivalry. We came third.

Q: Do you remember how many votes you got?

Hitchens: No! But I remember there was a very good communist candidate who took away a lot of my constituency.

Q: Why didn't you run as a communist then?

Hitchens: Because I was never, ever tempted by it. Maybe it was just an accident of where I was born and when. But the communists never appealed to me. And I was to a certain extent inoculated against it. I read Darkness at Noon before I read The Communist Manifesto.

No the leftward move for me was the very rapid experience of disillusionment with the Wilson government of 1964, with the collapse of that government into the most dismal kinds of conservative orthodoxy. There was the seaman's strike of 1966 and devaluation and the sell-out of Rhodesia- -a lot of stuff.

But obviously the central, defining, overarching, whatever word you want for this sort of thing, was Vietnam. The first time I went on a CND [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] march--Easter march as it used to be called--was in 1966, and what drew me to it principally was that CND was the main national movement making a stink about the war in Vietnam.

Q: And this is before you went to Oxford?

Hitchens: Before I went to Oxford, which I did in late 1967.

Q: How did the Oxford culture, the college system, the tutorials, the drinking, how did all of that help mold your character?

Hitchens: I don't think very much. I knew from some time before, having been at this rather well-placed school at Cambridge, and having done a bit of English history and economics, I knew that what I wanted to do was to read PPE [Politics, Philosophy, and Economics--a course many future journalists, diplomats, and politicians take at Oxford] at Balliol. I knew that when I was fifteen. Not only that, but I got to do it, too.

And my very first experience was one of extreme disappointment. The standard, the intellectual atmosphere, was not as rarefied as everyone had led me to believe it would be. I just didn't go to classes or lectures at all.

Q: What were your politics like then?

Hitchens: Before I went up to Oxford, I had basically been kicked out of the Labour Party-roughly the time I did go up to Oxford actually- and I associated myself there with the International Socialists. When 1968 came, I was a member of a peripheral group that had members in the single figures, which in the course of the spring and summer of 1968 ballooned into several hundred--this is just talking about in Oxford.

And one had the experience, which I've only had once in my life, and I think some people never have, of seeing what had been a minority analysis of everything, apparently confirmed by everyday newspapers. Many people were being driven to take our positions. Everything seemed to be confirmed. What we said about the Vietnam War turned out to be completely right; what we said about the emptiness of social democracy turned out to be right. What we had said about Stalinism was particularly confirmed by what happened in Poland in February and March and what happened in Czechoslovakia in August. And it was really exciting.

It was also very, very clear that the government and the authorities in general--the editor of the Times, even the BBC--they didn't know what was going on. And that's another feeling you don't often get.

In the summer, I went to Cuba, and we got into a huge fight with the Castro regime over a number of things: the one-party state, the maltreatment of dissenters--social and civic ones--and gay people as well. But I was there when Czechoslovakia was invaded. I was on my way to Prague on the invitation of the Czechs, to go and see Dubcek. If I'd left two days earlier I'd have got there. It's one of the biggest regrets of my life.

Q: And at that stage, if you had to identify yourself with an "ism, " what would it have been?

Hitchens: Luxemburg! Yeah, the International Socialists were often referred to as Trots, which wasn't completely right. We were Rosa Luxemburgist. Rosa Luxemburg was--still is for me--a great personal and intellectual heroine. Her analysis of Leninism and capitalism and social democracy are all worth reading right now. I wouldn't consider anyone truly politically literate if they hadn't given her work at least some study.

Q: There is a mystique that surrounds Balliol. Its students are taught to cultivate what is popularly known as an aura of "effortless superiority." You're obviously at least partially a product of this. Did it have an influence on why you chose journalism?

Hitchens: Journalism! I'd always wanted to write and I'd always written. And by elimination--I obviously wasn't going to become a lawyer. And yes, there was something in the Balliol atmosphere conducive to this, and if I meet someone from Balliol now, yes there is a certain code that is unspoken. I neither make too much use of it, nor a fetish of it, but I don't frown on it either. This includes people who are politically opposed to me-like George Stephanopoulos: We had the same tutor, Stephen Lukes.

Q: Why did you choose to go into print journalism rather than television? I understand at one stage you were considered semi-seriously for the role of Voice of the Left on CNN's Crossfire.

Hitchens: Quasi-seriously! Because it's solitary. I've always wanted to write and--it might sound pompous--I've needed to write. While I was still at Oxford, I was asked by The New Statesman, which was then still a great magazine--the magazine of politics and culture in a way--to be a book reviewer, and I published my first book review in 1969. It wasn't very often that they asked me, but it was a start, and it gave me a huge advantage to be writing for them at that age.

Q: And what happened when you left Oxford?

Hitchens: I got a scholarship [from Balliol] to travel around America. And the first thing I did when I got to New York was to go see Carey McWilliams, the great editor of The Nation. And he gave me people to see across America. I had to go back to England with some reluctance. I got a job on the Times, "Higher Education Supplement," as a social- -science editor. It didn't give me much scope for writing, but I wrote book reviews for the Times at that stage. Then I published my first book--on Karl Marx and the Paris Commune--it was the centenary of the Commune. And the Statesman offered me a job on the staff, when I was twenty-two. I had realized that probably I wasn't ever going to become a novelist--it hurt--or a playwright, or anything like that.

Q: Why?

Hitchens: Because when I was at the Statesman, my colleagues my age were Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, James Fenton, and Timothy Noel. And I have to say, I realized these guys were better at that kind of writing than I was. It was rather intimidating that they were so good. It made me specialize more in the generalist-type political essay. But they were very good people to work with, for style. They persuaded me it wasn't enough just to make the point; that style was substance, and that there was something in language itself I learned by osmosis. These people are still my circle, my best friends.

Q: Why did you decide to come to America?

Hitchens: The first thing I can remember I ever wanted was to go to the United States. And for reasons that are as conventional as you can imagine: I wanted to know if it was really true that it was the land of opportunity, of democracy, and individual liberty. My conclusion was that, at least as compared to the ancien regime under which I had been brought up, it was.

I'm a founding signatory of Charter 88 [a movement in Britain for the creation of a written, rights-based constitutional system]. And it was very obvious to me that the whole inspiration of that movement is constitutional democracy. But all of its models, all of its actually existing inspirations were American: things like the Freedom of Information Act, however imperfect it has become, like the First Amendment, separating Church and State, guaranteeing free speech, judicial review, separation of powers, and so on--as opposed to the British system where you have traditions instead of rights.

At the same time, I've always been very keen on European unification as a means of detaching certain elements of Britain from their extreme dependence on the oligarchic part of the United States. I don't think there's any contradiction there.

Q: In your book Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, you write about what might be the British position within what you call "The American Imperium." As a Briton living in America, commenting on both countries, yet not quite wholly of either country, what do you think Britain's position is vis-a-vis America?

Hitchens: What at the moment strikes me is the way American hegemony is back again in the crucial areas of politics and mass cult. I mean, to go to London now from New York or Washington--it used to be there was a lag of a few months between the conversation you'd just left in Washington and the one you were having in London. You could see that in a short while they'd be catching up with what was being talked about. Now, it's almost the same conversation, the Americanization of British politics, for example--very, very noticeable. And I don' t think they're borrowing the good bits. Now they talk exactly as if they've all been schooled by Lee Atwater or Ed Rollins.

But the point about Charter 88 and my book was this: Anglophiles in the United States are defined as people who like things like the monarchy, the accent, the marmalade, the country houses, the whole Masterpiece Theatre conception of Britain as a theme park of feudalism and charm, whereas a pro-American in Britain tended to be someone who wanted to reassure the White House or the Pentagon that we would not desert them in their hour of need.

What I hope for, and tried to argue for in the book, is we would borrow different things and try to emulate different things. For example, the United States, instead of admiring the monarchy, would be better off emulating national health, or the broadcasting standards of the BBC as it used to be. And perhaps even the tutorial system at Oxford. And the British, instead of saying we want to be the best ally, we want our chaps in Curzon Steet to be the best friends of those in Langley, could be saying we'd rather borrow their Freedom of Information Act.

Q: I take it you won't be voting for Tony Blair in England this time round.

Hitchens: I didn't vote Labour in 1979 which is the last time I could have done. But I will vote Labour in May; I would like the Labour Party to win.

Lesser evilism, incidentally, which I've spent a lifetime opposing, is somewhat different when you're arguing about electing an opposition rather than confirming a government in place. For example, all the arguments we had against Clinton in 1992 were very cogent--and our predictions were all validated, in fact we were moderate about him- -but they wouldn't have translated to a vote to keep Bush as President.

No, in many ways I think that Blair is an improvement on the hypocrisy of the Labour Party. Old Labour was no fucking bargain, I can tell you that. I'm young enough to have been Old Labour and old enough to have been New Left. So it's going to take a lot to surprise me. But the word "new" has no more charms for me.

Q: One of the emerging debates is whether or not the identity politics that grew out of the New Left has a future, and whether it's capable of forming a genuine ideological and intellectual alternative to the New Right.

Hitchens: I remember very well the first time I heard the slogan " the personal is political." I felt a deep, immediate sense of impending doom.

Q: Why?

Hitchens: Because I was a 1968er, I really was a 1968er. And I recognized when it was over. That slogan summed it up nicely for me: "I'll have a revolution inside my own psyche." It's escapist and narcissistic. In order to take part in discussions we used to have, you were expected to have read Luxemburg, Deutsche, some Gramsci, to know the difference between Bihar and Bangladesh, to know what was meant by the Goethe Program, to understand the difference between Keynes and Schumpeter, to have read a bit of Balzac and Zola. You were expected to have broken a bit of a sweat, to have stretched your brain a bit, in order just to have a discussion. And you were expected to keep up with what was going on as well. If you couldn't hold up your end on that, you wouldn't stay long in the discussion.

With "the personal is political," nothing is required of you except to be able to talk about yourself, the specificity of your own oppression. That was a change of quality as well as quantity. And it fit far too easily into the consumer, me-decade, style-section, New-Age gunk.

Q: Would that hold for movements like the feminist movement after the early 1970s, the gay-rights movement, maybe the environmental movement?

Hitchens: The environmental movement at least is about something larger than itself I mean, certainly you can't just say it's about the personal. At least there was some politics involved.

What they forgot, I think, because they all took as their model Dr. King's civil-rights movement, was that the whole reason for the success of that movement was that it was not a movement for itself The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.

Q: What about Jesse Jackson's strategy in the early 1980s of trying to create a Rainbow Coalition? Do you think this concept is a way forward?

HItchens: Unfortunately, the Rainbow Coalition was an attempt to get all of these groups, all of whom wanted their own agenda, to coalesce. It was an attempt to build the same bridge but from the middle of the river. It was a sort of squaring of the circle. Let's all be a member of the coalition without giving up our individuality.

I remember countless meetings where the idea was "one more plank." And the problem is that this is what Freud called the narcissism of the small difference. People will always try to concentrate on themselves. Well, you can go to a meeting where someone says, "The meeting doesn't stop till we discuss the question not just of Cherokee lesbians, but Cherokee lesbians who have to take an outsized garment label." It's barely an exaggeration. There will always be someone who wants it all to be about them. So what was for a moment something that was social, general, collective, educational, and a matter of solidarity can be very quickly dissolved into petty factionalism. Therefore, coalition-building is reassembling something out of fragments that needn't have been fragmented in the first place.

Q: In your writing, you reserve a special hatred for Clinton. What is it in particular about Clinton that you hate so much?

Hitchens: It goes back to what I said about Wilson in a way. Clinton comes on as someone who is definitely modern, no question about that, very much at home with modernity. Wilson's "white heat of technology" was a very clever means of talking revolution while in fact making sordid bargains.

It's nothing to me if there's a moderate, corrupt Republican about the place, really. That's part of the wallpaper of living in a consumer society, and the damage they do is mainly to their own side. But if there's someone who's appealing to the idealism of the young and the visions of the left and getting away with it by doing that, then he' s trampling on territory that I care about. It's like in a labor dispute, people dislike the scab much more than they do the boss. And there' s something completely cowardly and shabby--and ingratiating--about Clinton's personality as well that I find repulsive.

Q: Do you see a viable alternative emerging?

Hitchens: I think we're in for a very long period of conservative rule. It depends how long-term you're prepared to think. But we're living in one of those periods where, on the world stage, only capitalism is revolutionary, not just in rich countries, but also in poor ones and also in countries that used to be state-capitalist. This is a situation that wouldn't have been at all unfamiliar to the founders of the socialist movement. It would have been exactly true in the nineteenth century.

On NAFTA, free trade is going to go on. I don't think we should waste our time. But it has many of the problems of the first industrial revolution. It's extremely undemocratic; it's very unstable and very promiscuous.

Q: You're very much an internationalist.

Hitchens: I take capitalism very seriously, always have. It has, in fact, survived its crises--at huge fucking cost, let's not forget: war, empire. But still, it has survived. But it has not outlived its contradictions. If the world is one economy, why not make it one society? I look forward to the argument on this. What I won't do is spend ten seconds on the argument as to whether a plant should be in Michigan or Ontario, or for that matter in California or Tijuana.

Q: A lot would disagree with you on this.

Hitchens: They believe they can build a politics of populism against this. I'm not going to help them. They just will find out they can' t build a politics against this. What we really need is a new Internationale- -and that's a heavy responsibility. Sounds very utopian at the moment.

Q: What about your support for some recent international interventions, such as the one in Haiti?

Hitchens: It was very important to remind people that the U.S. military plays far too great a role in defining policy. This is something very few people would say. Why were the right and the generals and the CIA so hostile to doing anything about it? That was very important to me, the military subversion of the Clinton Administration--annexation really, because he was very ready to do nothing. It was part of the battle to prevent the banana-ization of things. They were protecting their friends, the Haitian junta.

It goes back to the arguments in the 1930s that Europe was none of their business and they were going to build a New Deal paradise at home, so who gave a shit about triumphing over fascism? Why don' t we simply demand the government acts according to its proclaimed principles? People like Noam [Chomsky] and others, who were visibly uneasy about Bosnia, I think had the difficulty of using any argument that suggests the American government can be a moral agent.

Q: What do you say about that?

Hitchens: You could say the same about any government. Why was the right against doing anything about Bosnia? The only ones who said any differently were the neo-cons, and for them the alarm-bell word was "genocide." Left and liberal people were saying, "Well, we don' t want another quagmire like Vietnam."

But the argument against Vietnam was not that an innocent, naive America had been suckered into Vietnam, for heaven's sake! That's an affront to the anti-war movement' end I wasn't going to have anything to do with that! The collapse of Yugoslavia into the hands of ethnic fascists could have been avoided or impeded if there'd been an intervention earlier than there was.

Q: Moving on to perhaps the subject that got you into hottest water with the left: abortion. Could you talk a little about your view on this?

Hitchens: Two points I wanted to make. One, that the term "unborn child" has been made a propaganda phrase by the people who called themselves "pro-life." But it's something that has moral and scientific realities. It's become very evident indeed that this is not just a growth upon the mother.

If that's true, what are the problems? It need not qualify the woman's right to choose. It need not. But it would be a very bold person to say that what was being chosen didn't come up. What I argued in my column was this was a social phenomenon. This is the next generation we're talking about. Considering the unborn as candidate members-- potential members--of the next generation; wouldn't that strengthen the argument for socialized medicine, child care, prenatal care?

There's a reason why this is the only country where it's a mania. Because it's between the fundamentalists and the possessive individualists. It's ruined politics, absorbed a huge amount of energy that should have been spent elsewhere.

Q: But you're not agreeing with the religious right on this?

Hitchens: No one who is not for the provision of sex education, contraception, and child care should be allowed to have any position on abortion at all--and those who do should be met with fusillades. Women will decide it, that's a matter of fact, as much as a principle.

Q: So, what is your position regarding the continued legal status of abortion?

Hitchens: There's no choice but choice. I mean that to sound the way it does sound. But there are choices about the conditions in which that choice is made.

I'm very much opposed to euthanasia. I've never understood why more of these people can't commit suicide. Why do they need a Doctor Kevorkian? It's very theatrical. I believe in a right to decide.

But I'm against all blurrings. There's a very sharp dividing line in the case of an infant. I'm against fooling with that. Everything in me rebels against that. The conclusion I've come to as to why it' s such a toxic question in America is it isn't about the rights of the unborn child. I think it's an argument about patriarchy. It is a metaphor for the status of women in what is still in some ways a frontier society.

Q: Give me a few choice encounters with the famous people you've met.

Hitchens: Most of them are disappointments. Claude Cockburn once said that it's awful how things often turn out exactly the way they're supposed to be. Some things are what they're cracked up to be.

So when I met Nelson Mandela he was unbelievably charming and graceful and courteous and self-effacing: just like he was supposed to be. It was a bit of a let-down.

We met Vaclav Havel last month: rumpled, chain-smoking, and democratic. What was the point of doing that?

Thatcher was a sadomasochistic person with no self-doubt.

Hillary was full of self-pity and self-righteousness.

Let's see who else we've got here. Abu Nidal offered to use me as someone to transmit a death threat to another Palestinian. Which he later carried out. Which I also delivered! These are all politicians, of course.

Andreas Papandreou was extremely rhetorical and bombastic.

Gerry Adams was very sentimental.

Willie Brandt probably.

Q: Why?

Hitchens: There was a meeting in Washington where everyone had come to accuse him of selling out the West for having doubts about Cruise missiles, and all that. "How dare Germany not be belligerent?" being the line of the day! And I said I had come to ask him what it was like being with George Orwell in Barcelona as volunteers fighting against fascism. He welcomed the change of subject.

Q: [Hitchers's wife, Carol Blue, intervenes: "What about the crazy Kurd with the eagle?"]

Hitchens: No one's ever heard of him. Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the PKK. Wore a Stalin mustache and had a large eagle--live eagle--tethered to his desk. I think to create some kind of impression--of destiny. He also brushed his hair like Stalin.

Clinton turned his back on me when I asked him about the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, even though he'd been hoping for a change of subject from the press conference about Gennifer Flowers.

John Major was an ingratiating, amiable mediocrity.

Barry Goldwater was a man of staunch but limited principle--who said that his dearest wish was to give Jerry Falwell a kick in the ass!

General Videla of Argentina wouldn't let me go till he'd confessed to a few murders, eagerly confessed to a few murders.

Nor would Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador. In other words, with them you don't get anything but a pig with a grunt.

Q: What about Auden? You mention him a lot.

Hitchens: Never met him. I heard him read. Met Isherwood and met Spender, but I never met Auden. I heard him read at Cambridge. I remember the poem he read: It was called "On the Circuit." Which ends, "God bless the USA/So large/So friendly/And so rich." Yes, he does keep coming up. It's amazing how he does. I'd love to have met him, but I can't start on people I wish I'd met. It would go on too long.

Sasha Abramsky is a freelance writer in New York City, He wrote "When God Laughs, It's Not Funny" in the October issue of The Progressive.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Progressive Inc.

Abramsky, Sasha, Christopher Hitchens.(columnist)(Interview)., Vol. 61, The Progressive, 02-01-1997, pp 32(5).