Christopher Hitchens: Flickering Firebrand (Essay‪)‬

Isaac Deutscher on apostates, quoted in 'Third Thoughts' by Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, November 1987. (1) In an offhand remark tucked away in a book review in The Nation many years ago, journalist Christopher Hitchens once averred: 'The real test of a radical or a revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies'. (2) Years later he was to famously leave The Nation over just such differences of opinion with the Left concerning every major political development that has flowed from the September 11 attacks. (3) In the immediate aftermath of the multi-storey immolations in New York and Washington, Hitchens unsheathed his pen and with it gored such sacred oxen as Noam Chomksy, Sam Husseini and, later, Tariq Ali. (4) Whether it is acknowledged or not, the seed of an apostate had been slowly germinating in him for some time. (He has dated--or backdated--his first rethinking of the morality of intervention in Iraq to the end of the Gulf War. (5)) The 9/11 cataclysm provided him with the necessary Grenzsituation in which to reveal his true credentials as a contrarian--specifically, that he would tolerate no nonsense even from fellow-travellers. Hitchens' apparent disgust that the Left had the nerve to continue to critique the 'larger issues' of US policy in the Middle East throughout this period provided him with what might, in the world of David Horowitz, be called his Betty Van Patter epiphany: in short, a moment of disenchantment (with the response to a violent attack) that quickly grew into a full-blown political apostasy.