Kim Jong-il, by all accounts a terrible, terrible man who helped make the country he ruled the consensus choice for worst place on Earth, died. The Orwellian cast of life in North Korea never ceases to fascinate and horrify, and Kim died as its architect, with a great deal of blood on his hands. A miserable person.
The timing of his death alongside Christopher Hitchens’ is darkly fortuitous.
Thinking about Hitchens, I wonder if his fatal flaw — literally, sadly enough — was machismo. For all his erudition, you can’t help but notice a stubbornly incurious streak in him where matters of non-hetero- or non-dude-ness were concerned. Perhaps this was a generational artifact, but what can you say about someone who apparently needed “persuad[ing],” to hear Andrew Sullivan tell it, that being gay has an emotional and romantic component beyond sex? Or who argued, at length, recently, in a publication intended for a very wide audience, with a straight face, that women aren’t funny? Or who dismissed the panoply of thought on abortion with a pro-life wave of the hand, as if talking to an actual woman or doctor about it had never crossed his mind? (See Katha Politt on these last two matters.) The life of the mind was something Hitchens celebrated every day and in nearly every essay or article, and that was one of the great pleasures of reading him. But his prodigious drinking, the evident relish with which he fought with people, and especially his tendency cheer violent conflict if he felt that people whose ideas he disliked would die in it, are when taken in tandem with the above attitudes toward women and homosexuality indicative less of a public intellectual and more of a meathead picking fights with the opposing team’s fans in the tailgate parking lot.
Unfortunately, when couched in antifascist, pro-human rights language, this macho belligerence was in many ways exactly the siren song I wanted to hear after 9/11. Hitchens was, if not the sole, then certainly the most prominent and to my mind persuasive person on either side of the debate who was talking about the virtue of toppling dictatorships and crushing violent religious fanatics. Years and years and years of genre and conspiracy-theory reading, plus a passionate anti-religious streak, plus the mentally destabilizing trauma of the murder of thousands in the city I worked in and loved so much, primed me for this message. I ate it right up and spat it back out at anyone who’d listen, and anyone who wouldn’t. At last, I thought, after decades of using our power to keep dictators in place, America was finally going to use it to take them down! I shared Hitchens’ dark glee at the prospect. Indeed, no one was more influential over my support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq than Hitchens. He gave me what I needed to do it at all, I think. I remember telling people that if not for Hitchens, I’d have felt like I’d gone completely insane. Which, perhaps, I had.
In the end, life isn’t a fucking Authority comic book. I can’t, as a person who found himself thrilling to the burning of the churches in Homage to Catalonia, say that Hitchens’ infamous delight in cluster bomb fragments that will tear right through a Koran on the way to some benighted al-Qaeda fuck’s heart is alien to me. But those bombs found a lot of other people as well. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. And in dropping them we also unleashed an atavistic tide of brutality, torture, state surveillance and oppression, and endless global warfare waged by an unaccountable executive branch; those bullets tore through not just Korans, but nearly every document we enlightened Westerners hold dear back through the Magna Carta. I’m no longer capable of performing the elaborate mental arithmetic necessary to excuse all this, and to excuse the deceptive and criminal way it was ushered in, because other people are bad. This is bad! When you’re primarily animated by hatred, as Hitchens was — and even though he generally hated genuinely hateful things — making the bastards pay is paramount. But the bastardry gazes also.
So Hitchens went to his grave quite literally praising endless war — a morally shameful philosophy that if adhered to would basically ruin civilization. But you don’t need to take my word for it. You can take the word of Hitchens’ hero, George Orwell, who wrote a book you may have heard of in which perpetual war was the core evil. Or you can take the word of Hitchens himself. I remember vividly his definition of terrorism: Demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint. How else to describe Hitchens’ call for a state of unceasing violence as some sort of curative for the other, wrong kind of violence?
I also recall (though I can’t find an exact link; take my word for it, please) Hitchens repeatedly admonishing anti-war forces for, in effect, acting according to the wishes of the enemy. But Hitchens died arguing that “we do have certain permanent enemies—the totalitarian state; the nihilist/terrorist cell—with which ‘peace’ is neither possible nor desirable,” calling for a war against them “that seems destined to last as long as civilization is willing to defend itself.” That’s a grandiose way of describing a struggle against a ragtag bunch of rogue states and a bunch of isolated bands of theocratic thugs who are lucky if they can set off a car bomb anymore, which is part of the problem, but putting that aside, is this not allowing the enemy to set terms? We must keep killing as long as people want to kill us?
But — and this gets back to the point about mindless machismo — this prospect, horrifying though it is and should be to most people, held no special unpleasantness for Hitchens. “Human history seems to register many more years of conflict than of tranquility,” he shrugs. “In one sense, then, it is fatuous to whine that war is endless.” By that perverted logic, since human history also seems to register many more years of, say, dictatorship, or torture, or slavery, or racial war, or holy war, then it is equally fatuous to whine about any of that. Or to dedicate one’s life, supposedly, to the cause of human rights and human freedom. But in order to cling to his argument, Hitchens was forced to implicitly reject all the arguments he’d ever made leading up to this one.
Which brings us back to the North Korea of Kim Jong-il. Last year Hitchens recalled his own visit to the country on the occasion of a book about North Korea’s manic chauvinism by B.R. Myers. “Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right,” Hitchens wrote. “It is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.” Later he notes, “Every child is told every day of the wonderful possibility of death by immolation in the service of the motherland and taught not to fear the idea of war, not even a nuclear one.”
Does this sound familiar?
Glenn Greenwald makes the case against Hitchens, and more specifically against remembrances of Hitchens’ virtues that don’t grapple first and foremost with this appalling stain on his legacy and what he might hesitate to call his soul, far more eloquently and devastatingly than I am. (He includes more cases where Hitchens is hoisted by Orwell’s petard, a grimly satisfying business.) But that’s no surprise, even aside from Greenwald being Greenwald and me being me. My heart’s not in this. It’s a strange thing, to think back on a man whose work I indelibly associate with sensations of great intellectual and philosophical pleasure, and to know despite those sensations’ lingering reverberations, it was poison all along.
