Despite my best efforts to avoid reading him, I remain fascinated by
Christopher Hitchens, even after his drift (okay, stampede) to the right. For a start, I like to read assholes and always have. But that aside, I just can’t seem to turn away from his horrible rantings. I mean, what will the man say next?
At first, the right-wing, pro-war Hitchens made me doubt myself for liking his previous semi-leftist incarnation. So I stopped reading him. Then, once in a while, I’d check in at Slate out of morbid fascination. Scathing indictments of Turkey prior to the Iraq war? Check. Screeds in defense of Paul Wolfowitz, accusing BBC newscasters of deliberating mispronouncing his name because of their anti-semitism? Absolutely. Ravings about North Korea curiously times to coincide with White House rhetoric? For shizzle. The man is a drinking, smoking invective machine. And, god help me, I really like to read his stuff.
What a lot of Americans don’t know is that Christopher Hitchens has a non-smoking, non-drinking British brother who is also a pundit. A Conservative pundit. Which means that he opposed the war in Iraq. Confused? You should be. But let’s start with their appearances…
Here is Christopher:
And here is Peter:
As you can see, the latter is like a weird, non-toxic version of the former. Stranger still is this debate between the two of them, part of a Guardian forum on sibbling rivalry. They hadn’t spoken for a couple of years over an argument about whether or not it would have been a good thing if the Red Army had watered its horses at Hendon. Or something. But the real fun comes from their zany political reference points.
The Iraq war was arguably a radical act, so it’s not too surprising that a conservative case can be made against it. This is P. Hitchens’ position, inspired by old-fashioned Toryism and a dose of snobby British anti-Americanism. Unfortunately, this allows C. Hitchens to cast his own support for the war as not simply radical, but revolutionary, and to style his opponents as “reactionaries.” P. Hitchens has unwittingly allowed C. Hitchens to wring even more mileage out of his hackneyed Spanish Civil War analogy. In this, Saddam Hussein = Franco, the Peshmurgas = the International Brigade, and C. Hitchens = George Orwell. He only says this explicitly in every third thing he writes, but it’s more than a subtext elsewhere.
The result leaves your head spinning, as surely as did Martin Amis’s book about Stalin, Koba the Dread, which included an open letter to his friend Hitchens castigating him for his Trotskyism. The book came out at precisely the time in which the latter made his switch to an open support for George W. Bush.
At one point during the Peter/Christopher encounter, a woman stood up and objected to C. Hitchens’ smoking (which is sort of like objecting to anyone else metabolizing oxygen). At no point did someone jump up, as they should have, and shout, “You’re both right-wing windbags! You have nothing to argue about! Please shut up!”
And yet once again I read the whole thing.
Posted by B. W. Ventril in Miscellanea
