REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century
By Scott Lucas
Pluto Press, 2004
324 pages, $33.95 (pb)
In 1949, George Orwell, a celebrated foe of "Big Brother", supplied a list of 38 names of intellectuals he thought were dangerous "crypto-communists and fellow-travellers" to British intelligence, through a friend in the Labour government's Information Research Department, which worked closely with the Foreign Office and MI6.
In 2001, Christopher Hitchens, self-styled radical "contrarian" and self-proclaimed Orwell heir, launched a public campaign of denunciation and ridicule against those on his list of supposed "Islamo-fascist" apologists and "defenders of totalitarianism" who dared to critique US foreign policy in the wake of the September terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.
Hitchens and Orwell, argues Scott Lucas in The Betrayal of Dissent, both saw themselves as guardians of political purity, "honourable liberals" uncorrupted by what Orwell called the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the "totalitarian" Marxist left. It was the flawed liberal politics of both writers that allowed them to spring to the defence of capitalist imperialism.
Among the 135 "communist dupes or agents" Orwell had placed on the master blacklist from which he selected the 38 for state surveillance, were actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave, historians E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher, singer Paul Robeson, former New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and numerous Labour MPs, Nobel Prize-winning physicists, novelists and journalists. Hitchens' list includes such noted progressive writers as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk and Susan Sontag.
Hitchens has attempted to exonerate Orwell's special services to British capitalism's "thought police" by dismissing Orwell's blacklist as a mere "party game".
This "game", however, not only had at least one possible victim (the poet, Randall Swingler, was fired from his teaching job and blacklisted by the BBC shortly after Orwell's meeting with British intelligence) but reveals the dark political shadow to the Orwell icon.
Socialists have rightly valued Orwell's commanding critique of state surveillance, political hypocrisy and the rewriting of history but uncritical socialist defenders of Orwell have always had trouble explaining why the two best known works of this self-proclaimed socialist, Animal Farm and 1984, have seen long service as noisy, ideological battering rams for the anti-socialist right.
Conservatives promoted Animal Farm as a political fable about the "inevitable" decline of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist tyranny, and waved 1984 about as a warning of the dangers of "socialist totalitarianism". The CIA financed the 1954 film version of Animal Farm, the US Information Agency financed the 1956 film of 1984, the Information Research Department (Orwell's spies of choice) developed an Animal Farm comic strip, and MI6 supplied the Times Literary Supplement reviewer for an illustrated Animal Farm reissue in 1956
As his leftwing critics have explained, Orwell's "socialism" rarely rose above an enlightened social democracy that delivered welfare and nationalisation of industry via a benign capitalist state. Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's most left-wing novel, is as much about left betrayal as a celebration of the working class in power.
Orwell's middle-class scepticism about the political capacities of the working class, whom he saw as individually stupid and collectively passive, was reinforced by a terrible series of international socialist defeats and self-destruction (Spain, Hitler, Stalin). Pessimism and despair gave Orwell's novels the fatalist theme of revolutionary socialism being doomed to end in an even worse tyranny. Orwell's last years were spent hunting enemies on the left who threatened bourgeois democracy. His anti-communist blacklist was not an aberration.
Hitchens and other liberal disciples of Orwell have evangelised the message that the "hard" left is defender of totalitarianism. In Orwell's Victory, Hitchens indulges in Orwell worship and denunciation of blasphemers, slandering as Stalinists Raymond Williams, Isaac Deutscher, E. P. Thompson and other leftist critics of Orwell.
Hitchens, a 1960s member of the International Socialists in Britain, had begun his odyssey from left-wing middle class intellectual to left-credentialled voice for capitalist imperialism during NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. While the left was opposing this war as imperialism with an ethical face, Hitchens defended it as a "humanitarian" intervention.
An uneasy truce with the left followed until 9/11 pushed Hitchens and his socialist pretensions over the edge. He leapt to the defence of Western "democracy" against "Big Brother" countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Hitchens' went into top gear, as he decreed the irrelevance of US imperialism's contribution to the growth of the Taliban and Bin Laden (as US-supported proxies in the war against the Soviet Union) and dismissed Third World resentment of US imperialism more generally.
Hitchens' failure to understand the imperialist roots of 9/11 reduced the terrorist atrocity to a "clash of civilisations", good versus evil, and he sided with "America" against "Islamic fascists" and their left "allies" like Chomsky. Hitchens had once defended Chomsky, praising him for upholding a single standard of morality which condemned terrorism regardless of its perpetrator (huge capitalist state or small-time fanatic) or victim (forgotten faraway peasant or Manhattan citizen). Now Hitchens launched into a frenzied denunciation of Chomsky, and like-minded critics of US foreign policy, as "soft on fascism", "infinitely stupid" and an "intellectual and moral disgrace".
Hitchens' attack, mirroring that of the corporate media, relied on misrepresentation of critics like Chomsky whose pointing out that terrorist atrocities are a response to US foreign policy does not amount to praise for those atrocities or a callous smirking that the US "deserved what it got".
Yet, when Susan Sontag said on US television that 9/11 was not a manifestation of evil isolated from the realities of US foreign policy, she was slammed by Hitchens for "baby talk", whilst the corporate media banished her from public view. Dissent was struck down by Hitchens with the discourse of playground taunts — with Afghanistan conquered, Hitchens rejoiced "Well, ha, ha, ha, and yah, boo" to the pacifists and the left and their "mind-rotting tripe".
"I will vote for [US President George] Bush", declared the one time features editor of Socialist Worker but now the voice of the "acceptable left" in US imperialism's new, triumphalist "war on terror".
Like Orwell, Hitchens was now the former torch-bearer of the left turned sheriff policing dissent. He had joined the posse of White House spokesperson, Ari Fleischer, who warned dissenters to "watch what you say, watch what you do". And the outlaws were many — all those who disagreed with Hitchens, the lone defender, like Orwell, of political decency.
Hitchens joined the pro-war refrain that the millions who marched in February 2003 against an attack on Iraq were "marching for Saddam". He caricatured all anti-war opposition as "anti-Americanism", the marchers as "the silly led by the sinister". Abuse was his sole resort — Tariq Ali was a "moral idiot" and Robert Fisk a "reactionary simpleton", Susan Sontag poured forth "infantile self-righteous drivel" and Nelson Mandela "spouted garbage", whilst the Dixie Chicks were "fucking fat slags".
As the massive protests forced a delay in the invasion, the vicious name-calling of Hitchens' tirade exemplified, says Lucas, the "spiteful tantrums of the right when denied a kill" by real democracy on the march.
When critics of the war call its presidential and prime ministerial leaders "war criminals", this is not childish abuse but is based on the evidence for the hollowness of the flimsy and ever-changing pretexts for war. It is a claim framed by a materialist analysis of the real economic and political interests driving the "coalition of the killing" to war, an analysis that Hitchens, the former left-wing journalist, had once subscribed and contributed to with spirit and flair.
Hitchens, the rogue liberal, has now joined the herd of "groupthink" apologists for the US capitalist state and its murderous imperialist ambitions. Orwell, once also a liberal critic of state power and class inequality, wound up as a spying eye for Big Brother. More than Hitchens knows it, he is truly the heir of Orwell.
From Green Left Weekly, June 30, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.