Christopher Hitchens

A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn't just think that I was right: I thought that “we” (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn well proved right. He also speculated drivellingly that the jury might yet return an open verdict on the theory of evolution. In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, […] this would constitute an exceptional entry. That this ultrareactionary mobocracy was composed mainly of people with brown skins ought to have made no difference. Salman Rushdie, commenting on my book God Is Not Great, remarked rather mordantly that the chief problem with its title was a lack of economy: that it was in other words exactly one word too long. He was sallow, morose-looking, and wearing dark glasses indoors: a thoroughly bad sign. A secret-police or Mukhabarat type, bored and resentful and hard to shake. This was hardly arrivisme on my part: I was “down” with my fellow American radicals, not conspiring with a bunch of aristos and expats. In Poland, a so-called anti-Zionist urge proved that the Stalinist gerontocrats would stoop even to Hitlerite tactics to repress dissent and prolong their sterile and boring hold on power. I was to see Adam Michnik on and off through the long transformation of Poland and watch him emerge as an honored historian and politician as well as the editor of perhaps the country's most respected newspaper, Gazeta Wyborzka, which had begun life as an illegal strike-sheet. Except that in the rest of society there was sex aplenty, with the hedonism of “the Sixties” almost officially instated as dogma, and the slow, surreptitious growth of this consensus to the then unguessed-at status of “correctness.” Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Adjacent were the remains of a mikvah bath for the ritual purification of women, and a kosher abattoir for the ritual slaughter of beasts [...]. But there was work to be done down in the Salinas Valley where César Chávez was organizing the grape pickers and lettuce workers out of their state of un-unionized peonage. I helped organize a sit-down outside an Oxford hairdressers' shop that refused black female customers. It was, to put it another way, quite astonishing to see how much, and to what at extent, the party-state depended on lies. Again I stress the matter of sheer scale: the teachers were enormous compared to us and this lent a Brobdingnagian aspect to the scene. Enoch Powell appeared to insult the memory of Dr. King by making a speech warning that “colored” immigration to Britain would eventuate in bloodshed. In my hometown of Portsmouth there was a riot in 1943, with the locals scorning attempts by American military policemen to enforce a color bar in the pubs. That this trahison would take a partly “multicultural” form was also something that was slowly ceasing to surprise me. Every night and day there were bombs and gunshots and riots and roundups, and it didn't take long to gain access to the bars and shebeens where these things were discussed with a certain knowingness. The doors of his temples were kept open in time of war, the time in which the ideas of contradiction and conflict are most naturally regnant. the old order had irretrievably vanished like breath off a razor blade, and there was a good old-fashioned power vacuum or, as we used to say in factional meetings, a “situation of dual power.” Tom adored to give pleasure while Gore has always liked to boast that he has never knowingly or intentionally gratified any of his partners. Not even a sighing reach-around by the sound of it. Thus, by the time that I enrolled as an “undergraduate” at Balliol College, Oxford, I was already a militant “student” member of the International Socialist groupuscule, as such factions were to become known after the momentously imminent events in France. I became the tenant of a walk-up on East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square, found for me by the seemingly omni-connected Ian McEwan […] The closing years of "Old Labour" in Britain were years laced with corruption, cynicism, emollience, and drift. The tactics were more those of 1948 in Prague than St. Petersburg in 1917, consisting of the slow acquisition of positions in the army and the police, and the application of what used to be called “salami tactics” against other parties. Dodo had been married to a drunken and adulterous wife-beater, Lionel Hickman by name, who had continued our mischling tradition by converting to Judaism in order to marry her, given her an all-around vile time, and then been run over by a tram during the blackout that accompanied the Nazi blitzkrieg. Another important thing about “CLR,” as he was known in our little movement, was his disdainful opposition to any Third World fetishism or half-baked negritude. Clinton and I became peripherally involved with a pair of Leckford Road girls who, principally sapphic in their interests, would arrange for sessions of group frolic. The second thing to absorb was that, behind all the spontaneity and eroticism and generalized “festival of the oppressed” merrymaking, a grim-faced Communist apparat was making preparations for an end to the revels and a serious seizure of the state. However, and just before I was due to take the entrance exam at the age of thirteen, my mother bethought herself that it might be worth taking a look at the place where I was due to be conscripted for the next five formative years. And Timerman's memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been “disappeared.” By trying his best to compose matters with the mullahs, he had sincerely shown that he did not seek a violent collision […] As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. Had Saddam taken only the Rumaila oil field and the Bubiyan and Warba islands, there would have been no casus belli. He chose to speak largely about Vietnam [...], and his wonderfully sonorous voice was as enthralling to me as his very striking carriage and appearance. A whole series of fault lines radiated away from this Lisbon earthquake, all of them shivering the structures of traditional order. In Europe I had been told by sapient academics that there wasn't really any class system in the United States: well, you couldn't prove that by the conditions in California's agribusinesses, or indeed its urban factories. Workers' committees were forming embryo soviets, soldiers' and sailors' collectives had whole ships and regiments under their temporary command, landless workers in the countryside were taking over abandoned farms and properties. Reporting from Vietnam in 1945, he may have been the first person to assert the extreme unwisdom of trying to restore French colonialism with British troops. It was a moment of bathos and anticlimax; a poor sequel to my smoke-ringed, vinous reverie on American grandeur the previous night.