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Christopher Hitchens: The World’s Most
Effective Anti-Totalitarian Voice
3.1.2012
By Dr Sabah Salih -
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Christopher Eric Hitchens 1949-2011 at home in
Washington, D.C., July 18, 2010 Photograph by John
Huba/vanityfair.com
January 3, 2012
On December 15, the world lost its most effective
anti-totalitarian voice. But the loss was especially
hard on Kurdistan. No writer offered a more robust
and intellectually convincing argument for ending
the occupation and abuse of Iraq by Saddam than
Hitchens.
At a time when the intellectual climate in Europe
and America and virtually everywhere else was
decidedly against the liberation of Iraq, Hitchens
offered argument after argument supporting it.
Hitchens, as a Marxist in the tradition of Marx
himself, saw in Saddam’s regime a totalitarian
menace that needed to be eliminated sooner than
later. Many needed no more than a car bomb here and
a car bomb there to convince themselves that the
regime change was a colossal blunder. And while
shady terms like “criminal” and “illegal” made the
criticism of the so-called anti-imperialist left
indistinguishable from that of the Islamists,”
Hitchens continued his vigorous defense of a
work-in-progress that would in time replace
totalitarianism with pluralism. The latter for
Hitchens, despite its conservative side, was a
virtue “far more revolutionary” than
anti-imperialist dogma.
His studies of George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson, and
Tom Pain showed that these men and their ideas
continue to be central to our time and needs,
precisely because they never waivered in insisting
that for a democracy to function properly it had to
accept two crucial things: one was that governments
were a necessary evil, and the other was that no
authority over the citizen, in particular religious
authority, should be given exemption from scrutiny.
This conclusion led Hitchens, rightly, to another
conclusion: the easy talk about the so-called the
American decline obscured the fact that America,
with its separation of powers and commitment to
secularism, was still the best emancipatory and
revolutionary experiment the world had ever seen.
Hitchens was also a great emancipator of literature
from the vulgarities of political correctness that
to this day plagues most universities. He
demonstrated how much more rewarding a reader’s
experience can be with a poem by T. S. Eliot,www.ekurd.net
Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, or Omar Khayyam, or a novel
by James Joyce, George Orwell, Wyndham Lewis, or
Charles Dickens, or a play by Bernard Shaw or Oscar
Wilde than with anything by the likes of Edward
Said, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and all
those who insist on taking culture’s claims,
especially with regard to Islam, at face value.
In Hitchens the world had a writer whose insight and
way with words the world had not seen since the days
of Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw. See for yourself
the power and grace of these words:
“Cultural-political interaction . . . must be
constructed as dialectical. Edward Said was in a
prime position to be a ‘negotiator’ here. In
retrospect, however, it can be argued that he chose
a one-sided approach and employed rather a broad
brush.”
Dr. Sabah Salih is Professor of
English at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, USA.
Dr. Salih is a longtime contributing writer
for ekurd.net
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