[In the following review, Bethell offers a generally negative assessment of Prepared for the Worst.]

I met Christopher Hitchens a year ago at Stanford University, strolling across the campus with a glass of red wine in his hand, en route to a terrorism conference. Unusually even for Stanford, everyone present seemed to be pro-terrorism, and from Hitchens the subject received a particularly witty defense. (The word itself “carries a conservative freight,” has “no meaning and no definition,” and so on. How the assembled professoriate gurgled with delight! This was before the Ayatollah put his foot in it by terrorizing Hitchens's left-wing friend Salman Rushdie.) Later that afternoon Hitchens told me he had recently discovered that he was a Jew. In England, his 92-year-old maternal grandmother (née Blumenthal) had told him about his family background in nineteenth-century Breslau. His recently deceased father, a commander in the Royal Navy, apparently was never told.

“On hearing the news,” Hitchens writes in the final and most interesting piece in this collection of his journalism [Prepared for the Worst], “I was pleased to find that I was pleased … My initial reaction, apart from pleasure and interest, was the faint but definite feeling that I had somehow known all along.”

Hitchens told me that he would now inevitably be dismissed by his Neoconservative “enemies” as a “self-hating Jew.” And indeed he is a tireless promoter of the Palestinian cause, an admirer of Chomsky, Shahak, Timerman, & Co., and endlessly dismayed that Israel refuses to see its Arab neighbors as a civil-rights movement writ large. Hitchens himself puts Rabbi Meir Kahane into the self-hating category.

More useful than “self-hating,” however, is the category “non-believing.” Kahane is a believing Jew, Hitchens (as he tells us time and again) is non-believing. He is a believing socialist. He quotes G. K. Chesterton's famous line about the credulity of those who cease to believe in God, but might have added that in the past hundred years the agnostic has not believed in anything so much as in socialism. Hitchens writes of the “sickening disillusionments that have, in the last generation, led socialists to dilute or abandon their faith.” Hitchens has kept his faith.

He quotes an Argentinian, “an ideologue of the junta”:

Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space.

“Here was the foe in plain view,” Hitchens writes.

Here were all my adopted godfathers in plain view as well: the three great anchors of the modern revolutionary intelligence. It was for this reason that, on the few occasions on which I had been asked if I was Jewish, I had been sad to say no, and even perhaps slightly jealous.

Not for Hitchens is the latter-day union of socialism and heretical Christianity: the liberated theologian, the “trendy encyclical,” the “bland ecumenical exhortation.” He wants that old nineteenth-century religion that tried to banish God altogether. And here he scores a bull's-eye: “The apologetic ‘modern Christian’ who argues faintly that of course the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally is saying that it isn't the word of God. He is thereby revising his faith out of existence. If the religious have so few real convictions left, why are socialists supposed to defer to their insights?”

Unusually for a socialist, Hitchens makes explicit the connection between his faith and the loss of religious faith. He quotes from the conclusion of Michael Harrington's book The Politics at God's Funeral: “Men and women of faith and anti-faith should, in the secular realm at least, stop fighting one another and begin to work together to introduce moral dimensions into economic and social debate.” Hitchens finds this “very insipid,” adding:

Neither believers nor unbelievers need to give up anything if they want to join the battle for socialism. But if the religious promise is good or true, then there is no absolute need for socialism … That the two schools should ‘stop fighting’ is, fortunately, impossible. If it were possible, it would not be desirable.

Many in the media adopt a leftish pose out of opportunism, seeing in it camouflage for wealth and a shield against envy. This may not be true in Hitchens's case. One senses that he would be only too happy not to be aligned with the Gorby-loving literati. Nonetheless, one problem with many of these pieces—reprinted from, among other publications, Grand Street, In These Times, Raritan, Mother Jones, The Nation, Harper's—is that Hitchens's attitudes for the most part are fashionable, whether he likes it or not, and therefore repetitious. (The Crisis interview in which he states his anomalous opposition to abortion is not included.)

He finds in Brideshead Revisited “deplorable attitudes to women,” in India (“behind the imposing British-built law courts”) “as fine a stew of misery and deprivation as you could wish to find”; he judges Nixon to be “sordid,” Nicaragua (home of poets) “extraordinarily beautiful,” El Salvador repressive (he means not yet socialist). And the following meet with his disapproval: the CIA, the Korean CIA, Ferdinand Marcos, fascism, Ronald Reagan (Teflon-coated, Hitchens tells us), Ollie North, Bill Casey, and (I almost forgot) Ed Meese. Such a redundant litany of rebuke, which I could have made twice as long, does not do justice to Hitchens's undoubted intelligence. It also raises the question whether an intelligent defense of socialism is possible at this late stage.

His longer pieces hold more promise, and I turned with real interest to “Holy Land Heretic,” apparently a profile of Israel Shahak, the left-wing chemistry professor who spends a good deal of time publicly denouncing the “Nazi-like” tendencies of his Israeli colleagues. But here one encounters another Hitchens fault: a great reluctance to do reporting. Evidently he spent a week with Shahak in Jerusalem but he never brings the man, or Israel itself, to life. The Hitchens style is relentlessly argumentative and analytical, rarely expository. His articles are filled with allusions to travels made and missions completed, but usually he has little more than Times-Lit-Supp-style analysis to show for it. His reporting seems to draw almost exclusively on materials available in North East Washington, D.C., the unromantic spot where he lives.

He longs for the day when collectivist arrangements are voluntarily entered into—that is, when human nature is transformed. He seems to believe that this will yet happen. He concludes:

I can supposedly redeem myself by moving into the Jerusalem home from which my friend Edward Said has been evicted. We must be able to do better than that. We still live in the prehistory of the human race, where no tribalism can be much better than another and where humanism and internationalism, so much derided and betrayed, need an unsentimental and decisive restatement.

He should be prepared for the worst, as the title of his book tells us that he is, for this “restatement” is likely to take the form of global capitalism, both humanistic and international.