SOURCE: Keach, William. “How Bad Will It Get?” Raritan 10, no. 1 (summer 1990): 139–52.

[In the following review of Prepared for the Worst, Keach commends Hitchens's coverage of the Middle East and Central America, but notes flaws in his analysis of other writers and his own “radical” socialist stance.]

Minority report is what Christopher Hitchens calls his regular column in the Nation. These days the title seems especially, depressingly, apt. Along with his fellow Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, Hitchens is one of the few socialist journalists based in this country with real national and international visibility: the pieces collected in Prepared for the Worst come from the New York Times and the Washington Post, from Harper's and the London Review of Books, as well as from the Nation and the New Statesman. Yet despite this range of circulation, Hitchens seems to be constituting more often than reporting on or for a minority. This has partly to do with his tone and journalistic persona, partly with the demise of American magazines on or near the left. We're in an era when Martin Peretz of the New Republic celebrates Ivan Boesky in a 1985 editorial titled “Productive Predators” (Peretz's family had ＄8.3 million in Boesky's crooked investment fund); when Partisan Review has to be persuaded by its friends to cancel a symposium on foreign policy featuring a contribution by Michael Ledeen, one of the disgustingly elusive originators of the Iran-Contra plot. As Hitchens observes, such alignments between once-progressive magazines and corrupt money and power “shrink the arena in which argument about ideas can take place.” The shrinkage has been so severe under Reagan and Bush that it's hard at times even to locate a political minority that Hitchens belongs to.

Hitchens does belong at the Nation—though on a recent occasion he found himself in a minority of one among the staff. His “Minority Report” for 24 April 1989, published just after a massive abortion-rights rally and march in Washington, was an uncharacteristically and unaccountably muddled piece against the pro-choice movement. His assumption seemed to be that the marchers were all glibly trivializing the issue by treating abortion itself as no big deal. He was sharply taken to task in a “Majority Report” (“Just Who Is This ‘We’?”) written on behalf of the Nation staff by Elsa Dixler, who very effectively exposed the evasions and distorting insinuations of Hitchens's performance. Dixler also accused Hitchens of being ignorant about the women's movement. Her charge is hard to counter on the basis of what I've read of him. The pieces reprinted in Prepared for the Worst pay almost no attention to this dimension of political struggle, and a few of them—most notably an otherwise strong essay on El Salvador from Grand Street titled “The Cathouse and the Cross”—are obtuse about the politics of sexuality and gender. And it's not just a question of women. When Hitchens says that “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” “was geldingly retitled ‘The Soul of Man’ when Wilde was in prison,” his testicular metaphor misrepresents the potency both of socialism and of Wilde's writing.

Hitchens's best political writing has been focused on the Middle East and on Central America. The 1988 collection of essays he edited with Edward Said, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, is an incisive, illuminating intervention in a debate that continues to be contorted by the now-strained convergence of US governmental hypocrisy and Zionist lobbying and propaganda. Hitchens's own contribution to Blaming the Victims scrupulously documents and analyzes false Israeli claims that Arab Palestinians, rather than being forcibly driven out of their homes in 1948, were instead urged to leave in a series of “broadcasts” by the Arab Higher Committee. There were no such broadcasts, yet groups such as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) have continued to refer to them as historical fact (Hitchens quotes from a full-page ad in a 1987 issue of the New Republic). Hitchens's writing on the Middle East is partisan in the best sense of that term: his deep commitment to the Palestinian cause is rooted in a history that must continue to be written and defended against those from without and within who would deny or manipulate it. In a striking sequence of short pieces from 1982, 1983, and 1986, he takes interviews with Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), Abu Nidal (Masen Sabry al-Banna), and Rabbi Meir Kahane as occasions for showing that self-destructive violence in the Middle East, for all its pervasiveness, is neither intrinsic to nor inevitable in the region.

Like Said, Hitchens makes a critique of the discourse of terrorism part of his position on the Palestinian question. Terrorism and terrorist came into English during the French Revolution, with a powerful rhetorical boost from Edmund Burke. The problem then, as now, was that the terms were used by the ruling class to condemn the violence of its political enemies and never to refer to the brutality, at once systemic and indiscriminate, of the dominant social order. In “Wanton Acts of Usage,” Hitchens shows how the vagueness of these terms has variously served the rhetorical interests of the Reagan and Bush administrations: “The word terrorist is not—like communist and fascist—being abused; it is itself an abuse. It disguises reality and impoverishes language and makes a banality out of the discussion of war and revolution and politics.” This has been true of what passes for public discussion in this country about Northern Ireland and Central America, and especially about the Middle East.

If you're at all persuaded by the analysis of terrorism in Prepared for the Worst—and maybe especially if you've got reservations—look up “Minority Report” in the Nation for 30 January and 7/14 August 1989, where Hitchens writes about the collaborationist past of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Under the name Yitzhak Yezernitzky, Shamir was a leader during the 1940s of the Stern Gang, later known as LEHI, an organization of Zionist extremists who called for a Jewish state extending from the Nile to the Euphrates and proposed an alliance with Hitler in support of his plan for a Europe free of all Jews. According to Hitchens, “Shamir has never renounced his political past, and he keeps up many of his old associations.” This is the head of state who, while seeming to hold the line against right-wing fanatics like Ariel Sharon, regularly condemns the PLO and participants in the intifadah as terrorists.

All Hitchens's writing on the Middle East, not least his conclusion that Meir Kahane is both “an Arab-hater” and “a self-hating Jew,” stands in provocative relation to his recent discovery that he is himself half-Jewish—which, as he explains, means Jewish, since the half in question comes from his mother. The discovery is finely, movingly recounted in “On Not Knowing the Half of It: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs.” In a wartime novel called The Cruiser, which contains a portrait of Hitchens's very English, naval-officer father, “Jacobs was a sea lawyer who kept a copy of Karl Marx in his kitbag.” Hitchens's bemused identification with “Jacobs” is one of many good touches in this piece, which concludes Prepared for the Worst and generates the book's title. Ironically, it's not the Jews who impressed Hitchens with their preparedness.

I had once talked to a gathering of Armenians in a leafy suburb in California. They did not scoff or recoil, even when they might disagree, as I droned on about the iniquity and brutality, the greed and myopia that marked Reagan's low tide. … nor did they bitch, as the English do, about how everything was getting worse, going to the dogs, and so on. … These people already know. They aren't to be fooled by bubbles of prosperity and surges of good feeling. They know the worst can happen.

Coming to terms with one's own buried cultural identity by discovering it in others, in difference: this makes a crucial link between Hitchens the descendant of the Blumenthals from Breslau and Hitchens the advocate of Palestinian self-determination. When this essay first appeared in Grand Street, its main title read, “On Not Knowing the Half of It—My Jewish Self.” In Prepared for the Worst, “My Jewish Self” is dropped from the title, and added to the last sentence, in square brackets, are three quite different words: “To be continued.”

There's more on Central America in Prepared for the Worst than on the Middle East or any other international situation. Hitchens is at his best in exposing the devastating consequences of US support for right-wing militarism in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. A measure of the political force of his writing is that so often he doesn't just give you a sense of knowing more, of having a fresh angle or vantage point—he fills you with his own anger. And yet the pieces based on trips to Central America ask tough questions about what the Left is really up to. In the 1985 article “Nicaragua Libre,” Hitchens was already adopting the posture that this book later endorses: “I was looking for the worst and was determined not to come away saying things like: ‘You have to remember the specific conditions.’” The authorial trope in this piece—Hitchens as amateur political biochemist (“How were the bacilli doing? Which were becoming the dominant strain?”)—is misleadingly noncommittal, and more than a little condescending. But it doesn't go very deep, fortunately, in determining his perspective. What he finds in talking to Sergio Ramírez, one of Nicaragua's best novelists and a member of the Sandinista directorate, and Pablo Antonio Cuadra, an internationally known poet and opponent of the Sandinistas, is how difficult the United States has made it for Nicaragua to sustain political openness and dissent. Yet Ramírez refuses to categorize all Nicaraguans critical of the Sandinistas as vendepatrias, sellers of the country. As for Cuadra, at the time of Hitchens's interview he feared a direct US invasion as much as Ramírez did. Imagine how they both must have felt after Bush's recent macho move on Panama. What will Cuadra and Ramírez say to each other now that US economic warfare and counter-revolutionary subversion have brought about the election of a coalition incapable of running the country without Sandinista cooperation?

Hitchens never writes as if US policy in Central America were primarily a tragedy for us here in this country. With 70,000 dead in El Salvador, 35,000 in Nicaragua, and massive economic suffering throughout the region, it's indulgent to believe that US self-corruption is what matters most. Yet Hitchens exposes the depth and scope of this self-corruption with bitter effectiveness: sometimes by simple quotations from a report to Congress (“For the first time in the history of US foreign aid, the level of US aid [to El Salvador] now exceeds a country's own contribution to its budget”), or from those who execute US policy on the local level—like Salvadoran General José Alberto Medrano, founder of ORDEN, the rural paramilitary death squad, and ANSESAL, the national political police (“ORDEN and ANSESAL grew out of the State Department, the CIA and the Green Berets during the time of Kennedy”). Salvadoran fascists are as proud of the support they've received from liberal Democrats as from conservative Republicans. Though much of Hitchens's analysis is directed towards the Reagan and Bush administrations, he is fiercely unsentimental about the illusion of a noble liberal alternative that will someday reclaim its title in Camelot, the elitist pseudo-Left equivalent of Reagan's “shining city on a hill.” “Kennedy Lies” reminds us that to call the Bay of Pigs operation a “fiasco” is grotesquely euphemistic. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy did nothing less than “attempt to take over and run Cuba, to enlist the support of the Mafia in the assassination of Castro, to poison and devastate Cuban crops, and to land a mercenary army on Cuban shores.” If you don't believe Hitchens about this, read Gary Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment. In the Caribbean and Central America as in Vietnam, the foreign policy wing of Kennedy's New Frontier laid the groundwork for Reagan and Bush, for those allegorically named American heroes North and Poindexter.

The Iran-Contra crimes were committed through a web spun from Washington and connecting the Middle East to Central America in ways which Hitchens is especially adept at exposing. In a series of columns for the Nation during the summer of 1987, while the Iran-Contra hearings were going on, he began to see that the whole gruesome business was born in the 1980 presidential election campaign. The main historical points in his case are these. In July 1980, papers were stolen from the Carter campaign offices by a “special team” working under Reagan campaign co-chairman William Casey. The stolen papers confirmed what Reagan's people knew already—that Carter was working hard to negotiate the release of American hostages held in Iran before the November elections. The Reagan forces, determined to prevent such a move, responded with an operation that would provide the basis for the Iran-Contra connection. Robert McFarlane arranged a meeting at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington between a trio of Reaganites headed by the other campaign co-chairman, Richard V. Allen, and two ayatollahs representing the Iranian government, Mohammed Beheshti and Hashemi Rafsanjani (now president). Reagan's people made a deal with the Iranians: Barbara Honegger, a Reagan campaign researcher and subsequent member of the White House team, remembered hearing a staffer say late on the night of 24 or 25 October: “We don't have to worry about an ‘October surprise.’ Dick cut a deal.” The deal Dick Allen cut was to promise the Iranians a series of arms shipments in return for their releasing the hostages after the election. Sure enough, on 20 January 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, Rafsanjani announced the hostages' release. And sometime in February 1981, arms shipments to Iran—through Israel, with full US support—began. When a plane carrying one such shipment crashed near the Soviet-Turkish border on 18 July 1981, exposing this flow of arms, Israeli officials acknowledged that the US knew all about it and approved.

The cast of characters in Reagan's 1980–81 campaign tricks would surface later as key figures in Iran-Contra: Casey, McFarlane, Ed Meese, Richard Secord (one of the retired military officers in Casey's “special operation”), Oliver North (in 1981 he was assigned to help Secord, who had been appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, lobby Congress in favor of supplying AWACs to Saudi Arabia). Some evidence about the 1980–81 deal came out in the 1984 House investigation of the theft of Carter campaign papers. But that investigation was even more feeble and protective—and much less public—than the Iran-Contra hearings. In a very recent “Minority Report” Hitchens writes witheringly about the sentences being handed out to those charged in the Iran-Contra “scandal” and broods on the broader implications: “At a time when those who raped and corrupted democracy and the rule of law in Bulgaria and the German Democratic Republic are being brought to account by outraged citizens, it is depressing in the extreme to see the furtive indulgence with which the Iran/contra conspirators are being handled.” He goes on to note the links between this travesty of the “democratic process” and Bush's phony “war on drugs”:

Noriega was perhaps the most decorated veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration until he became more useful as an opinion poll booster than as a crony. Oliver North works in drug counseling as part of the laughable “community service” to which he was sentenced. Meanwhile, the country's jails are filling up with the young members of the underclass, packed in tight to show that society has zero tolerance. No civil or constitutional liberty is safe from a demagogue on a narcotics sweep. But then, civil and constitutional liberties were no obstacle to the drug- and gun-runners who took over the Iran and Nicaraguan policies.

These are just the kinds of connections to which the national media have on the whole blinded themselves and us.

I've emphasized Hitchens's analyses of the US role in major areas of conflict during the 1980s because he has so much of immediate political relevance to offer. But the pieces in Prepared for the Worst range more broadly than I've been suggesting. Of those concerned primarily with other writers, only the opening essay on “Thomas Paine, The Actuarial Radical” moves back to focus on a distinctly earlier historical setting. Hitchens isn't at his best on Paine: the claim that “everything he wrote was plain, obvious, and within the mental compass of the average” is logically fallacious and belied by passages quoted by Hitchens himself:

Had Mr. Burke possessed talents similar to the author of “On the Wealth of Nations,” he would have comprehended all the parts which enter into and, by assemblage, form a constitution. He would have reasoned from minutiae to magnitude. It is not from his prejudices only, but from the disorderly cast of his genius, that he is unfitted for the subject he writes upon.

This is neither “plain” nor “obvious,” but it's certainly “within the mental compass of the average” reader, including a reader who might not remember Burke's famous pronouncement that “prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.” Having blunted the force of Paine's recognitions of Burke's genius, Hitchens has sharper things to say about one of Burke's influential current proponents, Connor Cruise O'Brien. “Only his most parsimonious critic would deny that he submits his prejudices to the tests of experience and adventure” says Hitchens, writing as “a socialist and a former as well as current admirer,” and arguing that “the Cruiser” (one of O'Brien's many Dublin nicknames) “is far better—and much worse—than his enemies will credit.” Hitchens applies O'Brien's analysis of Burke's range of styles to O'Brien himself and claims that “the Burke who informs O'Brien today is most often that Burke who dwelt on banal realism and pompously instructed us that ‘the nature of things is a sturdy adversary.’ This … undoubtedly eases the task of telling the besiegers, and reassuring the besieged, that they have no choice: that things must be as they must be.” Hitchens wrote this for Grand Street in 1987; as a recent test of the justness of his remarks, take a look at O'Brien's review of Fatima Meer's Higher Than Hope: A Biography of Nelson Mandela, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 February—1 March 1990, with its optimistic praise of Mandela's “chiefly lineage” and “essentially … Burkean” position as against the “radical blacks of South Africa” who “have inherited the European Jacobin tradition, through its Marxist heirs in Africa,” and for whom, “as for the Stalinists, politics is an absolute.”

If Hitchens's critique of O'Brien is tempered by a lingering respect (he concludes the piece by quoting O'Brien himself on “the contradictions in Burke's position”), his attack on Michael Foot is full of brittle hostility and contempt. “The Mouth of Foot” is one of the earliest pieces in this collection; it appeared in the New Statesman in November 1980, the month in which Foot defeated Denis Healey to become leader of the Labor Party and took on the job of trying to stem the Thatcherite tide. Hitchens's despair at the prospect of this “charming old ham's” being able to mount any kind of effective opposition underlies his assault on Foot's “treacly exaggerations” and “hero worship.” The instances Hitchens cites, rhetorical and political, are embarrassing enough—and the case against Foot's glozing impulses is strong (the glozing is pervasive in Foot's 1988 “Vindication” of Byron, The Politics of Paradise). But Hitchens's perspective here seems more than a little skewed by a deeper political disgruntlement. Would he really have preferred Healey as leader of the Labor Party?

Among the characteristics that Hitchens complains of in Michael Foot is “a pervasive and amusing variety of chauvinist Anglophobia—very highly developed and of an intensity usually found only among Americans.” It's disappointing that Hitchens never exemplifies or elaborates this point, since it bears importantly on his own Englishness and the cultural positioning this encourages him to adopt for his American publishers and readers. Consider his ambiguous analysis in Grand Street of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. Hitchens is at once shrewd about and tender towards the decaying British imperialism depicted in Scott's four novels. He doesn't just use his Englishness here to avoid appearing righteous:

My grandfather was a ranker in the Indian army. … My father's naval and military club was hung with prints, more than half of them commemorating battles like Chillianwallah or Gandamack—bloody shows in which the outnumbered British (how few there always were, in truth as well as in legend) fought off the gaudy warriors of the Mahrattas or kept watch on the hopeless defiles of the Khyber Pass.

This capacity to savor the “antinomies … of pride and guilt in having ‘civilized’ India and exploited the Indians” may be truthful as self-confession, but it marks a slipperiness in Hitchens's historical perspective. The slipperiness is evident in his claim that the “striking thing about Karl Marx's view” of British domination in India “is not its hostility to that of Macaulay but its similarity.” Now it's true that Marx saw British imperialism, for all its oppressiveness, as a necessary stage in India's socioeconomic development and break with “Oriental despotism.” Marx's account of India under British rule in the 1853 articles for the New York Daily Tribune from which Hitchens quotes is consistent with the emphasis in the Communist Manifesto on capitalism as a revolutionary system that “draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation.” But this aspect of Marx's position, especially his understanding of “oriental” backwardness, presents difficulties that Hitchens opportunistically slides over. Besides, to say that the “striking thing” is Marx's “similarity” to Macaulay is to obscure differences no less important for their being so obvious—differences that are too dimly acknowledged when Hitchens says that for Marx “the imperial edifice was built to change but not to last.” It's not so much Hitchens's feeling for the “elegiac” in the Raj Quartet as the way in which he constructs a protected space for such feeling that makes me uneasy.

Hitchens's writing is full of good turns. At its best the often acerb wittiness gives point to his engaging political anger and tenacity in attacking what's intolerably bad in the way things are going. “What he disliked in intellectuals—not about intellectuals—was their willingness or readiness to find excuses for power.” The pugnacious discrimination in this sentence from “Comrade Orwell” is a testimony to the writer in question. A paragraph attacking some conspicuously incoherent uses of the term liberal in Norman Podhoretz's Making It concludes, “Podhoretz, once again, is chewing more than he bites off”—an unexpectedly funny borrowing of Marian Hooper Adams's joke about Henry James. For the most part the acuity of Hitchens's prose earns him the right to call the second section of Prepared for the Worst “Blunt Instruments,” a title he originally used for a trenchant confrontation with the neoconservative dullness of Richard Krauthammer's Cutting Edge: Making Sense of the Eighties.

Sometimes, though, Hitchens's writing isn't as sharp as it needs to be to realize his own critical agenda. He seems oblivious to any difficulties with the terms vulgar and philistine—both of which he uses recurrently, and occasionally in tandem: “People like Jack Newfield, who don't think anybody should have gone to Vietnam, should beware of borrowing the philistine, vulgar speech with which antiwar spokesmen were slandered in those days.” People like Hitchens should beware of identifying what's crude, reductive, and uninformed with the paradigmatic Old Testament enemy in the case of philistine, or with what's practiced among the common people in the case of vulgar. The fact that both terms have been part of Marxist discourse from the beginning makes it all the more important that a writer with Hitchens's political perspective not just take them for granted. Here we have another case in which Marx's connection to his fellow Victorians such as Carlyle and Arnold needs real critical exposure. The recourse to philistine is particularly troubling in a writer as committed as Hitchens is to the Palestinian cause. When he says that the New Republic “fell into the philistine hands of Peretz,” the political and cultural context confusingly awakens the dormant racist metaphor. There is a related unintended irony in his saying, with reference to his speaking before Rabbi Robert Goldberg's congregation in New Haven, that “it is of course merely philistine to assume that people ‘vote their pocketbook’ all the time.”

How characteristic of Hitchens's identity as a writer is his readiness to rely on vulgar and philistine as terms of dismissal? Not very, I'd say—though there's a hint of cultural superiority in some of his gestures. In an excellent short assessment of Prepared for the Worst in Socialist Worker Review, Alex Callinicos remembers what Hitchens was like at Oxford in the late sixties: “One of the chief ornaments there of the left—and one of the International Socialists (the SWP's forerunner)—Chris Hitchens cut a romantic almost Byronic figure in red scarf and black donkey jacket. … Even in those days there was something a little ambiguous about Hitchens's politics. One always had the feeling that he would lead a demo and then dine at All Souls.” Such contradictoriness wasn't and isn't unusual; these days, when so few people in Hitchens's position are willing even to join a demonstration, it might actually seem admirable. Yet the feeling of something dandyish lingers. Callinicos's recollection reminds me of “Minority Report” for 2 April 1988, which begins:

There was a time in my life when I attended any event that featured Henry Kissinger as a speaker. The man—whose greatest single achievement is to have got everybody to call him Doctor—was a puzzle to me. Everything he touched turned to nightmare, yet people seemed to want to touch him. I lounged at the back of numerous black-tie dinners and corporate galas, listening to the elderly rubbish that he talked and looking for a sign. In the end I discovered the theme, or gimmick, of these gruesome soirees. There was always a point when Kissinger would hint, heavily and darkly, that he knew more than he could say. This hint usually took the form of a reference to some raw exercise of power and violence.

I realize that lounging at the back of a corporate gala isn't the same as dining at All Souls and that Hitchens is no longer an International Socialist. But his present style as a journalist may owe a good deal to his former style as Oxford radical. He writes well enough about Kissinger's “gruesome” performances, but did he really need to go to all those black-tie dinners to discover “the theme, or gimmick”? In the introduction to Prepared for the Worst he refers to “the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler.” Is this what's become of the “almost Byronic figure in red scarf and black donkey jacket”?

Hitchens refers to himself several times as a “socialist” (with a small s), but he prefers the more amphibious term “radical.” Writing about C. L. R. James, he says: “The real test of a radical or a revolutionary is not the willingness to confront the orthodoxy and arrogance of the rulers but the readiness to contest illusions and falsehoods among close friends and allies.” Hitchens meets one aspect of this test well enough. Last October he argued in the Nation that Alexander Cockburn's “lone efforts to be different” about the recent upheavals in eastern Europe “have led him into ridiculous inconsistencies because there is no core of principle at stake in the shifting positions he has found himself adopting.” But Hitchens could be more forthright about his own “core of principle.” He admires James for taking stands that “condemned [him] to spend decades among the fragments of the independent, quasi-Trotskyist left,” for continuing to work “with small but significant internationalist groupings.” But Hitchens's present relation to these groupings, to this tradition in which he once claimed membership, is unclear. He knows how shallow the current hype about the death-of-socialism and the triumph-of-capitalism is. Having helped us prepare for the worst, he needs to do more now to help us imagine and believe in a radical, alternative struggle for something genuinely better.