Hitchens’s inconvenient past

It is good for the soul to be reminded what a sharp and funny writer Christopher Hitchens was in the days before he collapsed under the weight of his own pomposity. Over the weekend, to take my mind off the excitement in Westminster, I picked up his 1988 collection, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports, which contains among many other good things his reflections on the ‘pseudoscientific propaganda word’ terrorism. The essay is called ‘Wanton Acts of Usage’ and appeared in Harper’s in September 1986. You can find it here (subscription required).

The piece makes hilarious reading today in the light of Hitchens’s enthusiasm for the war on terror (and scorn for those who oppose it). Money quote: 

‘What is frightening and depressing is that a pseudoscientific propaganda word like terrorism has come to have such a hypnotic effect on public debate in the United States. A word which originated with the most benighted opponents of the French Revolution; a word featured constantly in the antipartisan communiques of the Third Reich; a word which is a commonplace in the handouts of the Red Army in Afghanistan and the South African army in Namibia; a word which was in everyday use during the decline of the British, French, Portuguese, and Belgian empires. Should we not wary of a term with which rulers fool themselves and by which history is abolished and language debased? Don’t we fool and console ourselves enough as it is?’

Uh-oh. The consensus is that Hitchens has changed his politics. He hasn’t. He still wants worldwide revolution, but now believes that imperial America is the best delivery vehicle. George W. Bush’s ‘global democratic revolution’ has all but destroyed Christianity in Iraq, which is more than the poor old atheistic communists were able to do in Poland. Now more than ever Sir Christopher Hitchens is driven by his hatred of the God he does not believe in. No wonder he is hot for the Prez and his war.