Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

Julian, for example, was much quoted for saying that the whole battle over Iraq wasn’t worth the life of a single British soldier, which echoes what Otto von Bismarck said—“not worth the balls of a Pomeranian grenadier”—about the whole of the Balkans. Yet why is that sort of realpolitik considered to be “left” rather than conservative? Attacking me in one of the magazines of the American isolationist Right, Peter Hitchens denounced the war in Afghanistan as the sort of “stupid, left-wing war” that only people like his brother would endorse. That seemed to me nearer the mark than Julian.

This is why Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront , which suggests that decent people should break the Mafia’s law of omerta , is still regarded as morally dubious by many on the American Left.

Some time later, I was invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu . I gave it the partly ironic title: “Can One Be a Neoconservative?” Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as “How I Became a Neoconservative.” Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: it was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought.

Chomsky has since said some things to suggest that he never thought I was any good anyway: I possess several inscribed books from him that prove the contrary. As it happens I don’t think it’s kosher to pay him back in the same coin. In the late 1970s he wrote to me praising something I’d written about the need to try and keep Encounter magazine from going under: his libertarianism (and his rare-on-the-Left admiration for Orwell) has been relatively consistent. If you look back at the essays that made his name—on the incipient stages of the Vietnam War, on B.F. Skinner, on the memoirs of Kissinger, on East Timor, and on the Kahane Commission on the Sabra/Shatila massacres—you will find a polemical talent well worth mourning, and a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.

Reflecting on this now, I think perhaps that she wanted to be sure, and also for me and others to be on notice, that she wasn’t to be taken for granted and that there was always to be some demarcation between friendship and agreement. Quite probably a good thing. Many truths or useful remarks go unspoken for fear of rupturing intimacy, and after all, there never was a Sontag “circle,” or clique. This is the point that Edmund White rather fails to apprehend about her in City Boy , his free-hand memoir of the higher naughtiness in New York.

You really cannot win with everybody at once: the CIA’s historically more highbrow offspring Encounter ran a piece by Melvin Lasky accusing me of having removed the relevant words on purpose from her own text.

In spite of the general nullity of the Left on this question, Susan was only the best known of several, including Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Schneider, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Adam Michnik, and others, who in their way traced a line from 1968 through 1989 to future combats with the totalitarian.