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2022-09-20 -Land of the Free

[FrontPage] Or the importance of second thoughts.
September 16, 2022

by David Horowitz

PREFACE
Christopher Hitchens was a unique and, in many ways, irresistible individual, and eventually a friend. I say “eventually” because we started off as ideological antagonists, he, a lifelong admirer of Leon Trotsky and member of the destructive left, and I, a “second thoughter,” who had become a dedicated antagonist of the movement he never left. The fact that we were friends is a tribute to Christopher, who had a graciousness and humanity that made our friendship possible. I have never encountered another leftist who didn’t allow their political prejudices to strip them of their humanity and decency when dealing with human beings whose opinions differed from theirs.

As Christopher was dying unbeknownst to me, I was writing an essay which was both a portrait of him and an attempt to confront the inconsistency of his ideas. I called it “The Two Christophers, Or the Importance of Second Thoughts,” and consider it one of the best things I have written.

The article appeared 12 years ago in Frontpagemag.com, but when I went to locate it on the Internet I discovered it had been “removed” for violating the political standards of the fascists who control the WayBackMachine, who have erased the existence of Frontpagemag.com by removing its archives from the web. What has been done by the tech fascists to bury their political opponents on Wikipedia, Google – and all search engines – is a national tragedy, and ominous portent for the future. Had he lived, Christopher would have been nauseated and horrified by what his political friends have done in the fraudulent name of “social justice.” This is what Christopher thought he was fighting against as a radical all his life. Unfortunately, he could not have been more wrong.

THE TWO CHRISTOPHERS

(I had just finished the draft of this essay when I heard the terrible news that my friend Christopher had a cancer whose prognosis was dire. My heart and thoughts go out to him, as they would to a brother. I have known Christopher as a man of great courage and decency and have an affection for him that is not adequately disclosed in the intellectual argument that follows. As an argument Christopher I am sure will welcome it as a test of his mettle and a testament to the way in which he has – and will continue – to challenge us all. —DH)

I first met Christopher Hitchens in 1970 when I was editing Ramparts Magazine, which was then the largest publication of the left. Christopher was ten years my junior and fresh out of Oxford, embarking on his first adventure in the New World. When he stopped in at my Berkeley office looking for guidance, one of the questions he asked me in all seriousness was, “Where is the working class?” Only the devout left — the “holy rollers” as I by that time thought of them – could still think this mythical entity was an actual social force in a nation where social classes were relics of the past, and populists had declared every man a king. But rather than make an issue, I directed my visitor to the local Trotskyists, who were true believers, failing to realize that Christopher was one of them.

Our next encounter took place a dozen years later and was not nearly as pleasant. By then I had rejected most tenets of the leftist faith, although I had not publicly abandoned its ranks. We met at a small lunch with Nation editors Victor Navasky and Kai Bird, and one or two others. Before long the conversation turned to the Middle East and I found myself confronting what we referred to in those days as a political “gut check.” What was my attitude, Christopher wanted to know, towards Israel’s invasion of Lebanon? The Israeli offensive was designed to clear out PLO terrorists who had entrenched themselves behind an international border in southern Lebanon and were shelling towns in Israel (while destroying Lebanese society in the process). Good leftists already were regarding Israel as an “imperialist” pawn of the United States and oppressor of Palestinians and therefore were opposed to Israel’s effort to protect itself. I rose imprudently to Christopher’s provocation: “This is the first Israeli war I have supported,” I said, thereby ending any fraternal possibilities for the remaining conversation.

Two years later, my co-author Peter Collier and I voted for Ronald Reagan, and three years after that we organized a “Second Thoughts” conference bringing together other former radicals who had become advocates of the anti-Communist cause. Christopher came to the conference with his Nation cohort Alexander Cockburn to attack us. In the column he filed after our event, he described our suggestion that second thoughts might be superior to first ones as “smug,” and singled out my remark that supporting America’s enemies should be considered treason, as “sinister.”[1] He subsequently elaborated his feelings about second thoughts in the course of a brutal article on the writer Paul Johnson, sneering at his “well advertised stagger from left to right,” which Christopher regarded as the venal maneuver of someone “who, having lost his faith, believes that he had found his reason.”[2] (And why not?)

But times change, and subsequently Christopher himself became associated – not entirely correctly — with a generation of post-9/11 second-thoughters. Revising some of his attitudes towards the left and its loyalties, he had vaunted a patriotism towards America he would once have thought of as, well, sinister. A climatic moment in this odyssey – or so it should have been – was the publication of an engrossing memoir of his life, which has been heretical at both ends, and which he called Hitch-22. Among its other virtues, the book provides a fertile occasion for those of us who preceded him to take a second look at our own second thoughts, and measure the distances that we, and our one-time antagonist, had come.
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