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September 25, 2004
prodigal son
Christopher Hitchens, profiled in the UK Independent:
"I don't have a political allegiance now, and I doubt I ever will have again. I can no longer describe myself as a socialist. I miss it like a lost limb."
"It's one thing when you are sitting with old comrades to talk about reviving the left, but you can't say that to somebody who is just starting out. And what could I say to these people? I had to ask myself - is there an international socialist movement worth the name? No. No, there is not. Okay - will it revive? No, it won't. Okay then - but is there at least a critique of capitalism that has a potential for replacing it? Not that I can identify."
The interviewer objects...
But can we trust the Bush administration - filled with people like Dick Cheney, who didn't even support the release of Nelson Mandela - to support democracy and the spread of American values now? [Hitchens] offers an anecdote in response. There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book Reading Lolita in Tehran documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."
...but in the end realizes that Hitch has passed beyond his ken.
I stammer that I can't imagine him ever settling down on the American right. He pauses, and I desperately hope that he will agree with me. "Not the Buchanan-Reagan right, no," he says. There is a pause. I expect him to continue, but he doesn't.
(Via EURSOC.)
Posted by Anthony Perez-Miller at September 25, 2004 02:06 PM