Hitchens in the Weekly Standard
If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.
Writing on the war and fighting the sundry fifth columns of the left one of the noblest warriors out there is Hitchens. As well as being a student of Orwell (he wrote a book about him), Hitchens brings credentials from a leftist background (Orwell was a socialist), bringing a certain knowledge of rhetorical warfare from the 'other side.'
Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was a fascinating take on the political forces in civil war Spain. He did what seemed impossible at that time sorting out the various communists, socialists, nationalists and fascists, and told the story from the inside, as a soldier participating in the war. The book however, became obscure, perhaps because of all the detail, or perhaps because Hemmingway was getting all the attention. Lucky for us his keen eye found a more potent outlet with his novels 1984 and Animal Farm.
Hitchens has consistently shone the light on the defenders of totalitarian regimes, even if they don't consider themselves in that light. I'm sure Sid Blumenthal (who I briefly wrote about yesterday) doesn't consider himself thusly, yet he plays into the hands of an enemy that would have no compunction killing him were they to come to power. Hitchens understands this, as his closing lines in his article quoted above show.
When 1984 rolled around I found that it was considered rather pedestrian to bring up Orwell, because as that we didn't literally have Big Brother in our homes, his ideas were considered proven wrong. But 1984 was never about physicality; it was about words. It was about twisting words to mean the opposite of what they used to mean, unmooring them from their foundations so as to make them meaningless, and having them redefined for us by those who knew better.
Orwell matters, as the title of Hitchens's book suggests, and as well does Hitchens matter, as his attitude about not contributing to the loss of western civilization is one we would do well to emulate.
